Author: Mippo
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
The United States will re-emerge as the global cryptocurrency hub.
An increasing number of entrepreneurs will return to the United States and set up offices in New York.
The scale of cryptocurrency conferences in the U.S. will also surpass similar events in Asia.
More than 10 DeFi protocols will officially launch fee switches, including Uniswap.
DeFi protocols will gradually adopt customer asset rehypothecation as a new business model.
This trend will involve areas such as cross-chain bridges, liquid staking tokens (LSTs), etc.
The Ethereum community's debate over the 'Polaris' roadmap will come to a conclusion:
Attempts to scale L1 mainnets will remain at low levels (e.g., raising Gas targets to 50M gwei, while discussions on shortening block times will heat up).
Ultimately, the Rollup-centric roadmap will be reaffirmed.
Max's scaling proposal will fail to gain sufficient support and ultimately fail.
This outcome will bring much-needed cohesion to the Ethereum community and improve overall market sentiment.
Nevertheless, some dissenting developers and users may exit the ecosystem as a result.
The price of ETH tokens is expected to perform strongly.
Rollup-based solutions will still struggle to achieve major breakthroughs in 2025.
However, sufficient interoperability can be achieved through protocols like Across.
Currently, there is still no clear direction for achieving universal synchronous composability.
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) will gradually become an important component of L2 infrastructure and eventually become a permanent feature.
Solana's development momentum will continue during this cycle, but issues will gradually emerge by 2025:
Due to the decentralization of memecoins and challenges brought by MEV (maximum extractable value), Solana's REV will struggle to reach new highs. In response to these issues, maximalism within the Solana community will rise.
The Firedancer client will officially launch in the fourth quarter, at which point Solana's network will achieve a processing capacity of 100,000 TPS.
Solana may adjust its token issuance policy to reduce inflation, while Ethereum will not make similar changes.
Base will become a dark horse in the Rollup ecosystem and will be a major competitor to Solana.
Total assets on Base are expected to exceed $40 billion.
Base will also become the preferred chain for AI agents and other AI applications.
Stablecoins will gradually become the dominant asset on L2 networks, with their quantity expected to exceed twice that of ETH.
The stablecoin market will experience breakthrough growth in the coming year:
Market capitalization is expected to exceed $450 billion. Stablecoins will become one of the top three investment areas of focus for venture capitalists (VCs).
More than 5 large fintech companies or traditional financial institutions will launch their own stablecoins in 2025.
This will put competitive pressure on existing stablecoins, leading to a slowdown in their growth rate.
More than 10 enterprises (including banks and Web2 giants) will launch their own L2 networks in 2025.
However, most of these networks will struggle to gain market recognition and achieve tangible results.
The only possible exception may be fintech companies like Robinhood.
With a large user base and strong brand influence, Robinhood will become one of the dominant forces in the industry by 2025.
By the end of the year, Robinhood will be seen as one of the two leading crypto exchanges in the U.S., alongside Coinbase.
Investment opportunities in L1 blockchains still exist and will not disappear in the short term.
The most outstanding projects will be Sui and HyperLiquid.
The ICO model will make a comeback, but it will not dominate as it did in 2017.
Investor protection measures will be more完善, and ICOs will resemble crowdfunding activities.
Five blue-chip protocols are expected to raise funds through ICOs.
Venture capital will flow back into the crypto industry, but the scale of financing will not reach the levels of 2021.
The total venture capital in the crypto space in 2021 was $30 billion. In 2025, it is expected to be between $20 billion and $25 billion. The market will see more financing rounds of $50 million to $100 million.
Crypto companies will experience a window for IPOs, but there will not be a large-scale listing wave.
More than 4 companies are expected to conduct IPOs, but due to the valuation bubble in 2021 not being fully digested, more companies may postpone their listing plans.
Growth equity investments will still not enter the crypto space.
The mainstream trend in 2025 will be the combination of AI and crypto.
Continued advancements in foundational models will generate more attention and drive a surge in AI-related tokens.
The application scenarios of AI will become more diverse, not limited to agents.
Different types of agents will be attempted, such as content creators, hedge fund traders, artists, etc.
However, the vast majority of attempts will be in the early stages and may not succeed.
TikTok's influence in the crypto space will reach unprecedented heights.
Crypto Twitter (CT) may become the main exit channel for certain TikTok tokens.
The United States will pass significant crypto legislation in 2025.
An updated market structure bill or stablecoin bill may be signed into law.
Bitcoin's L2 solutions will still struggle to achieve breakthroughs in 2025.
Truly zero-knowledge proof (ZK) based Bitcoin L2 will still take longer to realize.
Cryptocurrency will be widely regarded as a long-term force in U.S. politics.
The mainstream media's (MSM) attitude will gradually shift, beginning to acknowledge that cryptocurrency will not easily exit the historical stage.
