This article summarizes 21 hot topics in the crypto industry for 2025 and categorizes them from solid to loose.
Article Author: DeFi Warhol
Source: PANews
Solid
Tokenization: RWA scale is reaching new highs (about 20 billion USD), and more stocks and commodities are being tokenized. With mainstream funds and custodians continuously expanding on major trading platforms, this is no longer just a conceptual level.
Stablecoins: As a market with a market value of 310 billion USD, stablecoins are gradually becoming the infrastructure for foreign exchange, payments, credit cards, and digital banking distribution, serving as the best bridge from the crypto world to real-world applications.
Prediction Markets: The trading volume and user numbers of prediction markets are reaching new highs. With the integration of mainstream crypto applications and traditional financial institutions, its promotion speed is accelerating.
Perpetual Contracts: Perpetual contracts still dominate crypto market trading volume, with derivatives trading far exceeding spot. The monthly trading volume of on-chain perpetual contract platforms has reached parity with centralized exchanges, breaking 1 trillion USD.
Top-notch
BTCFi: Bitcoin is transforming into productive capital, with billions of BTC being used for staking, yield, and collateral, among which Babylon and Lombard occupy a significant share in BTC staking TVL.
Privacy: As more traditional financial capital shifts to on-chain, selective disclosure becomes crucial. Institutions need to achieve compliance-friendly privacy protection in payments, identity verification, and corporate fund flows.
AI: AI and crypto technology continue to evolve, becoming important tools for processing data, driving intelligent agents, and achieving verifiable computing, with great potential. The scale of this industry is significant and cannot be ignored.
DeFi: DeFi is shifting towards consumer applications; Coinbase is currently providing DEX trading and USDC lending services within the app through Morpho, with DeFi TVL reaching an all-time high as emerging consumer applications rapidly emerge.
Elite
Chain Abstraction: Smart accounts, intents, and embedded wallets reduce user friction, making blockchain become intangible. Significant enhancements in user experience are crucial for adoption, even though development is slow.
InfoFi: Despite recent market concerns, uncertainties, and doubts, InfoFi remains the refinery for data markets, incentive activities, and trading signals. Significant progress is imminent for InfoFi; is InfoFi 2.0 on the way?
Robots: Their prospects are grander than actual progress. The pace of hardware and deployment development cannot keep up with cryptocurrency, making this more of an early infrastructure stage.
ZK: It is undoubtedly a core technology, but as an investment target, it is relatively complex. Most of the value will accumulate in ecosystems that can apply ZK technology on a large scale, rather than existing as an independent concept.
Software Infrastructure: Demand remains stable (e.g., RPC, indexing, interoperability, data availability, etc.), but competition has become extremely fierce. Nevertheless, quality projects may still emerge in this field.
NPC
Staking and Re-staking: Re-staking is indeed feasible, but the yield rate continues to be compressed, and the risk of penalties is real. The complex operations deter ordinary investors. The narrative in this track has been overheated from the very beginning.
DePIN: In the ideal scenario, DePIN should integrate and collaborate with the real world, but many projects still struggle to achieve this goal. Regulatory pressure and a lack of sustainable business models are hindering its development.
L1 and L2: Rollups have become the mainstream scaling solution, but the development momentum of new public chains is relatively weak. Currently, most value is shifting towards applications, liquidity, and ecological distribution, rather than just another underlying protocol.
SocialFi: Although there are occasional peaks in user activity, user retention and a lasting product-market fit have not yet been achieved, and it seems unlikely to do so in the short term.
La
GameFi: The Play-to-Earn model has fundamental flaws. Although some game chains are still operating, most GameFi projects simply add operational steps, resulting in a worse experience compared to re-skinned DeFi.
NFT: We have witnessed multiple attempts to revitalize the NFT market, but the market response indicates that if it cannot break free from the limitations of JPEG images and avatars to create new application scenarios, NFTs will always be trapped in the current dilemma. Even attempts to integrate into the gaming sector have not yet achieved breakthroughs.
Meme Coins: The super cycle of Meme coins is lively, but liquidity is transferring to serious projects, and their market dominance is continuously declining. Retail investors are tired of being repeatedly harvested and chasing the next hundredfold myth.
Modular Blockchain: Important architecture, poor narrative. Users do not care, and investors only care about whether there is a clear, sustainable profit effect, which most modular projects currently do not possess.
