This article will provide a detailed and professional overview of the top ten innovative directions that will define the Web3 industry landscape in 2025. These ten most iconic innovations of the year have not only reshaped the issuance, trading, settlement, and governance logic of on-chain assets, but have also enabled blockchain technology to truly reach traditional finance and the real economy for the first time.
Article author: 0x9999in1
Article source: ME
ME Group, in partnership with CoinFoundry, presents its highly anticipated annual column, "Crypto Chronicle 2025: The Era of Convergence | Web3 Annual Rankings and Year-End Review." Five main industry rankings will be released based on the Chinese-speaking community's interest, focusing on the most influential figures, events, and innovations in the industry.
This article will provide a detailed and professional overview of the top ten innovative directions that will define the Web3 industry landscape in 2025. These ten most iconic innovations of the year have not only reshaped the issuance, trading, settlement, and governance logic of on-chain assets, but have also enabled blockchain technology to truly reach traditional finance and the real economy for the first time.
Stablecoin payments and on-chain global settlement systems: becoming the new lifeblood of global clearing layers.
According to the "2025 Global Stablecoin Payments Report" jointly released by Artemis Analytics and Chainalysis, the total real-world payment settlement volume for "non-speculative, non-DeFi interactions" reached $1.36 trillion, a year-on-year increase of 411%, officially surpassing PayPal ($1.28 trillion) to become the world's third largest cross-border payment network, second only to Visa and Mastercard, while its fees were only 2% of the latter two. In this year, major global payment giants took action:
After a seven-year hiatus, Stripe relaunched its crypto payment channel in March 2025, switching the entire backend to Solana+USDC settlement, and processed $1.7 billion in corporate payments on the first day.
In the same month, Visa announced that its daily USDC settlement peak on Solana exceeded $4.2 billion, with an average settlement time of 1.8 seconds;
Mastercard has partnered with Circle to launch the "USDC Co-branded Corporate Card," which allows 92 million merchants worldwide to directly accept USDC and instantly convert it into 150 fiat currencies.
PayPal also quietly launched the PyUSD business payment gateway in Q4, which also uses Solana on the backend.
The most killer application is the global remote payroll and freelance economy. In 2025, four leading HR tech companies—Deel, Remote.com, Papaya Global, and Multiplier—all enabled stablecoin channels by default, covering 134 countries and 12 million remote employees. A Silicon Valley AI startup with 300 employees previously used Wise for payroll processing, which took an average of 3.8 days and incurred a total cost of 6.7%. After switching to USDC, payments arrived in 2 seconds at a cost of 0.58%, saving over $1.4 million annually in payroll costs. Argentina, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Vietnam received over $38 billion in stablecoin payroll, with local P2P exchange networks boasting over 28 million daily active addresses.
More importantly, stablecoin payments have become completely decoupled from the bull and bear markets of the crypto market for the first time. Even if Bitcoin falls from $118,000 to $74,000 in Q3 2025, stablecoin payment settlements still saw a 9.2% month-on-month increase, proving that it has completely transformed from a speculative asset into a productivity tool. It can be said that stablecoins are no longer an appendage of the crypto world, but rather a new lifeblood of the global clearing layer.
RWA: From Experimental Phase to Core Web3 Financial Infrastructure
In 2025, Real-World Asset Tokenization (RWA) became a global financial focus, with the market maintaining an optimistic atmosphere driven by both large-scale inflows of institutional funds and high public enthusiasm. Traditional giants such as UBS, Invesco, and Apollo have fully embraced blockchain, and tokenized assets have expanded from fixed income to stocks, pre-IPO shares, and real estate. Three key developments in the past year—deep participation from global institutions, the rapid emergence of new asset classes, and the implementation of regulatory frameworks such as the US GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act, and Hong Kong's Stablecoin Ordinance—have jointly pushed RWA to the watershed between hype and genuine large-scale adoption, and the integration of traditional finance and Web3 has entered an unprecedentedly close phase.
According to CoinFound data, RWA's total market capitalization is $362.27 billion. RWA's data dashboard shows: Commodities at $3.64 billion, Government Bonds at $1.18 billion, Institutional Funds at $2.76 billion, Private Lending at $34.18 billion, US Treasury Bonds at $9.09 billion, Corporate Bonds at $260 million, Stablecoins at $310.55 billion, and X-Stocks at $620 million.
Looking ahead, RWA will move from the experimental phase to core financial infrastructure. Hybrid permissionless markets, dedicated tokenized equity exchanges, and the first on-chain IPOs are on the horizon, with clear regulatory environments and the legalization of stablecoins in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and other locations paving the way for the industry. Asia is poised to lead the world, and 2025 will mark the beginning of the full tokenization of the real economy, truly ushering in an era of "a global capital market that never closes."
DEX: From "Easy to Use" to "Even Better to Use," On-Chain Transactions Undergo a Paradigm Reversal
In 2025, DEXs (Decentralized Exchanges) completely outclassed CEXs (Consolidated Exchanges) for the first time through sheer product superiority. Spot DEXs saw their market share surge from 15% to 28% throughout the year, while perpetual contract DEXs performed even more dramatically, skyrocketing from 9% to 27%. Together, these two platforms allowed on-chain trading to comprehensively crush centralized exchanges across four dimensions: speed, depth, fees, and capital efficiency. This wasn't just a simple increase in market share; it represented a historic paradigm shift: from "path-oriented" to "outcome-oriented," from "passively collecting fees" to "programmable liquidity," and from "spot toys" to a "full-stack financial market."
Uniswap v4, in collaboration with the Intent architecture, has successfully dominated the spot market: v4's Singleton+Hooks transform liquidity into pluggable financial building blocks, making limit orders, dynamic fees, and MEV rewards go from CEX exclusives to on-chain standard overnight; while Intent takes user experience to the extreme, you only need to say "what result do I want", and the Solver will compete globally to fill your order, eliminating cross-chain, slippage, and gas anxiety.
In 2025, perpetual contract DEXs delivered a satisfactory performance. Hyperliquid's 200,000 orders per second put many CEXs to shame. GMX v2, Aevo, and Drift collectively integrated BUIDL interest-bearing collateral, allowing traders to simultaneously leverage 10x to long on BTC and earn 5.2% Treasury bond yields, making their capital efficiency far superior to CEXs. The evolution of DEXs is no longer just about "decentralized exchanges," but about redefining the very concept of "exchange."
Web3 wallets: Exchanges led by Binance and OKX bring about the most seamless "user migration".
In 2025, the true iPhone moment for Web3 wallets didn't come from MetaMask or Phantom, but from the "exchange wallets" once scorned by fundamentalists. Binance Web3 Wallet and OKX Web3 Wallet, in the most brutal yet efficient way, packaged account abstraction, chain abstraction, Passkeys, Gas payment, unified balance, and social recovery into a single "super app," directly pulling 320 million CEX users worldwide into the true on-chain world in just 90 days, completing the largest and most seamless "user migration" in Web3 history.
On January 15, 2025, Binance pushed out a mandatory upgrade to "Smart Wallet" for 170 million users: old hot wallets were seamlessly migrated to ERC-4337+EIP-7702 smart accounts, and Face ID/Touch ID could be used to bind them upon first opening, with seed phrase readily available; gas payments were always handled by someone, and users had no idea that they "couldn't see the chain or the gas"; the built-in chain abstraction layer combined BNB Chain, Base, Arbitrum, Solana, and opBNB into a single "total balance," allowing cross-chain transactions with a single click.
In 2025, OKX's Web3 wallet continued to drive Web3 innovation, launching a brand-new standalone app that supports seamless interaction between millions of tokens and NFTs across 130+ chains. It also integrates AI-enhanced dashboards, real-time P&L tracking, smart wallet monitoring, and MEV protection, improving on-chain transaction efficiency and security for users. Simultaneously, it partnered with City Protocol to enable cross-chain flow of RWA, IP tokens, and DAT, allowing users to directly manage, trade, and transfer assets within their wallets, driving the adoption of RWA. Furthermore, the built-in DEX aggregator was upgraded to support the OKX Boost mechanism, helping multiple projects airdrop 120 million tokens as rewards, and OKX Pay introduced gas-free P2P payments.
After 2025, no one will use "exchange wallet" as a derogatory term anymore. Binance and OKX have proven in the simplest and most direct way that the growth of Web3 users has never been a technical issue, but rather that whoever dares to make the user experience sufficiently intuitive and whoever dares to offer sufficiently generous subsidies can "airdrop" hundreds of millions of users directly onto the blockchain.
Equity tokenization: The accelerated integration of traditional financial markets and crypto assets
In June of this year, Robinhood announced that it would offer tokenized US stocks and ETFs to European users, providing a product service similar to OTC financial derivatives through contracts for difference (CFDs).
In September of this year, Nasdaq officially submitted a proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, hoping that the exchange could publicly issue securities in the form of tokens, and the topic of tokenization of U.S. stocks officially came to the official table.
On October 29, Ondo Finance, known as the "BlackRock on the blockchain," announced that its core product, Ondo Global Markets (Ondo GM), has been officially integrated into the BNB Chain. This marks the first time that tokenized stocks and ETFs have been introduced into the BNB ecosystem on a large scale, setting off a new wave of tokenization in the US stock market.
The emergence of stock tokenization is even more disruptive in its restructuring of capital efficiency. The same Tesla stock can enjoy long-term appreciation in traditional brokerage accounts like Robinhood and Snowball Securities, or it can be used as collateral to borrow USDC 24/7 in the Web3 protocol, with an annualized cost of capital as low as 3.4-4.1%. Institutions are beginning to treat tokenized stocks as "living cash equivalents": they can benefit from stock price appreciation while instantly converting idle positions into interest-bearing assets. Some on Wall Street have already dubbed 2025 a "renaissance of equity liquidity," and Web3 has finally proven itself with real-world equity—not just a casino of worthless cryptocurrencies, but a super track capable of supporting trillions of dollars in traditional assets.
AI Autonomous Trading Competition: A Web3 Financial Turing Test for AI – From "Chatting" to "Making Money"
On October 17, 2025, Nof1.ai quietly launched an epic experiment on the Hyperliquid Perp DEX: Alpha Arena Season 1. Six top LLM models—DeepSeek Chat V3.1, Qwen 3 Max, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Grok 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro—each received $10,000 in live trading funds, trading perpetual contracts for BTC, ETH, SOL, DOGE, etc., 24/7 with zero human intervention, until the event concluded on November 3.
This wasn't a simulation sandbox, but a real-world battlefield: the model analyzed on-chain data, candlestick charts, and news every few minutes to decide on opening and closing positions, leverage, and stop-loss orders, exposing the true capabilities of AI in a noisy financial environment. With total assets under management of $60,000 and over 500 transactions, all fees and slippage were borne by the model itself—this was truly AI's "coming of age" in Web3. DeepSeek V3.1 ultimately triumphed with its extreme rationality: only 17 trades, a 41.2% win rate, a 9.8:1 profit/loss ratio, an average holding period of 49 hours, a 94% bullish bias, an average trade size of $21,000, a Sharpe ratio of 0.496 (the highest in the field), and a peak return of 125% (October 27th), although it later retraced to approximately +80%.
After the competition, Nof1 founder Jay Zhang remarked on X: "This is not entertainment, but the starting point for AI's financial autonomy." Following the competition, global hedge funds flocked to follow suit, with an estimated $50 billion AI-driven fund expected to be on-chain by 2026. The "copy trading" tool spawned on X became wildly popular, with the user mirror Qwen boasting over 50,000 daily active users. Alpha Arena is not the end, but a declaration of AI's transformation from a "tool" to a "player": financial markets will become multi-agent game arenas, and humans will no longer be the sole price setters.
Prediction Markets: From Niche Gambling and Edge Entertainment to a Global Risk Pricing Hub
In 2025, prediction markets completely shed their "niche betting" label and became the most robust and respected core infrastructure of Web3.
The total on-chain prediction market transaction volume exceeded $320 billion for the year, an 11-fold increase compared to 2024. The highest outstanding interest reached $5.8 billion, with peak monthly transaction volume exceeding $40 billion. Odds data has been officially cited by Bloomberg Terminal, Reuters Eikon, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), and CME Group, ranking alongside the Federal Reserve's dot plot and the VIX fear index as one of the four core risk curves for global traders.
Polymarket remains the undisputed leader in traffic, accounting for 62% of the industry's total transaction volume (approximately $198 billion) throughout the year, with a peak of 9.2 million monthly active addresses. Hundreds of events, including the Taiwan regional leadership election, the US midterm elections, the European Cup, the Oscars, CPI month-on-month changes, and the extent of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, all concluded with an accuracy of 10–25 percentage points ahead of traditional polls.
The truly terrifying aspect of prediction markets lies in their unprecedented global scale: every penny of odds represents a real bet, naturally filtering out noise and amplifying signals. In 2025, traditional media outlets for the first time mentioned "according to on-chain prediction market odds..." in their coverage of major events; hedge funds for the first time directly integrated prediction market data into their quantitative models; and central bank researchers for the first time cited on-chain prediction markets as a leading indicator in their public papers. More profoundly, it reshapes the chain of "information → consensus → price." Previously, information was monopolized by the media, consensus was shaped by polls, and prices were determined by Wall Street; after 2025, information is on-chain, consensus is voted on with money, and prices are cleared 24/7. Prediction markets have become the sharpest "truth-discovering machine" in Web3.
AI-powered agent payments: The payment order in intelligent agent commerce is being reshaped.
The rise of AI agents is reshaping the digital economy, and autonomous payment capabilities are key to their transformation from "intelligent assistants" to "independent economic entities." In September 2025, Google launched the open-source Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a universal framework independent of payment methods, focusing on solving three major challenges: authorization, intent authenticity, and transaction accountability. Working in conjunction with A2A (Agent-to-Agent) and MCP protocols, it supports traditional payments such as credit cards and bank transfers, while verifiable mechanisms like "intent authorization" and "shopping cart authorization" ensure the security and traceability of agent activities. Currently, over 60 partners, including PayPal and Mastercard, have joined.
Concurrently, Coinbase's x402 protocol revived the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, specifically designed for high-frequency machine-to-machine micropayments. Based on stablecoins (such as USDC), it enables instant, low-fee on-chain settlement without registration or manual intervention, making it ideal for automated scenarios such as API calls and digital content payments.
Based Rollup: Ethereum's Scaling Endgame and the Technological Leap of Self-Correction
Based Rollups can be seen as a dynamic rebalancing of Ethereum's scalability, security, and decentralization triangle. L2BEAT data shows that there are currently over 50 Ethereum Rollup-type L2 blockchains, making it one of the most thriving Ethereum blockchain sectors. However, with the expansion of the number of L2 blockchains, the liquidity fragmentation problem caused by independent orderers and cross-chain latency between chains is becoming increasingly serious.
For example, seamless interaction of funds and contracts cannot be achieved between different Rollups. Developers must stake on one or more L2 platforms to acquire customers, while users frequently and dynamically transfer assets between multiple L2 platforms. This process not only increases the complexity of user experience and development process but also greatly limits the efficiency of funds and severely restricts the overall development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Ultimately, the core factor causing this fragmentation between L2 platforms is that each L2 platform has its own centralized sorting mechanism. Therefore, Based Rollups, characterized by "L1-Sequenced," have become a new solution: returning the power of transaction sorting to the Ethereum mainnet. All Rollup application chains share this decentralized sorting mechanism infrastructure, and all transactions are sorted and packaged through the Ethereum mainnet.
Therefore, the core advantage of Based Rollup lies in achieving complete decentralization and inheriting the activity of the Ethereum mainnet—meaning that funds can be withdrawn directly from the Rollup, and since they are all sorted through the mainnet, smart contracts on different Rollups can interact seamlessly. Furthermore, since they are all sorted through the mainnet, the silo effect of funds and user groups is fundamentally eliminated.
From this perspective, Based Rollup is also an important step in breaking down the high wall of Ethereum's L2, and it is expected to restore interoperability and composability between L2 and L2, and between L2 and L1. Users will experience seamless interaction as if on a single chain, developers can build a highly interoperable application ecosystem, and Ethereum's capital efficiency and network effect can be maximized.
LaunchPad: A New Paradigm for Meme Launch Platforms, Ushering in Democratization of the Primary Market
In 2025, the primary market underwent a complete transformation. Pump.fun, with its minimalist Bonding Curve, shattered the entire "seed-private placement-pre-sale-lock-up" narrative monopolized by VCs over the past decade, replacing it with a "fair launch" frenzy that could be participated in by retail investors worldwide and completed in milliseconds. Throughout the year, Pump.fun created over 11 million new tokens, attracting $780 million from the platform with only 1% fees. 73 projects graduated from Pump.fun with market capitalizations exceeding $1 billion, and the highest single-day issuance of new tokens exceeded 68,000. It wasn't just a product; it was a violent coup against the traditional venture capital system.
Pump.fun is essentially a social emotion squeezer: it quantifies human greed, fear, FOMO, and belonging into a smooth curve, then ignites it through viral spread on social media. VCs were completely kicked out, and the primary market achieved a truly "gateless" environment for the first time. Although 99.9% of tokens ultimately went to zero, the 0.1% of super dark horses (Moodeng, Fartcoin, GOAT, etc.) convinced retail investors that community culture can indeed equal market capitalization. Pump.fun brutally disrupted the traditional venture capital system, allowing Solana to far surpass all public chains in daily active addresses and transaction volume in 2025.
It's important to understand that over the past decade, traditional LaunchPads have locked 99% of early-stage investment in the hands of VCs and teams, leaving retail investors to buy in at high prices on the secondary market. Now, the ultimate form of LaunchPad has emerged: a curve, a black hole, and a viral meme are all it takes to get a flood of funds flowing through the market.
Summarize
Looking at the "Top 10 Web3 Innovations of 2025," we can clearly see a main theme: the Web3 industry is shifting from "building infrastructure" to "defining market structure." Furthermore, these 10 innovations collectively accomplished one thing: transforming blockchain technology and Web3 finance from niche hotspots and breakthroughs into productivity tools relied upon by institutional capital, artificial intelligence, sovereign assets, and ordinary people alike.
Perhaps starting in 2026, the parallel lines between "Web3 industry" and "traditional finance" will cease to exist. All assets will eventually be tokenized, all transactions will eventually be programmatic, all value will eventually flow across borders, and all consensus will eventually be voted on with real money. These four "all" will truly move from beautiful ideas to practical implementation.
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