Source:Multicoin Capital
Compiled by: BitpushNews
2025 is expected to be a pivotal year for the crypto industry. The path towards the first regulatory framework that embraces cryptocurrencies, combined with the technological maturity of Layer 1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, DePIN networks, and stablecoins, creates a fertile ground for the next wave of frontier innovations.
In keeping with our tradition, we will share the ideas and opportunities that most excite us for the year ahead.
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network Robotics (DePIN Robotic) and Zero-Employee Companies
—Managing Partner Kyle Samani
DePIN Robotic—There are rumors that the incoming Trump administration will push to elevate Autonomous Driving (AD) regulation from the state to the federal level, creating a unified standard for self-driving companies. As GPU clusters continue to scale (e.g., over 100,000 H100 GPUs), Transformer-based self-driving technology will become more mature and poised for widespread real-world deployment. After this, I expect to see an explosion of Robotic-based DePIN. Many startups have already raised funds from non-crypto VCs but have not yet truly commercialized. I'm optimistic that many of them will adopt the DePIN model, shifting risk from the balance sheets of the development companies to the global pool of robotic professionals and "prosumers." Many early adopters of these robotic products will capture data critical to the development of autonomous robots. I know of one company in this space today—Frodobots—and I look forward to seeing more. Our portfolio company Hivemapper, while not an explicit robotics company, is exploring many similar ideas.
Zero-Employee Companies—The foundation of zero-employee companies is artificial intelligence. With OpenAI's o3 and other more advanced chain-of-thought reasoning models, models are reaching the point where they can think, plan, execute, and self-correct. This lays the groundwork for AI agents to perform all tasks in business operations.
To function, zero-employee companies will require human guidance, as AI will inevitably make mistakes and may exceed its context window. Over time, I expect the degree of human guidance to decrease as AI continually improves its self-correction and expands its context window. I believe the governance of these zero-employee companies may be through DAOs, and I expect the crypto capital markets to fund the ambitious experiments of zero-employee companies.
Startups often succeed where large companies fail due to unique constraints. I believe the zero-employee constraint will bring some incredible breakthroughs to all business operations.
On-Chain Securities
—Co-Founder and Managing Partner Tushar Jain
With the Trump administration taking office and the Republicans gaining full control of Congress, on-chain securities are finally poised for meaningful takeoff.
Transactions on blockchains like Solana can be near-instant, eliminating the waiting times common in traditional finance. Faster capital flows improve capital efficiency and should lead to more efficient pricing.
Blockchains ensure all participants can access a real-time, tamper-proof record of transactions. This level of transparency and security stands in stark contrast to the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases of traditional financial institutions. Transaction costs on blockchain networks are far lower than traditional banking systems, just compare the cost of sending stablecoins on Solana ($0.001) to the cost of a wire transfer ($30). Solana's token programmability now allows for precise, granular control of tokenized securities. Issuers can restrict their security holders to whitelisted addresses, recall tokens in the event of a court order, and comply with other securities laws or transfer agent requirements or best practices.
Undoubtedly, the near-instant finality, cheap transactions, and transparency of blockchains offer a superior settlement rail compared to the slow, expensive, and opaque traditional finance track. The only real barrier is regulation, and a more innovation-friendly SEC can open the doors for securities tokenization.
I don't believe public equities will be the first tokenized securities to see mass market adoption. Less liquid, more opaque markets that stand to benefit more from tokenization are more likely to be early adopters. This could be startup equity, where blockchains can manage cap tables for free, making no sense to pay Carta or Angelist. It could be the fixed-income instruments that Figure has been researching for years. It could be LP interests in funds.
Buy Now, Pay Never, Consume Your Portfolio, Portfolio Margining
—Investor Spencer Applebaum
Building on Tushar's ideas, as all assets become programmable and tradable on-chain, we will start to see interesting new products emerge. Here are a few examples:
Buy Now, Pay Never—Affirm and Klarna have popularized the idea of buy-now-pay-later. I believe users can now earn ~8% yields on SOL and ~15% yields on stablecoins. What if users didn't have to pre-pay subscription fees, but could instead lock their tokens with merchants (from Web2 companies like Netflix to Web3 companies like Dune Analytics), who would accrue staking/lending rewards over time? The user's tokens would be locked for a period to guarantee payment. We believe there is a strong consumer psychology factor here, where the opportunity cost of yield seems more palatable than upfront payments.
Consume Your Portfolio—When all assets are tokenized and aggregated in one place (a Web3 wallet), users should be able to use their portfolio to pay for medium to large-ticket items, which makes sense. Imagine Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in yield-bearing USDC, $10,000 in TSLA stock, and $10,000 in gold. She wants to buy a $4,000 couch. She doesn't have to convert her USDC to fiat, wait for a bank transfer, send payment, and then reverse the process to rebalance her portfolio. What if she could automatically sell $1,000 from each of her four holdings on-chain and immediately pay the couch merchant? She remains fully allocated to her existing portfolio, without having to worry about the rebalancing process.
Portfolio Margining—Within the next 3-5 years, as major crypto brokers and unified super-protocols emerge, users should be able to cross-margin hold all their assets. For example, Alice should be able to use her AAPL stock to short a BTC perpetual contract and borrow USDC on-chain. Or she should be able to use her tokenized whiskey as collateral to purchase tokenized debt on-chain. We're starting to see this in a holistic way (e.g., Ostium bringing FX trading on-chain), but it will become even clearer as physical assets are tokenized.
On-Chain Verification of Off-Chain States
—Investment Partner Shayon Sengupta
Ledger systems like Bitcoin and Solana represent a key step in the evolution of cryptocurrencies. These systems are fundamentally about money, enabling the storage and transfer of value through permissionless global channels. The cryptographic primitives that power these systems are now starting to cross-pollinate with non-ledger systems, unlocking entirely new markets. Over the next 12 months, cryptography will establish itself as a verification layer for data and computation through three novel means: network proofs, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media provenance.
I see this as a convergence of "monetary cryptography" and "verification cryptography," serving as a coordinating layer to birth new economic models and incentive mechanisms.
Emerging Markets: Zero-Knowledge Proofs Unlock New Possibilities
The first opportunity is the market for zkTLS and what it enables. zkTLS refers to building zero-knowledge proofs through TLS signatures on web pages, to verifiably and tamper-proof any data unit on the internet (e.g. your Equifax credit score or your Strava workout history) in a fully non-censorable way. Some teams have already started deploying zero-knowledge proofs in web sessions to build uncensorable and fraud-resistant applications. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples of this. p2p.me is a cash top-up/withdrawal platform in India that uses web proofs to bypass the fragmented market structure in the region. ZkMe is a system for sovereign verification of KYC credentials, allowing applications to verify user identity in a privacy-preserving way. The same principles can be extended to dozens of new markets, such as ticketing, reservations, and other systems where fraud is a key driver of liquidity.
Homomorphic Encryption: Unlocking AI Potential
Secondly, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter its golden age. As the returns to training AI systems on public datasets diminish, the ability to coordinate post-training and fine-tuning on private or confidential environments becomes increasingly critical. This creates a whole new design space for coordinating inputs to models from datasets that were previously inaccessible, especially as a large trove of valuable enterprise and consumer data continues to migrate from on-premises to cloud systems. Token-based incentive mechanisms will play a key role at this layer, and breakthroughs in this field will take top-tier base models to the next level.
Identity Verification and Media Provenance: Essential Tools for the AI Era
In the post-AI era where content generation costs approach zero, identity and content authenticity verification will become indispensable features of consumer applications. Early systems like Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode use cryptographic proofs to verify biometric information or state-issued credentials, and leverage token incentives as the primary means of massively coordinating participant engagement. Similarly, standards like C2PA mark content at the hardware layer to distinguish real-captured media from AI-generated media, but widespread adoption of these standards at the application layer may require some form of token-based coordination mechanism to overcome consumer habit inertia. These tools are critical to addressing the information risk of an AI-saturated consumer internet.
Trading Becoming a Multiplayer, Full-Stack Media Game
—Investor Eli Qian
Trading becoming a multiplayer game - sharing financial gains and losses, and speculating in group form, is a deeply human and highly viral behavior. People love to discuss how much money they've made (or lost!) in stocks, sports betting, and even meme coins. However, the popular crypto, stock, and sports betting trading platforms today are largely designed for single-player experiences. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot - these are not prioritizing multiplayer experiences. Yet the demand for social trading is undeniable. Today, users create their own ad-hoc social experiences through online forums and group chats. A large portion of the content on Crypto Twitter revolves around these discussions.
One of crypto's key advantages is permissionless liquidity. It has opened the door for anyone to build multiplayer trading tools for crypto assets. I'm very excited to see developers in 2025 leverage the viral spread inherent in social trading to create multiplayer experiences. Such products will allow users to share trades, compete on P&L leaderboards, and co-position with a single click or tap. The design space is vast, spanning Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord mini-apps, and more. While 2023 and 2024 saw the rise of single-player tools like BONKBot and BullX, 2025 will be the year trading becomes a multiplayer game.
Full-Stack Media Companies - There have been many attempts to use tokens to enhance media and content, but few companies have fully realized their potential. However, we're starting to see the rise of media companies that control the end-to-end content stack, including tokens, distribution, and human capital. These "full-stack" media companies have the ability to push the primitives of crypto much further than before. Examples include athlete tokens, creator tokens, live events with prediction markets, and more.
One example is Karate Combat. Instead of building a product around existing UFC fighters, they built a new martial arts league from the ground up, giving them more control over the rules, distribution, and fighters. While UFC fighter tokens have limited utility, Karate Combat fighters' tokens can allow token holders to vote on the fighters' training regimens, fight attire, or anything else - something only possible when Karate Combat controls the token design and fighter contracts.
Future live streaming, sports leagues, podcasts, and reality shows will achieve deep vertical integration in content, distribution, tokens, and human capital. I'm very excited to invest in and consume the next generation of token-enhanced media.
The Rise of Alpha Hunters
—Investor Vishal Kankani
There were a few defining events in 2024 that portend some interesting new phenomena in 2025.
First, issuing a new token costs virtually nothing (around $0) and can be done permissionlessly by almost anyone. This led to an astounding number of token launches in 2024, most of which were meme coins with lifespans measured in hours, very short-lived.
Second, the market sentiment in 2024 reverted back to the fair distribution, low fully diluted valuation (FDV) token launch models that harkened back to the ICO era of 2017. In this type of market, centralized exchanges (CEXes) struggle to keep up with the pace of new listings, which we expect to continue in 2025 (as they have their own listing processes), incentivizing on-chain trading and bringing more liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEXes). As a result, DEXes will gain more market share over CEXes in the coming year. With the explosion of token count and DEX trading activity, active traders will need more powerful tools and models to identify emerging tokens in real-time, analyze on-chain sentiment and metrics, detect vulnerabilities, manage risk (e.g. rug pulls), and execute trades efficiently.
This leads to the third thing that happened in 2024: AI agents. So far, we've seen AI agents creating content on social media to drive attention to their respective tokens. I expect the next iteration of AI agents to be "alpha hunters" - that is, their sole purpose is to seek out alpha and trade autonomously in real-time.
The Crypto Institutionalization Wave
—Partner Matt Shapiro
We are at the dawn of the institutionalization of crypto, and this process will happen at an astounding pace.
Over the past 5+ years, the crypto industry has made tremendous strides in major technological advancements, product-market fit, and substantive UI/UX improvements, but institutional participation in crypto has actually stagnated. The combination of regulation and professional risk has prevented many financial institutions from effectively entering the space, or even providing the most basic crypto products to their clients. With a crypto-friendly US government taking office and the record-breaking success of Bitcoin ETFs, we are about to see the complacency of the past 5 years give way to a frantic race to support crypto.
In 2024, there was $35 billion in unmet Bitcoin purchase demand that could not or would not simply go through Coinbase. With most asset managers and major brokerages still not fully ramped up on crypto, by 2025 there will be even more capital poised to enter the crypto markets. We will see a flood of ETF launches to meet and capitalize on this demand. This will include not just ETFs for new crypto assets like Solana (SOL), but also ETFs with baskets of crypto assets, and ETFs that blend crypto assets with traditional assets like gold, equities, or credit. There will be leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility-dampened ETFs, yield-generating ETFs, and more. Basically, every conceivable way to package crypto assets for institutional and retail investors to access will be explored.
We will see major financial institutions rushing to launch basic financial products around cryptocurrencies. Every financial institution should explore creating product lines that allow their clients to trade cryptocurrency products. Financial institutions should seek to custody crypto assets and provide credit against these assets, just as they do for more traditional assets today. We may also see a significant increase in stablecoin issuers. Any bank that takes deposits should seek to issue a local stablecoin. In my conversation with Visa's Cuy Sheffield at the 2024 Multicoin Summit, I emphasized that every company needs a stablecoin strategy, just as "e-commerce" eventually became integrated into "business," "stablecoins" will gradually become an integral part of business activities across the board.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, and while this may not be the most technologically ambitious thing in the crypto space, the scale and scope of its distribution and the amount of money involved is enormous.
