Author: Multicoin Capital; Compiled by: 0xjs@Golden Finance
2025 is expected to be a key year for the industry. The path to the first regulatory framework supporting cryptocurrency, combined with the technological maturity of L1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, DePIN networks, and stablecoins, creates fertile ground for the next wave of frontier innovation.
In keeping with our tradition, we will share the ideas and opportunities that excite us most in the coming year. If you are building in any of these areas, please DM Multicoin partners directly.
DePIN Robotics, zero-employee company
Kyle Samani, Multicoin Founder
DePIN Robotics - There are already rumors that the incoming Trump administration will attempt to push autonomous driving (AD) regulations from the state level to the national level, establishing unified standards for AD companies. With GPU clusters exceeding 100,000 H100, transformer-based autonomous driving will be ready for the real world. After that, I expect explosive growth in robot-based DePIN. Many startups have already raised funding from non-crypto VCs but have yet to truly commercialize. I am optimistic that many of them will adopt the DePIN model, distributing risks from the asset-heavy balance sheets of development companies to a global pool of robot professionals and production consumers. Many early adopters of these robotic products will capture data crucial for developing autonomous robotics. I know of one company in this space today—Frodobots—and I look forward to seeing more. Our portfolio company Hivemapper, while not explicitly a robotics company, is exploring many similar ideas.
Zero-employee companies - The foundation of zero-employee companies is AI. With the help of OpenAI's o3 and other more advanced reasoning models, these models are reaching a level where they can think, plan, execute, and self-correct. This lays the groundwork for AI agents to carry out all tasks in business. In order for a zero-employee company to operate effectively, it will need human guidance, as AI will inevitably make mistakes and may exceed its contextual window. Over time, I expect that as AI continually improves its self-correction and expands its context window, the degree of human guidance will decrease. I believe that the governance of these zero-employee companies could be conducted via DAOs, and I anticipate that the crypto capital market will fund the ambitious attempts of zero-employee companies.
Startups often succeed while large companies fail due to unique constraints they face. I believe the zero-employee constraint will bring some incredible breakthroughs to all business operations.
On-chain securities
Tushar Jain, Multicoin Co-Founder
With the advent of the Trump administration and the Republican sweep in Congress, on-chain securities finally saw meaningful takeoff.
Transactions on blockchains like Solana can be completed almost instantly, eliminating the wait times common in traditional finance. Faster capital movement enhances capital efficiency and should bring about more effective pricing.
Blockchain ensures that all participants have access to real-time, tamper-proof transaction records. This transparency and security stand in stark contrast to the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases of traditional finance. The transaction costs on blockchain networks are significantly lower than those in traditional banking systems; just compare the cost of sending stablecoins on Solana ($0.001) with the cost of sending a wire transfer ($30). The token expansion on Solana now allows for precise fine-grained control over tokenized securities. Issuers can restrict their security holders to whitelisted addresses, recall tokens in the case of court orders, and comply with other securities laws or transfer agent requirements or best practices.
There is no doubt that the near-instant finality, low-cost transactions, and transparency of blockchain offer a superior settlement compared to the slow, expensive, and opaque traditional financial rails. The only real barrier is regulation, and a more innovation-friendly SEC could open the door to securities tokenization.
I don't think public stock offerings will be the first tokenized securities to achieve mass market adoption. Markets that are illiquid, opaque, and benefit more from tokenization are more likely to be adopted first. This could be startup equity, as there is no reason to pay Carta or Angelist to manage capitalization tables when blockchain can do it for free. It could be the fixed-income instruments that Figure has been researching for years. It could be LP interests in funds.
Buy Now, Pay Never, Spend Your Portfolio, Portfolio Margining
Spencer Applebaum, Multicoin Investment Partner
Based on Tushar's idea, when all assets are programmable and can be traded on-chain, we will begin to see interesting new products emerge. Here are a few examples:
Buy Now, Pay Never - Affirm and Klarna have popularized the concept of buy now, pay later, and I believe you've seen these widgets on Amazon and other merchant sites. Nowadays, on-chain users can earn about 8% on SOL and about 15% on stablecoins. What if users didn't need to pay a subscription fee upfront but could deposit their tokens with merchants (from web2 companies like Netflix to web3 companies like Dune Analytics), and merchants would earn staking/lending rewards over time? The users' tokens would be locked for some time to ensure payment. We believe there is a strong consumer psychology factor here, where the opportunity cost of earning seems more acceptable than prepayment.
Spend your portfolio directly - When all assets are tokenized and aggregated in one place (a web3 wallet), it makes sense for users to be able to pay for medium to large items with their portfolio. Imagine Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in USDC earnings, $10,000 in TSLA stocks, and $10,000 in gold. She wants to buy a $4,000 sofa. What if she doesn't have to convert her USDC to fiat, wait for a bank transfer, send payment, and then reverse the process to rebalance her portfolio? Instead, she can auto-sell $1,000 of each of her four holdings on-chain and immediately pay the sofa merchant. She remains fully allocated to her existing portfolio without needing to consider the rebalancing process.
Portfolio margining - In the next 3-5 years, with the emergence of major cryptocurrency brokers and unified super protocols, users should be able to margin across all assets held. For example, Alice should be able to short BTC perpetual contracts with her AAPL stocks and borrow USDC on-chain. Or she should be able to use her tokenized whiskey as collateral to purchase tokenized debt on-chain. We are beginning to see this in an integrated manner (e.g., Ostium brings forex trading on-chain), but it all becomes clearer when spot assets are tokenized.
On-chain verification of off-chain states
Shayon Sengupta, Multicoin Investment Partner
The ledgers of assets like Bitcoin and Solana mark the moment when cryptocurrency goes from zero to one. These systems are fundamentally about money—they facilitate value storage and transfer globally, permissionlessly. We are now seeing the cryptographic primitives that make these systems possible begin to cross-pollinate with non-ledger systems, unlocking new net markets. In the next 12 months, crypto technology will become a verification layer for data and computation in three novel ways: network proofs, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media provenance. I see this as a fusion of monetary cryptography and verification cryptography—a coordinating layer that will enable new economic primitives and incentive structures.
The first opportunity here is zkTLS and its supported markets. zkTLS refers to building zero-knowledge proofs through TLS signatures to verify any data unit on the internet (e.g., your credit score on Equifax or your Strava activity history) in a fully untraceable and tamper-proof manner. Teams have already deployed zk proofs in web sessions to build untraceable and fraud-resistant applications. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples. p2p.me is a cash in/out service in India that utilizes network proofs to bypass the region's fragmented market structure. ZkMe is a sovereign verification system for KYC credentials that allows applications to verify their users' identities in a privacy-preserving way. Similar primitives can be extended to dozens of new markets—ticketing, bookings, and other fraud systems that are major bottlenecks for liquidity.
Secondly, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter its golden age. As the returns from training AI systems on public datasets diminish, post-training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become increasingly critical. This creates a whole new design space for coordinating datasets that were previously inaccessible as model inputs—especially as a significant amount of valuable enterprise and consumer data continues to shift from local to cloud systems. The token-based incentives at this layer will be critical, and unlocking this space will elevate SOTA foundational models to a new level.
Thirdly, in the post-AI era, verification and media provenance systems will become fixed content in consumer applications. As the cost of generating content approaches zero, the abundance of synthetic media content will make proving the authenticity of content and identity an urgent requirement. Early systems like Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode establish personhood using cryptographic proofs rather than biometrics or government-issued credentials and use token incentives as a primary call to action to mobilize participants en masse. Similarly, standards like C2PA address media provenance issues by tagging content at the hardware level to distinguish between real captured media and AI-generated media, but given the inertia of consumer habits, widespread adoption at the application layer may require some form of token-based coordination. These tools are crucial for addressing the information hazards of an AI-saturated consumer internet.
Multiplayer trading, full-stack media companies
Eli Qian, Multicoin Investment Partner
Multiplayer trading - Sharing financial gains and losses and speculating collectively is a very human, highly viral behavior. People love to talk about how much they made (or lost!) in various fields like stocks, sports betting, and memecoins. However, most popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are designed for solo experiences. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot—none of these are multiplayer-first experiences. Nevertheless, the demand for social trading is undeniable. Nowadays, users create their own ad-hoc social experiences through online forums and group chats. A significant portion of the content on Crypto Twitter revolves around these discussions.
One of the biggest advantages of cryptocurrency is permissionless liquidity. It opens the door for anyone to build multiplayer trading tools for crypto assets. In 2025, I look forward to seeing builders leverage the inherent viral spread of social trading to create multiplayer experiences. Such products will allow users to share trades, compete on profit and loss statements, and enter positions together with a click or tap. The design space is vast, covering Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord mini-apps, and more. While 2023 and 2024 witnessed the rise of single-player tools like BONKBot and BullX, 2025 will be the year trading goes multiplayer.
Full-stack media companies - Many people have tried to use tokens to enhance media and content, but few companies have been able to realize their potential fully. However, we are starting 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 ability to push crypto primitives further than ever before. Think: athlete tokens, creator tokens, live streams with prediction markets, and so on.
One example is Karate Combat. Karate Combat is not building products around existing UFC fighters but is creating a new fighting league from scratch, giving them more control over the rules, distribution, and athletes. While the utility of tokens for UFC fighters is limited, Karate Combat allows token holders to vote on fighters' training regimens, fight gear, or anything else—this is only possible if Karate Combat controls the token design and fighter contracts.
Future live broadcasts, sports leagues, podcasts, and reality shows will achieve deep vertical integration in terms of content, distribution, tokens, and human capital. I am excited to invest in and consume the next generation of token-enhanced media.
The rise of Alpha Hunters
Vishal Kankani, Multicoin Investment Partner
Some decisive things happened in 2024. They herald some interesting things coming in 2025.
Firstly, for approximately $0, almost anyone can issue a new token without permission. This has led to a staggering number of token issuances in 2024, most of which are memecoins with half-lives measured in hours.
Secondly, in 2024, market sentiment will fall back to high liquidity, low FDV fairly distributed token offerings—reminiscent of the ICO era in 2017. In this type of market, CEXs will struggle to keep up with the pace of new listings, and we expect new listings to occur in 2025 (due to their listing processes), thereby incentivizing people to go on-chain and bringing more liquidity to DEXs. Consequently, DEXs will gain market share over CEXs in the coming year. With the surge in token numbers and DEX activity, active traders will need more robust tools and models to identify emerging tokens, analyze sentiment and on-chain metrics, spot vulnerabilities, mitigate risks (e.g., rug pulls), and execute trades efficiently—all in real-time.
This brings us to the third thing happening in 2024: AI agents. So far, we have seen AI agents creating content on social media to attract attention to their respective tokens. I anticipate that the next iteration of AI agents will be Alpha Hunters, whose sole job is to seek alpha and trade autonomously in real-time.
Institutional frenzy
Matt Shapiro, Multicoin Partner
We have just entered the beginning of the institutionalization phase of cryptocurrency, and it will happen at a dazzling speed.
Over the past five years, the crypto industry has made significant progress through major technological advancements, product-market fit, and substantial UI/UX improvements, yet the institutional community has stagnated in crypto. The combination of regulatory and occupational risk has prevented many financial institutions from effectively entering the space, even to provide their clients with the most basic crypto products. With a pro-crypto government coming to power in the U.S. and the record success of BTC ETFs, we are about to see the institutional complacency of the past five years strive to catch up and find ways to support crypto as soon as possible.
In 2024, the demand for BTC purchases will reach $35 billion, a demand that cannot or will not simply be met by buying cryptocurrency through Coinbase. As most asset management firms and large brokerage firms have yet to fully launch, there will be more dollars available to buy cryptocurrency by 2025. We will see a slew of ETFs launched to meet and capitalize on this demand. This includes ETFs for new crypto assets like Solana, ETFs holding a variety of crypto assets, and ETFs mixing crypto assets with traditional assets like gold, stocks, or credit. There will be leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility-suppressing ETFs, staking ETFs, and more. Basically, all conceivable combinations of bundling crypto assets for institutional and retail investors will be explored.
We will see major financial institutions competing to launch basic financial products centered around cryptocurrencies. Each financial institution should explore creating product lines that allow customers to trade cryptocurrency products. Financial institutions should seek to custody crypto assets and provide credit against those assets just as they do today for more traditional assets. We may also see a significant increase in stablecoin issuers. Any bank accepting deposits should seek to issue local stablecoins. I spoke with Visa's Cuy Sheffield at the Multicoin Summit in 2024, and every company needs a stablecoin strategy. Companies that used to focus on e-commerce are now just commerce. Stablecoins are heading in the same direction.
These are just the tip of the iceberg; while this isn't the most technically ambitious thing in the crypto space, the scale of distribution and the capital involved are massive.
