Author: Haseeb, Dragonfly Partner; Compiled by 0xjs@Jinse Finance
I will either look like a prophet or a fool, but one thing is certain: I will annoy a lot of people with bags.
I will divide my 2025 predictions into six parts: L1/L2, token issuance, stablecoins, regulation, "AI agents" and Crypto x AI.
1. L1/L2
The distinction between L1 and L2 is disappearing. Users can no longer perceive the difference between L1 and L2 (did they ever?). The blockchain space (L1 and L2 combined) is already too crowded and needs a major shakeup. Consolidation will no longer be about technical superiority - it will be about owning a unique niche market and building stickiness through GTM.
While SVM and Move are formidable, the EVM market share will actually grow in 2025. This growth will be driven by Base, Monad, and Berachain. This is no longer due to compatibility, but because EVM/Solidity has more training data, and LLMs will be writing most application code by 2025. Having a battle-tested deep crypto contract library will also become a watershed, as LLMs are not good at writing low-level code. In the LLM development era, DevEx and footguns are less important than training data and reliable libraries.
Solana will force more blockchains to optimize for low latency. We will shift from the TPS war to the latency war - infrastructure like doublezero and super low latency L2s like MegaETH will drive user expectations for web2 responsiveness. Expect more adoption of optimistic UIs, pre-confirmation, intent, email onboarding, in-browser wallets, and progressive security. The emergence of Privy-like swaps.
Hyperliquid has shown that when specialized chains focus on specific applications and prioritize user experience and easy bridging, they can thrive. More projects will follow this pattern. The old dream of one chain ruling them all is dead.
2. Token Issuance
The era of massive airdrops through loyalty programs is over. We are moving towards a dual-track world.
Track 1: If a project has a clear North Star metric, like an exchange or lending protocol, they will distribute tokens purely based on loyalty. They won't care if they are being farmed or gamed - they are effectively distributing tokens as a rebate/discount on the protocol's core KPI, and airdrop farmers are your actual users anyway.
Track 2: Projects without a clear North Star (like L1s and L2s) will turn to crowdfunding. They may do small airdrops to reward social contributions, but most tokens will be distributed through crowdfunding. Airdrops for vanity metrics are dead. Those are not truly flowing to users, but to the industrialized airdrop farmers.
Memecoins will continue to encroach on the "AI agent" coin market share. I think this is a shift from financial nihilism to financial hyperoptimism. (Yes, I coined that term.)
3. Stablecoins
Stablecoin usage will surge, especially in SMEs. Not just for trading and speculation - real businesses will start using on-chain dollars for instant settlement.
Banks have noticed this: expect to see bank-issued stablecoin announcements by the end of 2025. They don't want to be left behind. But especially with Lutnick as Commerce Secretary, Tether will still maintain the top spot.
Ethena is expected to absorb more capital, especially as government bond yields continue to decline in the coming year. As the opportunity cost of capital decreases, it will make the underlying trading yields more attractive.
4. Regulation
The US will pass stablecoin legislation, while broader market infrastructure reform (FIT21) is delayed. Stablecoin adoption will accelerate, while Wall Street adoption, asset tokenization, and other TradFi integration will lag.
Under Trump's leadership, Fortune 100 companies will be more willing to offer cryptocurrencies to consumers, with tech companies and startups showing higher risk appetites. Trump's inauguration will create a noticeable regulatory honeymoon period until clear rules and enforcement priorities are set. During this time, expect to see aggressive expansion of crypto integrations with Web2 platforms.
5. AI Agents (This is the longest part, as my thoughts here may be controversial - please read to the end!)
The "AI agent" hype may continue until 2025. But it will ultimately fizzle out. This is not the long-term disruption of AI that people should be wary of, but it will be the focus of CT, as it is the most socially engaging.
The current AI agents are not true agents. These are chatbots with memecoins attached; they have almost no intelligence beyond posting on Twitter. The current "AI agents" are also largely "Wizard of Oz" agents - with humans behind the scenes ensuring the AI doesn't go off the rails. This is unlikely to change anytime soon, as the current agents are so bad (even Fortune 100 companies haven't deployed agents in production yet). The current agents are easily manipulated to say crazy things that damage their brand, or can be jailbroken to steal all their resources. See Freysa for what true autonomous AI looks like - if your favorite AI hasn't been jailbroken, it's because it's a Wizard of Oz AI.
That said, I think this trend will accelerate. Chatbots can indeed replace many KOLs, as they never sleep, are always delivering content, and aren't as greedy as human KOLs. Also, most KOLs aren't very creative. Even today, real-time information aggregation/amplification can easily be replaced by algorithms (see @aixbt_agent).
These chatbots are very appealing to us now because they are so novel. It's like seeing an elephant paint. The first time you see it, you don't care if the painting is good - it's just amazing. But by the 1000th time, the novelty wears off. I believe this will start to happen as these chatbots reach a steady state.
Today, you can see this with aixbt - it's already very good at aggregating data on different projects. By next year and the next generation of agents, maybe the illusion of aixbt will be a little less, a little deeper, with smarter takes. But how much will you notice? For most people, it may all feel the same.
I think this novelty and market craving will last until 2025. Crypto will take a while to get bored of these shiny things. But by 2026, I think there will be a sudden reversal. Chatbots will become ubiquitous, and people will lose interest in them. Seeing 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 not that different.
To combat this pro-human bias, chatbots will start to hide that they are AI, trying to impersonate humans to attract more attention. Future chatbots won't make money through memecoins like today, but will earn like human KOLs through sponsorships, affiliate links, and the tokens they own. KOLs will frequently be accused of being chatbots, and you'll see scandals of AI exposures. It will all get very weird.
But there's a darker side too. Remember, LLMs are currently excellent wordcels, but not so good in other areas. What's the best way to make money as a crypto wordcel? First, become an influencer, of course, but closely followed by becoming a scammer. You will start to see an explosion of autonomous scam bots. These bots will grow exponentially, rivaling the ransomware and cryptojacking boom post-2017. This is expected to become a real social problem.
However, while chatbots will likely remain a focus of attention in 2025, the long-term disruption of AI will not come at the social layer.
No, it will not appear in the trading field either. AI will not provide its own "trading intelligent agent" or micro-hedge fund for everyone. Yes, AI will expand the scale of everyone, but they will scale the workforce in proportion to capital, data, and infrastructure. Therefore, you should expect AI to provide super-powered capabilities for existing trading companies with capital scale and data scale. In other words, trading companies will become better at making money. It will also break down the hierarchy between trading companies (most trading companies will become quite excellent, as everyone can access cloud-based IQ 150 quantitative analysts).
Over time, AI will make the market extremely efficient, even for smaller niche markets, leaving little advantage for the average trader, even if they have a self-disciplined assistant AI. The value of original research will decline significantly. Nevertheless, the increase in competition and liquidity should be a blessing for us who inject noise into the market. (This also means liquidity for Polymarket!)
So, if the big news is not chatbots or trading bots, what else is there? This is my core argument, for some reason, hardly anyone is talking about it: The truly impactful AI agents will be software engineering agents.
Why is this a big deal? Ask yourself: what are the main inputs in our industry? What expensive input is holding back more applications, more wallets, better infrastructure, better everything? The answer is software. If AI agents cause the price of software to collapse, that will change everything.
In the post-AI era, you won't have to raise millions of dollars for a seed round, but can start an application with $10,000 in AI cloud computing. Self-funded projects like Hyperliquid and Jupiter will go from being exceptions to the norm. The number of on-chain applications and experiments will absolutely explode. For an industry driven by software, this deflationary shock will lead to a renaissance on-chain.
The impact on security is profound. AI-driven static analysis and monitoring will be ubiquitous, making security more accessible to everyone. These AIs will be fine-tuned on EVM/Solidity or Rust codebases and trained on a vast security audit and attack vector database. They will be RL-trained in simulated adversarial blockchain environments. I'm increasingly convinced that in security, AI tools will ultimately favor the defender over the attacker. You'll have AIs constantly red-teaming contracts, with other AIs reinforcing them, formally verifying their properties, and honing their incident response and remediation skills.
Meanwhile, of course, you can trade AI-style memecoins. But the real agents will have a bigger impact than tweeting and shilling their tokens.
6. The True Crypto x AI
Above, I've detailed the impact of AI on cryptocurrencies (which is the main direction of impact), but cryptocurrencies will also impact AI.
Truly autonomous agents will use cryptocurrencies to pay each other. Once there is lax stablecoin regulation, this will be especially true - you'll even see large companies running AI agents using stablecoins for inter-agent payments, as they're easier to spin up than bank accounts.
We'll also see more, larger-scale decentralized training and inference experiments. Promising next-gen projects like Exo Labs, Nous Research, and Prime Intellect will pave the way for real alternatives to centralized training and corporate-owned models.
Another intersection of Crypto and AI is in user experience. Post-AI wallets will be a game-changer - AI wallets should be able to handle bridging, optimize transaction routing, maximize your cost savings, abstract away interoperability issues or frontend errors, and help you avoid obvious scams or rugs. You won't have to switch between multiple different wallets, or change RPCs or rebalance your stablecoins. AI will handle all of this for you. This may not become reliable enough to transform the crypto user experience until 2026. But when it does, what impact will this have on blockchain network effects? What happens when users no longer care - or even experience - which chain their apps are on?
This space is still young, but I hope we'll see it take off soon. Looking further out (say, mid-2026), I expect the majority of the market cap of "AI x Crypto" to reside here.
That's all my predictions. Hopefully, by this time next year, everyone can stop working!
