Variant Fund: What excites us about cryptocurrency
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Variant Fund: What excites us about cryptocurrency
What do you think will happen in the crypto space over the next year?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: variant.eth
Compiled by: TechFlow
This summer, the Variant team has been looking ahead at the rest of 2024 and what we might see in 2025. Below are some snapshots of what we're watching as we explore the next wave of crypto development.
What do you think will happen in crypto over the next year? We’d love to hear your thoughts and predictions—feel free to share them with us on X (@variantfund) or Warpcast (/variant).
Jesse
My expectations for crypto products in 2024–2025 (quick list, not exhaustive):
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Mobile becomes the default.
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Stablecoin infrastructure matures to support global fintech adoption, driving institutional and regulatory acceptance.
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Prediction markets emerge in unexpected forms.
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NFTs undergo another surprising evolution.
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Interactions between creator tools and token launchers become more interesting and secure.
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Farcaster channels transform into wallets and DAOs, launching quirky and significant initiatives.
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Telegram deepens its development of mini-apps, wallets, and payments.
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Frames and blinks find mass-market social mini-apps, validating “headless” marketing as an effective way to bootstrap protocols and market liquidity.
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Data DAOs and tokenized markets attract a new set of users earning tokens.
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For native crypto users, token distributions will truly reflect “meaningful participation,” fostering more loyal and engaged users and holders.
Feel free to reply here to Jesse’s views.
My expectations for crypto infrastructure in 2024–2025 (quick list, not exhaustive):
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Institutions begin staking.
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Chain and wallet abstraction work well, finally delivering superior user experiences (the payoff from scalability, interoperability, and intent-focused efforts).
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Modularity matures; second-generation frameworks bundle modular components, solving fragmentation while preserving customizability.
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ZK technology achieves breakthrough applications at the intersection of privacy, off-chain data, and on-chain operations.
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Security vulnerabilities become increasingly rare (e.g., in DeFi and interfaces).
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Decentralized computing begins competing on cost and performance.
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MEV market structures mature and, optimistically, benefit end users.
Feel free to reply here to Jesse’s views.
Li
Developments I expect in crypto over the next 6 to 12 months:
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Open-source AI starts moving toward crypto for monetization.
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Decentralized AI and computing gradually gain momentum.
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DePIN helps people earn their first crypto.
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Negative incentives from financialization reach a tipping point.
Alana
My predictions for crypto in 2024/2025:
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Block / CashApp will launch a stablecoin.
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A third spot ETF will launch, but not the one people expect.
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PayPal will offer yield-bearing stablecoins (likely a modified version of PYUSD) and achieve significant adoption on Venmo.
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Human verification projects will attract over 100 million users.
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A prominent talk show host will use an NFT as their profile picture.
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Farcaster will surpass 3 million users and begin meaningful mobile-first distribution.
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A breakthrough AI x crypto use case will be community-owned and trained models.
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The current hype around decentralized GPU markets will ultimately prove to be just that—hype—as supply shortages ease and new chips emerge.
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We will see important use cases emerge for decentralized training and inference, as centralized cloud providers start imposing policies on which types of models can run on their servers—but this will take over two years to fully develop (due to slow regulatory progress).
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The developer experience on Bitcoin will significantly improve.
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A well-known traditional finance figure will tweet about Helium (or another DePIN project).
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A popular L2 will decide to become its own L1.
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At least half of these predictions will be wrong.
Feel free to reply here to Alana’s views.
Cooper
A few current end-of-year predictions:
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Shared sequencers finally go live.
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Multiple proving markets enter testnet.
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Rollup fears subside as decentralization progresses.
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Ethereum’s roadmap becomes clearer.
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ZK applications launch and are genuinely used.
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Sharding research becomes a hot topic again.
Feel free to reply here to Cooper’s views.
Derek
Meta-level prediction for 2024–2025: We’ll shift from infrastructure to the application phase of this cycle.
Some specific ideas:
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Over 10 major fintech companies launch their own stablecoins.
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ETFs begin staking.
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A Base-based consumer crypto app reaches over 10 million weekly active users.
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Every major traditional finance fund tokenizes its offerings.
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A crypto prediction market hits $1 billion in monthly trading volume outside politics.
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Bitcoin becomes a primary reserve asset among global currencies.
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A top 20 U.S. bank borrows via DeFi channels.
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A DePin network exceeds 10 million users.
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A major AAA studio launches an on-chain game.
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DEX trading volume surpasses CEX volume at some point.
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A mini-game on Telegram/Ton attracts 1 billion players.
Feel free to reply here to Derek’s views.
Geoff
Twelve months from now, I expect greater clarity on which agent-AI applications in crypto have product-market fit (PMF).
In the meantime, I believe we’ll see several applications gain traction and define the first generation of viable use cases. These leading apps will drive network effects on agent platforms, influencing which platforms become Schelling points.
The first step in this sequence is building compelling user experiences powered by agents. Some of the use cases most likely to gain early traction include:
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Token discovery, research, and trading.
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Airdrops and liquidity mining.
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Gaming: agents as playable characters and NPCs.
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AI companions.
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Autonomous content creators.
I’m very excited for the wave of innovation coming in these and other use cases. It should be an interesting time to be a crypto user!
Feel free to reply here to Geoff’s views.
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