Author: E. Johansson, L. Kelly, DL News; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance
As artificial intelligence dominates headlines, experts say adding cryptocurrency to the mix will accelerate the trend.
The popular cryptocurrency tied to artificial intelligence surged 160% and is expected to be worth nearly $55 billion by 2024. Meanwhile, investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into projects that leverage artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
Market watchers have reason to be bullish on the trend: Researchers estimate that the combination could add another $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
We asked industry experts what they expect to see at the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency in 2025.
Mark Beylin, Boost VC Investor
The crypto space is quickly becoming a battleground for developing open source general artificial intelligence, a trend that will only accelerate in 2025.
We will witness an increasingly tight feedback loop as more attention, capital, and talent flow into the field, vying to be part of what may be the most important invention of our generation.
Adversarial crypto environments will serve as the perfect breeding ground for a new era of hardened models that are battle-tested to resist attack vectors designed to subvert the intent of developers.
Improved open source tools will only further accelerate this trend, helping anyone deploy their own bots to fight on the big stage.
While some agents will use their ability to leverage large protocols to profit, others will simply find more efficient ways to extract value from human market participants who cannot possibly move as quickly or know as much as they do.
Even human-operated robots struggle with a host of new strategies that are not based on prior knowledge but have risen to the top through an accelerated process of natural selection, where the best programs have learned how to learn faster than anyone imagined.
David Gogel, Vice President of Strategy and Operations, dYdX Foundation
AI thrives on data, and blockchain provides a verifiable, decentralized, and transparent infrastructure.
Together, they enable revolutionary use cases such as AI-driven smart contracts, decentralized data marketplaces, AI-driven trading strategies, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that use AI-driven insights to adapt in real time.
These technologies promise systems that are not only intelligent and autonomous, but also inherently trustworthy.
In 2024, we saw AI tokens gain popularity on trading venues like dYdX, and projects at the forefront of decentralized computing and AI attracted market attention.
The success of the AI agent Terminal of Truths, which autonomously performed tasks and launched a cryptocurrency, shows how far this intersection has come in 2024.
Looking ahead, 2025 will see further development of AI tokens and applications, driven by innovations in on-chain AI integration and AI modeling.
Patrick Friedrich, Founder of onicai
2025 will be the year that autonomous agents take off, and web3 will provide the infrastructure layer to coordinate and control them.
Large Language Models (LLMs) will become more efficient, enabling better and better models to run on decentralized networks, edge devices, embedded systems, and user devices such as laptops and smartphones.
This will go hand in hand with specialist LLMs for specific fields and create a greater wave of accessibility and usefulness across more industries than we have ever seen.
Web3 tools for creating, running, and managing AI agents will give users the necessary ownership and control to transform AI from a service to a personal assistant.
This includes autonomous agents that independently complete tasks on behalf of their owners, thereby becoming a form of extension of the user in digital and physical space.
Calanthia Mei, Co-founder of Masa
With the rise of artificial intelligence agents, memes are evolving into something much more powerful.
These aren’t just for the big players — even teenage crypto traders are building AI-powered memes to mark their work and take part in the cultural craze.
The growing demand for AI agents comes with a critical need for a robust data infrastructure to deliver high-quality, relevant data and avoid bottlenecks caused by API rate limits.
If AI agents are expected to reach $47.1 billion by 2030, the data infrastructure layer behind them will be worth even more.
Ron Bodkin, Founder and CEO, ChainML
The recent surge in memes related to AI agents indicates that the demand for advanced AI development is increasing, the growth potential is huge, and our team expects significant developments in agent platforms in 2025.
There will almost certainly be volatility — this is cryptocurrency, after all.
But the trend suggests there’s a huge demand for more advanced AI agents that can handle increasingly complex tasks and workflows, which in turn will drive further innovation across the industry.
Additionally, 2025 will see the introduction of oversight and regulation of AI, especially with Trump appointing David Sacks as his new crypto and AI czar.
What form this oversight will take remains to be seen, but it’s clear that AI will be a key focus for the new administration.
We hope that any policies implemented will seek to empower consumers and not hinder industry progress.”
Yannik Schrade, CEO and Co-founder, Arcium
The biggest obstacle in history will not be the token — it will be ignoring privacy.
Without it, everything blockchain promises — freedom, autonomy, fair economics, community-driven governance — will mean nothing.
Privacy should not be considered an add-on, a feature, or an entirely separate application. Instead, it needs to be a foundational layer of the blockchain technology stack.
The next major technological revolution will occur at the intersection of artificial intelligence and encryption.
However, there are two paths: one is dystopian and the other is utopian. To build a future where artificial intelligence and human intelligence coexist harmoniously, privacy and confidentiality must be at its core.
