Multicoin Capital 2025 Vision: DePIN Robots, 0 Employee Companies... How the Crypto World Will Evolve

Original Title: "Frontier Ideas For 2025"

Source: Multicoin Capital

Compiled by: BitpushNews

2025 is expected to be a pivotal year for the crypto industry. The path to the first regulatory framework supporting cryptocurrencies, combined with the technological maturity of Layer 1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, DePIN networks, and stablecoins, creates fertile ground for the next wave of frontier innovations.

In keeping with our tradition, we will share the ideas and opportunities that excite us the most for the coming year.

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network Robotics (DePIN Robotic) and Zero Employee Companies

---Managing Partner Kyle Samani

DePIN Robotic—Rumors suggest that the incoming Trump administration will push to elevate 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 (for example, over 100,000 H100 GPUs), transformer-based autonomous driving technology will become more mature and is expected to see widespread application in the real world. Following this, I anticipate explosive growth in robot-based DePIN. Many startups have raised funds from non-crypto VCs but have yet to truly commercialize. I am optimistic that many of them will adopt the DePIN model, transferring risk from the balance sheets of development companies to global robotic professionals and "prosumers" (producers and consumers). Many early adopters of these robotic products will capture data critical to the development of 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 the help of OpenAI's o3 and other more advanced chain-of-thought reasoning models, models are reaching a level where they can think, plan, execute, and self-correct. This lays the groundwork for AI agents to perform all tasks in business.

For zero employee companies to operate effectively, they will require human guidance, as AI will inevitably make mistakes and may exceed its context window. Over time, I expect the degree of human guidance to decrease as AI continues to improve its self-correction and expand its context window. I believe the governance of these zero employee companies may be conducted through DAOs, and I anticipate that the crypto capital markets will fund the ambitious attempts of zero employee companies.

Startups often succeed while large companies fail because they face unique constraints. I believe the constraints of zero employees will lead to some incredible breakthroughs in all business operations.

On-Chain Securities

---Co-founder and Managing Partner Tushar Jain

With the Trump administration coming into power and the Republican Party achieving a sweeping victory in Congress, on-chain securities are finally poised for meaningful takeoff.

Transactions on blockchains like Solana can be completed almost instantaneously, eliminating the waiting times common in traditional finance. Faster capital movement enhances capital efficiency and should lead to more effective pricing.

Blockchains ensure that all participants have access to real-time, tamper-proof records of transactions. This level of transparency and security stands in stark contrast to the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases of traditional financial institutions. The transaction costs on blockchain networks are far lower than those of traditional banking systems; a simple comparison of the cost of sending stablecoins on Solana ($0.001) versus sending a wire transfer ($30) illustrates this. Solana's token expansion now allows for precise, fine-grained control over tokenized securities. Issuers can restrict their security holders to whitelisted addresses, recall tokens in the event of a court order, and comply with other securities laws or transfer agent requirements or best practices.

There is no doubt that the near-instant finality, low transaction costs, and transparency of blockchain provide better settlement than the slow, expensive, and opaque traditional financial rails. The only real barrier is regulation, and a more innovation-friendly SEC could open the door for security tokenization.

I do not believe that publicly traded stocks will be the first tokenized securities to achieve mass market adoption. Markets with lower liquidity, higher opacity, and greater benefits from tokenization are more likely to be adopted first. This could be startup equity, as there would be no reason to pay Carta or Angelist to manage a cap table when blockchains can do it for free. It could be fixed-income instruments that Figure has been researching for years. It could be LP interests in funds.

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

---Investor Spencer Applebaum

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

Buy Now, Pay Never—Affirm and Klarna have popularized the idea of buy now, pay later, and I believe you have seen these widgets on Amazon and other merchant sites. Nowadays, on-chain users can earn about 8% on SOL and about 15% on stablecoins. What if users didn’t need to pay subscription fees upfront but could deposit their tokens with merchants (from web2 companies like Netflix to web3 companies like Dune Analytics), and merchants would earn staking/borrowing rewards over time? Users' tokens would be locked for a period to guarantee payment. We believe there is a strong consumer psychology factor here, where the opportunity cost of earnings seems more acceptable than prepayment.

Consume Your Portfolio—When all assets are tokenized and aggregated in one place (a web3 wallet), it makes sense for users to be able to pay for medium to large items with their portfolio. Imagine Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in interest-bearing USDC, $10,000 in TSLA stock, and $10,000 in gold. She wants to buy a $4,000 sofa. She wouldn’t have to convert her USDC to fiat, wait for a bank transfer, send the payment, and then execute the reverse process to rebalance her portfolio if she could automatically sell $1,000 of each of her four holdings on-chain and pay the sofa merchant immediately. She would still be fully allocated to her existing portfolio without needing to consider the rebalancing process.

Portfolio Margining—In the next 3-5 years, as major crypto brokers and unified super protocols emerge, users should be able to margin all assets across their holdings. For example, Alice should be able to short BTC perpetual contracts using her AAPL stock and borrow USDC on-chain. Or she should be able to use her tokenized whiskey as collateral to purchase tokenized debt on-chain. We are beginning to see this in an integrated way (e.g., Ostium bringing forex trading on-chain), but it will become clearer when spot assets are tokenized.

On-Chain Verification of Off-Chain States

---Investment Partner Shayon Sengupta

Asset ledger systems like Bitcoin and Solana represent a key step in the evolution of cryptocurrency. These systems fundamentally concern money, enabling the storage and transfer of value through permissionless channels globally. Today, the cryptographic primitives that make these systems operate are beginning to intersect with non-ledger systems, unlocking entirely new markets. In 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 this as a fusion of "monetary cryptography" and "verification cryptography," which will serve as a coordinating layer to spawn new economic models and incentive mechanisms.

Emerging Markets: Zero-Knowledge Proofs Unlock New Possibilities

The first opportunity is zkTLS and the market it brings. zkTLS refers to building zero-knowledge proofs in web pages through TLS signatures to verify any data unit on the internet in a completely untraceable and tamper-proof manner (e.g., your credit score on Equifax or your exercise history on Strava). Some teams have begun deploying zero-knowledge proofs in web sessions to build untraceable and fraud-resistant applications. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples of this. p2p.me is a cash recharge/withdrawal platform in India that uses network proofs to bypass the region's fragmented market structure. ZkMe is a sovereign verification KYC credential system that allows applications to verify user identities in a privacy-preserving manner. The same principles can extend to dozens of new markets, such as ticketing, reservations, and other systems where fraud is a major liquidity bottleneck.

Homomorphic Encryption: Unlocking AI Potential

Secondly, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is about to enter its golden age. As the returns from training AI systems on public datasets diminish, post-training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become increasingly critical. This creates a new design space for coordinating previously inaccessible datasets as inputs to models, especially as vast amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue to shift from local to cloud systems. Token-based incentive mechanisms will play a key role at this layer, and breakthroughs in this field will elevate top foundational models.

Verification and Media Provenance: Essential Tools for the AI Era

In the post-AI era, where content generation costs approach zero, verifying the authenticity of identity and content will become an indispensable element in consumer applications. Early systems like Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode use cryptographic proofs to verify biometric information or government-issued credentials, leveraging token incentives as the primary means of mobilizing participants at scale. Similarly, standards like C2PA distinguish between genuinely captured media and AI-generated media by tagging content at the hardware level, but the large-scale adoption of these standards at the application layer may require some form of token-based coordination mechanism to overcome consumer habit inertia. These tools are crucial for addressing the information risks of an AI-saturated consumer internet.

Transactions Move Towards Multi-Player, Full-Stack Media Companies

---Investor Eli Qian

Transactions move towards multiplayer—sharing financial gains and losses and speculating as a group is a deeply human and highly contagious behavior. People love to talk about how much they made (or lost!) in stocks, sports betting, and even meme coins. However, the current popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are mostly designed for single-player experiences. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot—none of these prioritize multiplayer experiences. Nevertheless, the demand for social trading is undeniable. Today, users create their own ad-hoc social experiences through online forums and group chats. A significant 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. I am very excited to see developers leverage the inherent viral nature of social trading to create multiplayer experiences in 2025. Such products will allow users to share trades, compete on profit and loss sheets, and collaboratively build positions with a click or tap. The design space is vast, covering Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord mini-apps, and more. While 2023 and 2024 witnessed the rise of single-player tools like BONKBot and BullX, 2025 will be the year transactions move towards multiplayer gaming.

Full-stack media companies—People have attempted multiple times to enhance media and content with tokens, but few companies have been able to fully realize their potential. However, we are beginning 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 capability to push the primitives of cryptocurrency further than ever before. For example: athlete tokens, creator tokens, live streams with prediction markets, and more.

One example is Karate Combat. It did not build products around existing UFC fighters but instead established a new fighting league from scratch, giving them more control over rules, distribution, and athletes. While the utility of UFC fighter tokens is limited, Karate Combat allows token holders to vote on training regimens, fight attire, or anything else—something only possible if Karate Combat controls token design and athlete contracts.

Future live streams, sports leagues, podcasts, and reality shows will achieve deep vertical integration in content, distribution, tokens, and human capital. I am very excited to invest in and consume the next generation of token-enhanced media.

The Rise of Alpha Hunters

---Investor Vishal Kankani

2024 saw some decisive events that herald interesting new phenomena in 2025.

First, issuing a new token requires almost no cost (around $0), and almost anyone can do it permissionlessly. This led to an astonishing number of token issuances in 2024, most of which were meme coins with lifespans measured in hours.

Second, the market sentiment in 2024 returned to a high-volume, low fully diluted valuation (FDV) fair distribution token issuance model—reminiscent of the ICO era of 2017. In this type of market, centralized exchanges (CEX) struggle to keep 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 turn to on-chain trading and bring more liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEX). Therefore, DEX will gain more market share over CEX in the coming year. With the explosive growth of the number of tokens and DEX trading activity, active traders will need more robust tools and models to identify emerging tokens, analyze market sentiment and on-chain metrics, identify vulnerabilities, mitigate risks (e.g., rug pulls), and execute trades efficiently.

This leads to the third event that occurred in 2024: AI agents. So far, we have seen AI agents creating content on social media to attract attention to their respective tokens. I anticipate that the next iteration of AI agents will be "alpha hunters"—that is, their sole task will be to seek out alpha and autonomously trade in real-time.

The Wave of Cryptocurrency Institutionalization

---Partner Matt Shapiro

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

Over the past five years, the crypto industry has made significant strides in major technological advancements, product-market fit, and substantial improvements in user interface/user experience (UI/UX), but the institutional cohort has effectively stagnated in the cryptocurrency space. The combination of regulatory and career risks has made it difficult for many financial institutions to effectively enter the space, let alone offer their clients the most basic crypto products. With the rise of a pro-crypto government in the U.S. and the record success of Bitcoin ETFs, we are about to see the complacency of institutions over the past five years racing to catch up and find ways to support cryptocurrency as quickly as possible.

In 2024, there will be a demand for $35 billion in Bitcoin purchases that cannot or will not simply go through Coinbase. As most asset management firms and large brokerages have yet to fully launch their crypto businesses, by 2025, more capital will be able to enter the cryptocurrency market. We will see a plethora of ETFs launched to meet and capitalize on this demand. This will include ETFs for new crypto assets like Solana (SOL), ETFs holding multiple crypto assets, and ETFs that mix crypto assets with traditional assets like gold, stocks, or credit. There will be leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility-suppressing ETFs, staking ETFs, and more. Essentially, every conceivable combination of crypto assets bundled together for institutional and retail investors will be explored.

We will see major financial institutions racing to launch basic financial products around cryptocurrency. Every financial institution should explore creating product lines that enable their clients 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 accepting deposits should seek to issue local stablecoins. I emphasized in my conversation with Visa's Cuy Sheffield at the 2024 Multicoin Summit that every company needs a stablecoin strategy, just as "e-commerce" eventually became integrated into "business," "stablecoins" will gradually become an integral part of all aspects of business activity.

These are just the tip of the iceberg; while this may not be the most technically ambitious thing in the crypto space, the scale and scope of its distribution and the capital involved are enormous.