🧞 Web3 trends in 2025: insights from industry players

8 predictions for 2025

Epic Web3

Dec 23, 2024

Gm and happy Monday frens🖖

Just as ABBA sang: Happy New Year (or Christmas), Happy New Year (or Christmas), Happy New Year (or Christmas).

It has been an interesting (to say the least) year. Hopefully the next one will be even better.

To reflect on the past year and look forward to the next, we've got a bunch of useful content for you:

🎉 Must-see events next year
🧠 Predictions for 2025 from top experts
🧵 Top threads of 2024
📰 News

🔮 Epic Web3's plans for the next year

Our first stops are Hong Kong & Denver!

In Hong Kong we'll be hosting our next Telegram Builders Day (Feb 17th) with topics like user acquisition for Telegram apps, successful viral case studies and how to build successful Telegram games!

And in Denver we'll be hosting 3 events:

🥩 Restaking & Infra Day (Feb 25th) - expect a day packed with keynotes, workshops, and panels diving deep into the latest in the restaking space.

🧩 Modular & L2 Day (Feb 26th) - side event for web3 developers, tech founders, and enthusiasts seeking in-depth of modular stack and layer 2 scaling solutions.

👾 dAGI Summit (Feb 26th) - where visionaries, innovators, and pioneers will gather to explore the powerful convergence of AI and Web3. Together, we will push the boundaries of what’s possible in building a decentralized, transparent, and equitable future for AGI.

🛠️ Deep-dive: 8 predictions for 2025

About Ethereum, Restaking, Modularity, AI and Web3 in general.

"2024 saw Ethereum growing into a more robust and secure network with the rise of restaking on its base layer in 2023 that provided the year before. Today, nearly 4% of ETH is being restaked and over 100 EigenLayer Actively Validated Services have been developed—33 of which are live on the mainnet.

Layer 2 scaling is no longer just a theoretical ambition; it is a reality. In 2022, only Optimism and Arbitrum captured the Layer 2 landscape. With over 100 rollups in 2024, we are seeing an explosion of options, new data availability solutions, and diverse virtual machines. Such changes allow transactions to be processed faster and more efficiently than ever.

Another prominent use case is stablecoins which has attracted attention from crypto natives as well as new entrants. As one of the most widely accepted blockchain use case, stablecoins have played a huge role in making the industry more accessible and acceptable."

Altan Tutar

Co-founder & CEO, Nuffle Labs

"- The top 5 leading L2s by TVL will be Stage 2 in L2Beat framework.

- Linea’s Vortex prover will be 10x more performant than plonky3.

- More than 1M MAUs for card payments settled on Layer 2.

- All rollups will be ZK rollups.

- Many L2s and RaaS providers cease operating due to unsustainable economics, consolidating activity around chains with proven network effect."

Declan Fox

Product Director, Linea

"Shared security does not make any sense on a smaller scale, we need to get to thousands. We need to become all-encompassing because currently, if a new Oracle network launches in the shared security, everyone else that follows in their footsteps will be doing this. Optimally, the speed of innovation will improve. That’s what we hopefully will see in 2025."

Adam Efrima

Co-founder, SSV Labs

"The biggest change from 2024 will be the shift from theoretical advancements to practical, scalable solutions in blockchain and AI. High-performance blockchains, which have been under development for years, will finally become production-ready, enabling unprecedented scalability and low-latency applications. This will transform Web3 from a niche ecosystem into a foundation for mainstream use cases.

Simultaneously, AI in Web3 will evolve from hype-driven experiments to real-world applications like autonomous AI agents for trading, governance, and beyond. This transition will mark a turning point where infrastructure and use cases catch up with the immense potential of both technologies, reshaping how decentralized systems interact with intelligent agents."

Neil Han

Founder & CEO, Reddio

"The lagging protocols had this time to figure out the last elements of their design and start implementing them as well. 2025 will be production [year].

Protocols that are trading promises are not going to be as successful as they were before. So 2025 is the year to get it. Our industry is built by dreamers, but for some reason, they don't have imagination. You have to show them, like, look, this is the Oracle network. This is how it works. You have a registry, you have network middleware and you have off-chain parts. You need this, this and this to get you started.

The main goal for every risk-taking platform right now is to create a UX that is enough to be juicy enough even without risk-taking to implement."

Misha

Co-founder, Symbiotic

"Perhaps the key trends [in 2025] will be Hyperliquid-based products and a new wave of memefication: meme-ETFs, perp trading and other forms of speculation. Telegram social graph solutions are also expected to grow, from casual gaming to social trading. Onchain games combining gamification and financial incentives (e.g. Farmville + perp trading) may become an important driver of user activity.

The biggest change from 2024 will be that we may see the return of ICOs with a focus on retail investors. There are also signs of more projects emerging from the US due to advances in legal and compliance. Additionally, we should expect to see a growing trend around stablecoins as a foundation for payments and new products."

Arty Shatilov

Co-Founder, Nomis

"In no particular order:

We don't solve L2 fragmentation cross-ecosystems.
Stablecoin MCap breaks $500B.
“Sharding” research makes a strong comeback *outside of =nil; Foundation :).
The dominant ecosystem strategy will be product-led distribution (vs brand/marketing-led distribution of 2024).
We get real-time proving *but it’s not economically viable.
Crypto AI agents take mainstream media OR mainstream virtual influencers take on crypto.
2025 will be the year of the Super App. We’ll see 10+ companies emerge/enter, and at least two of them will have 1M+ WAU.
A mainstream AI company publicly rings alarm bells about the proof of personhood problem.
No more ETFs. BTC + ETH continue to outperform equities."

Avi Zurlo

CEO, =nil; Foundation

[We will see] increased interest in DEX, AI funds and AI traders. Regulation fragments liquidity on CEX, which increases volumes on DEX. Innovative products (AI-funds, memcoins, DeFi derivatives) attract users due to high returns. Tokenised AI funds and AI traders manage users' capital by automatically trading and managing funds via DeFi. Institutional entry through Bitcoin ETFs enhances the flow of liquidity into the crypto market.

Web3 integrates into everyday life via messengers (TON+Telegram, LINE+Kaia). A new ecosystem player is emerging - AI agents that automatically manage assets and funds. AI-influencers and AI-traders who trade and manage capital are appearing in social networks alongside humans, creating a new layer of the Web 2.5 economy.