Incoming US crypto czar David Sacks invested in Multicoin back in 2018.
As the closest crypto fund to the crypto czar, Multicoin has just released its views on the frontier tracks of crypto for 2025.
The article mentions many early projects, and friends who are good at capturing early opportunities should not miss out!
The original link can be viewed at the end of the article by clicking 'Read the original.'
First, Multicoin states that 2025 is a critical year for the crypto industry as it will be the first year in history to have a crypto-friendly regulatory framework. Additionally, the technology for Layer 1/DeFi/DePIN/stablecoins is maturing, creating fertile ground for the next wave of frontier innovations.
Track 1: DePIN Robotics
There are already rumors that the incoming Trump administration will attempt to push autonomous driving (AD) regulations from the states to the national level, seeking to create a unified standard for AD companies.
With GPU clusters exceeding 100,000 H100 chips, sensor-based autonomous driving will become a reality.
After this, I expect a boom in robot-based DePIN to occur.
Many of these startups have raised funds from non-crypto venture capital but have not yet truly commercialized.
I am optimistic that some of them will adopt the DePIN model to decentralize the balance sheets of development companies and mitigate the risks of robot professionals and manufacturers around the world. Many early adopters of these robot products will capture data that is crucial for developing autonomous robots.
Today I know of one company in this industry—Frodobots—but I expect more.
The company we invested in, Hivemapper, while not a distinct robotics company, is exploring many similar ideas.
Track 2: Zero-Employee Companies
The foundation of a zero-employee company is artificial intelligence.
With the development of OpenAI's o3 and other more advanced reasoning models, the models have reached a point where they can think, plan, execute, and self-correct.
This provides the foundation for AI agents to execute all tasks in business.
For a zero-employee company to work, it will require human guidance, as AI will inevitably make mistakes and may struggle to keep up.
However, over time, I expect that as AI continues to improve its self-correcting and scaling capabilities, the degree of human guidance will decrease.
I believe the governance of these zero-employee companies will likely be achieved through DAOs, and I anticipate that the crypto capital markets will fund ambitious attempts at zero-employee companies.
Startups often succeed while large companies face unique constraints. I believe zero-employee constraints will lead to some incredible breakthroughs in all business operations.
Track 3: On-Chain Securities
With the incoming Trump administration and Republicans sweeping Congress, the time has finally come for on-chain securities to take off in a meaningful way.
Transactions on blockchains like Solana eliminate typical waiting periods in traditional finance. Faster capital flows improve capital efficiency and should lead to more effective pricing.
Blockchain ensures that all participants can access real-time, immutable transaction records.
This level of transparency and security starkly contrasts with the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases in traditional finance.
The transaction costs on blockchain networks are much lower than traditional banking systems, as can be seen by comparing the cost of sending stablecoins on Solana ($0.001) and wire transfer costs ($30). Solana's token expansion now allows for the precise granularity control needed for tokenized securities.
Issuers can restrict holders of their securities to whitelisted addresses, can recall tokens if ordered by a court, and comply with other securities law or transfer agent requirements.
There is no doubt that blockchain's near-instant finality, cheap transactions, and transparency provide better solutions compared to slow, expensive, and opaque transaction tracks.
The only real obstacle is regulatory barriers, and a more innovation-friendly SEC could open the door to tokenization of securities.
I do not think that stocks of publicly listed companies will be the first widely accepted tokenized securities.
It is more likely that markets with poorer liquidity and less transparency will benefit first.
This could be equity in startups, as there’s no reason to pay intermediaries to manage your market cap table when blockchain can facilitate payment for free. It could operate automatically like fixed-income tools.
Track 4: On-chain Asset Management
When all assets are programmable and can be traded on-chain, we will start to see interesting new products emerge.
For example:
Buy now, pay later—e-commerce commonly features buy now, pay later options, while today's on-chain users can earn 8% annually on SOL and 15% annualized yield on stablecoins.
What if users can deposit tokens with merchants, allowing merchants to earn staking/borrowing rewards over time without needing to pay upfront?
Tokens for his users will be locked for a period to guarantee payment. We believe there is a powerful consumer psychology game here, as the opportunity cost of returns seems more acceptable than paying upfront.
Paying with a portfolio—when all assets are tokenized and aggregated in one place (like a web3 wallet), it should make sense for users to pay for medium to large orders with their portfolios.
Imagine Alice owns $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 generating USDC in yield, $10,000 in TSLA stock, and $10,000 in gold. She wants to buy a $4,000 sofa. Instead of converting her USDC to fiat, waiting for a bank transfer, sending the payment, and then going through the reverse process to rebalance her portfolio, what if she could automatically sell $1,000 of each of her four on-chain assets and pay the sofa merchant immediately?
She still maintains her existing portfolio without needing to consider the rebalancing process.
Portfolio margin—over the next 3-5 years, with the emergence of crypto brokers and unified super protocols, users should be able to cross-use margin within their various assets.
For example, Alice should be able to short BTC stocks using her AAPL stocks and borrow USDC on-chain.
Or she should be able to collateralize her tokenized whiskey to purchase tokenized bonds.
We have already seen this in synthetic assets (e.g., forex trading brought by foreign exchange), but it becomes clearer when spot assets are tokenized.
Track 5: Verifying Off-Chain State On-Chain
Assets like Bitcoin and Solana are the ledgers of cryptocurrency, marking the moment from zero to one.
These systems are fundamentally about money—they facilitate the storage and transfer of value on a global, permissionless track.
We are now seeing an increasing number of interactions between crypto-native and off-chain assets.
In the next 12 months, cryptography will position itself in three new ways as a verification layer for data and computation: network proof, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media sourcing.
I believe this is the fusion of monetary crypto and verification crypto—a coordinating layer that will enable new economic primitive structures and incentive structures.
The first opportunity here is zkTLS and the markets it supports. zkTLS refers to building zero-knowledge proofs on TLS signatures in web pages to verify any unit of data on the internet in a completely censorship-resistant, tamper-proof manner (e.g., your credit score on a fax waiting list or your Strava activity history).
Some teams have already deployed zk proofs on web sessions to build censorship-resistant and fraud-resistant applications.
Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples.
p2p.me is a fiat deposit and withdrawal project in India that leverages network evidence to bypass the fragmented market structure in the region.
ZkMe is a sovereign verification system for KYC credentials that allows applications to verify their users' identities in a privacy-preserving way. The same initial conditions can be extended to dozens of new markets—ticketing, reservations, and other systems where fraud is a major bottleneck for liquidity.
Secondly, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter its heyday.
As AI systems experience diminishing returns on training from public datasets, post-training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become increasingly important.
This creates a whole new design space for coordinating other inaccessible datasets as inputs for models—especially as large amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue to shift to cloud systems. Token-based incentives at this layer will be crucial, and unlocking in this area will take frontier foundational models to the next level.
Thirdly, identity verification and media provenance systems will become fixtures in a post-AI enriched world of consumer applications.
When the cost of generating content approaches zero, the proliferation of synthetic media will create a strong demand to prove the authenticity of content and identity.
Early systems like Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode use biometrics or government-issued credentials to establish identity and use token incentives as the main call to action to mobilize participants at scale.
Similarly, C2PA (Content Authenticity and Provenance Alliance) solves media provenance by labeling content at the hardware level, separating it from media captured by AI.
But considering the need to reach consumers, they may require some form of token-based incentive.
Track 5: Trading Goes Multiplayer
One of the biggest advantages of cryptocurrency is its permissionless liquidity. It opens the door for anyone to build multi-party trading tools for crypto assets.
In 2025, I am excited to see builders leverage the viral nature of social trading to create multiplayer gaming experiences.
Such products will allow users to share trades, compete on profit and loss statements, and enter positions with a single click.
This design space is vast, including Telegram bots, Twitter links, Discord mini-programs, and more.
2023 and 2024 witnessed the rise of single-player game tools like BONKBot and BullX, while 2025 will be the year of multiplayer trading games.
Track 6: Full-Stack Media Companies
People have attempted many times to use tokens to enhance media and content, but few have been able to fully unlock their potential.
However, we are beginning to see the rise of media companies that control end-to-end content production, including tokens, distribution, and human capital.
These 'full-stack' media companies have the capacity to utilize the primitives of cryptocurrency more deeply than before. Think: athlete tokens, creator coins, live predictions markets, etc.
Karate Combat is an example. Karate Combat does not create a product around existing UFC fighters but instead builds a new fighting league from scratch, giving them more control over the rule set, distribution, and athletes. While tokens have limited utility for UFC fighters, Karate Combat allows token holders to vote on fighters' training regimens, match gear, or anything else—because Karate Combat controls the design of the tokens and the fighters' contracts.
Future live broadcasts, sports leagues, podcasts, and reality game shows can undergo deep vertical integration in terms of content, distribution, tokens, and human capital.
I am excited to invest in and consume the next generation of media enhanced by generative capabilities.
Track 7: The Rise of Alpha Hunters
First, now almost anyone can freely issue tokens, leading to a staggering number of token offerings in 2024.
Most of these coins are meme coins, with half of them surviving only a few hours.
Secondly, in 2024, market sentiment shifted back to high-volatility, low FDV fair issuance style token offerings—reminiscent of the ICO era in 2017.
In this type of market, centralized exchanges find it hard to keep up, and we expect Dex to gain more market share by 2025. With the surge of tokens on Dex, active traders will need stronger tools and models to identify urgent tokens, analyze sentiment and on-chain metrics, detect vulnerabilities, reduce risks (such as exit scams), and execute trades effectively—all in real-time.
This brings to mind the third thing that will happen in 2024: AI agents.
So far, we have seen AI agents create content on social media to attract attention to their respective tokens.
I hope the next iteration of AI agents will be alpha hunters—those whose sole job is to find alpha and trade it automatically in real-time.
Finally: Institutional Frenzy
We have just entered the institutionalization phase of cryptocurrency, which will happen at a dazzling pace.
In the past five years, the crypto technology industry has made significant advancements in technology, product-market fit, and material UI/UX improvements.
But institutions have effectively remained stagnant in crypto technology.
The reasons are both regulatory and related to the professional risks of practitioners, which makes it difficult for many financial institutions to effectively enter this field, and even to provide the most basic cryptocurrency products to clients.
As governments supporting cryptocurrencies come to power in the US, and with BTC ETF's record success, we will see five years of institutional frenzy racing to catch up and find ways to support cryptocurrencies.
In 2024, there will be a $35 billion demand for BTC purchases that will go unmet as people cannot or will not land on Coinbase.
As most asset management firms have not fully launched, by 2025 there will be more dollars available for cryptocurrency. We will see a large number of ETFs released to meet and capitalize on this demand. This includes ETFs for new crypto assets like Solana (SOL), as well as ETFs that hold multiple crypto assets and others that mix crypto assets with traditional assets like gold, stocks, or credit.
Basically, any merger bundling crypto assets for institutional and retail investors that you can think of will be explored.