Author: Multicoin Capital; Compiler: 0xjs@黄金财经
2025 promises to be a pivotal year for the industry. The path to the first regulatory framework supporting cryptocurrencies, coupled with the technological maturity of L1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, DePIN networks, and stablecoins, creates fertile soil for the next wave of cutting-edge innovation.
In keeping with our tradition, we will share the ideas and opportunities that excite us most in the coming year. If you are building in any of these areas, please send a private message to Multicoin partners.
DePIN Robotics, a zero-employee company
Kyle Samani, founder of Multicoin
DePIN Robotics - There are already rumors that the incoming Trump administration will attempt to push Autonomous Driving (AD) regulations from the states to the national level to set uniform standards for AD companies. As GPU clusters surpass 100,000 H100s, Transformer-based autonomous driving will be ready for the real world. After that, I expect an explosion in robotics-based DePIN. Many startups have raised money from non-crypto VCs but have yet to truly begin commercialization. I am optimistic that many of them will adopt the DePIN model, spreading the risk from the balance sheets of development companies to robotics professionals and prosumers around the world. Many of these early adopters of robotics products will capture data that is critical to developing autonomous robots. I know of one company in this space today - Frodobots - and I look forward to more. Our portfolio company Hivemapper, while not explicitly a robotics company, is exploring many similar ideas.
Zero-employee companies - The foundation of zero-employee companies 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 business. In order for a zero-employee company to function properly, it will require human guidance, as AI will inevitably make mistakes and may operate outside of its context window. Over time, I expect the degree of human guidance will decrease as AI improves to self-correct and expand its context window. I believe governance of these zero-employee companies will likely be handled through DAOs, and I expect crypto capital markets will fund ambitious attempts at zero-employee companies.
Startups often succeed where large companies fail because they face unique constraints. I believe zero-employee constraints will lead to some incredible breakthroughs for all business operations.
On-Chain Securities
Tushar Jain, Co-Founder of Multicoin
With the Trump administration taking office and the Republican sweep of Congress, on-chain securities are finally taking off in a meaningful way.
Transactions on blockchains such as Solana can be completed almost instantly, eliminating the wait times common in traditional finance. Faster capital flows improve capital efficiency and should lead to more efficient prices.
Blockchains ensure that all participants have access to a real-time, immutable record of transactions. This transparency and security stands in stark contrast to the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases of traditional finance. Transaction costs on blockchain networks are far lower than the traditional banking system, 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, granular control over tokenized securities. Issuers can restrict their security holders to whitelisted addresses, recall tokens upon court order, and comply with other securities law 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 pro-innovation SEC could open the door to security tokenization.
I don’t think public equity offerings will be the first tokenized security to be adopted by the mass market. Markets with less liquidity, greater opacity, and more to gain from tokenization are more likely to be adopted first. This could be startup equity, there’s no reason to pay Carta or Angelist to manage a cap sheet when the blockchain can do it for free. It could be fixed income instruments like Figure has been working on for years. It could be LP equity in a fund.
Buy Now, Pay Never, Spend Your Portfolio, Portfolio Margining
Spencer Applebaum, Multicoin Venture Partner
Building on Tushar’s ideas, when all assets are programmable and tradable on-chain, we’ll start to see interesting new products emerge. Here are a few examples:
Buy Now, Pay Never — Affirm and Klarna popularized the idea of buy now, pay later, and I’m sure you’ve seen these widgets on Amazon and other merchant sites. Today, on-chain users can earn about 8% yield on SOL and about 15% on stablecoins. What if, instead of having to pay for a subscription upfront, users could deposit their tokens with merchants (from web2 companies like Netflix to web3 companies like Dune Analytics) who would earn staking/lending rewards over time? The user’s tokens would be locked up for a period of time to guarantee payment. We think there is a strong consumer psychology here, and the opportunity cost of yield seems more palatable than upfront payment.
Directly Spend Portfolios - When all assets are tokenized and aggregated into one place (a web3 wallet), it makes sense that users should be able to pay for medium to large items with their portfolios. Imagine Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in yield USDC, $10,000 in TSLA stock, and $10,000 in gold. She wants to buy a $4,000 couch. Instead of having to exchange her USDC for fiat, wait for a bank transfer, send the payment, and then do the reverse process to rebalance her portfolio, what if she could automatically sell $1,000 of each of her four holdings on-chain and then pay the couch merchant instantly? She remains fully allocated to her existing portfolio and doesn’t need to think about the rebalancing process.
Portfolio Margin - In the next 3-5 years, as crypto prime brokers and unified super protocols emerge, users should be able to margin across all assets they hold. For example, Alice should be able to short a BTC perpetual contract using her AAPL stock and borrow USDC on-chain. Or should be able to use her tokenized whiskey as collateral to buy tokenized debt on-chain. We’re starting to see this in a synthetic way (e.g. Ostium bringing FX trading on-chain), but it will all become clearer when spot assets are tokenized.
Verifying Off-Chain State On-Chain
Shayon Sengupta, Venture Partner at Multicoin
Asset ledgers like Bitcoin and Solana were the zero-to-one moment for crypto. These systems are fundamentally about money — they facilitate the storage and transfer of value on global, permissionless rails. We are now seeing the cryptographic primitives that made these systems possible begin to cross-converge with off-ledger systems, unlocking net new markets. Over the next 12 months, crypto will become a verification layer for data and computation in three novel ways: proof of network, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media provenance. I see this as the convergence of crypto for money and crypto for verification — a coordination layer that will enable new economic primitives and incentive structures.
The first opportunity here is zkTLS and the markets it supports. zkTLS is the construction of zero-knowledge proofs over TLS signatures in web pages to verify arbitrary units of data on the internet (e.g., your credit score on equifax or your Strava activity history) in a completely uncensorable, tamper-proof way. Teams are already deploying zk proofs in web sessions to build applications that are uncensorable and resilient to fraud. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples. p2p.me is a cash on/off-ramp in India that leverages web proofs to circumvent the region’s broken market structure. 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 — ticketing, booking, and other systems where fraud is a major bottleneck to liquidity.
Second, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter prime time. As AI systems reach diminishing returns from training on public datasets, post-training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become more critical. This creates an entirely new design space for orchestrating otherwise inaccessible datasets as inputs 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 SOTA foundational models to the next level.
Third, in the post-AI era, identity verification and media provenance systems will become a fixture 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 a compelling requirement. Early systems, such as Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode, use cryptographic proofs rather than biometrics or state-issued credentials to establish personhood, and use token incentives as the primary call to action to mobilize participants at scale. Similarly, standards such as C2PA address media provenance 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 will likely require some form of token-based coordination. These tools will be critical to addressing information hazards in an AI-saturated consumer internet.
Multiplayer Gamified Trading, Full-Stack Media Company
Eli Qian, Venture Partner at Multicoin
Trading Goes Multiplayer - sharing financial gains and losses, and speculating collectively, is a very human, highly viral behavior. People love to talk about how much money they made (or lost!) in various areas such as stocks, sports betting, and memecoins. However, most popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are designed for single-player experiences. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot - these are not multiplayer-first experiences. Despite this, the demand for social trading is undeniable. Today, users create their own ad hoc social experiences through online forums and group chats. A large portion of the content on Crypto Twitter revolves around these discussions.
One of the biggest advantages of cryptocurrency is permissionless liquidity. It opens the door for anyone to build multiplayer trading tools for crypto assets. In 2025, I am excited to see builders leverage the inherent virality of social trading to create multiplayer experiences. Such a product would allow users to share trades, compete on P&Ls, and enter positions together with a single click or tap. The design space is vast, spanning Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord applets, and more. While 2023 and 2024 saw the rise of single-player tools like BONKBot and BullX, 2025 will be the year trading goes multiplayer.
Full-Stack Media Companies – There have been many attempts to use tokens to enhance media and content, but few 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 power to push crypto primitives further than before. Think: athlete tokens, creator tokens, live streaming with prediction markets, and more.
An example is Karate Fighting. Instead of building a product around an existing UFC fighter, Karate Fighting is building a new fighting league from the ground up, giving them more control over rules, distribution, and athletes. While UFC fighters’ tokens have limited utility, Karate Fighting could allow token holders to vote on fighters’ training regimens, fight attire, or anything else — something that’s only possible if Karate Fighting controls the token design and fighter contracts.
Future livestreams, sports leagues, podcasts, and reality shows will have deep vertical integration 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 the Alpha Hunters
Vishal Kankani, Venture Partner at Multicoin
Some defining things happened in 2024. They portend interesting things to come in 2025.
First, for about $0, almost anyone can issue a new token permissionlessly. This led to an eye-popping number of token issuances in 2024. Most of them were memecoins with half-lives measured in hours.
Second, 2024 sees a reversion in sentiment to high float, low FDV fair share token launches - reminiscent of the ICO era of 2017. In this type of market, CEXs struggle to keep up with the pace of new listings, which we expect to happen in 2025 (due to their listing process), incentivizing people to come on-chain and bring more liquidity to DEXs. As a result, DEXs will gain market share on CEXs 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 creating content on social media to draw attention to their respective tokens. I expect the next iteration of AI agents will be Alpha Hunters, people whose only job is to find alpha and trade autonomously in real-time.
Institutional Mania
Matt Shapiro, Multicoin Partner
We are just at the beginning of the institutionalization phase of crypto, and it will happen at a dizzying pace.
The crypto industry has made tremendous progress over the past 5+ years through major technological advances, product-market fit, and substantial UI/UX improvements, but the institutional community has effectively stagnated in crypto. A combination of regulation and career risk has prevented many financial institutions from effectively entering the space and offering even the most basic crypto products to their clients. With a pro-crypto government in the US and the record success of BTC ETFs, we are about to see 5 years of institutional complacency scramble to catch up and find ways to support crypto as soon as possible.
In 2024, there is $35 billion in buying demand for BTC that cannot or will not simply buy crypto through Coinbase. Since most asset managers and large securities firms are still not fully launched, there will be more dollars able to buy crypto by 2025. We will see a slew of ETFs launched to meet and capitalize on this demand. This includes not only ETFs for new crypto assets like Solana, but also ETFs that hold multiple crypto assets, and ETFs that blend crypto assets with traditional assets like gold, stocks, or credit. There will be leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility dampening ETFs, collateralized ETFs, and more. Basically, every convergence you can think of that bundles crypto assets for institutional and retail investors will be explored.
We will see major financial institutions race to launch basic financial products around cryptocurrencies. Every financial institution should explore creating product lines that allow customers to trade crypto products. Financial institutions should seek to custody crypto assets and provide credit against these assets, 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 seek to issue a native stablecoin. I preached to Visa’s Cuy Sheffield at the 2024 Multicoin Summit that 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 this isn’t the most technically ambitious thing going on in crypto, the scale and scope of distribution and the money involved is massive.
Anais
Weatherly
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Kikyo