Original title: Big Ideas from a16z: Top Projects to Watch in 2025
By Stacy Muur
Compiled by: Scof, ChainCatcher
The end of the year is one of my favorite times of the year as the top minds in the Web3 industry begin to share their high-confidence ideas and predictions for 2025. It’s an exciting time to outline the potential of the crypto industry in the year ahead. Earlier this month, a16z crypto released its list of big ideas for 2025. What protocols are already building in these key areas? Let’s explore in this new publication.
This time, I want to focus on the article published by a16z crypto: "A16Z Looks Forward to New Crypto Trends in 2025".
Core Concept #1: AI Agents that Manage Wallets
In short, AI agents have demonstrated the ability to trade independently and be fully autonomous. There are many emerging application scenarios in this field, and AI agents can become new roles in Web3, participating in transactions, investments, bridges, and other purposes.
Several projects that I am interested in in this area include:
- NEAR Protocol: NEAR is positioning itself as the "AI blockchain". Recently, they have launched some important projects including Near AI and Near Intents. NEAR has accumulated considerable influence in the industry and is expected to become a leader in this field by 2025.
- Fetch.ai: Fetch.ai is a platform built for the AI economy, providing tools for building, deploying, and monetizing AI services. Its ASI wallet can integrate Fetch's best features and progress in the field of AI, and may become the first implementation case of combining AI with wallets.
- Armor Wallet: Armor Wallet is an AI-driven crypto wallet and trading assistant that supports transactions across multiple blockchains and quickly executes complex transactions. It should be noted that Armor Wallet is still in the early stages of development.
- Coin98 Super Wallet: Coin98 launched their AI wallet in late November, complete with an AI assistant that is able to recommend tools and simplify complex tasks while supporting natural human interactions.
Core Concept #2: Enhanced Information Aggregation
The concept revolves around new mechanisms based on prediction markets that aim to aggregate information more efficiently and enhance decision-making processes in various fields.
This is a relatively new idea, and for more on this area, I recommend reading Delphi Digital’s report, Markets Will Save the World.
My watch list:
- MetaDAO: MetaDAO is the first project to implement Futarchy on a large scale within a DAO. Futarchy is a governance system that combines prediction markets and democratic voting to drive decision-making through market trading results.
- Futarchy: The concept of Futarchy is similar to MetaDAO, emphasizing governance through the market and reflecting the impact that various policy options may have on the value of tokens.
Core Concept #3: Mass Adoption of Stablecoins
The idea is to focus on the increased adoption of stablecoins, which have surpassed Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal in terms of transaction volume. This shift will benefit many market participants, including stablecoin issuers, crypto card companies, and crypto acquiring services.
To better illustrate the stablecoin ecosystem, here is a diagram from the above research. Consider adding these projects to your watchlist.
In this space, it is particularly important, in my view, to highlight the infrastructure that can facilitate growing transaction volumes, which will be the main beneficiaries of widespread stablecoin adoption.
In addition to TRON (as a well-known USDT transfer engine), a protocol worth paying attention to is Noble. This emerging project is committed to developing liquidity infrastructure to help asset issuers participate in the cross-chain economy.
Core Idea #4: Modularize Everything
Modularity is not new, but a16z believes that more modular solutions will gain mainstream adoption next year. The following areas are worth paying attention to:
- RaaS (Rollup-as-a-Service): Gelato, Caldera, AltLayer, Conduit, Bison Labs.
- Interoperability:Hyperlane, Polyhedra, Omni.
- Shared sorting: Espresso, Radius, Zellular.
- Privacy: Nillion, Brevis, Automata, Fhenix, zkMe.
- Intent:Anoma, Aori, Native.
- Storage: Arweave, Storj, Filecoin, Zus.
- Oracles: Pyth, RedStone, Supra, Chainlink.
The focus on infrastructure solutions will remain critical in 2025.
Core Concept #5: Seamless User Experience
This is one of the strongest trends I think. Chain Abstraction has become a hot topic this year and we are finally approaching the point where abstract user experience becomes a reality, not just a concept.
Here’s a great chain abstraction from The Defiant:
These projects are all worth keeping an eye on, but I want to highlight Particle in particular as the one I am most bullish on. Their first implementation of “Universal Accounts” recently went live, allowing users to seamlessly trade assets on any chain through UniversalX.
Another project worth watching in this space is Everclear, the primary clearing layer for Web3. As the solver economy required for chain abstraction scales, solvers will need to rebalance assets between different chains, and Everclear is the most cost-effective facilitator of this process.
Core Concept #6: Crypto App Store
a16z’s original report mentioned some notable crypto app store developers, including the Telegram app on TON, Alchemy, Solana’s mobile dApp store (Seeker), and Worldcoin’s mobile app.
I would also like to recommend a few more projects: Glue, DeFi App and VeBetter.
Core Concept #7: Tokenization of Everything
Tokenization is a broad topic, especially regarding the tokenization of “unconventional” assets. Here are some projects worth paying attention to:
- Kaito AI: Tokenized influence (attention economy).
- GAIB: Providing an economic layer for an AI-driven future by tokenizing enterprise-grade GPUs.
- Compute Labs: Competes directly with GAIB by fragmenting ownership of GPUs.
- ShopX: Tokenized goods and products (RWA in the e-commerce space).
- Eaas: Tokenized Carbon Footprint.
- AI Agents and DeSci: Dolz (tokenized porn stars), PsyDAO (tokenized psychedelic science and art), Molecule (biopharma IP tokenization protocol), and other high-risk, peak-trend projects.
These projects bring more innovative possibilities to the crypto world and are worth paying attention to.
