AI and tokenization will lead the “new long-tail capital market” in 2025

Author: Martin Young, CoinTelegraph; Compiler: Wuzhu, Golden Finance

Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said that with the help of artificial intelligence and tokenization, 2025 could see the boom of small, niche businesses, more corporate adoption of Bitcoin, and a "revival" in mergers and acquisitions that could benefit cryptocurrencies.

In a series of X posts on January 5, Horsley said that he believes the world in 2025 is "on the brink of change."

Tokenization empowers small businesses

In an X post, Horsley also made some predictions about tokenization. He believes that most of the focus has been on the benefits on the demand side, such as democratizing access to money market funds, but the real revolutionary potential lies on the supply side.

He said the transformative power of tokenization could come from giving a large number of untapped small businesses access to capital markets.

The real world asset (RWA) tokenization industry could be the next key narrative in crypto by 2025, said Edwin Mata, founder and CEO of Brickken. “Tokenization of real-world assets is transforming traditional markets by enabling assets like real estate, debt and equity to be digitized and traded on the blockchain,” he noted.

AI will drive a surge in the number of micro-companies

“I think AI is likely to drive a surge in the number of companies and tokenized companies,” Horsley shared his thoughts on the development of AI in the coming year in a separate article.

"AI can significantly increase the number of niche companies. These companies can never go public, but can be tokenized. It may be an important new long-tail capital market."

An example of how AI can promote tokenization. Source: Hunter Horsley

‘Bitcoin Standard’ Companies

Horsley also predicts that a major theme in 2025 will be the emergence of ‘Bitcoin Standard Companies’, companies that hold BTC on their balance sheets.“2025 will see a number of companies join the Bitcoin Standard,” Horsley said.

MicroStrategy, which hinted at another purchase on Monday, is the largest corporate holder of BTC with 446,400 bitcoins, worth about $43.7 billion at current market prices.

In late 2024, several smaller companies announced that they had begun developing strategies to invest in and hold Bitcoin as part of their treasuries.

Removing controls on mergers and acquisitions

Horsley said the Trump administration could “remove controls” on mergers and acquisitions of large companies, which would be good for cryptocurrencies.

In a Jan. 6 article on X, Horsley predicted that companies like the “Big Seven” — made up of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — “may finally be able to play to their market caps.”

“Large companies could get bigger, and mid-sized companies could shrink,” he said, adding that “if that happens, I think it would accelerate the growth of cryptocurrencies” if the big companies are run in their own self-interest rather than the interests of their users. "The concept of cryptocurrency is based on not trusting large institutions to do what is in your best interest. The fact that big companies are getting bigger has only heightened that."