2024, The Year of Bitcoin and Solana.

2024 was brutal unless you are a BTC maxi or a trenches warrior. VCs, liquid funds, diamond hands, and true believers are all getting destroyed, and the future of crypto looks even more grim when AI exploded.

• BTC touched $100K, ETFs were approved, BTC Dominance 60% and TradFi adoption accelerated. 2024 was truly the year of BTC.

• Solana, the platform of tokenisation. At its peak, SOL is processing $36B daily trading volume, ~ 10% of NASDAQ of daily average , which is HUGE for crypto. Memecoin / AI coins meta made this happen.

• Hyperliquid is a BBH (Big black horse) in this market. They did a bold move by refusing VC funding, and their post-airdrop adoption proved there’s strong demand for non-KYC perpetual trading and “thick” platform liquidity.

• XRP , ADA , any Dino coins. Well, Uber drivers and US gov seem to love them, so I’ll give them that.

Beside that, I can not remember any pump that lasts more than 2 weeks in this mkt.

2025, From Casino to New DeFi + US Crypto.

Right after $Trump dropped, I observed that profits from the market weren’t rotating back into AI tokens. So I converted everything to stables except for some of my SOL position (Stupid).

It is getting clear and clear that after a few months of PVP, people are exhausted from memecoin and AI vaporware.

The whole AI space is wiped out, with most token down 70-80% from their peaks. The $libra incident has literally sealed the fate of this narrative.

In short, Pumpfun is going to 0.

So where the memecoin money goes? 💸

Without foreseeable catalyst in memecoin, the wealth effect is fading, creating a downward spiral that’s pushing players away from memecoin.

Meanwhile, in today’s crypto market, where:

• A lack of groundbreaking innovations in the crypto space

• Existing alts continue to stagnate and ETH is getting in trouble

• Fundamental suddenly does not matters

• Old memecoin are dead

• Poor survival rates for newly listed tokens, with only a handful lasting more than 2 weeks.

This sounds very bearish right.

At this peace, I think Investors would prefer more “risk-off” investment, and that is why I believe most of the money will be going into fiat-backed stablecoin in 2025.

And part of them would like to utilise their asset and earn some passive yield off the stable.

Therefore, yield generating “stable”, such as USDe or USDS would be very enticing to them.

• Stablecoin is the New Oil.

https://app.rwa.xyz/stablecoins

While the AI & meme market are getting demolished, stablecoin TVL continues to grow steadily, putting out a 3% MoM gains and exceeding $220B TVL by the time of writing.

Peoples who want to be safe and sound. They go for fiat backed stablecoin. USDT and USDC maintain their 90% market dominance, nearly undeafted thanks to their widespread adoption across different exchanges and payment platforms.

Peoples who want to put their stable in use, they opt into Yield-generating / decentralise stablecoins. For example, $USDe, $USDS, $DAI, $USD0 etc. So far, the sector only gets >10% of the pie, but they actually had an amazing year with the total TVL increasing over 70%.

Ok, I will cut the bullshit. The landscape now is:

90% fiat backed stable

10% yield generating stable

And I believe there is still room for new stablecoin (Yield) because:

1/ “low-volatility option” with yield always sounds attractive to crypto folks.

2/ Innovations can happen in new stability mechanism and strategy for capital efficiency that drive higher yield.

3/ Stablecoin found a PMF in crypto as both a currency and investment vehicles.

And hence this shapes my 2025 crypto plan.

My 2025 “Bearish” Crypto Plan

If there is no innovation / Narrative in 2025, I believe the market will have 2 directions:

• New DeFi Innovation driven by the growing stablecoins market

• Pro-crypto policy that pumps “made in USA” crypto.

1. Stablecoin and New DeFi innovations.

In the next 3-6 months, more and more stablecoins will be coming out as a $-based tokenized strategies that aim to generates competitive yield using different type of collateral or strategy.

Given the composability and the “price stability” of stable, they can easily work with different defi protocols and creates synergies with one another.

Examples of existing defi integration include:

1. Interest rate swap related product like @pendle_fi , @spectra_finance is an awesome designs that allow users to speculate on asset yields, effectively creating new markets for YG assets, including stablecoins.
2. Money market like @MorphoLabs , @0xfluid etc enable leveraged yield farming that contribute significant economic activity for stables.
3. Dex like @CurveFinance also provide a great venue for bootstrapping stable pairs liquidity etc.

Among all, my favourite Innovations are those that create new asset classes, for example, YT-USDe by pendle, which creates a new market on top of the yield “legos” and capable of providing an additional layer of yield for stables enjoyers.

Beyond yield optimisation, I also want to see some innovation in CDP design, particularly ideas that can get rid of over-collateralization and minimize liquidation risks, idea that can make decentralise stable great again.

After all, I expect to see more innovations emerge in the growing markets of stables, as this is the place where more and more money will flow into.

2. Pro-Crypto policy that pumps USA crypto.

Recently, Trump announced an attempt to push forward the crypto strategical reserve scheme that included a basket of “Made in USA” coins such as SOL , XRP etc.

While there remains uncertainty about whether crypto reserves will receive government approval, Trump’s influence on the crypto market cannot be ignored.

Some examples of Trump’s pro-crypto stance include:

1. Fired Gary Gensler on Day 1.

2. Retaining all BTC seized by the US to build a “strategic national BTC stockpile, (E.g., Silk road BTC is an example)

3. Launched WiFi DeFi Fund, launched $Trump coins, very crypto native.

4. SEC take back charges against exchanges and crypto project such as @coinbase , @Uniswap, @krakenfx etc.

Furthermore, the Trump team is likely to nurture the domestic crypto industry. Therefore, we can expect more bullish regulations for U.S.-based basket or cabal.

NFA but I would keep a close eye on these tokens since trump influential is big.

Summary:

As mentioned earlier, this is just a brainstorming and gut-feeling thread. None of these points are statistically supported. So please don’t take it as an alpha, @blknoiz06 and @CryptoHayes are the alphas if u wanna print.

Anyway, here is the summary for those who are too lazy to read 👇

Given the lack of crypto innovations and market excitement, if the market is still “bearish” in 2025, I expect there would be an increased demand for stablecoins.

1. Assuming investors want to put their stablecoins to work, I estimate that yield-generating stablecoin products could capture 20-30% of the total stablecoin market in the long run (Like stETH)
2. This growing stablecoin market will attract more developers and builders, potentially leading to new DeFi primitives come from the ecosystem.
3. Trump’s pro-crypto policies are +EV for the landscape in long term. Also , his policies are likely to favor domestic crypto development.
4. Therefore, it makes sense to monitor U.S.-based crypto token as some “news” can pump the token to moon already.

Disclaimer:

1. This article is reprinted from [Poopman]. All copyrights belong to the original author [Poopman]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. The Gate Learn team does translations of the article into other languages. Copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited unless mentioned.