“Together we will cast ourselves into the future.”

— Professor Trelawney

The top 10 crypto top 10s for 2025

When I got my crystal ball out in preparation for this year-ahead note, it seemed to be malfunctioning again — answering my questions about crypto with nothing but clouds — so I unfortunately have no idea what will happen in 2025.

Truth be told, I failed Professor Trelawney’s divination class (I thought my tea leaves just looked like tea leaves and couldn't read anything in anyone’s palms other than sweatiness), so even with a functioning crystal ball, I wouldn’t have much guidance for you.

However, my employment contract states I’m required to provide one list of crypto predictions each January.

So here it is: My top 10 list of everyone else’s top 10 crypto predictions for 2025.

10. Fidelity Digital Assets

Fidelity cracks the Top 10 mostly for its optimism: “We believe we are beginning to see early signs of mass diffusion and adoption.”

You may have spotted the typical TradFi-research caveats in there (“beginning,” “early”) — Fidelity Digital Assets wants you to know that this process of “mass diffusion” will take “decades.”

But it also predicts that 2025 will be remembered as the pivotal year in which the “chasm was crossed” to mainstream adoption.

Fidelity may have featured higher in this list if it hadn’t lost points by supporting its thesis with my two least favorite crypto use cases: “Nation-state adoption and increased corporate balance sheet adoption.”

But I admire its crypto-native-like confidence: “It is clear that investors are not too late to join the digital asset movement. In fact, we believe we may be entering the dawn of a new era for digital assets.”

9. Travis Kling

The crypto fund manager made waves at the start of the year with his thesis on financial nihilism which unfortunately turned out to be spot on.

He (also unfortunately) thinks we’ll get more of the same in 2025.

Kling expects that “crypto use cases will continue to struggle to find product-market fit in providing solutions to real-world problems” — but also that the “crypto market cap will reach $7 trillion.” (From $3.4 trillion now.)

Nothing could fit that thesis better than the current craze for AI agents with dubious utility: Kling thinks the aggregate market cap of tokens related to AI agents will reach $40 billion in the first half of the year, up from $12 billion now.

8. Kyle Samani

Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani earns eighth place here for the novelty of having a Top 10 list that consists of just one prediction: “By mid-year, using Solana will rival CeFi for all major finance functions (limit orders, market orders, borrow lend, perps, native support for passkeys, etc.) in terms of speed, liquidity and UX.”

More Top 10 lists should be as focused as this. 

(Including this one, probably.)

7. Everyone’s BTC price predictions

Everyone thinks bitcoin is going to at least $150,000 this year.

I’m naturally contrarian, so I can’t help but worry about an idea as overwhelmingly consensus as that.

But I’m also reminded that in the 2010s, Wall Street had about 161 buy recommendations for Apple shares against zero sell recommendations — and that worked out just fine.

Everyone turned out to be right about Apple, so maybe we’ll all be right about bitcoin, too.

Weirdly, I found the most entertaining price targets on Bankrate.com, which cites Chamath’s $500,000 target for October 2025, Schwab’s $1 million target if the US starts a strategic reserve, and Fidelity Investments’ $1 billion target for 2038.

6. Dr. Laurence Day

Crypto founder Laurence Day takes sixth place for posting the Top 10 list with the best mix of humor and substance.

Day predicts both that “nothing ever happens” and that 10 specific things will happen — and I somehow agree. 

Day also gets points for specificity: “At least two more zoo-based animal memecoins [hit] $500 million FDV”; the “AI Agent meta dies a bit in Q1, stays quiet until Q3, pending a TikTok moment for an appropriately zoomer coded one”; “Someone buys a Cryptopunk for at least 420.69 ETH.”

5. Miscellaneous

I liked several of the 2025 predictions from the Chopping Block podcasters: 

• An AI-based system will become a crypto scammer. (Robert Leshner)

• The crypto-AI market cap will at least 5x. (Tarun Chitra)

• A crypto “money game” (like freysa.ai, The Button Game, or Crypto: The Game) will go “mainstream viral.” (Tom Schmidt)

• “We’re going to get some kind of massive application-level compromise.” (Tom, again)

But I’ve labeled this entry as “miscellaneous” just so I could add a stray prediction I found from the derivatives expert Joshua Kim, who thinks DeFi’s share of the crypto derivatives market might quadruple this year to a total of 20%.

That may seem too in the weeds for this big-picture newsletter, but if DeFi hits that 20% target, 2025 will be a great year for the crypto industry. 

4. Blockworks Research ($)

My research colleagues take a typically understated, non-hyperbolic approach to their year-ahead predictions, but they add up to a very promising outlook: 

• “AI agent creators achieve popular mainstream attention.”

• “AI agents will accelerate their capital formation onchain, and start to generate return on that invested capital.” 

• “Stablecoins’ market cap will eclipse $300 billion.”

• “Base could potentially overtake Solana in DEX volume and transaction fees.”

• “New chains like Monad, MegaETH and BeraChain will win mindshare.”

If so, we’ll have plenty of new apps and chains to try, lots of airdrops to hope for and — most importantly — plenty to write about this year.

3. VanEck

The analysts at the 70-year-old asset manager VanEck often put crypto-natives to shame with their bullish outlooks for crypto, and their 2025 outlook is no exception. They predict that:

• The US strategic reserve really will happen.

• “2025 will be a breakthrough year for tokenized securities to launch on open-source blockchains” (emphasis added).

• Stablecoins are poised to revolutionize payments, with daily settlement volumes projected to reach $300 billion by the end of 2025.” (From $100 billion per day today.)

• One million new AI agents will emerge onchain. 

• “Ethereum blob space will generate $1 billion in fees driven by explosive layer-2 adoption.”

If even half of that pans out, it’ll be a busy year.

2. Bitwise

Bitwise earns a coveted second place here for its admirable mix of ambitious predictions and quantifiable targets: 

• “Coinbase will surpass Charles Schwab as the most valuable brokerage in the world, and its stock will top $700 per share.”

• At least five crypto unicorns will IPO in the US.

• “Tokens launched by AI agents will spearhead a memecoin mania even bigger than [they did] in 2024.”

• “The number of countries holding bitcoin will double.”

• The US Department of Labor will allow crypto assets in 401(k) plans.

• Stablecoin assets will double to $400 billion.

• “The value of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) will surpass $50 billion.”

Bitwise also has a bonus, 2029 prediction: “Bitcoin will overtake the $18 trillion gold market and trade above $1 million per bitcoin.”

I did the math on that last one and it turns out that shockingly, 2029 is just four years away.

1. Haseeb Qureshi

Finally, the “Head Hypeman” at Dragonfly Capital takes the top spot here for his spicy-yet-plausible predictions for 2025.

Unusually, some of these are even cautionary: Haseeb predicts a “deep bear market in 2025,” (but probably from a higher starting point), the proliferation of “autonomous scambots” (“expect this to become a real social problem”), and a “migration from financial nihilism to financial over-optimism” (as attention shifts from memecoins to AI agent coins). 

The rest of Haseeb’s predictions are more hopeful, however:

• “Super low-latency L2s like @megaeth_labs will push user expectations toward Web2 responsiveness.”

• “Stablecoin usage will explode, particularly among SMBs. Not just trading and speculation — real businesses will start using onchain dollars for instant settlement.” 

• “You’ll start seeing even large companies that run AI agents using stablecoins for agent-to-agent payments.”

• “​​EVM market share will actually grow in 2025” because code will increasingly be written by software engineering agents and there’s more Ethereum-based code for those agents to learn from.

• These agents will so dramatically cut development costs that “the amount of applications and experimentation onchain will absolutely explode.” 

So that’s my top 10 of everyone else’s top 10s.

Let’s hope everyone’s crystal balls are working better than mine. Because if so, I do have one prediction to make: It’ll be a fun year.

— Byron Gilliam

1. Judge sends Howey question to higher court in Coinbase case 

2. Yields up, rates down 

3. Fidelity exec addresses ‘too late?’ question, stagflation scenario

4. Starknet introduces SN Stack

5. AI could be the ‘biggest bubble’ since dot-com

Higher Bond Yields To Wreak Havoc in 2025

Jonny Matthews joins the show to discuss Fed policy and the labor market. Get his thoughts on the Trump Administration's potential impact and the outlook for US equities.

Listen to Forward Guidance on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube.