Author: Multicoin Capital; Compiler: 0xjs@金财经

2025 is expected to be a critical year for the industry. The path to the first regulatory framework to support cryptocurrencies, coupled with the technological maturity of L1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, DePIN networks, and stablecoins, creates fertile ground for the next wave of cutting-edge innovation.

Continuing our tradition, we'll be sharing the ideas and opportunities that excite us most in the year ahead. If you are building in any of these areas, please private message Multicoin partners directly.

DePIN Robotics, zero-employee company

Kyle Samani, founder of Multicoin

DePIN Robotics—There are already rumors that the incoming Trump will try to change the Autonomous Driving (AD) regulations Develop unified standards for AD companies from state to state. With GPU clusters exceeding 100,000 H100s, Transformer-based autonomous driving will be ready for the real world. After this, I expect bot-based DePIN to explode. Many startups have raised funding from non-crypto VCs but have yet to truly start commercialization. I’m optimistic that many of them will adopt the DePIN model, spreading risk from the balance sheets of development companies to robotics professionals and prosumers around the world. Many early adopters of these robotic products will capture data critical to developing autonomous robots. I know there's one company in this space today - Frodobots - and I'm looking forward to more. Our portfolio company Hivemapper, while not explicitly a robotics company, is exploring many similar ideas.

Zero-employee company—The foundation of a zero-employee company is AI. With OpenAI’s o3 and other more advanced thought chain reasoning models, models are reaching the point where they can think, plan, execute, and self-correct. This lays the foundation for AI agents to perform all tasks in the business. For a zero-employee company to function properly, it will need human guidance because AI will inevitably make mistakes and may exceed its contextual window. Over time, I expect that the degree of human guidance will decrease as the AI ​​continues to improve self-correction and expand the contextual window. I believe the governance of these zero-employee companies will likely be through DAOs, and I expect the crypto capital markets to fund ambitious attempts by zero-employee companies.

Startups tend to succeed while large companies fail because they face unique constraints. I believe zero employee constraints will lead to some incredible breakthroughs for all business operations.

Securities on the chain

Tushar Jain, Co-founder of Multicoin

With Trump coming to power and the Republican Party’s overall victory in Congress, on-chain securities have finally taken off in a meaningful way.

Transactions on blockchains like Solana can be completed almost instantly, eliminating the wait times common in traditional finance. Faster capital flows increase capital efficiency and should lead to more efficient prices.

Blockchain ensures that all participants have access to real-time, immutable records of transactions. This transparency and security contrasts with the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases of traditional finance. Transaction costs on blockchain networks are much lower than traditional banking systems, just compare the cost of sending a stablecoin on Solana ($0.001) to the cost of sending a wire transfer ($30). Solana’s token extension now allows for precise, fine-grained control over tokenized securities. An issuer may restrict its 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.

There is no doubt that blockchain’s near-instant finality, cheap transactions, and transparency provide better settlement than the slow, expensive, and opaque traditional financial rails. The only real obstacle is regulation, and a more innovation-friendly SEC could open the door to the tokenization of securities.

I don’t think public equity offerings will be the first tokenized securities adopted by the mass market. Markets that are less liquid, more opaque, and benefit more from tokenization are more likely to be the first to adopt. This could be startup equity, there's no reason to pay Carta or Angelist to manage it when the blockchain can manage the capital table for free. It could be the fixed-income instrument Figure has been working on for years. It could be an LP interest in a fund.

Buy Now, Pay Never, Spend Your Portfolio, Portfolio Margining

Spencer Applebaum, Multicoin Investment Partner

Based on Tushar's ideas, when all assets are 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 buy now, pay later concept, which I’m sure you’ve already seen These widgets are seen on Amazon and other merchant sites. Today, on-chain users can earn around 8% on SOL and around 15% on stablecoins. If users don’t need to pay for a subscription upfront and can instead deposit their tokens into the merchantWhat about merchants (from web2 companies like Netflix to web3 companies like Dune Analytics) who earn staking/lending rewards over time? User’s tokens will be locked for a certain period of time to guarantee payment. We think there is a strong consumer psychology factor here, with the opportunity cost of the benefits appearing to be more acceptable than the upfront payment.

Spend portfolios directly - When all assets are tokenized and aggregated into one place (a web3 wallet), users should be able to spend their portfolios on medium to large items, which It makes sense. Imagine Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in earnings USDC, $10,000 in TSLA stock, and $10,000 in gold. She wants to buy a $4,000 sofa. She doesn’t have to convert her USDC to fiat, wait for a bank transfer, send the payment, and then perform the reverse process to rebalance her portfolio if she can automatically sell each of her four holdings on-chain for 1,000 U.S. dollars and then pay the sofa merchant immediately, what happens? She remains fully allocated to her existing portfolio and does not need to consider the rebalancing process.

Portfolio Margin – In the next 3-5 years, with the emergence of cryptocurrency prime brokers and unified super protocols, users should be able to hold all assets across margins. For example, Alice should be able to use her AAPL shares to short BTC perpetual contracts and borrow USDC on-chain. Or should be able to use her tokenized whiskey as collateral to purchase tokenized debt on-chain. We’re starting to see this in a comprehensive way (like Ostium bringing FX trading on-chain), but it will all become clearer when spot assets are tokenized.

Verify off-chain status on-chain

Shayon Sengupta, Multicoin Investment Partner

Asset ledgers like Bitcoin and Solana are the moment when cryptocurrencies go from zero to one. These systems are fundamentally about money – they facilitate the storage and transfer of value in global, permissionless orbits. We are now seeing the cryptographic primitives that make these systems possible begin to cross-fertilize with off-ledger systems, unlocking new net markets. Over the next 12 months, cryptography will become an authentication layer for data and computing in three novel ways: network attestation, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media provenance. I think this is the fusion of monetary cryptography and verification cryptography - a coordination layer that will enable new economic primitives and incentive structures.

The first opportunity here is zkTLS and the markets it supports. zkTLS refers to building a zero-knowledge proof through TLS signatures in web pages to verify any transaction on the Internet in a completely uncensorable and tamper-proof manner.Data unit (for example, your credit score on equifax or your Strava activity history). Teams are already deploying zk proofs in network sessions to build applications that are uncensorable and resistant to fraud. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples. p2p.me is India’s cash on-ramp/exit, leveraging web proof to circumvent the region’s broken market structures. ZkMe is a sovereign verification system for KYC credentials, allowing applications to verify the identity of their users in a privacy-preserving manner. The same primitives can be extended to dozens of new markets—systems where ticketing, booking, and other fraud are major bottlenecks to liquidity.

Secondly, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter its golden age. As AI systems trained on public datasets experience diminishing returns, post-training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become even more critical. This creates a whole new design space for coordinating otherwise inaccessible data sets as input to models—especially as large amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue to move from on-premises to cloud systems. Token-based incentives at this layer will be critical, and unlocking this area will take the SOTA base model to the next level.

Third, in the post-AI era, identity verification and media source systems will become fixed content in consumer applications. When the cost of generating content approaches zero, the sheer volume of synthetic media content will make proving the authenticity of content and identity an urgent requirement. Early systems, such as Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode, used cryptographic proofs rather than biometrics or issued credentials to establish personhood, and used token incentives as the primary call to action to mobilize participants at scale. Likewise, standards such as C2PA address the media provenance issue by tagging content at the hardware layer to distinguish real captured media from AI-generated media, but given the inertia of consumer habits, their widespread adoption at the application layer may require Some form of token-based coordination. These tools are critical to solving the infohazards of an AI-saturated consumer internet.

Multi-player gamified trading, full-stack media company

Eli Qian, Multicoin investment partner

Multi-player gamified trading (Trading Goes Multiplayer) - share financial profits and losses, and speculate collectively , is a very human, highly viral behavior. People love to talk about how much money they’ve made (or lost!) in everything from stocks to sports betting to memecoins. However, most popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are designed for a single-player experience. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot—none of these are multiplayer-first experiences. Nonetheless, the need for social trading is undeniableI admit it. Today, users create their own ad hoc social experiences through online forums and group chats. A large portion of Crypto Twitter revolves around these discussions.

One of the biggest advantages of cryptocurrencies is permissionless liquidity. It opens the door for anyone to build multi-player trading tools for crypto assets. In 2025, I’m excited to see builders take advantage of the virality inherent in social transactions to create multiplayer experiences. Such a product would allow users to share trades, compete on P&Ls, and enter positions together with a click or tap. The design space is very broad, covering Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord mini-programs, etc. While 2023 and 2024 saw the rise of single-player tools like BONKBot and BullX, 2025 will be the year trading goes multi-player.

Full-Stack Media Companies – There have been many attempts to use tokens to enhance media and content, but few companies have been able to realize their full potential. However, we are starting to see the rise of media companies that control end-to-end content production, including tokens, distribution and human capital. These "full stack" media companies have the ability to push cryptographic primitives further than before. Think: athlete tokens, creator tokens, live streaming with prediction markets, and more.

One example is karate fighting. Rather than building a product around existing UFC fighters, Karate Fighting is building a new fighting league from the ground up, giving them more control over rules, distribution and athletes. While UFC fighter tokens have limited use, Karate Fighting allows token holders to vote on a fighter’s training regimen, competition attire, or anything else — and that’s only if Karate Fighting controls the token design and fighter contracts It's possible.

Future live broadcasts, sports leagues, podcasts and reality shows will be deeply vertically integrated in content, distribution, tokens and human capital. I'm excited to invest in and consume the next generation of token-enhanced media.

The Rise of Alpha Hunters

Vishal Kankani, Multicoin Investment Partner

Some decisive things happened in 2024. They are a sign of some interesting things to come in 2025.

First, for about $0, almost anyone can issue new tokens without permission. This has resulted in an eye-popping number of token issuances in 2024. Most of these are issued as memecoins, with half-lives measured in hours.

Secondly, market sentiment in 2024 is back towards high-float, low-FDV fair distribution token offerings – reminiscent of the ICO era of 2017. In this type of market, CEXs struggle to keep up with new listings, which we expect will occur in 2025 (because of theirlisting process), thereby incentivizing people to get on-chain and bring more liquidity to the DEX. Therefore, DEX will gain market share over CEX in the coming year. As the number of tokens and DEX activity surges, active traders will need more powerful tools and models to identify emerging tokens, analyze sentiment and on-chain indicators, identify vulnerabilities, mitigate risk (e.g. rugpulls), and execute trades efficiently— — All in real time.

This brings us to the third thing happening in 2024: AI agents. So far, we have seen AI agents create content on social media to draw attention to their respective coins. I predict that the next iteration of AI agents will be Alpha Hunters, those whose only job is to find alpha and trade autonomously in real time.

Institutionalization Mania

Matt Shapiro, Partner, Multicoin

We are just at the beginning of the institutionalization phase of cryptocurrencies, and it will happen at a dizzying pace.

The crypto industry has made tremendous progress over the past 5+ years through significant technology advancements, product-market fit, and substantial UI/UX improvements, but the institutional community has effectively stagnated when it comes to crypto. The combination of regulatory and professional risks prevents many financial institutions from effectively entering the space or offering even the most basic crypto products to their customers. With the rise of crypto support in the US and the record success of the BTC ETF, we are about to see 5 years of institutional complacency trying to catch up and find ways to support crypto as quickly as possible.

There will be $35 billion in BTC buying demand in 2024 that cannot or will not simply purchase the cryptocurrency through Coinbase. With most asset managers and large securities firms still not fully launched, more dollars will be able to buy cryptocurrencies in 2025. We will see the launch of a number of ETFs to meet and capitalize on this demand. This includes not only ETFs for new crypto assets like Solana, but also ETFs that own multiple crypto assets, as well as ETFs that mix crypto assets with traditional assets like gold, stocks, or credit. There will be leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility dampening ETFs, staking ETFs, and more. Basically, every confluence you can think of to bundle crypto assets for institutional and retail investors will be explored.

We will see major financial institutions racing to launch basic financial products around cryptocurrencies. Every financial institution should explore creating product lines that allow customers to trade cryptocurrency products. Financial institutions should look to custody crypto-assets and extend credit against them, just as they do today for more traditional assets. We may also see a significant increase in stablecoin issuers. Any bank that accepts deposits should look to issue a local stablecoin. I am hereSpeaking at Multicoin Summit 2024 with Visa’s Cuy Sheffield, every company needs a stablecoin strategy. Companies that used to focus on “ecommerce” are now just commerce. Stablecoins are moving in the same direction.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, and while it’s not the most technically ambitious thing to happen in crypto, the scale and scope of its distribution and the money involved are enormous.