Author: YBB Capital Researcher Zeke
Preface
Starting with the inscription craze and ending with the first crypto president’s victory, 2024 is coming to an end. This year, Crypto has experienced an extremely unusual “bull market”, with weak copycat performance and meme volume dominating. It is attributed to BTC. In general, although there are some lows and reluctance, Crypto is indeed moving in a more positive direction. In the coming 2025, we also have many directions worth paying attention to. In this article, we will combine Recent Views provides a brief outlook for next year.
1. About AI
At the current stage, chain abstraction projects often pursue conceptual perfection too much, resulting in the technical implementation process becoming extremely complicated, which ultimately affects the user's interactive experience. The implementation of projects containing the Intent architecture is relatively complex. Whether it is based on centralized (such as TG Bot), structured (combination of on-chain and off-chain preprocessing), or distributed (such as Solver + Executor architecture), these intentional projects often have some common problems. For example, users It is still necessary to have a certain degree of understanding of DeFi. The expression of intention must be clear, accurate and simple. For the complex and vague intentions proposed by users, the current intention projects are powerless and the scope of implementation is also quite limited. Since Paradigm proposed this concept in the middle of the year, so-called intent-centric projects have always been more noise than action, and have not been very helpful in guiding new users and lowering the user operation threshold. It is clear that judging from the development path of Ethereum's second layer, the market demand for both is still imminent.
Let’s review the development of Layer2 in the past few months. Among the top projects, the second-layer alliance represented by OP Superchain has been growing stronger. Zksync’s Elastic Chain and Arbitrum Orbit will eventually form their own alliance along this path. In the future, the alliance will be able to achieve direct internal interoperability through solutions such as interoperable clusters to alleviate the current problems of excessive fragmentation and lack of interoperability in the Ethereum second-layer ecosystem. The competition among dozens of chains will also be reduced to competition among multiple forces. . But from a broader perspective, as the crypto market continues to improve, new Layer 2 projects such as Movement and Fuel are also competing to launch their own mainnets in order to obtain scarce liquidity in the altcoin market. For projects, fragmentation and lack of interoperability are still increasing. Virtual machines based on different architectures may even have wallet plug-ins that are not interoperable. Not to mention attracting new users, for ordinary blockchain users, The entire second-layer ecosystem is extremely complex, and the development of non-financial application chains will also face great resistance under such circumstances.
If Ethereum wants to attract new users, ecological alignment is the biggest prerequisite. An ecosystem that requires users to be half geeks to get started will never usher in "Mass Adoption". We can see from the performance of Solana and Ton in this year. It can be seen that the strategy of lowering the user threshold and providing a consistent and more Web2-friendly user experience has obviously played an important role in the growth of the ecosystem. To put it more directly, the two ecosystems have only done The difficulty of asset issuance has been reduced, and the use of the chain has become more insensitive. Therefore, a comprehensive solution that prioritizes experience is necessary for Ethereum, but due to the consistent open attitude of Ethereum core developers, it is naturally impossible to pass The forced approach aligns the entire second-layer ecosystem.
I think the only solution that can solve this problem first is AI browser proxy. In the early days of ChatGPT, many people had imagined that AI would revolutionize APP interaction from point to speech, and could operate across multiple APPs. , forming a comprehensive super APP. Taking tourism as an example, after receiving the user's travel needs, AI can automatically complete comprehensive planning such as booking tickets, customizing travel routes, arranging meals and time according to the user's complaints. If this AI also has long-term memory capabilities, it can also arrange a plan that is more suitable for the user based on this memory.
Today, Google is about to launch Project Mariner, an AI browser agent powered by Gemini. In the example shown by Jaclyn Konzelmann, director of Google Labs, after the Chrome browser installs the AI agent extension, a chat window will pop up on the right side of the browser. The agent can be instructed to perform tasks such as "create a shopping cart from a grocery store based on this list." The AI agent then automatically navigates to a grocery store and adds the items to the cart and proceeds to the checkout interface. After confirming that everything is correct, the user will Check out by yourself (agents do not have payment authority). A similar product will be launched by OpenAI next month.
It is worth mentioning that although Google's Project Mariner is currently only available to selected testers, I have already experienced similar agents developed by some projects in Crypto for ordinary users. At present, the accuracy of the agent for complex and ambiguous intentions can reach 60% to 70% (the cursor operation speed is relatively slow), and it can complete token transactions such as Dex in various public chains and even cross-asset transactions from Ethereum to For layer 2 operations, all I need to do during this process is to inform it of my intention and enter my wallet password.
Of course, this base still needs to call the API of the centralized model, so what is the collision between Crypto and it? I think that in addition to becoming a better experience intention solution, AI browser agent will also promote AI wallets, The explosion of decentralized computing power and decentralized data projects.
Let’s think about a simple question: in the past few years of rapid development of AI, why has it taken until today to realize such a beautiful concept as Agent? In fact, looking back at the development process of OpenAI, it is not difficult to find that the development of pure language models has always been faster than the development of models such as image generation. It needs to be fast because the Internet itself is a huge corpus that can provide an inexhaustible supply of text materials for training. The limitations on the development of language models are more about computing power and energy. Agents require a lot of manual labeling and feedback. In addition, the reasoning process is expensive, and Crypto naturally has the ability to obtain labor through incentives. In this economic system, upper-level users can obtain tokens by providing a large amount of labeled data and feedback in a decentralized manner, and the bottom layer can also integrate decentralized computing power and data projects. After training, it can also be integrated with wallets and DeFi projects through SDK to realize a true AI wallet, and finally form a closed loop. Ideas about other AI agents can also be derived from this, because any AI agent suitable for Web3 , will require computing power, marking, and feedback to "grow".
2. Stablecoins
Stablecoins are always a battleground, and they are also a track with extremely high barriers to entry in Crypto. As for their application value, they have been widely recognized even outside the industry. For example, this year, several giants in the traditional financial field have also entered the field of stablecoins. The cryptocurrency market includes PYUSD launched by PayPal, USDb jointly launched by BlackRock and Ethena, and AUSD launched by VanEck (serving Argentina, Southeast Asia and other regions).
As Tether and Circle continue to dominate this market, new entrants to the stablecoin market have gradually divided into two categories. First, issuers of French stablecoins have begun to turn their attention to emerging markets, mainly in South America. The algorithmic stablecoins are currently turning to stablecoins with low-risk financial products as underlying assets, such as Ethena and Usual mentioned in the previous article. From the trend, there will be more next year. Delta neutral stablecoins will compete for short liquidity in Cex, and hedging assets will gradually expand from BTC and ETH to public chain tokens with higher risks and lower liquidity to compete for the remaining sinking market. I think that the stablecoins based on short- and medium-term U.S. Treasury bonds are more innovative in terms of protocol tokens and income methods. There is no better choice than short- and medium-term Treasury bonds in terms of RWA asset types. However, compared with Due to the limited liquidity in Cex, such stablecoins will have less competition and greater upper limit space.
In general, the development of stablecoins is gradually moving towards the pursuit of more stable underlying assets and decentralized governance. However, I hope that there will be some fully decentralized and non-overweighted stablecoins next year. The agreement appears.
3. Payment
With the compliance and accelerated adoption of stablecoins in various countries, the payment track downstream of stablecoins will also become a new focus of competition. Heterogeneous public chains with high TPS and low Gas, such as Solana and Move, will become the main infrastructure for payment applications. . Traditional payment is currently an extremely mature and involuted red ocean market. What changes can blockchain provide? First of all, there are two relatively simple and often mentioned points. One is to optimize cross-border payments and eliminate pre-financing. The second is to serve emerging markets, which I have mentioned in previous articles. In regions such as Latin America, the application value of stablecoins has been demonstrated. The strong financial inclusion enables residents of third world countries to effectively cope with the high monetary inflation caused by government instability. Through stablecoins, they can also participate in some global financial Events and subscriptions to use the world's most cutting-edge virtual services subscription.
The concept of "PayFi" proposed by Solana Foundation Manager Lily Liu at the 7th EthCC Conference provides more imagination for blockchain combined with payment. This concept involves two core aspects. The first is timely settlement, that is, T+0 settlement. PayFi can achieve same-day settlement, or even multiple settlements per day. The delays and complexities of the traditional financial system that should be involved in the entire process will be eliminated, greatly increasing the speed of capital circulation. “Buy Now, Pay Never”, for example, a user deposits $50 into a lending product and buys a $5 cup of coffee. Once the accumulated interest reaches $5, the interest will be used to pay for the coffee and the funds will be unlocked and returned to the user. in your account.
There are many ideas that can be extended from this. For example, the financing needs of emerging projects in the use scenario can be formed more securely and transparently in the blockchain through PayFi, and currency exchange in tourism no longer needs to rely on various physical financial institutions. Free control over institutions, payment and collection time (interest for delayed collection, discount for early payment). And the income methods will be more diversified. In addition to the above-mentioned deposit of stablecoins into lending products to obtain interest, I personally think that the types of stablecoins should also be allowed to be converted at will. In the future, with the emergence of new stablecoins, users can choose the most suitable type of stablecoin at any time according to their personal risk-bearing capacity, so that they can obtain stablecoin protocol tokens and more. High stablecoin interest. For DeFi, if this payment system can become mainstream, its growth space will be unimaginably huge.
4. Dex
We have already mentioned the fragmentation and lack of interoperability of Layer2 in the first section. This development path actually has another problem, that is, there is an excess of block space, and the development of Infra far outweighs the development of Dapp. This will cause a large number of long-tail chains to be naturally eliminated within a few years, which is also a very troublesome problem for Ethereum, as its DA pricing mistake cannot get positive feedback from Layer 2.
Looking back at this round of counter-trend growth, the public chains basically relied on their own strong community, ecology, and publicity advantages, and provided these advantages to the asset issuance platform to achieve the rapid growth of the overall TVL. In this kind of eyeball economy, the lack of super applications will still be a realistic problem to be faced next year. Following the trend, in addition to what we mentioned above, the demand for AI Agents in the future may be a way out. In the short term, there is also a relatively obvious trend. There are also on-chain order book Dex, privacy, payment-related stacks, decision-making tools, etc.
I personally think that on-chain order book Dex will become the mainstream of the next generation of Dex. After all, judging from the development of AMM, the complexity of its technical path is constantly increasing, but the efficiency is becoming more and more limited. This is also mentioned in articles related to Uni. However, for the second layer, the performance and Gas limitations are still very obvious. The improvement of the matching algorithm and the innovation of the Gas solution will become the key challenges.
5. Asset issuance remains the main theme
From 23 years to today, that is, from the inscription to the current AI Meme platform, providing asset issuance has been a hot topic in the past year. If we extend this time span a little bit, in fact, from the ICO era to the present, asset issuance can be regarded as The only main theme of the cryptocurrency circle. Only the external packaging and the threshold for issuance are changing. From a positive perspective, the gaming needs of users have promoted the advanced development of Infra and DeFi. As this technology becomes known and recognized by the world, the Blockchain has entered the mainstream and integrated into reality. From a negative perspective, this game has become more pure and absurd, and the reduction in the difficulty of asset issuance also means that this dark forest is more dangerous. Now you only need to click on it. With just a few pictures and a few words, a grand zero-sum game has begun. Why don't we lead it back to a more positive side and promote the progress of the industry in the game?
For example, some AI memes are now turning to practical agents, rather than the gibberish AI agents of the early versions. The recently popular DeSci can also be called the "scientific ICO". Although the current core is driven by memes, In the long run, DeSci, combined with the various advantages of blockchain, can make traditional scientific research more transparent, easier to disseminate, easier to finance, and easier to communicate. However, whether it can be implemented in the end and how it will evolve still need to be questioned.
In fact, similar ideas to DeSci were mentioned in my article about GameFi, such as the shortage of funds and personnel in independent games, and how to effectively promote the development of independent games through blockchain. The problem with blockchain financing is the threshold for asset issuance. Too low, too few restrictions, and too strong fundraising capabilities (it can also be said that it is because the entry threshold on the chain is extremely low). How to limit the use of funds through rules and force project parties to continue to create truly valuable things is also the focus of our thinking. .
Letting gamers play and builders move forward is the premise for the continuous development of blockchain. We may see more versions of "ICO" next year, but I hope that in this feast of game, we can promote the next A “DeFi Summer”.
