Author: Davis Canellis, Blockworks; Compilation: Wu Zhu, Jinse Finance.
In the mid-16th century, Nostradamus made 942 predictions over 8 years.
It is said that he dictated each prediction to his secretary as a poem. This is because he was taking large doses of nutmeg that caused hallucinations.
This article contains five cryptocurrency predictions, perhaps they will fully materialize by 2025. If they don’t, they can easily be repeated for hundreds of years, just like Nostradamus' prophecies.
1. AI chatbots will gamify flash loan attacks.
We rarely hear about flash loan attacks anymore.
Clearly, after the DOJ arrested Eisenberg last year ('It's just a profitable trading strategy'), they basically stopped them.
Until some evil edge lord trains an AI model to seek potential targets in the dirtiest and least liquid corners of DeFi.
After all, who should be blamed: the instant engineer or the law master's holder of a crypto wallet?
2. Bitcoin ETFs or nation-states will be hacked.
It's okay, most ETFs have abstracted the actual handling of tokens away from their own responsibilities—potentially replaced by WhatsApp chats represented by Coinbase custodians.
Next year will mark the return of significant cryptocurrency hacking incidents.
It has indeed been a while since we last saw that. Perhaps the Ronin hack was the last truly damaging hack.
Beware of missteps by nation-states or ETF issuers, possibly due to phishing emails from North Korea that lead to false coupons for Fula Chicken.
3. The FTC will sue meme coins.
You may have heard that the next SEC chair should be more friendly to cryptocurrencies.
But this is just the SEC. There are still a dozen US agencies that might take some real baby boomer actions next year.
The FTC has previously pursued cryptocurrency companies including Celsius and Voyager, and has filed federal lawsuits against fraudsters peddling false investment schemes.
I will watch the FTC qualitatively assess random meme coins and start suing. The void left by Gensler can only be filled by another shortsighted regulatory agency.
4. 'Crypto lottery' will become a public good.
Cryptocurrency already has its own pseudo-lottery system: meme coins.
If you really enjoy buying Powerball and Mega Millions, why not randomly purchase a Pump.fun memecoin every week and hope to make big money one day (as long as you can time it right).
Therefore, it is time for someone—perhaps from the public interest-focused Ethereum space—to write an unstoppable, permissionless crypto lottery that pays out once a week.
5. IRL streamers will adopt prediction markets.
It’s too obvious to suggest that streamers like Speed and KSI mint their own meme coins (or will they become social tokens?).
Say it now: major streamers will figure out how to leverage prediction markets to crowdsource their content.
For example: Speed suggests that he will participate in the sprint event at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, which could be a prediction market. All of his audience can bet on whether that will be the case or encourage him to take on any other challenges regarding this issue.
