Source: Multicoin Capital
컴파일됨 ~에 의해 오데일리 행성 일일 ( @오데일리차인 )
Editors Note: Multicoin Capital may be one of the most controversial VCs in the industry, but it also has the most convincing track record.
At the end of 2024, Mike Dudas, founder of 6th Man Ventures and former founder of The Block, revealed that Multicoin Capital has achieved an 18.6-fold return since the market bottomed out in 2022.
Hasseb Qureshi, a partner at another well-known VC Dragonfly Capital, also gave a high evaluation of Multicoin Capital. Hasseb even praised Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani as the best investor in the 암호화폐currency field: As competitors, Dragonfly and Multicoin are always at loggerheads, but experts know experts, and investing is like a sport, and Kyle is the highest scorer in history, no one can match him.
In the following article, several partners of Multicoin Capital share their own perspectives on the 2025 preface narrative, which may contain the next opportunity to detonate the market.
2025 will be a critical year for the cryptocurrency industry. The first regulatory framework to support cryptocurrencies is about to be introduced, and the growing maturity of Layer 1, DeFi, DePIN, and stablecoins will create fertile soil for the next round of cutting-edge innovation.
Continuing with our tradition, we’ll share the ideas and opportunities that excite us most in the year ahead.
Narrative 1: DePIN Robot, Zero-Employee Company
Recommended by: Kyle Samani (Co-founder of Multicoin Capital)
DePIN Robotics
There have been rumors that the incoming Trump administration will try to push autonomous driving (AD) regulations from the state level to the national level, creating a unified standard for autonomous driving companies. With GPU clusters exceeding 100,000 H100s, transformer-based autonomous driving is about to be ready in the real world. After this, I expect to see an explosion of DePIN based on robotics. Many startups have raised funds from non-crypto VCs but have not yet started commercialization. I am optimistic that many of these companies will adopt the DePIN model, spreading the risk from the balance sheet of the development company to robotics professionals and professional consumers around the world. Many of these early adopters of robotics products will capture data that is critical to developing autonomous robots. As far as I know, there is already a company in this field called Frodobots, and I look forward to more companies joining in. Although not explicitly a robotics company, our investment project Hivemapper is also exploring 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, AI models are gradually being able to think, plan, execute, and self-correct. This lays the foundation for AI agents to perform all tasks in the enterprise. In order for a zero-employee company to function properly, it will certainly need human guidance, as AI is bound to make mistakes and will likely encounter situations that are beyond its capabilities. However, over time, I expect AI will continue to improve its self-correction capabilities and expand its work scenarios, and the degree of human guidance will gradually decrease. I believe that the governance of these zero-employee companies will most likely be achieved through DAOs, and I expect the cryptocurrency capital markets will provide autonomy to those ambitious zero-employee companies.
스타트업 often succeed where large companies fail because they are always faced with various constraints. I believe that zero employees equals zero constraints, which will lead to some incredible breakthroughs in actual business operations.
Trend 2: On-chain securities
Recommended by: Tushar Jain
With the Trump administration coming to power and the Republican sweep of Congress, on-chain securities have finally had their moment to shine.
Transactions on blockchains like Solana are nearly instantaneous, eliminating the wait times common in traditional finance. Faster movement of capital improves capital efficiency and should lead to more efficient price discovery.
Blockchain ensures 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 significantly lower than those of the traditional banking system, as can be seen by comparing the cost of sending a stablecoin on Solana ($0.001) to the cost of sending a bank wire ($30). Today, Solana’s token extensions enable the precise granular controls required for tokenized securities, allowing issuers to restrict holders of their securities to whitelisted addresses, recall tokens in the event of a court order, and comply with other securities law or transfer agent requirements.
There is no doubt that blockchain’s near-instant finality, low transaction costs, and transparency provide a better settlement method than slow, expensive, and opaque trading systems. The only real obstacle is regulation, and a more innovation-friendly U.S. Securities and 교환 Commission (SEC) could open the door to security tokenization.
I don’t think public equity will be the first tokenized security to be adopted by the mass market. It’s more likely that some illiquid, opaque markets will benefit from tokenization first, such as equity in startups. There’s no reason to pay Carta or Angelist to manage your balance sheet when the blockchain can manage it for free. Beyond that, it’s also possible that fixed income instruments like Figure has been working on for years, or LP equity in funds, will be the first to be tokenized.
Trend 3: Buy Now, Pay Never, Portfolio Consumption, Portfolio Margin
Recommended by: Spencer Applebaum
According to Tushar, when all assets can be programmed and traded on-chain, we will start to see interesting new products emerge. Here are a few examples.
Buy Now, Pay Never
Affirm and Klarna popularized the idea of “pay with interest”, which I’m sure you’ve seen on Amazon and other merchant sites. Today, on-chain users can earn around 8% on SOL and 15% on stablecoins. What would happen if, instead of paying for a subscription upfront, users deposited their tokens with merchants (from Web2 companies like Netflix to Web3 companies like Dune Analytics), who could then earn deposit/lending rewards over a period of time? The user’s tokens would be locked up for a period of time to guarantee payment. We think there’s an interesting consumer psychology game here, and this model seems more acceptable to consumers than prepayment.
Portfolio consumption
When all assets are tokenized and brought together in one place (Web3 wallet), users can use their portfolio to pay for some large and medium-sized purchases. Imagine that Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in yield-generating USDC, $10,000 in TSLA shares, and $10,000 in gold. Now she wants to buy a $4,000 couch. Instead of exchanging USDC for fiat and paying through a bank, and then doing the reverse operation to restructure her portfolio, a better way is to sell each of the four holdings on-chain for $1,000 and pay the seller immediately. She can still maintain her existing portfolio allocation ratio without having to consider rebalancing.
Portfolio Margin
3-5 years from now, as crypto prime brokers and unified super protocols emerge, users should be able to use all of their assets as cross-margin. For example, Alice should be able to short BTC with her AAPL stock as collateral and borrow USDC on-chain; or collateralize her tokenized whiskey and buy tokenized bonds on-chain. We are already starting to see this synthetic approach (e.g. Ostium has brought FX trading on-chain), but this model will become clearer when spot assets are tokenized.
Trend 4: Verifying on-chain status off-chain
Recommended by: Shayon Sengupta
Asset ledgers like Bitcoin and Solana were the “0 to 1” moment for crypto. These systems are fundamentally about money — they facilitate the storage and transfer of value around the world in a permissionless manner. We are now seeing the cryptographic primitives that made these systems possible begin to cross-converge with non-ledger systems in a way that unlocks entirely new markets. Over the next 12 months, cryptography will become a verification layer for data and computation in three new ways: “Proof of Network”, “Privacy Preserving Data Processing”, and “Verified Identity/Content Origin”. I see this as a convergence of monetary cryptography and verification cryptography — the coordination layer will enable new economic primitives and incentive structures.
zkTLS refers to building zero-knowledge proofs on top of a webpage’s TLS signature to verify any unit of data on the internet (like your credit score on Equifax or your Strava activity history) in a completely undetectable, unalterable way. Many teams have deployed zk proofs on web sessions to build immutable and fraud-resistant applications. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples. p2p.me is a cash deposit and withdrawal platform in India that uses web proofs to circumvent the region’s broken market structure. ZkMe is a sovereign verification system for KYC credentials that allows applications to verify user identities in a privacy-preserving way. The same basic principles can be extended to dozens of new markets — ticketing, reservations, 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 train on public datasets to diminishing returns, post-training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become more critical. This creates a whole new design space for orchestrating otherwise inaccessible datasets as model inputs — especially as large amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue to migrate from on-premises to cloud systems. 토큰-based incentives will be critical at this layer, and breakthroughs in this area will enable new levels of state-of-the-art foundational models.
Third, identity and content source verification systems will become a fixture in consumer applications in the post-AI era. When the cost of generating content approaches zero, the proliferation of synthetic content will make it a strong requirement to prove the authenticity of content and identity. Early systems such as Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode use cryptographic proofs based on biometrics or state-issued credentials to establish a persons identity, and use token incentives as the main call to action to mobilize participants on a large scale. Similarly, standards such as C2PA determine the source of content by marking it at the hardware layer to distinguish between real content and content generated by AI, but their widespread adoption at the application layer may require some form of token coordination. Given consumer inertia, these tools will play a key role in addressing information risks in the consumer Internet after AI saturation.
Trend 5: Transactional social and full-stack media companies
Recommended by: Eli Qian
Trading Goes Multiplayer
Sharing financial gains and losses and collective speculation is a deeply human and highly contagious behavior. People love to talk about how much money they have made (or lost) in stocks, sports betting, memecoins, and more. However, most popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are designed for individual experiences. Platforms such as Robinhood, FanDuel, and BONKBot are not focused on collective trading experiences. Despite this, the demand for trading + social is undeniable. Today, users create temporary social experiences through online forums and group chats, and most of the content on Crypto Twitter revolves around these discussions.
One of the biggest advantages of crypto is permissionless liquidity. It opens the door to building multi-player trading tools for crypto assets that anyone can participate in. In 2025, I would love to see someone leverage the virality of “social trading” to create a better multi-player trading experience. This kind of product allows users to share trading results, compete on achievements, and “get on board” together with a simple click. The design space for this kind of product is very broad, including Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord applets, etc. We saw the rise of personal trading tools such as BONKBot and BullX in 2023 and 2024, and 2025 will be the year trading goes multi-player.
Full Stack Media Company
There have been many attempts to use tokens to optimize media and content, but few have reached their full potential. However, we are beginning to see the rise of media companies that control content production end-to-end. These full stack media companies have the ability to push the fundamentals of cryptocurrency to a higher level.
Karate Combat is an example of this. Rather than creating a product around an existing UFC fighter, Karate Combat built a new fighting league from scratch, giving them more control over rules, distribution, and athletes. While UFC fighters have limited token utility, Karate Combat lets token holders vote on a fighter’s training schedule, fight gear, or anything else — all of this is possible because Karate Combat controls both the design of the token and the fighters’ contracts.
The future of live streaming, sports leagues, podcasts, and gaming reality shows will be deeply vertically integrated in terms of content, distribution, tokens, and human capital. I am happy to invest in and consume media that leverages tokens to iterate.
Trend 6: The rise of “alpha hunters”
Recommended by: Vishal Kankani
Several major things happened in 2024 that foreshadow some interesting things to come in 2025.
First, anyone can launch a new token permissionlessly for around $0. This leads to a staggering number of tokens being launched in 2024, most of which are meme tokens with half-lives measured in hours.
Secondly, market sentiment in 2024 shifts back towards “high liquidity, low FDV, fair distribution” token issuance – reminiscent of the ICO era of 2017. In this type of market, CEXs struggle to keep up with the new market, which we expect to happen in 2025 (due to their listing process), which will incentivize people to move to the chain and drive more liquidity to DEXs. Therefore, DEXs will continue to eat into CEX market share in the coming year. As the number of tokens and DEX activity explodes, active traders will need more powerful tools and models to identify emerging tokens, analyze sentiment and on-chain indicators, identify vulnerabilities, reduce risks and execute trades efficiently – all of which needs to be done in real time.
This brings us to the third thing that will happen in 2024: the explosion of 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 generation of AI agents will be “alpha hunters” that hunt for alpha opportunities 24/7 and trade autonomously in real time.
Trend 7: Institutionalization craze
Recommended by: Matt Shapiro
We are just at the beginning of the institutionalization phase of cryptocurrency, which will happen at a dizzying pace.
While the cryptocurrency industry has made tremendous progress over the past 5+ years through significant technological advancements, product-market fit, and substantial improvements in UI/UX, institutional adoption of crypto has stagnated. A combination of regulatory 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 coming to power in the U.S. and the record-breaking success of the BTC ETF, we are about to see 5-year-old complacent institutions scramble to catch up and find ways to support crypto as quickly as possible.
A total of $35 billion in BTC purchase demand emerged in 2024, but these demands were unable or unwilling to purchase cryptocurrencies through Coinbase. Since most asset managers and major securities firms are still not fully open, more US dollars will access cryptocurrencies in 2025. We will see a large number of ETFs launched to meet and tap into this demand. This includes not only ETFs for new crypto assets such as SOL, but also ETFs that have multiple crypto assets, and others that mix crypto assets with traditional assets such as gold, stocks or credit. There are also leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility suppression ETFs, pledged ETFs, etc. Basically, every combination you can think of to package crypto assets for institutional and retail investors will be explored.
We will see major financial companies compete to provide basic financial products around cryptocurrencies. Every financial institution should explore and create product lines that enable customers to trade crypto products. Financial institutions should seek to custody crypto assets and make loans against these assets, just as they support other traditional assets today. We may also see a significant increase in stablecoin issuers. Any bank that accepts deposits should seek to issue stablecoins. In my conversation with Cuy Sheffield of Visa at the 2024 Multicoin Summit, I mentioned that every company needs to have a stablecoin strategy. In the past, companies focused on e-commerce, and now stablecoins will also move in this direction.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, and while this isn’t the most technically ambitious part of the cryptocurrency space, the scale of distribution and funding involved will be enormous.
This article is sourced from the internet: Multicoin Capital: 2025 Frontier Narrative
Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina ) Author: Wenser ( @wenser 2010 ) At about 8 am this morning, according to the information disclosed by researcher Waleswoosh, the Pudgy Penguins project token PENGU may be launched within 48 hours; at the same time, as the coin issuance approaches, the floor price of Pudgy Penguins NFT has also been rising. As of the time of writing, it is temporarily reported at 33.7 ETH, worth nearly 140,000 US dollars, which is only 10,000 US dollars away from the floor price of CryptoPunks. At the same time, Pudgy Penguins parent company Igloos L2 network Abstract Chain also officially announced that it will be launched on the mainnet in January next year, and there is also market expectation of issuing a separate coin;…
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