Multicoin: Cutting-edge ideas and opportunities that excite us in 2025

Author: Multicoin Capital; Compiler: 0xjs@金财经

2025 promises to be a pivotal year for the industry. The path to the first regulatory framework to support cryptocurrencies, coupled with the technological maturity of L1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, DePIN networks, 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. If you are building in any of these areas, please private message Multicoin partners directly.

DePIN Robotics, a zero-employee company

Kyle Samani , founder of Multicoin

DePIN Robotics — There are already rumors that the incoming Trump administration will try to push autonomous driving (AD) regulations from states to the national level to establish unified standards for AD companies. With GPU clusters exceeding 100,000 H100s, Transformer-based autonomous driving will be ready for 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'm optimistic that many of them will adopt the DePIN model, spreading risk from the balance sheets of development companies to robotics professionals and prosumers around the world. 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 AI. 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 lays 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 contextual window. Over time, I expect that the degree of human guidance will decrease as the AI ​​continues to improve self-correction and expand the contextual 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 of Multicoin

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 real-time, immutable records of transactions. This transparency and security contrasts with the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases of traditional finance. Transaction costs on blockchain networks are much lower than traditional banking systems, just compare 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 equity offerings 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 Margining

Spencer Applebaum, Multicoin Investment Partner

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 for a subscription 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 Portfolios Directly - When all assets are tokenized and aggregated into one place (a web3 wallet), it makes sense that users should be able to spend their portfolios on medium to large ticket items. Imagine that Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in earnings 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 Margin – In 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 margin. 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 , Multicoin Investment Partner

Asset ledgers like Bitcoin and Solana are the moment when cryptocurrencies go from zero to one. These systems are fundamentally about money – they facilitate the storage and transfer of value in global, permissionless orbits. We are now seeing the cryptographic primitives that make these systems possible begin to cross-fertilize with off-ledger systems, unlocking new net markets. Over the next 12 months, cryptography will become an authentication layer for data and computing in three novel ways: network attestation, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media provenance. I think this is the fusion of monetary cryptography and verification cryptography - a coordination layer that will enable new economic primitives and incentive structures.

The first opportunity here is zkTLS and the markets it supports. 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 activity history) in a completely uncensorable and tamper-proof way. Teams are already deploying ZK proofs in network sessions to build applications that are uncensorable and resistant to fraud. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples. p2p.me is India’s cash on- ramp/exit that leverages web proof to circumvent the region’s broken market structures. ZkMe is a sovereign verification system for KYC credentials, allowing applications to verify the identity of their users in a privacy- preserving manner. The same primitives can be extended to dozens of new markets—systems where ticketing, booking, and other fraud are major bottlenecks to liquidity.

Secondly, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter its golden age. As AI systems trained on public datasets experience diminishing returns, post- training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become even more critical. This creates a whole new design space for coordinating otherwise inaccessible data sets as input to models—especially as large amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue to move from on- premises to cloud systems. Token-based incentives at this layer will be critical, and unlocking this area will take the SOTA base model to the next level.

Third, in the post-AI era, identity verification and media source systems will become fixtures in consumer applications. When the cost of generating content approaches zero, the sheer volume of synthetic media content will make proving the authenticity of content and identity an urgent requirement. Early systems, such as Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode, used cryptographic proofs rather than biometrics or state-issued credentials to establish personhood, and used token incentives as the primary call to action to mobilize participants at scale. Likewise, standards such as C2PA address the media provenance issue by tagging content at the hardware layer to distinguish real captured media from AI-generated media, but given the inertia of consumer habits, their widespread adoption at the application layer may require Some form of token-based coordination. These tools are critical to solving the infohazards of an AI-saturated consumer internet.

Multiplayer gamification transaction, full stack media company

Eli Qian, Multicoin Investment Partner

Multiplayer Gamification Trading (Trading Goes Multiplayer) - sharing financial profits and losses and collective speculation is a very humane and highly viral behavior. People love to talk about how much money they’ve made (or lost!) in everything from stocks to sports betting to memecoins. However, most popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are designed for a single-player experience. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot—none of these are 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. In 2025, I'm excited to see builders take advantage of the virality inherent in social transactions to create multiplayer experiences. Such a product would allow users to share trades, compete on profit and loss statements, and enter positions together with a click or tap. The design space is very broad, covering Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord mini-programs, etc. While 2023 and 2024 saw the rise of single-player tools like BONKBot and BullX, 2025 will be the year trading goes multi-player.

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 cryptographic primitives further than before. Think: athlete tokens, creator tokens, live streaming with prediction markets, and more.

One example is karate fighting. Rather than building a product around existing UFC fighters, Karate Fighting is 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 excited to invest in and consume the next generation of token-enhanced media.

Rise of the Alpha Hunter

Vishal Kankani, Investment Partner at Multicoin

Something decisive happened in 2024. They portend some interesting things to come in 2025.

First, for about $0, almost anyone can issue new tokens without permission. This has resulted in an eye-popping number of token issuances in 2024. Most of these are issued as memecoins, with half-lives measured in hours.

Second, market sentiment in 2024 is back towards high-circulation, low-FDV fair-distribution token issuances—reminiscent of the ICO era of 2017. In this type of market, CEXs struggle to keep up with new listings, which we expect will happen in 2025 (because of their listing process), thus incentivizing people to get on-chain and bring more liquidity to the DEX. Therefore, DEX will gain market share over CEX in the coming year. As the number of tokens and DEX activity surges, active traders will need more powerful tools and models to identify emerging tokens, analyze sentiment and on-chain indicators, identify vulnerabilities, mitigate risk (e.g. rugpulls), and execute trades efficiently— — All in real time.

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, those whose only job is to find alpha and trade autonomously in real time.

institutional mania

Matt Shapiro , Partner at Multicoin

We are just at the beginning of the institutionalization phase of cryptocurrencies, and it is going to happen at a dizzying pace.

The crypto industry has made tremendous progress over the past 5+ years through major technological advancements, product-market fit, and substantial UI/UX improvements, but the institutional community has effectively stagnated when it comes to crypto. The combination of regulatory and professional risks prevents many financial institutions from effectively entering the space or offering even the most basic crypto products to their customers. With a pro- crypto government coming to power in the US and the record success of the BTC ETF, we are about to see 5 years of institutional complacency trying to catch up and find ways to support crypto as quickly as possible.

There will be $35 billion in BTC buying demand in 2024 that cannot or will not simply purchase the cryptocurrency through Coinbase. Since most asset managers and large securities firms are still not fully started, more dollars will be able to buy cryptocurrencies in 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, 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, pledged ETFs, etc. Basically, every confluence you can think of to bundle crypto assets 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 allow customers to trade cryptocurrency products. Financial institutions should look to custody crypto-assets and extend credit against them, just as they do today with 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. I spoke with Visa's Cuy Sheffield at the 2024 Multicoin Summit that every company needs a stablecoin strategy. Companies that used to focus on “ecommerce” are now just commerce. Stablecoins are moving in the same direction.

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.