Escrito por: Multicoin Capital

Compilado por: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

Há dois dias, a Multicoin Capital publicou um artigo (Multicoin Capital: 2025 Frontier Narratives), que delineou as narrativas de fronteira mais incertas, mas também as mais imaginativas em 2025.

Hoje, a Multicoin Capital publicou outro artigo, mas o foco está nessas “narrativas eternas” com a maior certeza.

A seguir está o texto completo do Multicoin Capital, compilado pelo Odaily Planet Daily.

O fundador da Amazon, Jeff Bezos, tem um ditado famoso.

O que mudará nos próximos 10 anos? Esta é uma pergunta muito interessante e frequentemente feita. Mas quase nunca me fazem esta pergunta – O que não mudará nos próximos 10 anos? Na minha opinião, a segunda questão é na verdade mais importante, porque saber o que não vai mudar significa que você pode construir sua estratégia de negócios em torno desses eventos determinísticos. Em nosso negócio de varejo, sabemos que os clientes querem preços mais baixos, e sei que isso será verdade em 10 anos; haverá usuários chegando e dizendo: "Ei, Jeff, gosto da Amazon, mas meus preços serão mais altos e minha entrega será mais lenta"... isso nunca vai acontecer. Portanto, precisamos investir energia nessas coisas e fazê-las melhor. Sabemos que a energia que investimos hoje ainda resultará em feedback positivo dos nossos clientes daqui a 10 anos. Quando você sabe que algo será valioso no longo prazo, você pode investir muita energia trabalhando para isso.

Earlier this week, we published a typical VC article primarily about the new opportunities the Multicoin Capital investment team looks forward to seeing in 2025. Based on Bezos' logic, we also find it necessary to highlight trends that we often take for granted but are still evolving. This provides us with a stable opportunity upon which we can continue to invest.

Unchanging narrative one: The relentless pursuit of capital efficiency.

Narrator: Kyle Samani (Co-founder of Multicoin Capital)

DeFi's initial capital efficiency was very low. Uniswap's xy=k curve is notoriously low in capital efficiency.

Over the past five years, capital efficiency in DeFi has improved in many ways. CLOBs, looping/multiply products, concentrated liquidity, derivative exchanges based on USDe, lending using derivative collateral, using LP positions as derivative collateral, and more... The market has been relentlessly pursuing capital efficiency.

This is the charm of DeFi. Permissionless innovation has driven all these capital efficiency improvements.

We believe that Drift, the leading derivatives exchange on Solana, represents a focus on the path of capital efficiency exploration in DeFi. It is one version of the logical endpoint. Spencer and David discussed these issues in their speeches at the 2024 Multicoin Summit.

Unchanging narrative two: The irresistible new financial game.

Narrator: Tushar Jain

Humans always want to gamble, but the games are constantly changing.

Meme tokens represent the next generation of gambling games. Meme tokens are more volatile, making them more interesting than traditional casinos or sports betting. Compared to other forms of gambling, meme tokens offer higher potential returns, and the thrill and risk associated with their extreme volatility surpass traditional casino games or sports betting, with potential massive returns that far exceed existing gambling forms, appealing to those with a higher risk tolerance. This potential for massive gains, combined with the inherent unpredictability of meme tokens, creates an experience unmatched by traditional gambling.

Meme tokens also have a unique social dimension. Abstracting internet culture into a meme token provides social attributes that other forms of gambling lack. They are often associated with internet culture and communities, fostering 'consensus' among gamblers. This social attribute transforms the trading of meme tokens into a group activity, where individuals can connect through shared interests and experiences. This creates a sense of belonging and a shared identity, something other forms of gambling do not possess.

Meme tokens represent a fusion of gambling, internet culture, and social interaction. They offer a high-stakes, high-reward experience, catering to humanity's nature of seeking thrills while also leveraging the social and collective aspects of online communities. As internet culture continues to evolve, meme tokens are likely to remain an important component of the gambling industry, providing unique and appealing experiences for those willing to take risks.

The human impulse to gamble is timeless, but the games we play are constantly changing. Meme tokens are the next step in this evolution, but they won't be the last.

Unchanging narrative three: Transparency in financial markets.

Narrator: Spencer Applebaum

In the TradFi trading market, brokers can offer zero-fee trading to retail investors because firms like Citadel Securities, Susquehanna International, Wolverine Trading, and other high-frequency trading (HFT) companies bid to execute these orders. This is known as payment for order flow (PFOF).

These companies are willing to bid for large orders at mid-market or near mid-market prices. There is a wealth of literature on why PFOF is beneficial to the world rather than evil (despite its usual negative connotations).

The challenge faced by order flow payment models like Robinhood and E-Trade is that they are opaque, and bidding is limited to market makers that partner with brokers. Additionally, there are multiple layers of intermediaries, such as clearing houses, exchanges, and brokers, all of which charge hidden fees to end users, which are often included in the spreads.

Regarding the opacity of PFOF, a research article pointed out: 'The agreements that Robinhood has with wholesalers have come at the cost of slip for the growth of PFOF - this is exactly the conflict of interest issue that SEC Chairman Gensler is concerned about... If consumers could easily distinguish the differences in execution quality among different brokers, that would not be a problem. However, it is impossible to infer those differences from the current disclosure regime.'

The charm of DeFi lies in its ability to compress settlement, exchanges, custody, and execution into a single API, all of which are transparent. This brings a natural advantage to DeFi, as the market always values transparency.

The project DFlow, invested by Multicoin, is pioneering the concept of 'conditional liquidity.' This concept stipulates that liquidity can only be matched when the matching party is recognized as non-malicious by the front-end application (or the matching party can obtain better pricing from market makers through algorithms). Market makers can provide liquidity on on-chain CLOBs like Phoenix or on-chain AMMs like Orca, offering better slip performance for retail orders while avoiding exploitation by malicious matching parties.

The entire stack is open and transparent, utilizing 'conditional liquidity' to build PFOF on this basis. It elegantly combines the best features of traditional finance and DeFi: the ability to slice order flow and provide better quotes to retail investors, while also retaining the openness, transparency, and auditability that DeFi offers.

Unchanging narrative four: Value capture models will continue to split and bundle.

Narrator: Shayon Sengupta

Last year, I published an article on the 'Attention Theory of Value,' in which I described that the core way to introduce cryptocurrency in consumer applications is through permissionless asset issuance and trading in any interface and environment.

In 2024, asset issuance will be concentrated in a few key places, with pump.fun being the most prominent. These venues dominate in asset issuance, but importantly, assets are traded elsewhere - on Telegram bots, on aggregators like DexScreener and Birdeye, within Phantom wallets... Asset issuance and trading do not occur within the same 'issuance platform/trading platform' but across a series of decentralized venues. As long as the crypto capital market exists, asset issuance and trading have always been decoupled. Bitcoin was initially issued on a crypto mailing list called metzdowd.com, but today it is traded (via ETFs) on NASDAQ. Tokens launched during the ICO boom in 2017 are traded on major CEXs.

Therefore, while pump.fun won the issuance stage last year, the trading stage was taken by Telegram bots and retail aggregation products (new sources of order flow). In the long run, I believe that owning an exchange or order flow will be the more profitable business.

This is just the beginning for the issuance platform/trading platform. Asset issuance and trading will be split and bundled a thousand times in a thousand places because attention on the internet is not confined to a single application; it exists across forums, streaming platforms, chat tools, and other interfaces we interact with, omnipresent.

More importantly, I hope these applications can recognize more clearly that possessing attention provides the opportunity to own order flow, which is a highly profitable industry. Get ready to see wallets and trading features embedded in more consumer applications in 2025.

Unchanging narrative five: Capital seeks yield.

Narrator: Eli Qian

Everyone is looking for ways to earn yield, preferably in a simpler and clearer manner.

Until recently, most sources of yield were only accessible to mature market participants and investors. For example, if you deposited money into a savings account at a bank, you would receive a 0.01% annual interest rate (while the bank would lend your money at a 10% rate!). Only by purchasing a money market fund could one garner more reasonable yields. However, the demand for yield remains, and products like ETFs (which abstract stock selection) and robo-advisors (which can manage your entire portfolio) have made it easier for non-expert market participants to access previously locked yield.

The situation with cryptocurrency is similar, as earning yield from staking or lending is not easy and requires users to have a certain level of expertise. Products that simplify the yield acquisition process will continue to emerge, ending the passive knowledge arbitrage situation for retail investors. Nowadays, with just a few simple clicks, you can log into a wallet or app with cryptocurrency and earn staking or lending yields without much related knowledge. Products like Fuse Wallet and StakeKit can do this. In the future, wallets and DeFi applications will automatically allocate and rebalance assets between validators, lending protocols, and liquidity pools, providing users with optimal yields around the clock.

Unchanging narrative six: Reducing banking costs through innovation.

Narrator: Vishal Kankani

The Medici family led the development of modern banking in the 14th century. Banking at that time was slow, physical, costly, and required significant trust. Over time, the cost of obtaining financial services has dropped dramatically. With blockchain, we can clearly see 24/7, global, zero-cost banking.

No matter how advanced financial instruments become, there is always a demand for banking services. The origin of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) is that, no matter how innovative the application layer is, it is difficult to build basic financial components on the TradFi track; this naturally modularized in software, leading to the separation of front-end and back-end. Today, the backend is known as BaaS.

BaaS service providers license their infrastructure to fintech companies, enabling companies to launch digital banks, corporate cards, and lending products with minimal time and cost. By providing these services through APIs, BaaS providers allow tech companies to focus on customer experience and products, while BaaS handles the 'boring but critical' backend operations, including compliance, risk management, and capital flow.

The pre-blockchain era BaaS stack included banking infrastructure, KYC/AML compliance, payment processing, card issuance, and data aggregation. This system can operate, but it is complex and inefficient, as it is still rooted in the traditional banking infrastructure established in the 1970s (SWIFT/ACH) with high costs, non-24/7 availability, low capital efficiency, and a lack of global reach.

Blockchain will disrupt modern BaaS, as blockchain represents transformative innovation. By using blockchain-based assets and protocols, we can build a new BaaS model that is simpler, cheaper, faster, more global, and more transparent.

The BaaS stack in the post-blockchain era will include: self-custody wallets like Squads, enhanced on-chain KYC and compliance protocols like zkMe, stablecoin payment infrastructure like Bridge, as well as DeFi protocols for lending (Kamino) and trading (Drift).

The evolution of BaaS to blockchain-based models is inevitable. As infrastructure matures, we will see blockchain protocols replace every component in today's BaaS stack, creating a more streamlined, efficient, and transparent model for financial services.

Squads is a project invested by Multicoin, whose core is to provide banking-as-a-service protocols on Solana, allowing businesses, individuals, and developers to create a secure account that can store value and be used for programmatic trading. Squads is the first formally verified protocol on Solana, having processed over 1 billion stablecoin transactions, and the assets secured by the Squads protocol are growing exponentially. We expect Squads to lead the development of BaaS in 2025.

Unchanging narrative seven: Eliminating friction to increase usage.

When you make things simpler by lowering costs and friction, people will naturally use them more. Email changed the way we communicate; the iPhone increased the convenience of capturing photos and recording life; Amazon simplified our online shopping experience; social media made sharing content smoother.

Clearly, making transactions and remittances easier will yield the same results. Stablecoins may be one of the biggest financial revolutions of this era. The ability to settle remittances 24/7, almost instantaneously, will have profound impacts. It will allow the dollar to penetrate new markets and reach ordinary people in ways that Treasury auctions cannot. It will make business activities more efficient, eliminating downtime during nights, weekends, or holidays. It will reduce working capital requirements and significantly lower the costs and time of cross-border transactions. The supply of stablecoins has reached new highs, trading volumes of stablecoins have also reached new highs, and as regulation clarifies, the acceptance of stablecoins will increase.

The development of stablecoins will further catalyze the concept of open finance. When trading becomes easier, more transactions will occur. Those who hold stablecoins will seek the yields of these assets and tend to platforms like Kamino and Drift, which autonomously match borrowers and lenders by reducing friction. Once on-chain, stablecoin holders can easily access yields from money market funds (like Blackrock's BUIDL) and decentralized exchanges (like Drift, Jupiter, Raydium, and Uniswap) with just a few clicks. As on-chain assets continue to grow, there is no doubt that the options for stablecoin holders to own and participate in assets will increase. Stablecoins are the Trojan horse of the on-chain economy, growing into a more inclusive and open global financial system.