Author: Stacy Muur, Web3 researcher; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

The end of the year is one of my favorite times of the year because Web3 industry leaders start sharing their highly credible thoughts and predictions for 2025. It’s an exciting time that will paint a picture of what cryptocurrency mindshare will look like in the coming year.

Earlier this month, a16z crypto released a list of Big Ideas for the crypto industry in 2025. What projects are currently being developed and built in these key areas? Let’s explore further in this article.

Big Idea 1: AI Agents to Manage Wallets

In short, AI agents have demonstrated their ability to trade independently and operate fully autonomously. Many new use cases may emerge in this space. AI agents can play new roles in Web3, participating in transactions, investments, bridging, and other purposes.

In this space, there are several projects on my watch list:

● NEAR Protocol: NEAR now positions itself as the “AI blockchain”. It has recently launched several major products, including Near AI and Near Intents. NEAR has already captured some pretty impressive mindshare and is expected to become one of the leaders in the field by 2025.

● Fetch.ai: Fetch.ai is a platform built for the AI ​​economy, providing tools to build, deploy, and monetize artificial intelligence services. Its ASI wallet can integrate the best features and progress of Fetch in AI, and has the potential to become one of the first implementations of "AI x wallet" integration.

● Armor Wallet: This is an AI-powered crypto wallet and trading assistant. Armor Wallet is a non-custodial wallet that uses artificial intelligence to conduct transactions across multiple blockchains and can perform complex transactions quickly and easily. Please note that Armor is still a relatively early project.

● Coin98 Super Wallet: In late November, Coin98 released their AI wallet, which comes with an AI assistant that can recommend tools and simplify complex tasks. It also supports natural human-like interactions.

Big Idea 2: Enhanced Information Aggregation

The idea revolves around new mechanisms based on prediction markets, which aim to gather information more efficiently and strengthen the decision-making process in various departments.

This is a relatively new idea, and in this area I recommend you read Delphi Digital’s article “Markets Will Save the World”.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

My watch list is as follows:

● MetaDAO: MetaDAO is the first project to implement Futarchy at scale within a DAO. Futarchy is a governance system that combines prediction markets with democratic voting for decision making. In a Futarchy system, participants trade based on the outcomes of various decision options. This approach allows them to "vote" with their own money on the decisions they believe will produce the best outcomes.

● Futarchy: The concept of Futarchy is very similar to MetaDAO: using the market for governance, reflecting the potential impact on the value of shares (tokens).

Big Idea 3: Widespread Adoption of Stablecoins

The idea focuses on the growing popularity of stablecoins, which have surpassed Visa, MasterCard or PayPal in terms of transaction value. This shift will benefit many market participants, including stablecoin issuers, crypto card companies and cryptocurrency acquisition services.

To better illustrate the prospects of stablecoins, below is a diagram of the ecosystem from the above research. You may consider adding these projects to your watchlist.

Within this space, I believe it is critical to emphasize that infrastructure will facilitate growth in transaction volumes and be the primary beneficiary of wider stablecoin adoption.

In addition to TRON (a well-known USDT transfer engine), another protocol worth highlighting is Noble. This new project develops liquidity infrastructure that enables asset issuers to participate in the cross-chain economy.

Big Idea 4: Modularization of Everything

Modularity is nothing new, but a16z crypto predicts that more modules will gain mainstream adoption next year. I think of a few notable verticals:

● RaaS (Rollup-as-a-Service):Gelato、Caldera、AltLayer、Conduit、Bison Labs。

● Interoperability: Hyperlane, Polyhedra, Omni.

● Shared sorting: Espresso, Radius, Zellular.

● Privacy protection: Nillion, Brevis, Automata, Fhenix, zkMe.

● Intents:Anoma, Aori, Native.

● Storage: Arweave, Storj, Filecoin, Zus.

● Oracles: Pyth, RedStone, Supra, Chainlink, etc.

In summary, the focus on infrastructure solutions will remain very important in 2025.

Big Idea 5: Seamless User Experience

In my opinion, this is the strongest bet. Chain abstraction has been a hot topic for a while now and we are finally approaching the point where abstracted user experience becomes a reality rather than just a concept.

Here’s a great chain abstraction from The Defiant:

All of them are definitely worth your attention, but I want to highlight Particle as my favorite. Their first Universal Accounts deployment recently went live, allowing users to seamlessly trade assets from any chain through UniversalX.

Another bet in the space is Everclear, the primary clearing layer for Web3. As the solver economy (critical to chain abstraction) scales, solvers will need to be rebalanced between chains. Everclear is the most cost-effective facilitator of this process.

Big Idea 6: Crypto App Store

This original a16z crypto article highlights several notable crypto app store developers, including Telegram apps on TON, Alchemy, Solana’s mobile (Seeker) dApp store, and Worldcoin’s mobile app.

In fact, many wallet providers can seamlessly transform into crypto app stores.

And I would like to highlight a few more: Glue, DeFi App, and VeBetter.

Big Idea 7: Tokenize Everything

Tokenization is a broad topic, especially regarding the tokenization of “unconventional” assets. In this space, I think of several projects worth paying attention to:

● Kaito AI: Tokenized influence (attention economy).

● GAIB: Providing economics for an AI-driven future by tokenizing enterprise-grade GPUs.

● Compute Labs: Supports split ownership of GPUs (a direct competitor of GAIB).

● ShopX: Tokenized goods and products (RWA for e-commerce).

● Eaas: Tokenized carbon footprint.

● AI Agents and DeSci: Dolz (tokenization of porn stars), PsyDAO (tokenization of psychedelic science and art), Molecule (biomedical IP tokenization protocol), etc. (high risk, peak hype curve).

The above lists some of the protocols on my personal watch list, but please don’t limit your research to just these protocols. The Web3 space is huge, and there are many more protocols that are truly worth paying attention to!