Author: Haseeb ＞|＜
Compiled by: TechFlow
These predictions will either make me look like a prophet or make me seem very ignorant, but one thing is certain - my views may upset a lot of "hodlers".
I will break down my predictions into six parts: L1 and L2, Token Issuance, Stablecoins, Regulation, "AI Agents", and the Convergence of Crypto and AI.
Estimated reading time: about 9 minutes.
The Future Trends of L1 and L2
The boundaries between L1 and L2 are becoming blurred. Users no longer care about the distinction (in fact, they may never have truly cared). The current blockchain ecosystem, including L1 and L2, has become overly crowded, and a wave of consolidation is coming. The key to this consolidation will not be technical superiority, but the ability to find a unique market positioning and establish user stickiness through effective go-to-market (GTM) strategies.
While SVM and Move technologies are performing strongly, EVM's market share will continue to grow in 2025. This is largely driven by projects like @base, @monad_xyz, and @berachain. This growth is no longer due to compatibility, but because EVM and Solidity have a wealth of training data. By 2025, large language models (LLMs) will dominate application code writing, and EVM has already accumulated a large library of verified crypto contracts, which will be a key advantage.
Solana's low-latency performance will drive more blockchains to optimize for response speed. The blockchain industry will shift from competing on "transactions per second (TPS)" to competing on "latency time" - infrastructure like @doublezero and ultra-low latency L2s (such as @megaeth_labs) will drive user expectations for blockchain experiences to approach Web2 response speeds. We will see more trends around Optimistic UI, pre-confirmation, intent expression, email registration, in-browser wallets, and progressive security. Special thanks to @privy for their innovations in this area.
@HyperliquidX has proven that, especially when prioritizing user experience and cross-chain operability, a dedicated chain focused on specific applications is a viable model. In the future, more projects will emulate this model, and the "one chain to rule them all" idea has become a thing of the past.
New Trends in Token Issuance
The current model of large-scale airdrops through reward programs has come to an end. There will be two main token distribution models in the future:
For projects with clear core metrics (such as exchanges or lending protocols), they will distribute tokens entirely based on reward programs. These projects do not mind being "farmed" or "gamified", as token distribution is actually a feedback or discount mechanism for the core metrics, and those who "short" in a sense are also their real users.
For projects without clear core metrics (such as L1 and L2), they will shift more towards crowdfunding sales. They may do small-scale airdrops to reward social contributions, but the majority of tokens will be distributed through crowdfunding. The airdrops for vanity metrics are outdated, as these tokens do not truly flow to users, but to professional airdrop farmers.
Furthermore, the market share of Memecoins will gradually be replaced by "AI Agent" themed tokens. This shift can be seen as a transition from "financial nihilism" to "financial over-optimism".
Explosive Growth of Stablecoins
The usage of stablecoins will experience explosive growth by 2025, especially in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Their use cases will no longer be limited to trading and speculation, with more businesses using on-chain US dollars for instant settlement.
Banks are also starting to pay attention to this trend: By the end of 2025, it is expected that banks will announce the issuance of their own stablecoins to avoid being left behind by the industry. However, with Lutnick as the Commerce Secretary, Tether is expected to maintain its market dominance.
Meanwhile, @ethena_labs is expected to attract more capital, especially as government bond yields continue to decline over the next year. As the opportunity cost of capital decreases, the profits from basis trading will become more attractive.
Regulation
In 2025, the US is expected to pass stablecoin-related legislation, while more comprehensive market infrastructure reforms (i.e., the FIT21 Act) may be delayed. The adoption of stablecoins will accelerate significantly, but Wall Street's crypto integration, asset tokenization, and traditional finance (TradFi) progress may lag behind.
Under the Trump administration, Fortune 100 companies may become more proactive in offering crypto services to consumers, while tech companies and startups will exhibit higher risk tolerance. Trump's inauguration may bring a brief "regulatory vacuum" period, during which, due to a lack of clear rules and enforcement priorities, the market will take a more lenient attitude towards the integration of crypto technologies. It is expected that during this window, crypto technologies will see a large-scale application expansion on Web2 platforms.
AI Agents
(This section is longer, as my views may be controversial - please read patiently!)
The "AI Agent" hype is expected to persist throughout 2025, but will gradually subside. This is not a true long-term disruption brought by AI, but rather due to its social attributes, making it the focus of the crypto community (CT).
The current "AI Agents" are not truly intelligent agents. They are essentially chatbots with Memecoins, with little autonomous capability beyond posting on Twitter. Furthermore, most existing "AI Agents" are "Wizard of Oz" models - with real people behind the scenes to ensure the AI does not make mistakes. This situation is unlikely to change in the short term, as the current state of agent technology still has many issues (even Fortune 100 companies have not deployed agents in production environments). For example, these agents can be easily manipulated, potentially making inappropriate statements that damage brand reputation, or be hacked to steal their resources. For a true autonomous AI, one can refer to the case of @freysa_ai - if an AI has not been hacked, it is likely due to human intervention.
Nevertheless, I believe this trend will continue to accelerate. Chatbots do have the potential to replace many internet celebrities, as they do not need rest, maintain consistent messaging, and are more "economical" than humans. Furthermore, most internet celebrities are not known for their originality. The collection and dissemination of real-time information can actually be easily achieved algorithmically (e.g., @aixbt_agent).
Currently, these chatbots feel novel because their concept is very unique, like seeing an elephant painting. The first time you see it, you may not care about the quality of the painting, as the process itself is astonishing. But after seeing it a thousand times, the novelty will gradually wear off. I believe this will happen when the technology of chatbots reaches a plateau.
Take aixbt as an example, it is already very good at aggregating data from different projects. By next year, with the emergence of the next generation of agents, aixbt may reduce generating erroneous information (i.e., "hallucinations"), provide deeper analysis, and have more insightful views. But for most users, these improvements may not seem particularly significant, and may even feel not much different from the current state.
I believe this fresh feeling and market enthusiasm will continue throughout 2025, as the crypto industry usually maintains interest in new things for a relatively long time. However, by 2026, I expect a mutation to occur : chatbots becoming too prevalent, to the point that users start to get tired of them. Public opinion may reverse. When users see their favorite human key opinion leaders (KOLs) losing their livelihoods due to competition from chatbots, a sense of "class consciousness" may be awakened. Users will gradually tend to support human KOLs, even if the quality and consistency of their content may not be as good as chatbots.
To address this preference for human content, future chatbots may hide their AI identity and try to disguise themselves as human to compete for more attention market share. Unlike the current reliance on Memecoins for monetization, future chatbots may adopt revenue models similar to human KOLs, such as through sponsorships, affiliate links, and promoting their own Tokens. At that time, incidents of KOLs being accused of being chatbots may occur frequently, and even AI identity exposure scandals may arise. This trend may become very complex and bizarre.
However, there is an even darker trend behind this. Currently, large language models (LLMs) perform well in text processing, but are not yet mature in other areas. In the crypto domain, one of the easiest ways to monetize text capabilities is to become an influencer, and another is to become a scammer. In the future, as technology advances, we may see a proliferation of autonomous scam bots (scambots). This situation may become a serious social problem, similar to the outbreak of ransomware and cryptojacking after 2017.
Although chatbots may still be the focus of attention in 2025, the long-term disruptive impact of AI will not be manifested at the social level.
Similarly, the long-term impact of AI will not appear in the trading domain. AI will not give everyone a "trading intelligent agent" or a mini-hedge fund. While AI can indeed enhance individual capabilities, this enhancement is proportional to the user's capital, data, and infrastructure. Therefore, we can expect AI to further strengthen existing large trading companies, as they have greater capital and data advantages. In other words, large trading companies will become even more profitable. Additionally, AI will narrow the technological gap between trading companies, as all companies can use "advanced quantitative analysis tools in the cloud".
Over time, AI will make the market extremely efficient - even in some niche markets. This will result in ordinary traders having almost no advantage, even if they have their own assistant AI. The value of original research will therefore decline significantly. However, for ordinary users, increased market competition and liquidity may be good news, as it means more trading opportunities and a more active market. (For example, @Polymarket may achieve higher liquidity across all domains!)
If the future focus is not on chatbots or trading bots, what else is worth looking forward to? Here is my core view, although it is hardly mentioned by anyone at the moment: The AI Agents that will have truly disruptive impact will emerge in the software engineering domain.
Why is this so important? Let's ask ourselves: what is the most critical input in our industry? What scarce resource limits the emergence of more applications, wallets, and higher-quality infrastructure? The answer is software. If AI Agents can significantly reduce the cost of software development, it will change the landscape of the entire industry.
In the post-AI era, seed-round financing may no longer require raising millions of dollars. With just $10,000 in AI cloud computing costs, you can launch an application. Self-funded projects like Hyperliquid and Jupiter will transition from rare exceptions to the mainstream. On-chain application development and innovation attempts will see an explosive growth. For an industry driven by software, this cost reduction shock will trigger a wave of innovation in the blockchain space.
The impact of this change on security will also be far-reaching. AI-driven static analysis and monitoring tools will become ubiquitous, making security more prevalent. These AIs will be optimized for code bases like EVM/Solidity or Rust, and trained on a large database of security audits and attack cases. They will also improve their capabilities through reinforcement learning (RL) in simulated adversarial blockchain environments. I am increasingly convinced that in terms of security, AI tools will ultimately be more beneficial to defenders than attackers. AI will continuously "red team" smart contracts, while other AIs will focus on strengthening contracts, formally verifying their properties, and enhancing incident response and remediation capabilities.
At the same time, while you can continue to trade those AI-flavored Memecoins, the true intelligent agents will be far more than just tweeting and pumping tokens - their impact will be much deeper.
The True Crypto x AI
So far, we have mainly discussed the impact of AI on the crypto industry (which is the primary direction of influence), but crypto technology will also have a reverse effect on AI.
In the future, truly autonomous intelligent agents may use cryptocurrencies to make mutual payments. Once the regulatory policies for stablecoins become more relaxed, this trend will become more apparent - even large companies running AI Agents may choose to use stablecoins for inter-agent payments, as it is more convenient than traditional bank accounts.
Furthermore, we will also see more large-scale experiments around decentralized training and inference. Some emerging projects, such as @exolabs, @NousResearch, and @PrimeIntellect, will provide genuine alternatives to centralized training and proprietary corporate models. @NEARProtocol is also working hard to build a trusted, neutral, and permissionless full-stack AI technology stack.
Another intersection of Crypto and AI is in user experience (UX). Wallets in the post-AI era will undergo a complete transformation - an AI-driven wallet will be able to automatically handle cross-chain bridging, optimize transaction paths, minimize fees, resolve interoperability issues or frontend vulnerabilities, and help users avoid obvious scams or rug pulls. Users will no longer need to switch between multiple wallets, change RPCs, or rebalance stablecoins - AI will handle all of this automatically. This transformation may not be mature enough until 2026, but when it does, how will it impact the network effects of blockchains? What will happen when users no longer care about which chain an application is running on, or even stop noticing it?
This domain is still in its early stages, but I am excited about its future and hope to see it truly take off soon. In the long run (say, by mid-2026), I believe the majority of the market capitalization in the "AI x Crypto" space will be concentrated in this direction.
Those are all my predictions. I had promised to complete this article before reaching 100,000 followers, and although it's a bit late, I've managed to finish it before the new year!
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that by this time next year, I've been replaced by AI and officially "unemployed"!
Disclaimer: The content of this article represents my personal views only and does not reflect the position of Dragonfly; Dragonfly has investments in many of the projects mentioned in this article. This article is not financial advice, so please do your own research (DYOR). As for whether I am an AI or not, that's a question for you to ponder.
