Crypto Market Analysis: Stablecoins, AI, and Memes in 2025

The crypto market in 2025 is shifting from narrative-driven to value-driven, focusing on projects with real revenue and profits. Key trends and assets include:

Stablecoins/RWA: This category includes assets tied to stablecoin growth and real-world assets.
- $CRCL: Bets on Circle's top stablecoin position; expensive but potential growth with market expansion.
- $PlasmaFDN: A leading stablecoin public chain candidate with strong backing and ecosystem development.
- $ENA: Represents decentralized stablecoin growth via Ethena, with strong fundamentals despite recent price weakness.
- $Ondo: Facilitates borderless RWA and US stock trading on blockchain, though with high valuation.
AI: Focus on practical AI agents with product/market fit, not just hype. Key event is the Bittensor halving in early 2025, with it remaining a leading Web3 AI project.
Meme: Continues to be dominant, with $Pump as the consistent leading platform and key beta asset.
Prediction Markets: An emerging theme with strong growth on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, potentially disrupting insurance. No major token assets yet, awaiting Polymarket's token.

The overarching theme is investing in projects with real revenue and token buybacks, with $Hype and $Pump highlighted as prime examples. Additional attention is given to Tempo as a potential major business-focused stablecoin player, backed by Stripe and Paradigm.

Author: Lao Bai

Looking back at the predictions I made about this round of main lines a year ago, I think I was half right. The current main and secondary lines have the following feeling:

1. Payfi - This is not wrong, but it should be more accurately called "stable currency". Now RWA can actually be thrown into this category

The most noteworthy targets on this line are:

$CRCL - Essentially, it is betting on Circle's position in the top two stablecoins. The current price of $135 is still not cheap considering the market value and profit. However, considering the 5-8 times expansion of stablecoins in the next 5 years and the big correction from $300 to $108 in the past few months, it may be a good opportunity to get on board. I personally invested at $115.

$PlasmaFDN - Since you don’t have Tether shares, Plasma is the only target you can buy at the moment. Of course, I will wait for the spot market and the main network instead of betting on contracts. Whether it is the scale of financing, ecological construction or social voice, Plasma is currently far ahead of Stable and similar competitors. The TVL of the main network is basically 3-4B. The current pre-market/contract price of 6B is also very expensive, so wait for the spot market to go online to find opportunities. Similarly, the trillion-scale stablecoins in the next few years will bring huge imagination space to the stablecoin public chain. Who will be the dragon of the stablecoin public chain is a big attraction. At present, the TVL of USDT of the old dragon Tron has fallen from a high of 83B to 77B in the past month. In the rookie circle (Plasma, Stable, Arc, Tempo, Codex, etc.), Plasma is currently far ahead.

$ENA - This is a hedge against the first two. With stablecoins being the clear-cut story, you should bet on both centralized and decentralized assets. The only decentralized asset worth buying is Ethena. USDE has already surpassed 13.5 billion, and both DAT and the fee switch are ready. The fundamentals are rock solid. Oh, and they also have the centralized USDTB, which is about to break 2 billion, and Converge, their own RWA public chain, is also coming... There are a lot of positives, but the price has been quite weak recently. Is it a scammer selling stocks?!

$Ondo - As mentioned in my previous Twi post, I bought my Crcl from Ondo. Currently, it's the only exchange that offers 24/7 US stock trading, no KYC requirements (via 1inch), and is backed by a major institution, making it relatively safe and reliable. If you're bullish on the borderless RWA trend of bringing US stocks to blockchain, Ondo is one of the few options. Of course, the market cap is a bit hesitant, with its high control and high FDV. Good stuff doesn't come cheap...

2. AI Agent - This isn't quite right. Last year's AI agents were Goat, ai16Z, and the like. They were popular for a while, but then everyone realized they were just repurposed memes, and the hype died down. This year, quite a few truly useful AI agents with potential for product/market fit have emerged. For example, Skywork on Web2, and @HeyAnonai, @gizatechxyz, @Almanak__, and @ReiNetwork0x on Web3 are all good.

My personal focus is on the Bittensor halving event early next year. If there is a gold mine around that time, I would consider investing. The leader is still the leader. Currently, the revenue of three or four sub-networks is slowly increasing. Overall, it is still the Web3 AI project with the most hope of running something.

3. Meme - This is absolutely true. Meme has been popular since last year, and even this year, there was a commercial war between major launchpads to grab the market share from Pump. However, your uncle is always your uncle. Pump is still far ahead and has begun to cut into the live broadcast track, starting to follow the Web3 TikTok route. The Alpha of the Meme track changes every day, and there is only one Beta: Pump.

4. In addition to the three main themes mentioned above, a potential new theme in this round is prediction markets. Polymarket's data has been steadily growing, and Kalshi's has been even more explosive. Its data performance in the past month has surpassed Polymarket by a wide margin. The primary market has been flooded with dozens of new prediction market projects this year, and Hyperliquid has even launched a HIP-4 proposal specifically for event prediction markets (HIP-3 is not suitable for many event-based prediction markets). I also saw an article today by an insurance industry expert suggesting that prediction markets could eventually disrupt the current insurance industry. After all, insurance is a financial wrapper around probability and mathematics. What if users could access and hedge these transparent probabilities and risk exposures themselves, rather than accepting the black box odds of insurance companies?

However, there are no secondary assets to buy in this sector, so we can only wait for Polymarket to issue its token. It is said to have a valuation of 3 billion, which is also very expensive...

Finally, there's another angle to look at the main theme of this round, or perhaps the only main theme, which is projects with real revenue and profits that repurchase tokens. From this perspective, there are only two tokens to buy: $Hype & $Pump :)

One more thing to add, among Payfi/stablecoin/RWA, the projects I personally pay the most attention to include CRCL, Plasma, ENA, Ondo mentioned earlier, and @tempo. The reason I didn’t write about it last time was mainly because I thought it might not issue a coin.

But after listening to the latest episode of Bankless Podcast, I feel that Tempo will eventually be released.

If the reason for optimism about Plasma is Tether's investment, the founder's strong execution, and the connections with major blue-chip DeFi companies and Binance, then the reason for optimism about Tempo is simply because of Stripe, the strongest B2B distribution channel serving millions of merchants, and Paradigm, the industry's most technologically advanced and well-known VC, who directly invested in it (not invested, but built it).

Hyperliquid's stablecoin investment campaign has demonstrated to the market the importance of stablecoin distribution channels beyond issuance. Perhaps the future of stablecoin public chains will be a dual-leading model: Plasma to Consumer + Tempo to Business.