Original title: The Crypto Theses 2025
Original author: NingNing, SevenUp DAO
1. Overview
This 190-page report from Messari consists of three parts: the current state of crypto (macro environment, institutional status, where users are) + track analysis (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Alt L1s + infra, DeFi, Al x Crypto, DePin, Consumer, CeFi) + analyst selection awards.
Messari's core analytical framework includes: blockchain space economics, ecological mapping valuation framework, narrative economics, Schumpeter's innovation theory, etc.
2. Macro Environment
1. Economic Environment and Regulatory Environment
After reviewing major events in the macro environment for 2024, Messari predicted trends in the US economic environment and cryptocurrency regulation for 2025.
The year 2025 is destined to be a key year for reforming US crypto policy. The FIT21 and stablecoin bills are the most notable regulatory legislative cases, which will promote transparency and standardization of global crypto regulatory frameworks.
In contrast to the optimistic views of ETF-related institutions like VanEck, Messari cautiously believes that there is a possibility of reversal in Trump's crypto policy.
However, in any case, it will be friendlier than Biden's crypto policy.
Comment: Messari's macro environment analysis does not provide any particularly insightful observations; the level is average and does not match the professionalism of macro analysts on Twitter. This part mainly serves to fill pages.
Looking ahead to market trends in 2025, several institutions share a consistent view with Messari:
The market trend in 2025 will be a Banana For Scale, with new highs in Q1 and the first half, a significant adjustment in Q2, and a recovery in Q3 and Q4 that sets new highs for the entire year.
2. What are institutions doing?
In 2024, institutions will focus on applying for and operating Bitcoin/ETH spot ETFs and promoting RWA (mainly tokenization of US Treasury bonds) businesses. Events such as Paypal launching the stablecoin PYUSD and Stripe acquiring the stablecoin company Bridge have begun to blur the lines between fintech, payments, and cryptocurrencies.
In terms of investment, institutions are adopting a barbell strategy composed of Al and DePin, with total financing for these two sectors growing approximately 100% and 300% compared to last year, respectively.
The incoming artificial intelligence and crypto czar David Sacks is an investor in Solana, Helium, Render, and Hivemapper. The US government is expected to seriously consider collaborating with DePin projects in 2025.
Comment: Next year, the main theme of AI x Crypto will likely be Web3 AI Agents. The democratization of AI and heavy industrial AI x Crypto projects like AGI, which are capital and talent-intensive, will need to adapt to the environmental changes.
DePin is a favorite among North American institutions this year, especially interested in high-quality data collection DePin and new energy DePin. One of Solana's strategies in 2025 is still to ensure that DePin occurs on Solana.
3. Where are the on-chain users?
Messari cites A16Z's report, estimating that out of 220 million active addresses, about 30 to 60 million are real monthly active users.
Users are mainly distributed across Phantom wallets, stablecoins, Telegram mini-programs, Polymark prediction markets, Base, and Hyperliquid.
Messari believes that the growth of on-chain users in 2025 will come more from the product strength of Dapp rather than Bitcoin ATH news events or the legendary wealth stories of meme coins. Therefore, it is very bullish on the adoption of chain abstraction and aggregation frontends in 2025.
Comment: 2025 will be a pivotal year for Web3 to transition from the era of 'fat protocols' to that of 'fat applications', with APPChain/chain abstraction becoming the mainstream paradigm for building Dapps.
The biggest regret of the application layer in 2024 is that Polymark successfully broke the circle but converted very few crypto users. I hope that in 2025, super apps of chain abstraction can sell crypto-native stablecoin services, high-yield staking financial products, and cyber lottery meme coins to a wide range of consumers, achieving both acclaim and commercial success.
3. Track Analysis
The essence of Messari's annual outlook report is in this part, which is one of our excellent windows to observe the views of the North American institutional industry.
Bitcoin
Messari focused on inscriptions/runes, Bitcoin programmability, and BTC Staking.
Inscriptions/runes will revive under the stimulation of the Fat Penguin consumer chain mainnet, OpenSea issuing tokens, and the NFT renaissance.
Key developments in Bitcoin programmability, specifically BitVM2, will make progress.
BTC Staking has inherent disadvantages compared to ETH Staking, while the higher economic security of Bitcoin ReStaking's AVS does not effectively persuade users to utilize it. The focus for BTC Staking projects in 2025 should still be on increasing penetration among BTC holders.
Ethereum
Last year, Messari was openly anti-Ethereum. This year, the attitude is much more moderate, acknowledging Ethereum's transcendent position after the approval of ETH spot ETFs. It also points out that after the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum's blob pricing mechanism results in L1 being unable to effectively capture L2's DA fees, which is the main reason for Ethereum's defeat in the competition in 2024.
However, Ethereum's native narratives/products at the application layer, such as Friends·Tech, Farcaster, Lens Protocol, and Eigen Layer AVS, have not been successful.
However, Messari believes that fee revenue is not the most important indicator for measuring L1 value; the ecological map is. From this perspective, Ethereum remains the best L1 ecosystem.
Comment: In 2025, Ethereum's performance will depend on whether it can incubate high-performance parallel EVM L1 (Monad)/L2 (MegaETH) that can compete with Solana.
Solana
Key milestone events for Solana in 2024 include the lightweight solution Frankendancer for the Firedancer client, the new SPL token standard, and the state compression solution ZKCompression.
Key milestone events for Solana in 2025 will include the release of the Firedancer client, wider adoption of the prediction market governance protocol MetaDAO, new large DePin projects based on Solana, AlAgentSummer occurring on Solana/Base, and the approval of SOL spot ETFs.
Comment: There are no supercycles for meme coins; the popularity of cyber lotteries is a special phenomenon of a unique period. The Solana ecosystem needs to prepare and diversify ahead of time, aiming to reduce its heavy reliance on meme coins in 2025.
Alt L1s + infra
In 2025, Monad and Sonic will join the competition of high-performance monolithic L1s with Solana and Sui. The BeraChain driven by token economic models will also launch its mainnet.
In 2025, the blockchain space will be severely oversupplied, and the voice of Dapp developers will further increase, no longer constrained by the ideology of the crypto community, allowing for more freedom in building consumer-oriented use cases.
After the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum's 'Seven Injuries Fist' signifies the end of the DA narrative for modular public chains. Celestia and Avail are beginning to transition toward a global cross-chain interoperability coordination layer.
Next-generation L2s such as Mega and UniChain, which have high performance and AltVMs, will also reach the battlefield.
Avalanche is undergoing the largest mainnet upgrade in its history, Avalanche 9000, which will bring significant performance improvements, establishing liquidity centers centered around the C chain with Avalanche Interchain Messaging (AIM). Avalanche's ecosystem is expected to perform well in RWA and Web3 games (represented by off the grid) in 2025.
The prospects for Cosmos in 2025 remain uncertain; when the Interchain Foundation (ICF) truly gains control will be a critical checkpoint. After acquiring Skip Protocol earlier this month, this may accelerate the process.
Another giant project in the Cosmos ecosystem, Initia, which focuses on APPChain interoperability and ecological role benefit re-production, will also join the ranks of powerful new suppliers in the blockchain space in 2025.
In 2025, chain abstraction protocols like @ParticleNtwrk are accelerating from narrative to productization. Chain abstraction is not a single technology but a combination of technical primitives such as cross-chain bridges, messaging platforms, intent infrastructure, ZK proof aggregators, and shared sequencers.
Comment: When analyzing Alt L1s + infra projects, the explanatory power of blockchain space economics is unrivaled.
DeFi
When will the trading volume/CEX ratio of PerpDEX catch up to the trading volume/CEX ratio of spot DEX? This has been a focus for DeFi enthusiasts. The emergence of Hyperliquid has reignited hope.
Another focus is how to make trade-offs between vertical integration and composability when building DeFi protocols.
Currently, RWA structure is primarily centered around the tokenization of US Treasury bonds. In 2025, RWA will have two main lines: tokenization of DAO idle assets and exporting on-chain yields to traditional capital markets.
In terms of yieldFi, Pendle occupies a unique and critical ecological position.
In terms of anti-MEV, the intent architecture of CowSwap has emerged outside the market game model of FlashBot.
Al x Crypto
Messari categorizes Al x Crypto into decentralized computing networks, coordination platforms, AI tools and services, and applications. Of course, Messari also pays attention to AlAgent KOL and AIAgent meme coins.
Messari predicts that significant events worth noting in 2025 for AI x Crypto will include: Bittensor and dynamic TAO becoming new AI project token factories, the work of Prime Intellect and Nous Research further enhancing the feasibility of decentralized computing power training, and AI Agents becoming OnChain and completely separating from AI meme coins.
The open-source AGI project SentientLabs, which fights against commercial titans, will also receive greater attention in 2025.
DePin
As the inventor of the term DePin, Messari now subdivides DePin into Physical Resource Networks (PRN) and Digital Resource Networks (DRN).
Messari is very bullish on the new energy DePin projects in the PRN sector such as Glow, Daylight Energy Helium, DAWN, GEODNET, Hivemapper, DIMO, and the Prodia, Filecoin, Grass in the DRN sector.
In 2025, Solana's dominant position in the DePin field will be challenged by Base and others.
Comment: This part contains a large number of potentially high-risk/reward Alpha projects. Interested parties are strongly recommended to read the original text.
Consumer
Messari categorizes Web3 games, meme coins and their launch platforms, DeSoc & SocialFi, NFTs all into this part.
I have written many articles discussing Web3 games, so I won't elaborate here. I will only mention that Messari has observed an interesting change: the game design of Web3 games is shifting from Play2Airdrop to Pay2Airdrop.
Meme coins and their launch platforms are seeing gamification and personalized design as new trends. In summary, developing around the positioning of Meme Coin as a cyber lottery is sufficient.
DeSoc & SocialFi, as a former product operation, I do not want to discuss much, as there is still not much achievement in 2025. Solana has transformed from the flagship protocol Send to operate AIAgent.
The cultural renaissance of NFTs led by Fat Penguin and Web3 consumer IP, Fat Penguin and Azuki will respectively launch consumer chains Abstractchain and Animechain in 2025.
Comment: In the Consumer sector, I am most bullish about the Fat Penguin NFT and the consumer chain Abstract Chain. The year 2025 will be a year of legendary status for @LucaNetz.
CeFi
Not related to retail investors, slightly.
