Multicoin Capital 2025 Vision: DePIN Robot, 0-employee company, on-chain securities…

Первоисточник: Multicoin Capital

Original translation: BitpushNews

2025 promises to be a pivotal year for the криптовалюта industry. The path to the first regulatory framework supporting cryptocurrencies, coupled with the technological maturity of layer 1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, DePIN networks, and stablecoins, creates fertile ground for the next wave of cutting-edge innovation.

Continuing with our tradition, we’ll share the ideas and opportunities that excite us most in the year ahead.

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network Robotics (DePIN Robotic) and 0-employee company

—Kyle Samani, managing partner

DePIN Robotic — There are rumors that the incoming Trump administration will push to move autonomous driving (AD) regulation from the state level to the national level, creating a unified standard for autonomous driving companies. As GPU clusters continue to scale (e.g., over 100,000 H100 GPUs), autonomous driving technology based on Transformer models will become more mature and expected to be widely used in the real world. After this, I expect robotics-based DePIN to explode. Many startups have raised funds from non-crypto VCs but have not yet truly started commercialization. I am optimistic that many of them will adopt the DePIN model, shifting the risk from the balance sheets of development companies to robotics professionals and “prosumers” (both producers and consumers) around the world. Many of these early adopters of robotic 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 artificial intelligence. 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 a business.

In order for a zero-employee company to function properly, it will require human guidance, as the AI will inevitably make mistakes and may exceed its context window (the amount of information the model is able to process). Over time, I expect the degree of human guidance to decrease as the AI continues to improve, self-correct and expand the context window. I believe the governance of these zero-employee companies will likely be conducted through DAOs, and I expect crypto capital markets will provide funding for ambitious attempts at zero-employee companies.

Стартапы 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 and managing partner

With the Trump administration coming to power and the Republicans’ sweeping victory in Congress, on-chain securities are finally experiencing a meaningful take-off.

Transactions on blockchains like 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.

Blockchain ensures that all participants have access to a real-time, immutable record of transactions. This level of transparency and security stands in stark contrast to the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases of traditional financial institutions. Transaction costs on blockchain networks are far lower than in 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 holders of their securities 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 innovation-friendly SEC could open the door to security tokenization.

I don’t think public equities will be the first tokenized securities to see mass market adoption. Рынокs that are less liquid, more opaque, and have more to gain from tokenization are more likely to be adopted first. It could be startup equity, where there’s no reason to pay Carta or Angelist to manage the 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 interests in funds.

Buy Now, Pay Never, Consume Your Portfolio, Portfolio Margin

—Spencer Applebaum, investor

Building on Tushar’s ideas, when all assets are programmable and tradable on-chain, we will start to see interesting new products emerge. Here are a few examples:

Buy Now, Pay Never — The idea of buy now, pay later was popularized by Affirm and Klarna, and I’m sure you’ve seen these widgets on Amazon and other merchant sites. Today, on-chain users can earn ~8% on SOL and ~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 веб3 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’s a strong consumer psychology here, and the opportunity cost of the yield seems more palatable than paying upfront.

Spend Your Portfolio — 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 portfolio. Imagine Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in interest-earning USDC, $10,000 in TSLA stock, and $10,000 in gold. She wants to buy a $4,000 couch. Instead of having to convert her USDC to fiat, wait for a bank transfer, send the payment, and then perform the reverse process to rebalance her portfolio, what if she could automatically sell each of her four holdings on-chain for $1,000 and instantly pay the couch merchant? She remains fully allocated to her existing portfolio and doesn’t need to think about the rebalancing process.

Portfolio Margining — In the next 3-5 years, as crypto prime brokers and unified super protocols emerge, users should be able to hold all assets across margin. 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.

Verify off-chain status on-chain

—Shayon Sengupta, Venture Partner

Asset ledger systems like Bitcoin and Solana represent a critical step in the evolution of cryptocurrencies. These systems are fundamentally about money, enabling the storage and transfer of value through permissionless channels around the world. Today, the cryptographic primitives that enable these systems to operate are beginning to cross-fertilize with non-ledger systems, unlocking entirely new markets. Over the next 12 months, cryptography will establish itself as a verification layer for data and computation in three novel ways: network proofs, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media provenance.

I see it as a fusion of monetary cryptography and verification cryptography, which will serve as a coordination layer to give rise to new economic models and incentive mechanisms.

Emerging Markets: Zero-knowledge Proofs Unlock New Possibilities

The first opportunity is zkTLS and the markets it enables. zkTLS refers to building zero-knowledge proofs via TLS signatures in web pages to verify any unit of data on the internet (e.g., your credit score on Equifax or your Strava exercise history) in a completely uncensorable and tamper-proof way. Some teams have already begun deploying zero-knowledge proofs in web sessions to build uncensorable and fraud-resistant applications. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples of this. p2p.me is a cash top-up/withdrawal platform in India that uses network proofs to circumvent the region’s broken market structure. ZkMe is a system for sovereign verification of KYC credentials, allowing applications to verify user identities in a privacy-preserving manner. The same principles can be extended to dozens of new markets such as ticketing, booking, and other systems where fraud is a major bottleneck to liquidity.

Homomorphic encryption: Unleashing the potential of artificial intelligence

Second, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter its prime time. As AI systems reach diminishing returns on training on public datasets, post-training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become more critical. This creates a whole new design space for coordinating otherwise inaccessible datasets as input to models, especially as large amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue to move from on-premises to cloud systems. Токен-based incentive mechanisms will play a key role in this layer, and breakthroughs in this area will enable state-of-the-art basic models to reach new heights.

Identity verification and media traceability: essential tools in the AI era

In the post-AI world where the cost of content generation approaches zero, identity and content authenticity verification will become an integral element of consumer applications. Early systems like Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode use cryptographic proofs to verify biometric information or state-issued credentials, and leverage token incentives as the primary means of mobilizing participants at scale. Similarly, standards like C2PA distinguish between authentically captured media and AI-generated media by tagging content at the hardware layer, but large-scale adoption of these standards at the application layer will likely require some form of token-based coordination mechanism to overcome the inertia of consumer habits. These tools will be critical to addressing information risks in an AI-saturated consumer internet.

Transactions go to multi-faceted, full-stack media companies

—Eli Qian, investor

Trading Goes Multiplayer — Sharing financial gains and losses, and speculating as a group, is an ingrained, highly contagious behavior. People love to talk about how much money they’ve made (or lost!) in everything from stocks to sports betting to even meme coins. Yet, most of the popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are designed for single-player experiences. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot — these aren’t multiplayer-first experiences. Still, 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 crypto is permissionless liquidity. It opens the door for anyone to build multiplayer trading tools for crypto assets. I fully expect to see developers leveraging the inherent virality of social trading to create multiplayer experiences in 2025. Such products will allow users to share trades, compete on PL sheets, and open positions together with a single click or tap. The design space is vast, spanning Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord mini-apps, 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 beginning to see the rise of media companies that control content production end-to-end, including tokens, distribution, and human capital. These “full-stack” media companies have the power to push cryptocurrency primitives further than ever before. Examples include: athlete tokens, creator tokens, live streaming with prediction markets, and more.

An example is Karate Combat. Rather than building a product around existing UFC fighters, it built a new fighting league from the ground up, giving them more control over rules, distribution, and athletes. While UFC fighters have limited use for their tokens, Karate Combat can let token holders vote on fighters’ training regimens, fight attire, or anything else — something that’s only possible if Karate Combat controls the token design and fighter contracts.

The future of live streaming, sports leagues, podcasts, and reality shows will have deep vertical integration in content, distribution, tokens, and human capital. I’m very much looking forward to investing in and consuming the next generation of token-enhanced media.

Rise of the Alpha Hunter

—Vishal Kankani, investor

Some decisive events occurred in 2024 that foreshadow some interesting new phenomena that will emerge in 2025.

First, issuing a new token costs almost nothing (~$0) and can be done permissionlessly by almost anyone. This has led to a staggering number of token issuances in 2024. Most of these issuances are memecoins, which have a very short lifespan measured in hours.

Second, market sentiment in 2024 is returning to a fair distribution token issuance model with high circulation and low fully diluted valuation (FDV) – reminiscent of the ICO era of 2017. In this type of market, centralized exchanges (CEXs) have difficulty keeping up with the pace of new coin listings, and we expect this to continue in 2025 (as they have their own listing processes), which will incentivize people to move to on-chain trading and bring more liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEXs). As a result, DEXs will gain more market share over CEXs in the coming year. As the number of tokens and DEX trading activity explodes, active traders will need more powerful tools and models to identify emerging tokens in real time, analyze market sentiment and on-chain indicators, identify vulnerabilities, reduce risks (such as absconding with funds), and execute trades efficiently.

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” — that is, their sole mission is to look for excess returns (alpha) and to trade autonomously in real time.

The wave of crypto institutionalization

—Matt Shapiro, Partner

We are at the beginning of the institutionalization phase of cryptocurrency, and this process will happen at an astonishing speed.

While the crypto industry has made tremendous progress over the past five-plus years in terms of major technological advancements, product-market fit, and substantial UI/UX improvements, the institutional community has effectively stagnated in the cryptocurrency space. A combination of regulation and career risk has prevented many financial institutions from effectively entering the space or offering even the most basic crypto products to their clients. With the advent of a pro-crypto government in the U.S. and the record success of Bitcoin ETFs, we are about to see the complacency of the past five years of institutions race to catch up and find ways to support cryptocurrencies as quickly as possible.

In 2024, there will be $35 billion in demand for Bitcoin purchases that cannot or will not simply go through Coinbase. Since most asset managers and large brokerages still have not fully launched crypto businesses, more money will be able to enter the cryptocurrency market in 2025. We will see a large number of ETFs launched to meet and capitalize on this demand. This will include not only ETFs for new crypto assets such as Solana (SOL), but also ETFs that have multiple crypto assets, and ETFs that mix crypto assets with traditional assets such as gold, stocks, or credit. There will be leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility suppression ETFs, collateralized ETFs, and more. Basically, every combination you can think of that bundles crypto assets together 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 enable its customers to trade cryptocurrency products. Financial institutions should seek to custody crypto assets and provide credit against these assets 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 local stablecoin. In my conversation with Cuy Sheffield of Visa at the 2024 Multicoin Summit, I emphasized that every company needs a stablecoin strategy, just as e-commerce was eventually integrated into commerce back then, stablecoins will gradually be integrated into all aspects of commerce and become an indispensable part of business activities.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, and while this isn’t the most technically ambitious thing going on in crypto, the size and scope of the distribution and the money involved is massive.

This article is sourced from the internet: Multicoin Capital 2025 Vision: DePIN Robot, 0-employee company, on-chain securities…

Related: Planet Daily｜ME Token Economics Announced; MicroStrategy Purchases Another 51,780 BTC (November 19)

Headlines ME Token Economics Announcement: Total Supply 1 Billion, TGE Initial Claims 12.5% The ME Foundation announced the ME token economics, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. The token distribution will be released within 4 years, of which more than half will be allocated to the community. Among them, TGE initial ME claims accounted for 12.5%, the community and ecology accounted for 37.7%, contributors accounted for 26.2%, and strategic participants accounted for 23.6%. ME will be distributed within 4 years, by which time all ME will be fully circulated, and most of it will be allocated to the community. MicroStrategy purchased another 51,780 BTC, and currently holds 331,200 BTC According to Michael Saylors announcement on the X platform, MicroStrategy used the proceeds from the stock sale to purchase…