Author: Haseeb, Dragonfly partner; Compiler: 0xjs@金财经

I either look like a prophet or I look like an idiot, but one thing is for sure: I will piss people off Lots of people with bags.

I divide my predictions for 2025 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 overcrowded and in need of a major shakeout. Consolidation will no longer be about technological superiority – it will be about owning a unique niche market and building stickiness through GTM.

Despite the strength of SVM and Move, EVM market share will actually grow in 2025. This growth will be driven by Base, Monad, Berachain. This is no longer due to compatibility, but because EVM/Solidity has more training data, and LLM will be writing the majority of application code in 2025. Already having a deep, battle-tested library of cryptographic contracts will also be a watershed moment, as LLMs are not good at writing low-level code. In the age of LLM development, DevEx and footguns are less important than training data and reliable libraries.

Solana will force more blockchains to optimize for low latency. We will move from the TPS war to the latency war - infrastructure like doublezero and ultra-low latency L2s like MegaETH will drive user expectations for web2 responsiveness. Expect more adoption of optimistic UI, pre-confirmations, intents, email onboarding, in-browser wallets, and progressive security. Swap the appearance of Privy.

Hyperliquid has proven that when professional chains focus on specific applications and prioritize user experience and easy bridging, they can work. More projects will follow this model. The old dream of one chain dominating them all has been shattered.

2. Token Issuance

The current era of large-scale airdrops through points programs is over. We are moving towards a two-track world.

Track 1: If a project has a clear North Star metric, such as an exchange or lending protocol, they will distribute tokens purely based on points. They don't care if they are being farmed or toyed with - they are actually handing out the tokens as rebates/discounts on the protocol's core KPIs, and the airdroppers are your actual users anyway.

Track 2: Projects without clear North Star metrics (such as L1 and L2) will turn to crowdfunding. They may conduct small-scale airdrops to reward social contributionsdonation, but the majority of tokens will be distributed through crowdsale. Airdrops for vanity metrics are dead. Those do not really go to users, but to industrial airdroppers.

Memecoins will continue to compete for market share from “AI smart agent” coins. I think this is a shift from financial nihilism to financial over-optimism. (Yes, I coined that term.)

3. Stablecoins

The use of stablecoins will surge, especially among small and medium-sized enterprises. It’s not just trading and speculation – real businesses will start using on-chain USD for instant settlement.

Banks are taking note: expect to see announcements of bank-issued stablecoins by the end of 2025. They don't want to fall behind. But especially with Lutnick as Commerce Secretary, Tether will remain in first place.

Ethena is expected to devour more capital, especially if Treasury yields continue to fall in the coming year. When the opportunity cost of capital falls, it makes underlying trading yields more attractive

4. Regulation

The United States passes stablecoin legislation while broader market infrastructure reforms (FIT21) are delayed. Stablecoin adoption accelerates, while Wall Street adoption, asset tokenization and other TradFi integrations will lag.

Under Trump, Fortune 100 companies will be more willing to offer cryptocurrencies to consumers, and technology companies and startups will show a higher risk appetite. Trump’s inauguration will create an overt regulatory celebration until clear rules and enforcement priorities are set. During this period, it is expected that the integration of cryptocurrencies with the Web2 platform will be actively expanded.

5. AI Agents (This is the longest section because my ideas here may be controversial – read to the end!)

The “AI Agent” craze may continue until 2025 . But it will eventually die. This is not a long-term disruption of AI to be wary of, but it will be a concern for CT because it is the most social.

The current AI agents are not real agents. These are chatbots with memecoins attached; they have little to no intelligence beyond posting on Twitter. Most of the current "AI agents" are "Wizard of Oz" agents - there are humans behind the scenes to ensure that the AI ​​does not derail. This isn't going to change anytime soon because current agents are so bad (even Fortune 100 companies aren't using agents in production yet). Current agents can easily be manipulated into saying crazy things that damage their brand, or they can be jailbroken to steal all of their resources. See Freysa, What True Autonomous AI Looks Like - If your favorite AI isn't jailbroken, that's because it's the Wizard of Oz's AI.

Having said that, I think this trend will accelerate. Chatbots can indeed replace many KOLs because chatbots start fromThey don’t sleep, they are always delivering information, and they are not as greedy as human KOLs. In addition, most KOLs are not very creative. Even today, real-time information aggregation/amplification can easily be replaced by algorithms (see @aixbt_agent)

These chatbots are very attractive to us now because they are so new. It's like seeing an elephant painting. When you first see it, you don't care if the painting is good or not - it looks spectacular. But the novelty wears off the 1,000th time. I believe this will start to happen as these chatbots reach a plateau.

You can see this today with aixbt - it has become very good at aggregating data about different projects. By next year and the next generation of agents, maybe aixbt will be a little less hallucinatory, a little deeper, and have a smarter view. But how much will you notice? It probably feels the same to most people.

I think this novelty and market desire will continue into 2025. It will take a while for cryptocurrencies to get tired of the shiny stuff. But by 2026, I think there will be a sudden reversal. Chatbots will become so ubiquitous that people will lose interest in them. The mood will reverse. Seeing the stories of their favorite human influencers losing their livelihoods will inspire a sense of class. Users will start to discriminate against human KOLs, even if their content is less consistent.

In response to this pro-human bias, chatbots will begin to hide that they are AI, trying to impersonate humans to attract more attention from the market. The chatbots of the future won’t make money through memecoins like they do today, but like human KOLs, through sponsorships, affiliate links, and tokens they own. KOLs will often be accused of being chatbots, and you will see scandals exposing AI. This is all going to get weird.

But there is a darker side. Keep in mind that LLM is currently an excellent wordcel (note: someone with superb writing skills and language intelligence), but not good enough in other areas. What is the best way to make money as wordcel in cryptocurrency? The first is to be an influencer, of course, but a close second is to be a hustler. You will start to see a proliferation of autonomous scam bots. These bots will explode in popularity, rivaling ransomware and cryptojacking post-2017. This is expected to become a real social problem.

However, while chatbots are likely to continue to be the focus of attention in 2025, AI’s long-term disruption will not occur at the social level.

No, it will not appear in the trading area either. AI won’t provide everyone with their own “trading agent” or micro-hedge fund. Yes, AI will scale everyone, but they will scale people proportionally based on capital, data, and infrastructure. Therefore, you should expectAI is expected to provide super power for existing trading companies with capital scale and data scale. In other words, trading firms will become better at making money. It will also break down the hierarchy between trading firms (most trading firms will become pretty good because everyone will have access to an IQ 150 quant in the cloud).

Over time, AI will make markets extremely efficient, even for smaller niche markets, which will leave the average trader with little advantage, even if they have home-made Assistant AI. The value of original research will decline significantly. Still, increased competition and liquidity should be a boon to those of us who inject noise into the market. (This also means Polymarket liquidity!)

So, if the big news isn’t chatbots, and it’s not trading bots, what else is? This is my core argument, and for some reason almost no one talks about it: the truly impactful AI agents will be software engineering agents.

Why is this a big deal? Ask yourself: What are the major inputs to our industry? What’s the expensive investment holding back more apps, more wallets, better infrastructure, better everything? The answer is software. If AI agents cause software prices to collapse, that will change everything.

In the post-AI world, instead of raising millions of dollars for a seed round, you can launch an application using $10,000 of AI cloud computing. Self-funded projects like Hyperliquid and Jupiter will move from the exception to the norm. The number of applications and experiments on the chain will absolutely explode. For an industry driven by software, this deflationary shock will lead to an on-chain renaissance.

The impact on security is profound. AI-driven static analysis and monitoring will be everywhere, making security more accessible to everyone. These AIs will be fine-tuned on EVM/Solidity or Rust code bases and trained on a vast database of security audits and attack vectors. They will be trained for RL in a simulated adversarial blockchain environment. I am increasingly convinced that AI tools will ultimately favor defenders over attackers when it comes to security. You will have AIs that are constantly red team testing contracts, while other AIs will harden them, formally validate their properties, and hone their skills in incident response and remediation.

In the meantime, it is of course possible to trade AI-style memecoins. But real agents will have a greater impact than tweeting and promoting their own tokens.

6. Real Crypto x AI

I have introduced in detail the impact of AI on cryptocurrency (this is the main direction of impact), but cryptocurrency will also have an impact on AI.

Truly autonomous agents will use cryptocurrencies to pay each other. This will be especially true once there is looser stablecoin regulation – you may even seeLarge companies running AI agents also use stablecoins for inter-agent payments because they are easier to initiate than bank accounts.

We will also see more and larger-scale decentralized training and inference experiments. A new generation of promising projects such as Exo Labs, Nous Research and Prime Intellect will pave the way for a real alternative to centralized training and company-operated models. The NEAR protocol is also fully trying to create a full-stack, trust-neutral, and permissionless AI stack.

Another place where Crypto and AI intersect is in user experience. Post-AI wallets will revolutionize — AI wallets should be able to handle bridging, optimize transaction routing, minimize fees for you, mask interoperability issues or front-end errors, and help you avoid obvious scams or rugpulls. You don’t have to switch between multiple different wallets, change RPCs, or rebalance your stablecoins. AI will handle all this for you. It may take until 2026 for this to become reliable enough to transform the cryptocurrency user experience. But when it all comes, what impact will this have on blockchain network effects? What happens when users no longer care - or even experience - which chain an application exists on?

This field is still very young, but I hope we will see it take off soon. In the long term (say mid-2026), I expect the majority of "AI x Crypto"'s market cap to be located here. -

That's all my predictions. I hope everyone won’t have to work this time next year!