Author: YBB Capital Researcher Zeke

Introduction

Starting from the craze for inscriptions and culminating in the election of the first crypto president, 2024 is about to come to a close. This year, Crypto has experienced an unusually "bullish market," with altcoins performing weakly, meme coins dominating the conversation, and ultimately, all streams converging back to BTC. Overall, despite some lows and frustrations, Crypto is indeed moving in a more positive direction. In the upcoming year of 2025, there are many directions worth paying attention to, and in this article, we will briefly look ahead to next year based on recent viewpoints.

1. About AI

At the current stage, blockchain abstraction projects often become overly complex in their technical implementation due to the pursuit of conceptual perfection, ultimately affecting the user interaction experience. Projects that include Intent architecture tend to have a relatively complex implementation method, whether they are centralized (like TG Bot), structured (a combination of on-chain and off-chain preprocessing), or distributed (like Solver + Executor architectures). These intent projects often share some common issues. For example, users still need to have a considerable understanding of DeFi, and the expression of intent must be clear, accurate, and simple. For complex and vague intents proposed by users, current intent projects show a kind of helplessness, and the scope of implementation is quite limited. Therefore, since Paradigm proposed this concept in mid-2023, so-called intent-centered projects have been more noise than substance, providing little help in guiding new users and lowering operational thresholds. However, we all know that, looking at the development path of Ethereum Layer 2, the market's demand for both is still urgent.

Let’s review the development of Layer 2 over the past few months. Among the leading projects, the Layer 2 alliance represented by OP Superchain has gradually grown, and Zksync's Elastic Chain and Arbitrum Orbit will eventually form their own alliance along this path. These alliances will be able to achieve direct interoperability through solutions like interoperable clusters in the future, alleviating the current issues of excessive fragmentation and lack of interoperability in the Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem. The competition among dozens of chains will shrink to a competition among multiple forces. However, from a broader perspective, as the crypto market improves, new Layer 2 projects with architectures like Movement and Fuel are also competing to launch their mainnets to capture the scarce liquidity of the altcoin market. For projects below the first tier, fragmentation and lack of interoperability are still intensifying, and virtual machines based on different architectural designs may even have wallet plugins that do not interoperate. Let alone bringing in new users, for ordinary blockchain users, the entire Layer 2 ecosystem is extremely complicated, and the development of non-financial application chains will also face significant resistance in this context.

For Ethereum to attract new users, ecosystem alignment is the biggest prerequisite. An ecosystem that requires users to be half-geeks to get started will never achieve "Mass Adoption." From the counter-trend performance of Solana and Ton this year, it is clear that strategies to lower user thresholds and provide a more consistent, Web2-like user experience have played an important role in ecosystem growth. To put it more directly, what these two ecosystems have done beyond promotion is simply to lower the difficulty of asset issuance and make the use of the chain feel more seamless. Therefore, for Ethereum, a comprehensive solution prioritizing experience is essential, but given the core developers' consistent open attitude, it is naturally impossible to align the entire Layer 2 ecosystem through coercive means.

I believe the solution that can first address this issue is the AI browser agent. In the early days of ChatGPT's emergence, many people envisioned that AI would revolutionize app interactions, allowing operations to span multiple apps and form a comprehensive super app. Taking a common situation like travel as an example, after receiving a user's travel needs, AI can automatically complete ticket booking, customize travel routes, arrange meals and schedules, etc., based on what the user has stated. If this AI also has long-term memory capabilities, it can arrange plans that are more suitable for the user based on that memory.

Now, Google is about to launch an AI browser agent powered by Gemini, called Project Mariner. In a demonstration by Google Labs director Jaclyn Konzelmann, after installing the AI agent extension in the Chrome browser, a chat window pops up on the right side of the browser. Users can instruct the agent to perform tasks such as "create a shopping cart from this list at the grocery store." The AI agent will then automatically navigate to a grocery platform and add items to the cart, proceeding to the checkout interface. Once confirmed, the user will check out themselves (the agent does not have payment permissions). Similar products will also be launched by OpenAI next month.

It is worth mentioning that although Google's Project Mariner is currently only available to selected testers, I have already experienced similar agents developed for ordinary users in some crypto projects. From a few hours of testing, the current agent can achieve an accuracy level of about 60-70% for complex and vague intents (cursor operation speed is relatively slow) and can autonomously complete tasks such as token trading within various public chains and even cross-asset transfers from Ethereum to Layer 2. Throughout this process, all I needed to do was inform it of my intent and input my wallet password.

Of course, this foundation still requires calling centralized model APIs, so what kind of collision can Crypto generate with it? I believe that the AI browser agent, in addition to becoming a better intent solution, will also drive the emergence of AI wallets, decentralized computing power, and decentralized data projects next year.

Consider a simple question: why has the beautiful concept of Agent only been realized today during these years of rapid AI development? Looking back at OpenAI's development process, it is not difficult to find that the development of pure language models has always been faster than that of models like image generation. This is because the internet itself is a vast corpus, providing an endless supply of text material for training, and the limitations on the development of language models are more about computing power and energy. Agents require a large amount of manual labeling and feedback, and the reasoning process is expensive. Crypto inherently has the ability to obtain labor through incentives. In this economic system, upper-layer users can provide a large amount of labeled data and feedback in a decentralized manner to earn tokens, while the lower layer can integrate decentralized computing power and data projects. After training is completed, it can also be integrated with wallets and DeFi projects through SDKs to achieve a true AI wallet, ultimately forming a closed loop. Other ideas for AI agents can also be derived from this, as any AI agent suitable for Web3 will need computing power, labeling, and feedback to "grow."

2. Stablecoins

Stablecoins are always a battleground and a highly competitive track in Crypto. Regarding their application value, they have gained widespread recognition even outside the industry. For example, this year, several giants in traditional finance have entered the stablecoin market, including PayPal's PYUSD, BlackRock's collaboration with Ethena on USDb, and VanEck's AUSD (serving regions like Argentina and Southeast Asia).

As Tether and Circle's dominance in this track continues to deepen, new entrants among stablecoin issuers are gradually dividing into two categories. First, issuers of fiat-backed stablecoins are beginning to focus on emerging markets in South America and specific application scenarios, while algorithmic stablecoins are generally shifting towards stablecoins backed by low-risk financial products, such as those mentioned in our previous article regarding Ethena and Usual. From a trend perspective, next year will see more Delta-neutral stablecoins competing for short-selling liquidity in centralized exchanges, while hedging assets will gradually expand from BTC and ETH to higher-risk, lower-liquidity public chain tokens to compete for the remaining sinking market. As for Usual-type stablecoins backed by short- to medium-term U.S. Treasury bonds, I believe they are more about innovating in protocol tokens and yield methods, as there are no better choices in terms of RWA asset types than short- to medium-term Treasury bonds. However, compared to the limited liquidity in centralized exchanges, the competition for such stablecoins will be smaller, and the upper limit will be larger.

Overall, the development of stablecoins is gradually moving towards pursuing more stable underlying assets and decentralization in governance. However, I hope to see some completely decentralized and non-over-collateralized stablecoin protocols emerge next year.

3. Payments

With the compliance and accelerated adoption of stablecoins in various countries, the downstream payment track of stablecoins will also become a new competitive focus. Heterogeneous public chains like Solana and Move, which have high TPS and low gas fees, will become the main infrastructure for payment applications. Traditional payments are already a highly mature and saturated red ocean market; what kind of transformation can blockchain provide? Firstly, two relatively simple and commonly mentioned points are to optimize cross-border payments, eliminating pre-funding requirements, making cross-border remittances faster, cheaper, and easier, thus solving the problem of trillions of dollars in pre-paid funds in traditional systems. Secondly, serving emerging markets, which I mentioned in previous articles, where the application value of stablecoins has already been demonstrated. The strong financial inclusivity allows residents of third-world countries to effectively cope with high inflation caused by government instability, and through stablecoins, they can participate in some global financial activities and subscribe to the most cutting-edge virtual services.

The concept of "PayFi," proposed by Solana Foundation manager Lily Liu at the 7th EthCC conference, provides more imagination for the combination of blockchain and payments. This concept involves two core aspects: first, timely settlement, which is T+0 settlement. PayFi can achieve same-day settlement, and even multiple settlements in a day, eliminating the delays and complexities of the traditional financial system that should be involved in the entire process, significantly improving the speed of capital flow. Secondly, it involves buy now, pay never (BNPL), for example, a user deposits $50 into a lending product to purchase a $5 cup of coffee. Once the accumulated interest reaches $5, that interest will be used to pay for the coffee, and the funds will be unlocked and returned to the user's account.

And there are many ideas that can be extended from this, such as the financing needs of emerging projects in usage scenarios can form a more secure and transparent entry and exit through PayFi in the blockchain, currency exchange during travel no longer needing to rely on various physical financial institutions, and the free control of payment and receipt times (delayed receipts to earn interest, early payments to obtain discounts). The methods of earning will also become more diversified; in addition to the stablecoin deposits mentioned above to earn interest from lending products, I personally believe that the types of stablecoins should also allow for easy conversion. In the future, with the significant emergence of new stablecoins, users can choose the most suitable type of stablecoin at any time based on their personal risk tolerance, thus obtaining both stablecoin protocol tokens and higher stablecoin interest. For DeFi, if this payment system can become mainstream, its growth potential will be unimaginably vast.

4. Dex

We have already mentioned the issues of fragmentation and lack of interoperability in Layer 2 in the first section. This development path also presents a problem: an oversupply of block space, where the development of infrastructure far exceeds that of Dapps. This issue will lead to the natural elimination of many long-tail chains within a few years, which is also a significant headache for Ethereum, where DA pricing missteps do not receive positive feedback from Layer 2.

Looking back at this round of counter-trend growth in public chains, it largely relies on its strong community, ecosystem, and promotional advantages, supplying these advantages to asset issuance platforms to achieve rapid growth in overall TVL. Therefore, not every Layer 2 can replicate this attention economy, and the lack of super applications remains a reality to face next year. Following the trend, in addition to what we mentioned earlier, the future demand for AI Agents may be a way out. Other relatively obvious short-term trends include on-chain order book Dex, privacy, payment-related stacks, and decision-making tools.

I personally believe that on-chain order book Dex will become mainstream among the next generation of Dex. After all, looking at the development of AMM, the complexity of its technical path is continuously increasing, but the efficiency gains are becoming more limited, as we have discussed in articles related to Uni. However, for Layer 2, the limitations of performance and gas fees are still quite evident, and improvements in matching algorithms and innovations in gas solutions will become key challenges.

5. Asset Issuance Remains the Main Theme

From 2023 to today, from inscriptions to the current AI Meme platforms, the methods of asset issuance have been a hot topic over the past year. If we extend this time span a bit, in fact, from the ICO era to the present, asset issuance can be considered the only main theme in the crypto space. However, the external packaging and the thresholds for issuance are changing. On the positive side, users' gaming needs have driven the advanced development of infrastructure and DeFi. As this technology becomes known and recognized by the world, blockchain can step into the mainstream and integrate into reality. On the negative side, this game has become more pure and absurd; the decreasing difficulty of asset issuance also means that this dark forest is becoming more dangerous. Nowadays, with just a click, accompanied by an image and a few words, a grand zero-sum game begins. Why not steer it back to a more positive side? To promote industry progress through the game.

For example, some current AI Memes are also beginning to shift towards the development of practical Agents, rather than the early versions of nonsensical AI Agents. The recently popular DeSci can also be referred to as the "ICO for scientific research." Although the current core is driven by Memes, in the long run, combining various advantages of blockchain, DeSci can promote traditional research to be more transparent, easily disseminated, easily financed, and easily communicated. However, whether it can ultimately land and how it will evolve still needs to be questioned.

In fact, I have also mentioned similar ideas to DeSci in my article about GameFi, such as the situation of independent game funding and personnel shortages, and how to effectively promote the development of independent games through blockchain. The problem with blockchain financing is that the thresholds for asset issuance are too low, with too few restrictions, and the fundraising capabilities are too strong (it can also be said that the entry threshold on the chain is extremely low). How to impose rules to restrict the use of funds, forcing project parties to continuously create truly valuable things, is also a key point we should consider.

Let the gamers game, and let the builders advance; this is the premise for blockchain to continue developing. Next year, we may see more versions of "ICO," but what I hope is that this gaming feast can lead to the next "DeFi Summer."

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