coindesk.com
Every year, bulls and bears use short-term case studies to forecast crypto armageddon or exponential growth. And every year, neither group is right.
Some notable events this year: Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade, the U.S. election, crypto ETFs, Wyoming's DUNA, the wBTC controversy, Robinhood’s Well’s notice, Hyperliquid’s near $2 billion airdrop, Bitcoin hitting $100,000, and SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s January resignation announcement.
2024 was a year with no major market shocks. And, though it didn’t bring in an explosion of new capital, it proved that a growing number of companies in the crypto ecosystem are sustainable. Bitcoin is worth $1.9 trillion and all other cryptos are worth $1.6 trillion. The market cap of all crypto has doubled since the start of 2024.
The diversification of crypto has strengthened its ability to react to shocks. Payments, DeFi, gaming, ZK, infrastructure, consumer, and more, are all growing sub-sections. Each of these now have their own funding ecosystems, their own markets, their own incentives, and their own bottlenecks.
This year, at Pantera, we’ve invested in companies that target these ecosystem-specific problems. Crypto gaming companies face issues adopting Web3 data analysis tools, so we invested in Helika, a gaming analysis platform. Web3 AI products often face adoption challenges because of the fragmentation of the AI stack, so Sahara AI aims to create an all-in-one platform to allow permissionless contribution while keeping a seamless Web2-like user experience.
Intent infrastructure is messy and orderflow is fragmented, so Everclear standardizes the process by connecting all stakeholders. zkVM’s are complicated to integrate, so Nexus uses modularity in order to cater to customers who want only parts of their hyper-scalable layer. Building consumer apps faces the issue of attracting users, so we made our largest ever investment in TON, the blockchain that directly plugs into Telegram’s 950 million monthly active users.
We enter 2025 on tailwinds of possible regulatory clarity, continued mainstream interest, and rising crypto prices. Even after a bit of a summer slump this year, crypto users are entering the new year with strong optimism (or “greed”).
Review of 2024 Predictions:
Before we dive into 2025 predictions, let’s take a look back at how I did predicting 2024. I’ll score myself with 1 being the least accurate and 5 being the most accurate.
- The resurgence of Bitcoin and “DeFi Summer 2.0.” Accuracy: 4/5
- Tokenized social experiences for new consumer use cases. Accuracy: 2/5
- An increase in TradFi-DeFi “bridges” such as stablecoins and mirrored assets. Accuracy: 5/5
- The cross-pollination of modular blockchains and Zero Knowledge Proofs. Accuracy: 4/5
- More computationally intensive applications moving on-chain, such as AI and DePIN. Accuracy: 2/5
- Consolidation of public blockchain ecosystems and a “Hub-and-Spoke” model for app-chains. Accuracy: 2/5
2025 Predictions
This year, I enlisted the help of investors on the Pantera team. I’ve split my predictions into two categories: rising trends and new ideas.
Rising Trends:
By year-end, RWAs (excluding stablecoins) will account for 30% of on chain TVL (15% today)
RWAs on-chain has increased over 60% this year, to $13.7 billion. Around 70% of RWAs are private credit and the majority of the rest are in T-Bills and commodities. Inflows from these categories are accelerating, and 2025 may see the introduction of more complex RWAs.
Firstly, private credit is accelerating because of improving infrastructure. Figure accounts for almost all of this, increasing by almost $4 billion worth of assets in 2024. As more companies enter this space, there is increasing ease to use private credit as a means to move money into crypto.
Secondly, there are trillions of dollars worth of T-Bills and commodities off-chain. There is only $2.67 billion worth of T-Bills on-chain, and their ability to generate yield (as opposed to stablecoins, which allow the ones who mint the coin to capture the interest), makes it a more attractive alternative to stablecoins. Blackrock’s BUIDL T-Bill fund only has $500 million on-chain, as opposed to the tens of billions of government bills it owns off-chain. Now that DeFi infrastructure has thoroughly embraced stablecoins and T-Bill RWAs (integrating them into DeFi pools, lending markets, and perps), the friction to adopt them has drastically decreased. The same goes for commodities.
Finally, the current extent of RWAs is limited to these basic products. The infrastructure to mint and maintain the RWA protocols has drastically simplified and operators have a much better understanding of the risks and appropriate mitigations that come with on-chain operations. There are specialized companies that manage wallets, minting mechanisms, sybil sensing, crypto neo-banks, and more, meaning it may finally be possible and feasible to introduce stocks, ETFs, bonds, and other more complex financial products on-chain. These trends will only accelerate the use of RWA’s heading into 2025.
Bitcoin-Fi
Last year, my prediction of Bitcoin finance was strong but didn’t reach the 1-2% of all Bitcoins TVL mark. This year, pushed by Bitcoin-native finance protocols that do not require bridging (like Babylon), high returns, high Bitcoin prices, and increased appetite for more BTC assets (runes, Ordinals, BRC20), 1% of Bitcoins will participate in Bitcoin-Fi.
Fintechs become crypto gateways
TON, Venmo, Paypal, Whatsapp have seen crypto growth because of their neutrality. They are gateways where users can interact with crypto, but do not push specific apps or protocols; in effect, they can act as simplified entryways into crypto. They attract different users; TON for its existing 950 million Telegram users, Venmo and Paypal for their respective 500 million payments users, and Whatsapp for its 2.95 billion monthly active users.
Felix, which operates on Whatsapp, allows instant money transfers via a message, to be either digitally transferred or can be picked up in cash at partner locations (like 7-Eleven). Under the hood, they use stablecoins and Bitso on Stellar. Users can now buy crypto on Metamask using Venmo, Stripe acquired Bridge (a stablecoin company), and Robinhood acquired Bitstamp (a crypto exchange).
Whether intentionally or because of their ability to support third-party apps, every fintech will become a crypto gateway. Fintechs will grow in prevalence and may perhaps rival smaller centralized exchanges in crypto holdings.
Unichain becomes leading L2 by transaction volume
Uniswap has a TVL of almost $6.5b, 50-80k transactions per day, and volume of $1-4 billion daily. Arbitrum has ~$1.4 billion of transaction volume a day (a third of which is Uniswap) and Base has ~$1.5 billion of volume a day (a fourth of which is Uniswap).
If Unichain captures just half of Uniswap’s volume, it would easily surpass the largest L2s to become the leading L2 by transaction volume.
NFT resurgence but in a application specific way
NFTs were meant as a tool in crypto - not a means to an end. NFT’s are being used as a utility in on-chain gaming, AI (to trade ownership of models), identity, and consumer apps.
Blackbird is a restaurant rewards app that integrates NFTs into customer identification in their platform of connecting Web3 into dining. By integrating the open, liquid, and identifiable blockchain with restaurants, they can provide consumer behavior data to restaurants, and easily create/mint subscriptions, memberships, and discounts for customers.
Sofamon creates web3 bitmoji’s (which are NFTs), called wearables, unlocking the financial layer of the emoji market. They recognize the increasing relevance of IP on chain and embrace collaboration with top KOL’s and K-pop stars, for example, to fight digital counterfeiting. Story Protocol, which recently raised $80 million at a $2.25 billion valuation, has the broader goal of tokenizing the world’s IP, putting originality back as the centerpiece of creative exploration and creators. IWC (the Swiss luxury watch brand) has a membership NFT that buys access to an exclusive community and events.
NFTs can be integrated to ID transactions, transfers, ownership, memberships, but can also be used to represent and value assets, leading to monetary, possibly speculative growth. This flexibility is what brings NFTs power. The use-cases will only increase.
Restaking launches
In 2025, restaking protocols like Eigenlayer, Symbiotic, and Karak will finally launch their mainnets which would pay operators from AVS and slashing. It seems that through this year, restaking lost relevance.
Restaking draws power as more networks use it. If protocols use infra that is powered by a particular restaking protocol, it derives value from that connection, even if it is not direct. It is by this power that protocols can lose relevance but still hold huge valuations. We believe restaking is still a multi billion dollar market and as more apps become appchains, they harness restaking protocols, or other protocols that are built on restaking protocols.
New Ideas:
zkTLS bringing offchain data on-chain
zkTLS uses zero knowledge proofs to prove the validity of data from the Web2 world. This new technology has yet to be fully implemented, but when it (hopefully) does this year, it will bring in new types of data.
For example, zkTLS can be used to prove that data came from a certain website to others. Currently, there is no way to do this. This tech takes advantage of advancements made in TEE’s and MPC’s, and may be further improved to allow some of the data to be private.
This is a new idea, but we predict that companies will step up to begin building this and integrating it into on-chain services, like verifiable oracles for non-financial data or cryptographically secured data oracles.
Regulatory support
For the first time, the U.S. regulatory environment seems crypto-positive. 278 pro-crypto house candidates were elected versus 122 anti-crypto candidates. Gary Gensler, an anti-crypto SEC chair, announced that he will be resigning in January. Reportedly, Trump is set to nominate Paul Atkins to lead the SEC. He was previously an SEC Commissioner from 2002-2008 and is outspokenly supportive of the crypto industry and an advisor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce, an institution focused on promoting the acceptance of crypto. Trump also named David Sacks, a tech investor and former CEO of Yammer and COO of PayPal, to head the new role of “AI & crypto czar.” Trump’s announcement said that “[David Sacks] will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for.”
We hope for a winding down of SEC lawsuits, clear definitions of crypto as a particular asset class, and tax considerations.