Source: Variant Fund; Compiled by: 0xjs@Golden Finance
The Variant team has been looking ahead to the rest of 2024 and possible trends in 2025.
Here’s what we’re watching as we embrace the next wave of crypto development.
Jesse Wald, Co-founder of Variant:
Things I’m excited about in crypto products for 24-25 (quick list, not exhaustive):
Mobile becomes the default.
The stablecoin space is large enough for global fintech adoption, accelerating institutional/regulatory validation.
Prediction markets have taken on surprising forms.
There’s been another surprising evolution of NFTs.
The interplay between creator tools/token launchers becomes more interesting/safer.
The Farcaster channel becomes a wallet/DAO that does something weird/big.
Telegram tends to focus on mini-programs/wallets/payments.
Frames/blinks saw the emergence of a large social applet, validating “headless” GTM as a way to bootstrap protocol/market liquidity.
Data DAO/Tokenized Marketplace attracts new users to earn tokens.
For crypto native users, the real concern comes back to token distribution leading to more loyal/engaged users/owners.
Things I’m excited about in 24-25 years for crypto infrastructure:
Institutions began pledging.
The chain/wallet abstraction works well, and users end up with a superior user experience (a benefit of all the work on scaling/interop/intent etc).
Modularity matures; second-generation frameworks package integrated modules, addressing fragmentation issues while maintaining customizability.
ZK has groundbreaking applications at the intersection of privacy/off-chain data/on-chain operations.
Security vulnerabilities are becoming less common (e.g. in DeFi/interfaces).
Decentralized computing is beginning to compete on cost and performance.
The MEV market structure is becoming more mature and is expected to benefit users.
Li Jing (Variant co-founder)
Here are some developments I think we’ll see in the crypto space over the next 6 months to 1 year:
Open source AI turns to crypto for monetization.
Decentralized AI and computing gain momentum.
DePIN helps people earn their first cryptocurrency.
The negative incentives caused by financialization have reached a critical point.
Alana
Some of my predictions for cryptocurrencies in 2024/2025:
Block/CashApp launches stablecoin.
There is a third type of spot ETF, but it’s not what people are expecting.
PayPal started offering a yield-bearing stablecoin (likely a modified version of PYUSD), and it’s seeing widespread adoption with Venmo.
The human verification project will welcome more than 100 million users
A major talk show host has an NFT as his profile picture.
Farcaster surpasses 3 million users and begins delivering meaningful mobile-first distribution.
The groundbreaking AI x Crypto use case is community owned and trained models.
As supply shortages ease and new chips emerge, the hype surrounding a decentralized GPU market turns out to be just that: hype.
We do see an important use case emerge in decentralized training + inference as centralized clouds start to set policies on what types of models can run on their servers, but this will take 2+ years to really develop (because regulation is slow)
Developing on top of Bitcoin will bring a better experience to developers.
A well-known traditional finance figure wrote a post about Helium (or another depin project).
Popular L2 decided to develop its own L1.
At least half of them are wrong.
Cooper
Some current year-end forecasts:
The shared sequencer finally started.
Many proof-of-concept markets have made their way to testnets.
With decentralization, Rollup FUD is gradually subsiding.
Ethereum’s roadmap is becoming clearer.
The ZK application is put into production and actually used.
Sharding research has become popular again.
Derek
Meta-level prediction for 24-25: We will transition from the infrastructure part of this cycle to the application part.
Some specific ideas:
More than 10 major fintech companies have launched their own stablecoins.
ETFs start staking.
Crypto consumer apps on Base have reached over 10 million weekly active users.
Each TradFi mega-fund will tokenize a product.
Crypto prediction markets are seeing $1 billion in monthly volume in categories outside of politics.
BTC is the reserve asset of major global currencies.
The top 20 US banks use DeFi for borrowing.
The number of DePin network users grew to over 10 million.
A large AAA studio built a game on-chain.
The trading volume of DEX once exceeded that of CEX.
A small game on Telegram/Ton attracted 1 billion players.
Geoff
In 12 months, I expect there will be more clarity around the use cases and platforms for AI agents to have PMF in crypto.
During this time, I think we will see a few applications gain traction and define the first generation of viable use cases. These leading applications will then lead to network effects for agent platforms, influencing which platforms become Schelling points.
The first step in this sequence is to leverage agents to build compelling user experiences. I think a few use cases are most likely to gain early traction:
Token discovery, research, and trading.
Airdrops and yield farming.
Games: Agents as playable characters and NPCs.
Artificial intelligence companion.
Autonomous content producer.
I’m really excited to see the coming wave of innovation in these and other use cases. It should be fun to be a crypto user!
