Author: Mippo, Co-founder of Blockworks
Compiled by: TechFlow
The United States will re-emerge as the core center of global cryptocurrency.
More and more entrepreneurs will return to the United States and set up offices in New York.
Cryptocurrency conferences in the United States are also expected to be larger than similar events in Asia.
More than 10 DeFi protocols will officially launch fee switches, including Uniswap.
DeFi protocols will gradually adopt customer asset rehypothecation as a new business model.
This trend will involve areas such as cross-chain bridges and liquidity staking tokens (LSTs).
The Ethereum community's debate over the 'North Star' roadmap will reach a conclusion.
Attempts to scale the L1 mainnet will remain at a low level (for example, raising the gas target to 50M gwei, while discussions about shortening block times will heat up).
Ultimately, the roadmap centered around Rollups will be reaffirmed.
Max's scaling proposal will fail to gain sufficient support and will ultimately fail.
This outcome will bring much-needed cohesion to the Ethereum community and improve overall market sentiment.
Nevertheless, some dissenting developers and users may exit the ecosystem as a result.
The ETH token price is expected to perform strongly.
Rollup-based solutions will still struggle to make significant breakthroughs in 2025.
However, sufficient interoperability can be achieved through protocols like Across.
Currently, there is still no clear direction for achieving universal synchronous composability.
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) will gradually become an important component of L2 infrastructure and ultimately become a permanent feature.
Solana's momentum will continue in this cycle, but issues will gradually emerge by 2025:
Due to the decentralization of memecoins and challenges posed by MEV (maximum extractable value), Solana's REV will struggle to reach new highs. In response to these issues, extremism in the Solana community (Maximalism) will rise.
The Firedancer client will officially launch in Q4, at which point Solana's network will achieve a processing capacity of 100,000 TPS.
Solana may adjust its token issuance policy to reduce inflation, while Ethereum will not make similar changes.
Base will become a dark horse in the Rollup ecosystem and will become a major competitor to Solana.
The total assets on Base are expected to exceed $40 billion.
Base will also become the preferred chain for AI agents and other AI applications.
Stablecoins are expected to gradually become the dominant asset on L2 networks, with their quantity projected to exceed that of ETH by more than double.
The stablecoin market will see breakthrough growth in the coming year.
The market capitalization is expected to exceed $450 billion. Stablecoins will become one of the top three investment areas of focus for venture capitalists (VCs).
More than five large fintech companies or traditional financial institutions will launch their own stablecoins in 2025.
This will create competitive pressure on existing stablecoins, leading to a slowdown in their growth rate.
More than ten enterprises (including banks and Web2 giants) will launch their own L2 networks in 2025.
However, most of these networks will struggle to gain market recognition and achieve tangible results.
The only possible exception is fintech companies like Robinhood.
With a large user base and strong brand influence, Robinhood will become one of the dominant forces in the industry by 2025.
By the end of the year, Robinhood will be seen alongside Coinbase as one of the two leading cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States.
Investment opportunities in L1 blockchains still exist and will not disappear in the short term.
The most outstanding projects will be Sui and HyperLiquid.
The ICO model will return, but it will not dominate as it did in 2017.
Investor protection measures will be further improved, and ICOs will resemble crowdfunding activities more closely.
It is expected that five blue-chip protocols will raise funds through ICOs.
Venture capital will flow back into the cryptocurrency industry, but the scale of financing will not reach the levels of 2021.
The total venture capital in the crypto space in 2021 was $30 billion. It is expected to be between $20 billion and $25 billion in 2025. The market will see more financing rounds between $50 million and $100 million.
Cryptocurrency companies will enter a window for IPOs, but there will not be a large-scale wave of listings.
More than four companies are expected to go public, but due to the valuation bubble of 2021 still not being fully digested, more companies may delay their IPO plans.
Growth equity investment will still not enter the cryptocurrency space.
The mainstream trend in 2025 will be the combination of AI and cryptocurrency.
The continuous advancement of foundational models will attract more attention and drive a boom in AI-related tokens.
The application scenarios for AI will become more diverse, not limited to agents.
Different types of agents will be attempted, such as content creators, hedge fund traders, artists, etc.
However, the vast majority of attempts will be in their early stages and may not succeed.
TikTok's influence in the cryptocurrency space will reach unprecedented heights.
Crypto Twitter (CT) may become a major exit channel for some TikTok tokens.
The United States will pass significant cryptocurrency legislation in 2025.
An updated market structure bill or stablecoin bill may be signed into law.
Bitcoin's L2 solutions will still struggle to achieve breakthroughs in 2025.
Truly zero-knowledge proof (ZK) based Bitcoin L2 still needs more time to materialize.
Cryptocurrency will be widely regarded as a long-term force in American politics.
The mainstream media's (MSM) attitude will gradually shift to acknowledge that cryptocurrency will not easily exit the historical stage.
