Author: OKX Ventures, Bixin Ventures, ABCDE Capital, Foresight Ventures, BTX Capital
Organizer: Scof, ChainCatcher
Editor’s Note:
At the beginning of the new year, the global investment environment continues to change, with various emerging technologies and market trends constantly emerging. In this context, how investors formulate long-term strategies and how they assess and select investment projects have become widely discussed topics both within and outside the Crypto industry.
In response, RootData, in collaboration with ChainCatcher, hosted this interview, inviting several representative investment institutions, including OKX Ventures, Bixin Ventures, and ABCDE Capital, to engage in in-depth discussions on investment trends and recommendations for 2025.
OKX Ventures will focus on promoting the deep integration of AI, RWA, stablecoins, and emerging DeFi in 2025. As blockchain technology matures, regulatory frameworks become clearer, and the global economy accelerates its digital transformation, these areas will play a core role in driving industry innovation and progress.
We will support breakthroughs in both Ethereum technology and ecosystem while continuing to pay attention to multi-chain ecosystems, including Bitcoin, Solana, Sui, and emerging public chains like Monad and Berachain, aiming to bring more choices and possibilities to blockchain infrastructure and application scenarios.
Specifically, we believe:
For more predictions for the industry in 2025 and investment strategies, please refer to our published “ OKX Ventures Annual Report: 60+ Project Layouts and 14 Major Trends Outlook ”
AI Redefining the Internet Economic Structure
The combination of AI and blockchain is redefining the economic structure of the traditional internet. The traditional model relies on a few internet giants controlling demand and content creators' revenue through advertising or other means, while AI breaks this pattern. AI tools can now generate and summarize content, eliminating the need for users to click links to access content providers, which undermines the economic model of content creators.
However, AI itself cannot independently participate in market exchanges and lacks the ability to operate and manage resources autonomously. Blockchain can provide AI with decentralized transaction and data management mechanisms, especially in building AI Agents, where blockchain offers the infrastructure for self-management. For example, AI agents can trade through crypto wallets, becoming independent market participants, thereby enhancing the role of AI in DeFi and other distributed networks, with over 80% of DeFi transactions potentially completed by AI Agents in the future.
The global AI agent market is expected to reach $1.81 trillion by 2030, contributing approximately $16 trillion to global GDP. The autonomy of AI agents is an important direction in current technological development. Traditional AI has mostly existed as an auxiliary tool, but with technological advancements, AI is gradually transitioning to an "agent" role, gaining more autonomous decision-making and action capabilities. For instance, decentralized AI chatbots will build their fan bases through decentralized social media, generate revenue, and manage their assets in cryptocurrency. Furthermore, these AI agents could become truly independent business entities, creating unprecedented value.
As technology matures, AI agents will also be able to better manage infrastructure networks like DePIN. The underlying technology support is Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which allows AI to operate independently without human intervention. These agents coordinate through consensus protocols of decentralized nodes, ensuring their activities and revenues are transparent and decentralized. The impact of AI technology on software development is also noteworthy. As AI agents can efficiently generate code and automate deployment, the cost of software development will significantly decrease. This change will accelerate the innovation and popularization of blockchain applications, enabling more small projects to launch at lower costs and iterate rapidly.
AI infrastructure and frameworks for interactions between multiple agents are worth long-term tracking and attention. As AI agents become increasingly independent, ensuring their compliance and autonomy will be key indicators of their success. Current investment opportunities in this sector mainly focus on the following aspects:
The current market size of DeFAI is approximately $1 billion, which has significant growth potential compared to DeFi's $150 billion. AI will enhance the efficiency of the DeFi market through smart contracts and automated trading strategies. Areas such as automated trading, risk management, and liquidity allocation will become important directions in 2025. AI will enhance the trading algorithms of DeFi platforms, helping them provide more accurate risk predictions and capital flow management.
AI will provide intelligent decision support for trading platforms like DEX and derivatives by analyzing market dynamics, social media, and on-chain data. By analyzing market sentiment, capital flows, open interest, trading volume, and other data in real-time, it will offer automated decentralized trading assistance to traders. Additionally, AI will transform wallets from mere asset storage tools into intelligent, personalized trading entities. It can automatically optimize trading routes, manage cross-chain bridging, reduce fees, and monitor risks in real-time to prevent users from encountering potential scams and bad projects. For example:
As agents gradually find their Product-Market Fit (PMF), multi-agent swarm intelligence and collaboration layers will gain more attention, promoting collaboration among more agents and forming an agent-to-agent economy. As more AI agents enter the decentralized economy, how to coordinate interactions among agents and establish effective market mechanisms will be an important focus for future development.
From the user's perspective, as these agents become more autonomous, they will ultimately form an agent-dominated workflow capable of automatically handling tasks, significantly boosting productivity. Agents will begin to use each other's services, creating the desired outcomes for users through these services and interactions, thus addressing the fragmentation issue among AI agents.
AI Agents will be active in protocol governance, facing risks such as smart contract vulnerabilities, malicious attacks, and technical errors, and may experience the first AI-driven governance attacks. Deepfake attacks have increased over the past year and are expected to rise by 50% to 60% in the future, with security-focused AI agents finding their PMF, and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) potentially growing exponentially:
RWA, Stablecoins, and New DeFi
By the end of 2024, the total market value of on-chain tokenized assets has exceeded $14 billion, with Ethereum accounting for nearly 80% of the market share, becoming the core driving force behind the development of this field. RWA has already accounted for over 20% of Ethereum assets (mainly high-credit-rated debt instruments like U.S. Treasury bonds). As macroeconomic policies and regulatory norms become more standardized, an increasing number of traditional financial assets are being transferred on-chain, bringing higher yields and further promoting the maturity of DeFi.
The on-chainization of RWA is a key strategic direction. Large asset management companies have realized that by tokenizing assets on-chain, they can achieve lower issuance and maintenance costs while increasing asset accessibility. As more traditional assets enter the chain, DeFi protocols are expected to gradually replace existing financial infrastructures, forming a new decentralized financial system.
The on-chainization of traditional financial assets will lead to "capital outflow." For a long time, DeFi has primarily relied on the cyclical flow of endogenous capital, such as on-chain lending through platforms like Maker and Aave or trading on DEX. However, most of this capital comes from crypto-native assets, which have strong reflexivity (i.e., capital quickly enters and exits when the market rises or falls).
On-chain activities related to RWA are expected to generate fees exceeding $100 billion annually. The inclusion of RWA brings external capital from traditional financial markets to DeFi, which not only enhances the liquidity and stability of DeFi but also supports its diversification. Especially in areas like lending, trading, and asset management, the on-chainization of traditional assets can significantly reduce market volatility and improve the predictability and stability of financial products, thus attracting more institutional investors. The tokenized treasury bond market has become a core component of the on-chain DeFi ecosystem, with a locked value exceeding $3 billion, accounting for 21.38% of the RWA market. We particularly focus on the diversified applications of RWA, including stablecoins in DeFi, providing stable liquidity and risk management tools for tokenized RWA:
Stablecoins in the DeFi ecosystem are no longer merely value storage tools; their roles have gradually expanded to the core aspects of payments and settlements. As the global financial system transitions to digitalization, traditional financial service providers and payment platforms are actively embracing blockchain technology. Stablecoins, as cross-chain payment tools, have become an indispensable part of the global payment system due to their programmability, low transaction costs, and high liquidity. OKX Ventures focuses on the following dimensions:
Protocols like Uniswap and Morpho are gradually evolving from single-protocol services to platformization, enabling stablecoins and other assets to flow efficiently, further promoting the scaling of DeFi. DeFi protocols can provide more flexible liquidity and customized financial products, offering more innovation space for DeFi application developers and creating more opportunities for the issuance and application of RWA assets, including stablecoins. Here are several key trends and opportunities:
As traditional assets gradually enter DeFi protocols, especially with the help of stablecoins, the boundaries between traditional financial markets and DeFi will become increasingly blurred. DeFi protocols can provide more efficient lending, clearing, and insurance services for RWA. RWA, centered around high-rated assets, will become the "engine" of the DeFi market, driving exponential growth in market size and liquidity.
Investment Strategy for 2025
Our investment strategy at Bixin Ventures in 2025 will focus on the following points:
Bixin Ventures has invested in over 100 projects in the past few years. For those with potential, we provide more support, such as white paper consulting and revisions, benchmarking against similar projects, sector research, competitor analysis, introducing media resources, writing investment research articles, and connecting with exchanges and other VC institutions. We not only provide funding but also "work" for the entrepreneurial teams to help projects grow better.
Last year, the Federal Reserve began a rate-cutting cycle, injecting liquidity into global markets. At the same time, the support for Crypto from Trump's team in policy suggests that we believe there will be a series of favorable policies introduced, such as Bitcoin reserves and stablecoin support legislation.
These factors provide favorable external conditions for project exits. Therefore, we believe 2025 will be a good year for exits; only with successful capital exits can we help more projects in the future.
In 2025, regarding investments in the primary market, we will be more cautious, considering the exit cycle, rhythm, and the rotation of different industries. We will pay attention to some promising sectors, not limited to the Web3 industry, but also traditional Web2 sectors like artificial intelligence and biomedicine, by introducing different industries to hedge the investment cycle itself.
At the same time, we will also pay attention to some opportunities in the secondary market, such as AI-related infrastructure and applications, DeFi categories (including Lending, DEX, Restaking, LST, LRT, etc.), and tokens related to U.S. politics.
Promising Sectors
As algorithms and data mature, ushering in a development singularity, we believe the timing for AI to empower traditional industries is gradually maturing, such as in the fields of intelligent driving, military, and efficiency software, which contain huge investment opportunities.
The application of AI in the biomedicine field can promote industry development, such as cancer screening, image recognition, and new drug development. We believe that the support of AI will bring many opportunities.
The intelligent integration of AI with blockchain asset tokenization and liquidity can create numerous opportunities. We focus on AI-related infrastructure, such as L1 with AI narratives, AI computing networks, data, and related applications, including AI Agents, agent development frameworks, AI+DeFi, AI+gaming, AI+social, etc.
With Trump and his team taking office, changing the previous ambiguous or even oppositional stance towards Crypto, numerous policies favorable to Crypto will be introduced, promoting the development of sectors like stablecoins and RWA.
With the emergence of Hyperliquid, it has gradually proven that optimizing underlying public chains and developing decentralized DEX is a viable path. Compared to CEX, which is constrained by regulatory laws in various countries/regions, DEX, including Spot and Perp, can naturally reach every corner of the globe, with a higher ceiling.
Although the gaming sector is currently somewhat neglected, it can bring more users into the Web3 industry, which itself can promote mass adoption, thus holding potential.
The logic is simple: AI is the biggest narrative both inside and outside the circle. Although the first wave of AI Frameworks and Agents is still too simplistic and many bubbles have burst, the next generation of smarter Agents that operate in DeFi or other sectors, as well as the infrastructure and applications for collaboration, communication, cross-validation, trading, and governance among Agents will certainly present opportunities.
ETH recently proposed the concept of Native Rollup, which is novel and should help empower and expand ETH L1. Hardware acceleration on Solana, such as Solayer, Magicblock, Soon, and new clients like FireDancer, will likely bring some opportunities for infrastructure on Solana.
RWA will also benefit from Trump's administration, with visible future support for WLFI, AAVE, Link, ENA, and other tokens, leading to more policy support for compliant RWA tokenized assets on-chain.
Our investment strategy has remained unchanged. We aim to discover disruptive innovations with long-term value. More specifically, we hope to find business models that solve large market demands in innovative ways; technological transformations that improve productivity; and tokenomics that change production relationships.
If we specifically talk about sectors, I believe that infrastructure linking DeFi and TradFi, as well as innovative products or advantageous channels for crypto payments, will be the theme of this year. We will be cautious about crypto AI, as it currently shows signs of overheating, and we need to be wary of trend-following entrepreneurship.
In 2025, BTX Capital's investment strategy will focus on three core areas: AI-driven blockchain applications, the large-scale implementation of RWA, and breakthroughs in next-generation blockchain infrastructure.
The logic behind choosing these sectors is that they are at the intersection of technological maturity, explosive market demand, and the improvement of regulatory frameworks, possessing long-term growth potential and short-term feasibility.
(1) Deep Integration of AI and Blockchain
We believe that the combination of AI and blockchain will unleash value far beyond that of a single technology. AI can optimize the efficiency and decision-making capabilities of blockchain, while blockchain provides data credibility assurance for AI. We will pay special attention to teams that have validated their effectiveness in real-world scenarios.
(2) Large-scale Implementation of RWA Applications
The core value of RWA lies in combining traditional assets with the transparency and liquidity of blockchain. We are optimistic about two types of opportunities: one is the on-chain mapping of standardized assets, which have high liquidity and clear compliance paths; the other is the securitization innovation of non-standard assets. Overall, we focus on innovative solutions that can overcome compliance and market access barriers. Successful RWA projects must possess the ability to prove their compliance.
(3) Upgrading and Popularizing Blockchain Infrastructure
As the user base expands, the availability of infrastructure will become a competitive focus. We focus on three directions: first, modular architecture, achieving high performance and low cost through layered design; second, user experience innovation; and third, cross-chain interoperability, ensuring that assets and data can flow seamlessly in a multi-chain ecosystem.
In 2025, new financial tools and structures for crypto financing will continue to emerge, with community-driven ICO platforms like Echo providing founders with more innovative opportunities. The first suggestion: use AI, become a tacit partner with AI early on, and fully leverage AI's potential to accelerate decision-making and iteration. Others include:
Choosing high-potential sectors is crucial, as they will attract a large influx of entrepreneurs and capital, creating momentum and bringing more opportunities. Small sectors are unlikely to yield large projects.
Find the best-performing projects in this sector, conduct more research and analysis, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and then leverage creativity to improve their shortcomings while inheriting their advantages, and promote the improvements vigorously.
Identify the core capabilities required for the project, compare them with the existing team's capabilities, identify the missing skills, and then find the corresponding individuals. During this process, pay attention not only to their professional abilities but also to their creativity, sense of mission, passion, and focus.
Control the amount of financing and burn rate; the market is no longer buying into the previous high financing and high FDV. It is necessary to raise funds and survive under relatively low FDV.
Focus on the core or surrounding areas of the main sector and narrative, striving to create projects with real users and real revenue. Last year, HyperLiquid, PumpFun, Kaito, and GMGN were all good learning examples.
If the sector is highly competitive, consider stepping out of the current sector and thinking from a different perspective. For example, when everyone is focused on AI Agents or Frameworks, consider what businesses can "sell water" to thousands of Agents on-chain in the next year, such as shared memory layers, communication layers, and collaboration layers among Agents.
I believe that the community is becoming increasingly important, and financing structures need innovation, making changes in allocations among institutions, KOLs, and communities, such as giving more quotas to KOLs and communities. However, it is essential to note that whoever is unwilling to lock up their tokens is certainly not your supporter. Entrepreneurs also need to do enough work to make the community believe in their long-term value. Relying solely on discounts or token giveaways does not effectively build a community.
For projects planning to raise funds in 2025, BTX Capital suggests building competitiveness from the following four aspects:
(1) Clarify Value Proposition: Ensure that the project's core innovation aligns with market demand and can clearly communicate its value proposition. Avoid vague "disruptive narratives" and focus on quantifiable improvements.
(2) Design a Phased Milestone System
Break down the long-term vision into executable short-term goals. Prepare comprehensive materials, including financial models, market analyses, and technical roadmaps, to demonstrate the project's execution capability and prospects; also set up risk buffer mechanisms, such as reserving 20% of funds to cope with extreme market fluctuations.
(3) Focus on Long-term Potential. Seek Differentiated Ecological Niches
Investors are interested in sustainable growth models, so projects need to demonstrate long-term competitiveness and differentiated advantages. Additionally, showcase synergies with strategic partners, such as technical integration plans between infrastructure projects and mainstream public chains.
(4) Establish Strong Industry Connections and Transparent Project Operations
Actively participate in industry events to build trust and recognition with potential investors and partners. At the same time, enhance trust by regularly disclosing verifiable on-chain data (such as TVL, user growth curves, protocol revenue).
Success in 2025 will belong to projects that balance technological depth, compliance capabilities, and user value. Regardless of the sector, the core lies in solving real pain points and continuously validating feasibility through phased results.