Author: Haseeb, Dragonfly partner; Translated by: 0xjs@Golden Finance
I'm either going to look like a prophet or an idiot, but one thing is for sure: I'm going to piss off a lot of people with bags.
I divide my predictions for 2025 into six sections: L1/L2, token issuance, stablecoins, regulation, “AI agents” and Crypto x AI.
1、L1/L2
The distinction between L1 and L2 is disappearing. Users no longer perceive the difference between L1 and L2 (did they ever?). The blockchain space (L1 and L2 combined) is already overcrowded and in need of a major shakeout. Consolidation will no longer be about technological superiority — it will be about owning a unique niche market and building stickiness through GTM.
Despite the strength of SVM and Move, EVM market share will actually grow in 2025. This growth will be driven by Base, Monad, and Berachain. It is no longer about compatibility, but because EVM/Solidity has more training data, and LLMs will write most application code in 2025. Existing battle-tested deep crypto contract libraries will also become a watershed, as LLMs are not good at writing low-level code. In the era of LLM development, the importance of DevEx and footguns is not as critical as training data and reliable libraries.
Solana will force more blockchains to optimize for low latency. We will shift from a battle of TPS to a battle of latency — infrastructure like doublezero and ultra-low latency L2s such as MegaETH will raise user expectations for Web2 responsiveness. Expect more acceptance of optimistic user interfaces, pre-confirmations, intents, email onboarding, in-browser wallets, and progressive security. The emergence of Privy for swaps.
Hyperliquid has proven that when specialized chains focus on specific applications and prioritize user experience and seamless bridging, they can work effectively. More projects will follow this model. The old dream of one chain ruling them all has been shattered.
2. Token Issuance
The era of large-scale airdrops through points programs is over. We are moving towards a dual-track world.
First Track: If a project has a clear North Star metric, like an exchange or lending protocol, they will purely distribute tokens based on points. They won’t care whether they are being farmed or played — they are actually distributing tokens as a rebate/discount based on the protocol's core KPI, while airdrop farmers are your actual users.
Second Track: Projects without a clear North Star metric (like L1 and L2) will turn to crowdfunding. They may conduct small airdrops to reward social contributions, but most tokens will be distributed through crowdfunding. Airdrops conducted for vanity metrics are dead. Those do not truly flow to users but rather to industrialized airdrop farmers.
Memecoins will continue to compete for market share against 'AI agent' coins. I see this as a shift from financial nihilism to financial over-optimism. (Yes, I coined that term.)
3. Stablecoins
The use of stablecoins will surge, especially among small and medium-sized enterprises. It will not just be for trading and speculation — real businesses will start using on-chain dollars for instant settlements.
Banks have noticed this: announcements of banks issuing stablecoins are expected by the end of 2025. They do not want to be left behind. But especially under Lutnick's tenure as Secretary of Commerce, Tether will still maintain its top position.
Ethena is expected to absorb more capital, especially with government bond yields continuing to decline over the next year. As the opportunity cost of capital decreases, it will make the base trading yield more attractive.
4. Regulation
The US will legislate on stablecoins, while broader market infrastructure reforms (FIT21) will be delayed. Adoption of stablecoins will accelerate, while Wall Street adoption, asset tokenization, and other TradFi integrations will lag.
Under Trump's leadership, Fortune 100 companies will be more willing to offer cryptocurrencies to consumers, and tech companies and startups will show a higher risk appetite. Trump's inauguration will create a clear regulatory celebration until explicit rules and enforcement priorities are established. During this period, an active expansion of the integration of cryptocurrencies with Web2 platforms is expected.
5. AI Agents (this is the longest section because my thoughts here may be controversial — please read to the end!)
The 'AI agent' craze may last until 2025. But it will eventually fade away. This is not a long-term disruption of AI that needs to be watched closely, but it will become a focal point of CT because it is the most social.
Current AI agents are not truly autonomous agents. These are chatbots attached to memecoins; they have almost no intelligence beyond posting on Twitter. Current 'AI agents' are mostly 'Wizard of Oz' agents — with humans behind the scenes ensuring the AI does not go off track. This situation will not change quickly, as current agents are too poor (even Fortune 100 companies have not yet used agents in production). Current agents can easily be manipulated to say crazy things that damage their brand or can be jailbroken to drain all their resources. See Freysa for what true autonomous AI looks like — if your favorite AI has not been jailbroken, it is because it is a Wizard of Oz AI.
That said, I believe this trend will accelerate. Chatbots can indeed replace many KOLs because chatbots never sleep, they are always passing on information, and they are not as greedy as human KOLs. Moreover, most KOLs are not very creative. Even today, real-time information aggregation/amplification can be easily replaced by algorithms (see @aixbt_agent).
Now these chatbots are very appealing to us because they are very novel. It's like seeing an elephant paint. The first time you see it, you don’t care whether the painting is good — it looks spectacular. But by the 1000th time, the novelty wears off. I believe this will start to happen as these chatbots reach a steady state.
You can see this today through aixbt — it has become very good at aggregating data about different projects. By next year and the next generation of agents, perhaps the illusions of aixbt will be a little less and a little deeper, with smarter insights. But how much will you notice? For most people, it might all feel the same.
I believe this novelty and market thirst will last until 2025. It will take some time for cryptocurrencies to get tired of this shiny thing. But by 2026, I believe a sudden reversal will occur. Chatbots will become ubiquitous, and people will lose interest in them. Sentiment will reverse. Stories of their favorite human KOLs losing their livelihoods will spark a class consciousness. Users will start to discriminate against human KOLs, even if their content is less consistent.
To cope with this pro-human bias, chatbots will start to hide that they are AI, trying to pass off as humans to attract more attention in the market. Future chatbots will not make money through memecoins as they do today, but will earn money like human KOLs through sponsorships, affiliate links, and the tokens they own. KOLs will frequently be accused of being chatbots, and you will see scandals revealing AI. All this will become very strange.
But there’s a darker side. Remember, LLMs are currently excellent wordcel (i.e., people with exceptional writing skills and linguistic intelligence), but they are not good enough in other respects. What is the best way for a wordcel in cryptocurrency to make money? Becoming an influencer, of course, but closely following is becoming a scammer. You will start to see a surge in autonomous scam bots. These bots will proliferate like ransomware and crypto hijacking after 2017. This is expected to become a real social issue.
However, while chatbots are likely to remain a focus in 2025, the long-term disruption of AI will not occur at the social level.
No, it won't appear in the trading realm either. AI will not provide everyone with their own 'trading agent' or mini hedge fund. Yes, AI will scale everyone up, but they will scale personnel based on capital, data, and infrastructure. Therefore, you should expect AI to supercharge existing trading firms with capital scale and data scale. In other words, trading firms will become better at making money. It will also break down hierarchies between trading firms (most trading firms will become quite competent since everyone can access cloud-based IQ 150 quantitative analysts).
Over time, AI will make the market extremely efficient, even in smaller ecological niche markets, leaving ordinary traders with little advantage, even if they have homemade assistant AIs. The value of original research will decline significantly. Nevertheless, the increase in competition and liquidity should be a blessing for those of us who inject noise into the market. (This also means liquidity for Polymarket!)
So, if the big news isn't chatbots or trading bots, what is it? This is my core argument, which for some reason, almost no one talks about: the truly influential AI agents will be software engineering agents.
Why is this a big deal? Ask yourself: What is the major input for our industry? What expensive inputs are hindering more applications, more wallets, better infrastructure, and better everything? The answer is software. If AI agents cause software prices to collapse, it will change everything.
In the post-AI era, you will not need to raise millions of dollars for a seed round but will be able to launch applications using just $10,000 of AI cloud computing. Self-funding projects like Hyperliquid and Jupiter will go from being exceptions to the norm. The number of on-chain applications and experiments will absolutely surge. For a software-driven industry, this deflationary shock will lead to an on-chain renaissance.
The impact on security is profound. AI-driven static analysis and monitoring will be ubiquitous, enabling everyone to obtain security more easily. These AIs will be fine-tuned on EVM/Solidity or Rust codebases and trained on a vast database of security audits and attack vectors. They will undergo RL training in simulated adversarial blockchain environments. I am increasingly convinced that in terms of security, AI tools will ultimately favor defenders rather than attackers. You will have AIs constantly red-teaming contracts, while other AIs reinforce them, formally verify their properties, and hone their skills in incident response and remediation.
Meanwhile, of course, AI-style memecoins can be traded. But true agents will have a greater impact than tweeting and promoting their own tokens.
6. Real Crypto x AI
Above, I detailed the impact of AI on cryptocurrency (this is the primary direction of influence), but cryptocurrency will also impact AI.
Truly autonomous agents will use cryptocurrencies for mutual payments. This will be especially true once there is relaxed regulation on stablecoins — you will even see large companies running AI agents using stablecoins for inter-agent payments because they are easier to initiate than bank accounts.
We will also see more and larger-scale decentralized training and inference experiments. Promising new projects, such as Exo Labs, Nous Research, and Prime Intellect, will pave the way for true alternatives to centralized training and corporate self-service models. The NEAR protocol is also making a strong attempt to create a full-stack, trust-neutral, and permissionless AI stack.
Another intersection of Crypto and AI is user experience. Post-AI wallets will be radically transformed — AI wallets should be able to handle bridging, optimize transaction routes, minimize fees for you, mask interoperability issues or front-end errors, and help you avoid obvious scams or rug pulls. You won’t have to switch between multiple different wallets, nor will you have to change RPC or rebalance your stablecoins. AI will handle all of these for you. It might not become reliable enough to change the user experience of cryptocurrencies until 2026. But when all this arrives, what impact will it have on blockchain network effects? What happens when users no longer care — or even experience — which chain an application exists on?
This field is still young, but I hope we will see it take off soon. In the long run (say mid-2026), I expect most of the market capitalization of 'AI x Crypto' to be located here.
That's all my predictions. I hope that by this time next year, everyone will be able to stop working!
