Multicoin Capital 2025 Ideas: DePIN Bot, 0-Employee Company…How the Crypto World Will Evolve

Original title: "Frontier Ideas For 2025"

Source: Multicoin Capital

Compiled by: BitpushNews

2025 promises to be a pivotal year for the crypto industry. The path to the first regulatory framework to support cryptocurrencies, coupled with the technological maturity of layer 1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, the DePIN network, and stablecoins, creates fertile ground for the next wave of cutting-edge innovation.

In keeping with our tradition, we'll share the ideas and opportunities that excite us most in the year ahead.

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network Robot (DePIN Robotic) and 0

employee company

—Kyle Samani, managing partner

DePIN Robotic—There are rumors that the incoming Trump administration will push to elevate autonomous driving (AD) regulation from the state level to the national level to create a unified standard for autonomous driving companies. As the scale of GPU clusters continues to expand (such as more than 100,000 H100 GPUs), autonomous driving technology based on the Transformer model will become more mature and is expected to be widely used in the real world. After this, I expect there will be an explosion of bot-based DePIN. Many startups have raised funding from non-crypto VCs but have yet to truly start commercialization. I am optimistic that many of them will adopt the DePIN model, shifting the risk from the balance sheets of development companies to the world's robotics professionals and "prosumers" (prosumers (both producers and consumers)). Many early adopters of these robotic products will capture data critical to developing autonomous robots. I know there's one company in this space today - Frodobots - and I'm looking 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 OpenAI's o3 and other more advanced thought chain reasoning models, models are reaching the point where they can think, plan, execute and self-correct. This provides the foundation for AI agents to perform all tasks in the business.

In order for a zero-employee company to function properly, it will need human guidance because AI will inevitably make mistakes and may exceed its context window (the amount of information the model can handle). Over time, I expect that the degree of human guidance will decrease as the AI ​​continues to improve self-correction and expand the context window. I believe the governance of these zero-employee companies will likely be through DAOs, and I expect the crypto capital markets to fund ambitious attempts by zero-employee companies.

Startups tend to succeed while large companies fail because they face unique constraints. I believe zero employee constraints will lead to some incredible breakthroughs for all business operations.

Securities on the chain

—Tushar Jain, Co-Founder and Managing Partner

With the Trump administration coming to power and the Republican Party’s overall victory in Congress, on-chain securities are finally taking off meaningfully.

Transactions on blockchains like Solana can be completed almost instantly, eliminating the wait times common in traditional finance. Faster capital flows increase capital efficiency and should lead to more efficient prices.

Blockchain ensures that all participants have access to a real-time, immutable record of transactions. This level of transparency and security contrasts with the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases of traditional financial institutions. Transaction costs on blockchain networks are much lower than traditional banking systems, as shown by just comparing the cost of sending stablecoins on Solana ($0.001) to the cost of sending a wire transfer ($30). Solana’s token extension now allows for precise, fine-grained control over tokenized securities. An issuer may restrict its 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 blockchain’s near-instant finality, cheap transactions, and transparency provide better settlement than the slow, expensive, and opaque traditional financial rails. The only real obstacle is regulation, and a more innovation-friendly SEC could open the door to the tokenization of securities.

I don’t think public equities will be the first tokenized securities adopted by the mass market. Markets that are less liquid, more opaque, and benefit more from tokenization are more likely to be the first to adopt. This could be startup equity, there's no reason to pay Carta or Angelist to manage it when the blockchain can manage the capital table for free. It could be the fixed-income instrument that Figure has been working on for years. It could be an LP interest in a fund.

Buy Now, Pay Never, Spend Your Portfolio, Portfolio Margin

—Investor Spencer Applebaum

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

Buy Now, Pay Never – Affirm and Klarna have popularized the buy now, pay later concept, and I’m sure you’ve seen these widgets on Amazon and other merchant sites. Today, on-chain users can earn approximately 8% on SOL and approximately 15% on stablecoins. If users didn't need to pay a subscription fee upfront, but could instead deposit their tokens with merchants (from web2 companies like Netflix to web3 companies like Dune Analytics) and the merchants would earn staking/lending rewards over time, then What will happen? User’s tokens will be locked for a certain period of time to guarantee payment. We think there is a strong consumer psychology factor here, with the opportunity cost of the benefits appearing to be more acceptable than the upfront payment.

Spend your portfolio — When all assets are tokenized and aggregated into one place (a web3 wallet), it makes sense that users should be able to spend their portfolio on medium to large items. Imagine that 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 doesn’t have to convert her USDC to fiat, wait for a bank transfer, send the payment, and then perform the reverse process to rebalance her portfolio if she can automatically sell each of her four holdings on-chain for 1,000 U.S. dollars and then pay the sofa merchant immediately, what happens? She remains fully allocated to her existing portfolio and does not need to consider the rebalancing process.

Portfolio Margining — Within the next 3-5 years, with the emergence of cryptocurrency prime brokers and unified super protocols, users should be able to hold all assets across margins. For example, Alice should be able to use her AAPL shares to short BTC perpetual contracts and borrow USDC on-chain. Or should be able to use her tokenized whiskey as collateral to purchase tokenized debt on-chain. We are starting to see this in a comprehensive way (such as Ostium bringing FX trading on-chain), but it will all become clearer when spot assets are tokenized.

Verify off-chain status on-chain

—Shayon Sengupta, Investment Partner

Asset ledger systems like Bitcoin and Solana represent a critical step in the development of cryptocurrencies. These systems are fundamentally about money, enabling the storage and transfer of value through permissionless channels around the world. Now, the cryptographic primitives that enable these systems are beginning to cross-fertilize with non-ledger systems, unlocking entirely new markets. Over the next 12 months, cryptography will establish itself as the verification layer for data and computing in three novel ways: network attestation, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media provenance.

I see it as the fusion of "monetary cryptography" and "verification cryptography". It will serve as a coordination 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 through TLS signatures in web pages to verify any unit of data on the Internet (for example, your credit score on Equifax or your Strava sports history) in a completely uncensorable and tamper-proof way. Some teams have begun deploying zero-knowledge proofs in network sessions to build uncensorable and fraud-resistant applications. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples of this. p2p.me is a cash deposit/withdrawal platform in India that uses proof of network to bypass the region’s broken market structures. ZkMe is a system for sovereign verification of KYC credentials that allows applications to verify user identities in a privacy-preserving manner. The same principle can be extended to dozens of new markets, such as ticketing, reservations, and other systems where fraud is a major bottleneck for liquidity.

Homomorphic Encryption: Unleashing the Potential of Artificial

Intelligence

Second, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter its golden age. As AI systems suffer from diminishing returns when trained on public datasets, post-training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become even more critical. This creates a whole new design space for orchestrating otherwise inaccessible data sets as inputs to models, especially as large amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue to move from on-premises to cloud systems. Token-based incentives will play a key role at this layer, and breakthroughs in this area will take top-notch base models to the next level.

Identity verification and media traceability: essential tools in the AI

​​era

In the post-AI era where the cost of content generation is close to zero, authenticity verification of identity and content will become an indispensable element in consumer applications. Early systems like Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode used cryptographic proofs to verify biometric information or state-issued credentials, and leveraged token incentives as the primary means of mobilizing participants at scale. Similarly, standards such as C2PA differentiate between real captured media and AI-generated media by tagging content at the hardware layer, but large-scale adoption of these standards at the application layer will likely require some form of token-based coordination mechanism to Overcome the inertia of consumer habits. These tools are critical to addressing the information risks of an AI-saturated consumer internet.

Deal heads to multi-faceted, full-stack media company

—Investor Eli Qian

Trading is becoming a multiplayer game - sharing financial profits and losses and speculating in groups is a behavior that is rooted in human nature and is easily spread. People love to talk about how much money they’ve made (or lost!) in everything from stocks to sports betting and even meme coins. However, most of the currently popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are designed for a single-player experience. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot – these are not multiplayer-first experiences. Nonetheless, the need for social trading is undeniable. Today, users create their own ad hoc social experiences through online forums and group chats. A large portion of Crypto Twitter revolves around these discussions.

One of the biggest advantages of cryptocurrencies is permissionless liquidity. It opens the door for anyone to build multi-player trading tools for crypto assets. I very much look forward to seeing developers in 2025 taking advantage of the inherent virality of social trading to create multiplayer experiences. Such a product would allow users to share trades, compete on P&Ls, and jointly open positions with a single click or tap. The design space is very broad, covering Telegram bots, Twitter mini programs (Twitter Blinks), Discord mini applications, etc. While 2023 and 2024 saw the rise of single-player tools like BONKBot and BullX, 2025 will be the year trade goes multiplayer.

Full-Stack Media Companies – There have been many attempts to use tokens to enhance media and content, but few companies have been able to realize their full potential. However, we are starting 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 ability to push the primitives of cryptocurrency further than ever before. For example: athlete tokens, creator tokens, live broadcasts with prediction markets, etc.

One example is Karate Combat. Rather than building a product around existing UFC fighters, it's building a new fighting league from the ground up, giving them more control over rules, distribution and athletes. While UFC fighter tokens have limited use, Karate Fighting allows token holders to vote on a fighter’s training regimen, competition attire, or anything else — only if Karate Fighting controls the token design and fighter contracts It's possible.

The future of live streaming, sports leagues, podcasts and reality shows will be deeply vertically integrated in terms of content, distribution, tokens and human capital. I’m very much looking forward to investing in and consuming the next generation of token-enhanced media.

Rise of the Alpha Hunters

—Investor Vishal Kankani

Some decisive events occurred in 2024, which foreshadow some interesting new phenomena in 2025.

First, it costs next to nothing to issue a new token (around $0), and almost anyone can do it permissionlessly. This has resulted in a staggering number of token issuances in 2024. Most of these are issued as memecoins, which have a very short lifespan measured in hours.

Second, market sentiment in 2024 is back to a high-volume, low fully diluted valuation (FDV) fair distribution token issuance model - reminiscent of the Initial Coin Offering (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 to happen in 2025 (as they have their own listing processes), which incentivizes people to switch to On-chain trading and bringing more liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEX). Therefore, DEX will gain more market share over CEX in the coming year. As the number of tokens and DEX trading activity explodes, active traders will need more powerful tools and models to identify emerging tokens in real time, analyze market sentiment and on-chain indicators, identify vulnerabilities, and mitigate risks such as volume funds run away) and execute transactions efficiently.

This brings us to the third thing happening in 2024: AI agents. So far, we have seen AI agents create content on social media to draw attention to their respective coins. I predict that the next iteration of AI agents will be “alpha hunters”—that is, their only mission is to find excess returns (alpha) and trade autonomously in real time.

Crypto institutionalization wave

—Matt Shapiro, Partner

We are entering the beginning of the institutionalization phase of cryptocurrencies, and this process will happen at an alarming rate.

Over the past five-plus years, the crypto industry has made tremendous progress in terms of significant technological advancements, product-market fit, and substantive user interface/user experience (UI/UX) improvements, but the institutional community has effectively stagnated in the cryptocurrency space Not forward. The combination of regulatory and professional risks prevents many financial institutions from effectively entering the space or even offering the most basic crypto products to their customers. With the rise of a pro-crypto government in the United States and the record success of Bitcoin ETFs, we are about to see the institutional complacency of the past five years racing to catch up and find ways to support cryptocurrencies as quickly as possible.

In 2024, there is $35 billion in demand for Bitcoin purchases that are unable or unwilling to simply go through Coinbase. Since most asset managers and large brokerages have still not fully launched their crypto business, more funds will be able to enter the cryptocurrency market by 2025. We will see the launch of a number of ETFs to meet and capitalize on this demand. This includes not only ETFs for new crypto assets like Solana (SOL), but also ETFs that hold multiple crypto assets, as well as ETFs that mix crypto assets with traditional assets like gold, stocks, or credit. There will be leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility suppression ETFs, staking ETFs, and more. Basically, every combination you can think of that bundles crypto assets together for institutional and retail investors will be explored.

We will see major financial institutions racing to launch basic financial products around cryptocurrencies. Every financial institution should explore creating product lines that enable its customers to trade cryptocurrency products. Financial institutions should look to take custody of crypto-assets and extend credit against them as they do today for more traditional assets. We may also see a significant increase in stablecoin issuers. Any bank that accepts deposits should look to issue a local stablecoin. In my conversation with Visa’s Cuy Sheffield at the 2024 Multicoin Summit, I emphasized that every company needs a stablecoin strategy. Just as “e-commerce” was finally integrated into “commerce” back then, “stablecoins” will gradually be integrated into it. to all aspects of business and become an integral part of business activities.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, and while it’s not the most technically ambitious thing to do in crypto, the scale and scope of its distribution and the money involved is enormous.