Variant: Cryptocurrency Trend Forecast for the Next 6 Months to 1 Year

Source: Variant Fund; Compiled by: 0xjs@黄金财经

The Variant team has been looking ahead to the rest of 2024 and what trends might emerge in 2025.

Here are the things we are watching as we embrace the next wave of crypto development.

Jesse Wald (Variant co-founder):

Things I am excited about in 24-25 crypto products (quick list, not exhaustive):

• Mobile devices become the default.

• The stablecoin space is large enough to meet global fintech adoption, accelerating institutional/regulatory validation.

• Prediction markets take surprising forms.

• NFTs have another surprising evolution.

• Interplay between creator tools/token launchers becomes more interesting/safer.

• Farcaster channels become wallets/DAOs that do weird/big things.

• Telegram leans into mini-apps/wallets/payments.

• Frames/blinks emerge as a large social mini-app, validating “headless” GTM as a way to bootstrap protocol/market liquidity.

• Data DAOs/tokenized markets attract new users to earn tokens.

• For crypto native users, the real concern comes back to token distribution, resulting in more loyal/engaged users/owners.

Things I’m excited about in 24-25crypto infrastructure:

• Institutions start staking.

• Chain/wallet abstractions work well, and users finally get a superior user experience (a benefit of all the work on extensions/interop/intentions, etc.).

• Modularity matures; 2nd generation frameworks package integration modules, solving the fragmentation problem while maintaining customizability.

• ZK has groundbreaking applications at the intersection of privacy/off-chain data/on-chain operations.

• Security vulnerabilities become less common (e.g. in DeFi/interfaces).

• Decentralized compute starts to compete on cost and performance.

• MEV market structure is maturing and is expected to benefit users.

Li Jing (Variant co-founder)

I think we will see some developments in the crypto space in the next 6 months to 1 year:

• Open source AI turns to crypto technology for monetization.

• Decentralized AI and computing gain momentum.

• DePIN helps people earn their first cryptocurrency.

• The negative incentives caused by financialization have reached a critical point.

Alana

Some of my predictions for crypto in 2024/2025:

• Block/CashApp launches stablecoins.  

• There is a third spot ETF, but it is not what people expected.  

• PayPal started offering a yielding stablecoin (likely a modified version of PYUSD), and it has seen widespread adoption in Venmo.  

• Human Verification Project to Hit 100M+ Users

• A major talk show host has an NFT as his profile photo.

• Farcaster has over 3M users and is starting to provide meaningful mobile-first distribution.  

• The breakthrough AI x Crypto use case is community owned and trained models.  

• The hype around the decentralized GPU market turned out to be just hype as supply shortages ease and new chips emerge.

• We do see a significant use case in decentralized training + inference emerge as centralized clouds start to develop policies on what types of models can run on their servers, but this will take 2+ years to really develop (because regulation is slow)

• Building on top of Bitcoin will give developers a much better experience.  

• A well-known traditional finance person wrote a post about Helium (or another depin project).

• Popular L2s decide to develop their own L1s.  

• At least half of them are wrong.  

Cooper

Some current year-end predictions:

• Shared sequencers are finally live.

• Many proof markets have entered testnets.

• Rollup FUD subsides as decentralization goes away.

• Ethereum roadmap becomes clearer.

• ZK apps go into production and are actually being used.

• Sharding research becomes popular again.

Derek

24-25 year meta-level prediction: We will transition from the infrastructure part of this cycle to the application part.

Some specific thoughts:

• 10+ major fintechs launch their own stablecoins.

• ETFs start staking.

• Crypto consumer apps on Base reach 10M+ weekly active users.

• Each TradFi mega-fund will tokenize a product.

• Crypto prediction markets hit $1B in monthly volume in categories other than politics.

• BTC is a reserve asset for major global currencies.

• Top 20 US banks use DeFi to borrow.

• DePin network grows to 10+ million users.

• A major AAA studio builds an on-chain game.

• DEX volume briefly exceeds CEX volume.

• A small game on Telegram/Ton attracts 1B players.

Geoff

In 12 months, I expect there will be more clarity around use cases and platforms for AI agents to have PMF in crypto.

In the interim, I think we’ll see a few applications gain traction and define the first generation of viable use cases. These leading applications will then lead the network effects of agent platforms, influencing which platforms become Schelling Points.

The first step in this sequence is to build compelling user experiences using agents. I think a few use cases are most likely to gain early traction:

• Token discovery, research, and trading.

• Airdrops and yield farming.

• Gaming: Agents as playable characters and NPCs.

• AI companions.

• Autonomous content producers.

I’m really excited to see the coming wave of innovation in these and other use cases. It should be fun to be a crypto user!