Prediction: The Future of Blockchain and AI L1 and L2 Trends: - The line between L1 and L2 is blurring, as users no longer focus on the distinction. The blockchain ecosystem, including L1 and L2, is becoming overcrowded, and a wave of consolidation is expected. The key to this consolidation will be finding a unique market positioning and building user stickiness through effective go-to-market (GTM) strategies, rather than technological superiority. - Despite the strong performance of SVM and Move technologies, the market share of EVM will continue to grow in 2025, driven by projects like @base, @monad_xyz, and @berachain. This growth is due to the abundance of training data for EVM and Solidity, which will enable large language models (LLMs) to dominate application code writing. Token Issuance Trends: - The era of large-scale airdrops through loyalty programs is over. Future token distribution models will be either based on core metrics for projects with clear use cases, or through crowdfunding sales for projects without clear metrics. - Memecoins will gradually lose market share to "AI Agent" themed tokens, reflecting a shift from "financial nihilism" to "financial over-optimism." Stablecoin Explosion: - Stablecoin usage will experience exponential growth by 2025, particularly in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) sector, with applications extending beyond trading and speculation to on-chain USD settlement. - Banks will also enter the stablecoin market, but Tether is expected to maintain its dominant position, especially with Lutnick as the Commerce Secretary. Regulation: - The U.S. is expected to pass stablecoin-related legislation in 2025, while broader market infrastructure reforms (the FIT21 Act) may be delayed. Stablecoin adoption will accelerate, but the integration of crypto into Wall Street, asset tokenization, and traditional finance (TradFi) progress may lag. AI Agents: - The "AI Agent" hype will peak in 2025 but gradually subside, as these are not true intelligent agents but rather chatbots with Memecoins, lacking true autonomy. However, the trend will continue to accelerate, as chatbots have the potential to replace many online influencers. - By 2026, as chatbots become ubiquitous, users may start to tire of them, and a "class consciousness" may emerge, leading to a preference for human key opinion leaders (KOLs) over AI agents.

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 field, 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 large influx of autonomous scam bots (scambots). This situation may become a serious social problem, just like 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 field. AI will not give everyone a "trading intelligent agent" or a mini-hedge fund. Although AI can indeed enhance individual capabilities, this enhancement is proportional to the user's capital, data, and infrastructure. Therefore, we can expect that AI will further strengthen existing large trading companies, as they have greater capital and data advantages. In other words, large trading companies will become more profitable. In addition, 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 mean that ordinary traders will have 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 in all areas!)

If the future hotspot is not 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 truly disruptive AI Agents will appear in the field of software engineering.

Why is this so important? Let's ask ourselves: what is the most important 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, this 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 shift from rare exceptions to the mainstream. On-chain application development and innovation attempts will see explosive growth. For an industry driven by software, this cost reduction shock will trigger a wave of innovation in the blockchain field.

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 widespread. These AIs will be optimized for code bases such as 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 test" 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 agents will be far more than just tweeting and pumping tokens - their impact will be much deeper.

The True Crypto x AI

In the above, we have mainly discussed the impact of AI on the crypto industry (which is the main direction of impact), but crypto technology will also have a reverse effect on AI.

In the future, truly autonomous intelligent agents may use cryptocurrencies for mutual payments. Once the regulatory policies for stablecoins become more relaxed, this trend will be more evident - even large companies running AI Agents may choose to use stablecoins for agent-to-agent payments, as this 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 overhaul - an AI-driven wallet will be able to automatically handle cross-chain bridging, optimize transaction paths, minimize fees, solve 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 do all of this automatically. This transformation may not be mature enough until 2026 to truly transform the user experience in the crypto industry. But when this is achieved, what impact will it have on the network effects of blockchains? What will happen when users no longer care which chain an application is running on, or even stop noticing?

This area 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 that the majority of the market capitalization in the "AI x Crypto" field will be concentrated in this direction.

These are all my predictions. I had promised to complete this article before reaching 100,000 fans, 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 will have been replaced by AI and officially "unemployed"!

Disclaimer: The content of this article represents my personal views only and does not represent the position of Dragonfly; Dragonfly has investments in many of the projects mentioned in the article. This article is not financial advice, please do your own research (DYOR). As for whether I am an AI or not, that's a question for you to judge.

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