Author: NingNing

Report Source: Messari

I. Summary

This 190-page report from Messari consists of three parts: the current state of crypto (macroeconomic environment, institutional status, where users are) + track analysis (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Alt L1s + infra, DeFi, AlxCrypto, DePin, Consumer, CeFi) + analyst choice awards. (Related reading: “Messari 2025 Crypto Outlook: The Macroeconomic Environment Will Drive Bitcoin Up, Meme Fever Will Continue”)

Messari's core analytical framework includes: blockchain space economics, ecological mapping valuation framework, narrative economics, Schumpeter's theory of innovation, etc.

II. Macroeconomic Environment

1. Economic Environment and Regulatory Environment

After reviewing significant events in the macroeconomic environment of 2024, Messari predicts trends in the U.S. economic environment and crypto regulation for 2025.

• 2025 is destined to be a key year for U.S. crypto policy reform, with the FIT21 and stablecoin legislation being the most notable regulatory cases that will promote transparency and standardization in global crypto regulatory frameworks.
• Unlike the optimistic views of ETF-related institutions like VanEck, Messari cautiously believes there is a possibility of a reversal in Trump’s crypto policy.

However, it will still be friendlier than Biden's crypto policy.

Commentary: Messari's macroeconomic analysis lacks particularly insightful observations and is of average quality, not as professional as macro analysts on Twitter; this part mainly serves to fill pages.

Looking ahead to the market trends in 2025, several institutions align with Messari's views:

• The market trend in 2025 will resemble a Banana ForScale, with new highs in Q1 and the first half, significant adjustments in Q2, and a recovery to create new highs in Q3 and Q4.

2. What Are Institutions Doing?

In 2024, institutions focused on applying for and operating Bitcoin/ETH spot ETFs and promoting RWA (mainly tokenization of U.S. Treasury bonds). Events like PayPal launching the stablecoin PYUSD and Stripe acquiring the stablecoin company Bridge have blurred the lines between fintech, payments, and cryptocurrencies.

In terms of investment, institutions are adopting a barbell strategy composed of Al and DePin, with total financing in these two sectors growing approximately 100% and 300% compared to last year, respectively.

The soon-to-be-appointed AI and crypto czar David Sacks is an investor in Solana, Helium, Render, and Hivemapper. It is expected that in 2025, the U.S. government will seriously consider collaborating with DePin projects.

Commentary: Next year, the main theme of AIxCrypto will likely be Web3AIAgent. The democratization of AI and AGI, which are capital and talent-intensive heavy industrial AIxCrypto projects, will need to adapt to significant environmental changes.

DePin is a favorite among North American institutions this year, particularly interested in high-quality data collection DePin and new energy DePin. One of Solana's strategies in 2025 remains ensuring DePin occurs on Solana.

3. Where Are On-Chain Users?

Messari cites a report from A16Z, stating that out of 220 million active addresses, approximately 30 to 60 million are real monthly active users.

Users are primarily distributed across Phantom wallets, stablecoins, Telegram mini-programs, Polymark prediction markets, Base, and Hyperliquid.

Messari believes that the growth of on-chain users in 2025 will come more from the product capabilities of Dapps rather than Bitcoin ATH news events or meme coin wealth legends. Therefore, it is very bullish on the adoption of chain abstraction and aggregation frontends in 2025.

Commentary: 2025 will be a pivotal year for Web3, transitioning from the "fat protocol" era to the "fat application" era, with APPChain/chain abstraction becoming the mainstream paradigm for Dapp construction.

The biggest regret of the application layer in 2024 is that Polymark successfully broke the circle but converted very few crypto users. It is hoped that in 2025, chain abstraction super apps can successfully sell crypto-native stablecoin services, high-yield staking financial products, and cyber lottery meme coins to a broad consumer base, achieving both acclaim and commercial success as a super phenomenon Dapp.

III. Track Analysis

The essence of Messari's annual outlook report lies in this part, which serves as an excellent window to observe the perspectives of North American institutions.

--Bitcoin

• Messari focuses on inscriptions/runes, Bitcoin programmability, and BTC staking.
• Inscriptions/runes are expected to revive with the launch of the fat penguin consumer chain mainnet, OpenSea issuing tokens, and the stimulation of the NFT renaissance.
• Key engineering progress in Bitcoin programmability, particularly BitVM2, is anticipated.
• BTC staking has inherent disadvantages compared to ETH staking, and the higher economic security of Bitcoin ReStaking's AVS does not effectively persuade users to adopt it. The focus of BTC staking projects in 2025 should still be on increasing penetration among BTC holders.

--Ethereum

• Last year, Messari was openly anti-Ethereum. This year, the attitude is much more moderate, acknowledging ETH's transcendent status after the spot ETF approval. It also points out that after the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum's blob pricing mechanism prevents L1 from effectively capturing L2's DA fees, which is the main reason for Ethereum's defeat in the competition in 2024.
• However, Ethereum's native narratives/products at the application layer, such as Friend.tech, Farcaster, Lens Protocol, and Eigen Layer AVS, have not been successful.
• But Messari believes that fee revenue is not the most important metric for measuring L1 value; the ecological mapping is. From this perspective, Ethereum remains the best L1 ecosystem.

Commentary: In 2025, Ethereum's success will depend on whether it can incubate high-performance parallel EVML1 (Monad)/L2 (MegaETH) projects that can compete with Solana.

--Solana

• Key milestone events for Solana in 2024 include the lightweight solution Frankendancer for the Firedancer client, the new SPL token standard, and the state compression solution ZKCompression.
• Key milestone events for Solana in 2025 will include the release of the Firedancer client, broader adoption of the prediction market governance protocol MetaDAO, new large DePin projects based on Solana, and AlAgentSummer occurring on Solana/Base, along with the approval of SOL spot ETF.

Commentary: Meme coins do not have super cycles; the popularity of cyber lottery is a special phenomenon of a unique period. The Solana ecosystem needs to diversify and prepare for the future, reducing its heavy reliance on meme coins in 2025.

--Alt L1s + infra

• In 2025, Monad and Sonic will join the high-performance monolithic L1 competition alongside Solana and Sui. The (3,3) token economic model-driven BeraChain will also launch its mainnet.
• The block space in 2025 will be severely oversupplied, and the voice of Dapp developers will further increase, no longer constrained by the ideological limitations of the crypto community, allowing for more freedom in building consumer-oriented use cases.
• The "seven injury fist" of Ethereum after the Cancun upgrade has concluded the narrative of modular public chains' DA. Celestia and Avail are beginning to transition to a global cross-chain interoperability coordination layer.
• Next-generation L2s with high performance + AltVMs, such as Mega and UniChain, will also enter the battlefield.
• Avalanche will undergo its largest mainnet upgrade in history, Avalanche9000, which will bring significant performance improvements and, along with Avalanche Interchain Messaging (AIM), will build a liquidity center centered around the C chain. The Avalanche ecosystem is expected to perform well in 2025 in RWA and Web3 gaming (represented by off the grid).
• The prospects for Cosmos in 2025 remain uncertain, with the timing of when the Interchain Foundation (ICF) truly gains coordination power being a key checkpoint. After ICF's acquisition of Skip Protocol earlier this month, this process may accelerate.
• Another giant project in the Cosmos ecosystem, Initia, focusing on APPChain interoperability and ecological role benefit re-production, will also join the ranks of powerful new block space providers in 2025.
• In 2025, chain abstraction protocols like @ParticleNtwrk are accelerating from narrative to productization. Chain abstraction is not a single technology but a combination of technical primitives such as cross-chain bridges, messaging platforms, intent infrastructure, ZK proof aggregators, and shared sequencers.

Commentary: The explanatory power of blockchain space economics is unmatched when analyzing Alt L1s + infra projects.

--DeFi

• The ratio of PerpDEX trading volume to CEX trading volume catching up to the ratio of spot DEX trading volume to CEX trading volume has always been a focal point for DeFi enthusiasts. The emergence of Hyperliquid has reignited hope.
• Another focus is how to make trade-offs between vertical integration and composability when building DeFi protocols.
• Currently, RWA is primarily structured around the tokenization of U.S. Treasury bonds, with two main lines for RWA in 2025: tokenization of DAO idle assets and exporting on-chain yields to traditional capital markets.
• In terms of points finance, Pendle occupies a uniquely critical ecological position.
• In terms of anti-MEV, beyond the market game model of FlashBot, the intention architecture of CowSwap has emerged.

--Al x Crypto

• Messari categorizes AlxCrypto into four types: decentralized computing networks, coordination platforms, AI tools and services, and applications. Of course, Messari also pays attention to AlAgentKOL and AI Agent meme coins.
• Messari predicts that significant events worth watching in AIxCrypto in 2025 include: Bittensor and dynamic TAO becoming new AI project token factories, the work of Prime Intellect and Nous Research further enhancing the feasibility of decentralized computing power training, and AI Agents becoming on-chain and completely separating from AI meme coins.
• The open-source AGI project SentientLabs, which counters commercial titans, will also receive greater attention in 2025.

--DePin

As the inventor of the term DePin, Messari now subdivides DePin into Physical Resource Networks (PRN) and Digital Resource Networks (DRN).

Messari is very bullish on the PRN sector's new energy DePin projects such as Glow, Daylight Energy Helium, DAWN, GEODNET, Hivemapper, and DIMO, as well as the DRN sector's Prodia, Filecoin, and Grass.

In 2025, Solana's dominant position in the DePin field will face challenges from Base and others.

Commentary: This part contains numerous alpha projects with potentially high risk-reward ratios; interested readers are strongly recommended to read the original text.

--Consumer

• Messari categorizes Web3 games, meme coins and their launch platforms, DeSoc & SocialFi, and NFTs all into this part.
• I have written many articles discussing Web3 games, so I won't elaborate here. I will only mention that Messari has observed an interesting change: the gameplay design of Web3 games is shifting from Play2Airdrop to Pay2Airdrop.
• For meme coins and their launch platforms, gamification and personalized design are new trends for meme coin launch platforms. In short, developing around the positioning of meme coins as cyber lotteries is sufficient.
• Regarding DeSoc & SocialFi, I don't want to discuss it much as a former product operator; it still hasn't made much progress in 2025. Solana's leading protocol Send has already transformed to focus on AI Agents.
• The NFT renaissance led by the fat penguin and Web3 consumer IP will see the fat penguin and Azuki launch consumer chains Abstractchain and Animechain in 2025.

Commentary: In the Consumer sector, I am most bullish on the fat penguin NFT and the consumer chain Abstract Chain. 2025 will be a year of deification for @LucaNetz.

--CeFi

Not related to retail investors, briefly mentioned.

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