Multicoin Capital's 2025 Vision: DePIN Robots, Zero-Employee Companies—How Will the Crypto World Evolve?
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Multicoin Capital's 2025 Vision: DePIN Robots, Zero-Employee Companies—How Will the Crypto World Evolve?
2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for the crypto industry.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsSource: Multicoin Capital
Compiled by: Bitpush News
2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for the crypto industry. The path toward the first crypto-friendly regulatory framework, combined with technological maturity in Layer 1 blockchains, DeFi protocols, DePIN networks, and stablecoins, creates fertile ground for the next wave of frontier innovation.
In line with our tradition, we will share the ideas and opportunities that excite us most for the coming year.
DePIN Robotics & Zero-Employee Companies
— Managing Partner Kyle Samani
DePIN Robotics—There are rumors that the incoming Trump administration will push to elevate autonomous driving (AD) regulation from the state level to the national level, creating a unified standard for self-driving companies. As GPU clusters grow ever larger (e.g., exceeding 100,000 H100 GPUs), transformer-based autonomous driving systems are maturing rapidly and approaching real-world viability. Following this, I expect explosive growth in robot-powered DePINs. Many startups have already raised capital from non-crypto VCs but haven't yet begun commercialization. I'm optimistic that many will adopt a DePIN model, shifting risk from the company's balance sheet to a global base of robotics professionals and "prosumers" (individuals who both produce and consume). Early adopters of these robotic products will capture data critical to developing autonomous robots. I know of one such company in this space today—Frodobots—and I look forward to seeing more. Our portfolio company Hivemapper, while not explicitly a robotics firm, is exploring many similar concepts.
Zero-Employee Companies—The foundation of zero-employee companies is artificial intelligence. With OpenAI’s o3 and other advanced chain-of-thought reasoning models, AI systems are reaching levels where they can think, plan, execute, and self-correct. This lays the groundwork for AI agents to perform all tasks within a business.
For zero-employee companies to function effectively, human oversight will still be required, as AIs inevitably make mistakes and may exceed their context window (the amount of information a model can process at once). Over time, as AI improves its self-correction and expands its context window, I expect the need for human guidance to diminish. I believe governance of these zero-employee firms could occur via DAOs, and I anticipate crypto capital markets will fund ambitious attempts at building them.
Startups often succeed where large companies fail because they operate under unique constraints. I believe the zero-employee constraint will unlock incredible breakthroughs across all aspects of business operations.
On-Chain Securities
— Co-Founder & Managing Partner Tushar Jain
With the incoming Trump administration and Republican sweep of Congress, on-chain securities are finally positioned for meaningful takeoff.
Trading on blockchains like Solana settles nearly instantly, eliminating the settlement delays common in traditional finance. Faster capital flows increase capital efficiency and should lead to more efficient pricing.
Blockchains ensure all participants have access to real-time, tamper-proof transaction records. This level of transparency and security stands in stark contrast to opaque, sometimes risky centralized databases used by traditional financial institutions. Transaction costs on blockchain networks are far lower than in legacy banking systems—one need only compare sending stablecoins on Solana (~$0.001) versus wire transfers (~$30).
Solana’s token extensions now allow fine-grained control over tokenized securities. Issuers can restrict holders to whitelisted addresses, recall tokens when ordered by courts, and comply with securities laws or transfer agent requirements and best practices.
Clearly, blockchains offer superior settlement through near-instant finality, low cost, and transparency compared to slow, expensive, and opaque traditional financial rails. The only real barrier has been regulation, and a more innovation-friendly SEC could open the floodgates for securities tokenization.
I don’t believe public equities will be the first type of tokenized security to see mass adoption. Markets that are less liquid, more opaque, and stand to benefit more from tokenization are likely to lead. This could include startup equity—when blockchains can manage cap tables for free, there’s no reason to pay Carta or AngelList. It might be fixed-income instruments, which Figure has long pursued. Or it could be LP interests in funds.
Buy Now, Pay Never; Spend Your Portfolio; Portfolio Margining
— Investor Spencer Applebaum
Building on Tushar’s insights, when all assets become programmable and tradable on-chain, we’ll begin to see novel products emerge. Here are a few examples:
Buy Now, Pay Never—Affirm and Klarna popularized buy-now-pay-later (BNPL). You’ve likely seen those widgets on Amazon and other merchant sites. Today, on-chain users earn ~8% on SOL and ~15% on stablecoins. What if instead of paying upfront for subscriptions, users could deposit their tokens with merchants—from web2 companies like Netflix to web3 platforms like Dune Analytics—and let the merchant earn staking/lending yields over time? The user’s tokens would be locked temporarily to secure payment. We believe there’s a strong behavioral economics component here—the opportunity cost of yield feels easier to accept than an upfront fee.
Spend Your Portfolio—When all assets are tokenized and aggregated in one place—a web3 wallet—it makes sense that users should be able to use their entire portfolio to purchase medium-to-large items. Imagine Alice holds $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in yield-bearing USDC, $10,000 in TSLA stock, and $10,000 in gold. She wants to buy a $4,000 sofa. Instead of converting USDC to fiat, waiting for bank transfers, making a payment, and then rebalancing her portfolio, what if she could automatically sell $1,000 each from her four holdings on-chain and immediately pay the furniture merchant? She remains fully allocated to her existing portfolio without needing to manually rebalance.
Portfolio Margining—Over the next 3–5 years, as major crypto prime brokers and unified super-protocols emerge, users should be able to margin across all their assets. For example, Alice should be able to short BTC perpetuals using her AAPL stock as collateral and borrow USDC on-chain. Or use her tokenized whiskey as collateral to purchase tokenized debt. We’re beginning to see integrated versions of this (e.g., Ostium bringing FX trading on-chain), but it becomes much clearer once spot assets are tokenized.
Verifying Off-Chain States On-Chain
— Investment Partner Shayon Sengupta
Asset ledger systems like Bitcoin and Solana represent a crucial phase in crypto evolution. These systems are fundamentally about money—enabling permissionless storage and transfer of value globally. Now, the cryptographic primitives powering these systems are beginning to intersect with non-ledger systems, unlocking entirely new markets. Within the next 12 months, cryptography will establish itself as a verification layer for data and computation in three novel ways: proof of network activity, privacy-preserving data processing, and identity/media provenance.
I view this as the convergence of “money cryptography” and “verification cryptography,” forming a coordination layer that enables new economic models and incentive structures.
Emerging Market: Zero-Knowledge Proofs Unlock New Possibilities
The first opportunity lies in zkTLS and the market it enables. zkTLS refers to constructing zero-knowledge proofs over TLS signatures in web sessions to verify arbitrary units of online data (e.g., your Equifax credit score or Strava workout history) in a completely uncensorable and tamper-proof manner. Several teams are already deploying zero-knowledge proofs in web sessions to build fraud-resistant, censorship-resistant applications. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples. p2p.me is a cash-in/cash-out platform in India leveraging network proofs to bypass fragmented regional market structures. ZkMe is a sovereign KYC verification system allowing apps to validate user identities privately. The same principle can scale to dozens of new markets—ticketing, reservations, and any system where fraud is a key liquidity bottleneck.
Homomorphic Encryption: Unlocking AI’s Potential
Second, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is entering its golden era. As AI models exhaust gains from training on public datasets, post-training and fine-tuning on private or confidential data will become increasingly important. This opens up a new design space for coordinating previously inaccessible datasets as inputs to models—especially as vast amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue migrating from on-premise to cloud systems. Token-based incentives will play a key role at this layer, and breakthroughs here will push leading foundational models even further.
Identity Verification & Media Provenance: Essential Tools in the AI Era
In a post-AI world where content generation costs approach zero, verifying identity and authenticity of content will become essential in consumer applications. Early systems like Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode use cryptographic proofs to verify biometric data or government-issued credentials, using tokens as primary incentives to drive mass participation. Similarly, standards like C2PA mark content at the hardware level to distinguish real media from AI-generated content. However, widespread adoption of these standards at the application layer may require token-based coordination mechanisms to overcome inertia in user behavior. These tools are critical for mitigating information risks in an AI-saturated consumer internet.
Trading Evolves into Multiplayer, Full-Stack Media Companies
— Investor Eli Qian
Trading as a Multiplayer Experience—Sharing financial wins and losses and speculating collectively is a deeply human, highly viral behavior. People love talking about how much they made (or lost!) in stocks, sports betting, or meme coins. Yet today’s dominant trading platforms for crypto, equities, and sports betting are mostly designed for solo experiences. Robinhood, FanDuel, BONKBot—none prioritize multiplayer interaction. Despite this, demand for social trading is undeniable. Users currently create makeshift social experiences via online forums and group chats. Much of Crypto Twitter revolves around these discussions.
One of crypto’s greatest advantages is permissionless liquidity. It opens the door for anyone to build multiplayer trading tools for crypto assets. I’m excited to see developers leverage the inherently viral nature of social trading to create rich multiplayer experiences in 2025. Such products would allow users to share trades, compete on profit-and-loss leaderboards, and jointly open positions with a single click or tap. The design space is vast—Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord mini-apps, and beyond. While 2023 and 2024 saw the rise of solo tools like BONKBot and BullX, 2025 will be the year trading goes multiplayer.
Full-Stack Media Companies—There have been many attempts to enhance media and content with tokens, but few companies have realized their full potential. Now, we’re starting to see the emergence of media companies that control end-to-end content creation—including tokens, distribution, and human capital. These “full-stack” media firms have the ability to push crypto primitives further than ever before. Examples include athlete tokens, creator tokens, live events with integrated prediction markets, and more.
Karate Combat is one such example. Rather than building around existing UFC fighters, it created a new combat league from scratch, giving it greater control over rules, distribution, and athletes. While UFC fighter tokens have limited utility, Karate Combat allows token holders to vote on fighter training regimens, fight gear, or anything else—only possible because Karate Combat controls both token design and athlete contracts.
The future of live entertainment, sports leagues, podcasts, and reality shows will involve deep vertical integration across content, distribution, tokens, and talent. I’m excited to invest in and consume the next generation of token-enhanced media.
The Rise of Alpha Hunters
— Investor Vishal Kankani
Several definitive developments in 2024 point to exciting new phenomena emerging in 2025.
First, launching a new token costs nearly nothing (~$0), and anyone can do so permissionlessly. This led to an explosion of token launches in 2024. Most were meme coins with lifespans measured in hours.
Second, market sentiment shifted back toward high-volume, low fully-diluted valuation (FDV), fairly distributed token launches—reminiscent of the 2017 ICO era. In such markets, centralized exchanges (CEXs) struggle to keep up with new listings due to their internal listing processes. We expect this trend to continue into 2025, pushing users toward on-chain trading and increasing liquidity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs). As a result, DEXs will gain market share from CEXs over the next year.
With the surge in token count and DEX trading volume, active traders will need more powerful tools and models to identify emerging tokens in real time, analyze market sentiment and on-chain metrics, detect vulnerabilities (e.g., rug pulls), manage risk, and execute trades efficiently.
This leads to the third key development of 2024: AI agents. So far, we’ve seen AI agents generate social media content to promote their respective tokens. I expect the next evolution to be “alpha hunters”—AI agents whose sole purpose is to seek alpha and trade autonomously in real time.
The Institutionalization Wave in Crypto
— Partner Matt Shapiro
We are at the dawn of the institutionalization phase in crypto—and it will accelerate at an astonishing pace.
Over the past five years, the crypto industry has made tremendous progress in core technology, product-market fit, and significant UI/UX improvements. Yet, institutionally, the sector has remained stagnant. A combination of regulatory uncertainty and career risk has prevented many financial institutions from meaningfully engaging with crypto—even offering basic crypto products to clients. With the arrival of a pro-crypto U.S. administration and the record success of Bitcoin ETFs, we’re about to see years of institutional complacency rapidly reverse as firms race to support crypto as quickly as possible.
In 2024, $35 billion in Bitcoin demand existed from entities unable or unwilling to simply buy via Coinbase. Since most asset managers and large broker-dealers haven’t fully launched crypto offerings, 2025 will see significantly more capital enter the crypto market. We’ll witness a wave of new ETFs launched to meet and capitalize on this demand—not just ETFs for new crypto assets like Solana (SOL), but multi-asset crypto ETFs, and hybrid ETFs combining crypto with traditional assets like gold, equities, or credit. We’ll see leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility-suppressed ETFs, staking ETFs, and more. Essentially, every conceivable bundle of crypto assets for institutional and retail investors will be explored.
We’ll see major financial institutions rush to launch fundamental crypto-enabled financial products. Every financial firm should explore creating product lines that enable their clients to trade crypto products. Institutions should seek to custody crypto assets and extend credit against them, just as they do with traditional assets today. We may also see a significant rise in stablecoin issuers. Any bank taking deposits should consider issuing native stablecoins. As I emphasized in my conversation with Visa’s Cuy Sheffield at the 2024 Multicoin Summit, every company needs a stablecoin strategy—just as “e-commerce” eventually became simply “commerce,” “stablecoin” will become seamlessly embedded into commerce, an indispensable part of everyday business.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. While not the most technically ambitious aspect of crypto, the scale, scope, and capital involved are enormous.
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