Authors: E. Johansson, L. Kelly, DL News; Translated by Tao Zhu, Jinse Finance
As AI becomes headline news, experts say that incorporating cryptocurrency will accelerate this trend.
Cryptocurrencies related to AI have surged by 160%, and by 2024, their value will approach $55 billion. Meanwhile, investors have poured hundreds of millions into projects leveraging AI and blockchain technology.
Market observers have reason to be optimistic about this trend: researchers estimate that by 2030, this combination could add $20 trillion to the global economy.
We asked industry experts what they expect at the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency in 2025.
Mark Beylin, Investor at Boost VC
The cryptocurrency space is rapidly becoming the battleground for developing open-source general artificial intelligence, a trend that will only accelerate by 2025.
We will witness an increasingly tight feedback loop, with more attention, capital, and talent flooding into the space, competing to participate in the most important inventions of our generation.
Adversarial cryptographic environments will become a perfect breeding ground for reinforced models that have been battle-tested to withstand attacks aimed at subverting developer intent.
Improved open-source tools will only further accelerate this trend, helping anyone deploy their own robots to fight on the big stage.
While some agents will capitalize on their ability to exploit large protocols for profit, others will find more efficient ways to extract value from human market participants, as those participants cannot act as quickly or know as much as they do.
Even human-operated robots will struggle with a range of new strategies that are not based on prior knowledge but rise to the top through an accelerated natural selection process, with the best programs learning to learn faster than anyone can imagine.
David Gogel, Vice President of Strategy and Operations at dYdX Foundation
AI thrives on data, while blockchain provides a verifiable, decentralized, and transparent infrastructure.
Together, they enable revolutionary use cases such as AI-driven smart contracts, decentralized data markets, AI-driven trading strategies, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that adapt in real-time using AI-driven insights.
These technological promises systems that are not only intelligent and autonomous but fundamentally trustworthy.
In 2024, we see AI tokens gaining immense popularity on trading platforms like dYdX, while projects at the forefront of decentralized computing and AI attract market attention.
The success of the AI agent Terminal of Truths indicates how far this intersection had come by 2024, autonomously executing tasks and launching a cryptocurrency.
Looking ahead to 2025, AI tokens and applications will further develop, driven by innovations in on-chain AI integration and AI modeling.
Patrick Friedrich, Founder of onicai
2025 will be the year of the rise of autonomous agents, with web3 providing the infrastructure layer to coordinate and control them.
Large language models (LLMs) will become more efficient, allowing increasingly better models to run on distributed networks, edge devices, embedded systems, and user devices like laptops and smartphones.
This will go hand in hand with specialized LLMs for specific domains, unleashing a wave of greater accessibility and practicality across more industries than we have seen before.
Web3 tools for creating, running, and managing AI agents will empower users with necessary ownership and control, transforming AI from a service into a personal assistant.
This includes autonomous agents that independently complete tasks on behalf of their owners, becoming a form of user extension in both digital and physical spaces.
Calanthia Mei, Co-Founder of Masa
With the rise of AI agents, memes are evolving into something more powerful.
These are not just aimed at the big players—teenage cryptocurrency traders are even creating AI-driven memes to mark their work and engage in cultural frenzies.
The growing demand for AI agents is accompanied by an urgent need for robust data infrastructure to provide high-quality, relevant data and avoid bottlenecks caused by API rate limits.
If AI agents are projected to reach $47.1 billion by 2030, the value of the data infrastructure layer supporting them will be even higher.
Ron Bodkin, Founder and CEO of ChainML
The recent surge in memes related to AI agents suggests a growing demand for advanced AI development by 2025, with immense growth potential, and our team anticipates significant developments in agent platforms.
There will almost certainly be volatility—after all, this is cryptocurrency.
But this trend indicates a huge demand for more advanced AI agents capable of handling increasingly complex tasks and workflows, which in turn will drive further innovation across the entire industry.
Additionally, 2025 will introduce oversight and regulation for AI, especially with Trump appointing David Sacks as his new cryptocurrency and AI czar.
What form this oversight will take remains to be seen, but it's clear that AI will be a focal point of new governmental attention.
Any policies we seek to implement will aim to empower consumers without hindering industry progress.
Yannik Schrade, CEO and Co-Founder of Arcium
The biggest historical barrier will not be tokens—it will be the disregard for privacy.
Without it, everything promised by blockchain—freedom, autonomy, fair economies, community-driven governance—would be meaningless.
Privacy should not be seen as an add-on, feature, or entirely separate application. Rather, it needs to be a foundational layer of the blockchain technology stack.
The next major technological revolution will occur at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.
However, there are two paths: one dystopian and one utopian. To build a future where AI and human intelligence coexist harmoniously, privacy and confidentiality must be at its core.