DWF Ventures' Selection of 2025 Narratives

Source: DWF Ventures

Compiled by: Fu He, Odaily Planet Daily

In 2024, the crypto industry is attracting more attention from institutional investors, with ETFs and stablecoins also experiencing steady growth. Therefore, DWF Ventures holds an optimistic outlook on the overall crypto industry in 2025 and predicts that capital inflows will shift towards on-chain activities. DWF Ventures' focus on 2025 trends includes:

• Stablecoins
• DeFi
• Consumer-facing applications
• AI

Stablecoins

Tether and Circle have long dominated the growth of stablecoins. While stablecoins are primarily used as mediums for trading and payments, we believe their role as assets is also gradually strengthening. The profitability of Tether and Circle has attracted more traditional fintech companies into the stablecoin space.

• Stripe's acquisition of Stablecoin further demonstrates the strong interest of traditional fintech companies in this market.
• PayPal is focusing on PYUSD and is promoting its application on Solana by offering yields of up to 20%.
• The USDtb launched in collaboration with BlackRock provides exposure to RWA yields through the Usual platform, while the launch of iUSDe marks a further integration—bringing regulated high DeFi yields into traditional finance for the first time.

Additionally, DWF Labs is incubating a high-yield stablecoin project called Falcoin Stable, which is planned to launch this year.

Therefore, we believe that with the accelerated entry of institutions, the application of stablecoins will experience explosive growth in 2025, and the increase in yields will benefit all users.

DeFi

With the growth of stablecoins, DeFi has also seen significant advancements. The usage of many DeFi protocols has rapidly increased, with Aave and Pendle achieving record protocol revenues.

The trading volume of DEX/CEX spot and perpetual contracts has also doubled since the beginning of the year, primarily driven by platforms such as Uniswap, Raydium Protocol, and Hyperliquid.

As more liquidity flows into the ecosystem, we will see more innovations, especially in yield layers and lending mechanisms.

With technological advancements in throughput, latency, and execution, along with upcoming projects like Monad, MegaETH, and Hyperliquid's HyperEVM, the momentum for DeFi innovation will be further enhanced.

Consumer-facing Applications

Consumer-facing applications aim to lower the entry barriers for non-crypto native users.

TON's mini-apps are an example, allowing users to quickly get started using the Telegram platform without the need to create a wallet or back up seed phrases, ultimately guiding users into the on-chain world.

Mobile-centric experiences are on the rise, with well-known protocols like Jupiter and trading tools such as Moonshot, Photon, BONKbot, and ApePro gaining popularity. Therefore, this will be a trend in 2025, where protocols that enhance user experience and introduce more retention mechanisms will capture a larger market share.

Artificial Intelligence

In recent months, AI Agents have exploded within the crypto community, with aixbt consistently topping the charts. These bots process information and generate content at an astonishing speed, operating around the clock without rest, far surpassing human capabilities.

Currently, AI Agents are involved in multiple areas, including discovering security vulnerabilities, assessing code, no-code frameworks, data analysis, and fund investments. We believe that as OpenAI's o1 introduces more human-like behaviors, the next wave of innovation will bring more interesting application scenarios, especially in commercialization.

The number of AI Agents will continue to grow, and competition will become increasingly fierce; finding the right product-market fit (PMF) will be key to standing out. With the widespread application of AI Agents, decentralized AI infrastructure will rapidly develop across various levels of the crypto space.