HTX DAO describes 2025 as the moment when its ideas finally started to feel real. After years of talking about deflation, community power and on-chain decision-making, the organization says this was the year when those principles actually shaped behavior in the ecosystem. The report paints a picture of a community that’s learning, slowly but surely, that long-term value only appears when people, incentives and governance pull in the same direction.
A Year When the Community Started Acting Like an Ecosystem
From the outside, the numbers show momentum. HTX DAO’s market cap climbed toward $1.841 billion, listings expanded across 28 exchanges and its yield products drew in almost half a million participants. Users earned more than $30 million in payouts as subscriptions crossed $9 billion, but behind the numbers, the DAO insists the real story is trust — that people felt more comfortable committing to an ecosystem that finally seemed to reward patience rather than hype.
Deflation became the centerpiece of that shift. Between Q1 and Q3, HTX DAO burned 36.22 trillion $HTX — a substantial part of all burns in that period — bringing total burns to nearly 86 trillion tokens worth about $163 million. What mattered most to the DAO wasn’t the size of the burns, but the fact that they were governed, predictable and transparent, a change that followed a mid-2025 update to the whitepaper.
Alongside burns, new programs tried to make long-term holding feel meaningful. Pledge and Burn gained traction, and the HODL Furnace delivered a nominal 70% APY designed to reward consistency more than speculation. A turning point came on June 30 with the launch of the tokenized listing system: the community used more than 1.19 trillion $HTX — over $3 million — to vote in six listings, a moment the DAO describes as proof that users genuinely wanted to shape the direction of the platform. The surge that followed — more addresses, higher TVL and a 44% jump in the token price — gave the community a sense that their participation mattered.
By the end of 2025, $HTX had grown into something more versatile than the DAO originally imagined. It carried governance power, delivered yield and played a direct role in deflation. The ecosystem added staking, incentive voting, a unified points system and a sustainability-focused treasury, while also launching a global developer program to connect CeFi and DeFi builders. The DAO’s presence on the global stage grew too, from Hong Kong and Dubai to Istanbul, the CIS region, Bitcoin 2025 and TOKEN2049 in Singapore.
HTX DAO ends its report with a kind of cautious optimism. The organization believes that the blend of deflation, shared governance and user participation has finally created an identity strong enough to build on, but it also acknowledges that 2026 will be the real test — especially as it prepares to roll out the next phase of Listing Governance and a deeper CeFi-DeFi integration.
