Hello, this is Inside Economics.
I'm Rachana Shanbog, the Economist's Business Affairs Editor.
With me is Henry Curr, our Economics Editor.
And Mike Bird, our Wall Street Editor is in the studio as well, fresh from New York.
It's been almost 17 years since the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto unveiled Bitcoin, the first major cryptocurrency.
The changes that have taken place since then have been extraordinary, especially this year.
Today we're going to discuss how crypto went mainstream in 2025, after long being derided as a pariah,
and then the implications for the wider financial system from the rise of crypto,
from contagion to deeper questions about the nature of money.
But before we do that, first, the wild swings in cryptocurrencies.
Henry just give us a sense of the scale of crypto, how big it's grown.
If you go back to 2020, which is just as the pandemic was striking,
which is when a lot of people would have really come across crypto for the first time,
then the total market cap of outstanding crypto was about 300 billion dollars.
Now it's over 4 trillion dollars.
So it's really gone from something that was novel and new and becoming known,
to something that's really sizable, an increasingly sizable part of the financial system.
It's a big number.
So when we say crypto going mainstream, I think that's what we mean.
A lot of that happened this year.