Greenfield Predictions for 2025

From greenfield xyz by the Greenfield Team – January 1, 2025

Crypto is still a young breed. It grows new limbs almost every day. Our most critical and demanding job as fund managers is to assess which of these verticals could one day develop into leading narratives and significant market opportunities. No core list should prevent us from keeping our eyes open for new opportunities across the crypto stack. At the same time, it is essential to set a certain focus in the increasingly overwhelming crypto landscape. The following predictions represent verticals across the Infrastructure, DeFi and Consumer stack to which we generally attribute large and disruptive market potential.

1_$10B in Based rollups – Ethereum will focus on scaling L1 again

Sometimes strategies turn against you if they are too successful: Ethereum Foundation learned this hard lesson from helping to scale L2s, making slow expensive L1 transactions almost irrelevant for everyday usage. In 2025, Ethereum will take countermeasures and focus on scaling L1 again. We expect a doubled gas limit and shorter blocktimes. The “Ethereum as sequencing layer” narrative will take center stage with $10B TVL in Based rollups/appchains and at least one of the top 5 rollups becoming “Based” by EOY.Today, L2 rollups have centralized sequencers that control the ordering of L2 transactions. Based rollups are a form of permissionless sequencing where L1 Ethereum validators are in charge of sequencing (ordering transactions) on the Based rollup (L2). L1 validators using MEV Boost today are already sequencing Based rollup (L2) blocks without even realizing it, as the complexity is abstracted and outsourced to the Ethereum block builders, which are incentivized to build Based rollup (L2) blocks as they can earn fees & MEV. All user transactions on the Based rollup (L2) are settled on Ethereum as a single large transaction. This transforms Ethereum L1 into a shared sequencing layer which has the potential to overcome some of the coordination problems of other shared sequencing layers. While also still offering DA (Data Availability) and settlement (Proofs) services to rollups.

2_10% of all onchain transactions – AI agents will start to take over

In late 2024, AI agents took crypto as investment advisors or even memecoin creators by storm. But this was just the prelude. Smart contracts are literally the perfect instrument for AI agents to interact with. In 2025, fully autonomous AI agents will start owning private keys, without their creators having access to them. People will trust their AI agents more than they will trust themselves (leading even to automated AI investment decisions).  We do not dare to predict which use cases and business models will emerge and be adopted as a result. However, we are confident that by the end of 2025, AI agents will account for 10% of all onchain transactions.

3_$500B+ in RWA’s – Primary issuance will move onchain

Onchain issuance eliminates intermediaries, reduces transaction costs, and drastically accelerates settlement times compared to traditional methods. Eventually, primary issuance will move onchain with the emergence of supporting industries of enablers and solution providers. For example, while real-world companies will have a primary issuance of their legal construct/shareholders onchain, compliance partners such as our portfolio company Keyring will do wallet KYC. 2025 will mark a significant step in this direction, assuming that major corporations or governments will be among the first movers issuing assets such as large-cap stock IPOs, government bonds, and real estate REITs, thereby validating the approach. Synthetic stocks DEXs will likely pop up and thrive (remember Mirror Protocol that allowed users prior to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem to create and trade synthetic assets that mirrored the price of real-world assets like stocks). 

Alongside the surge in onchain issuance, the total market cap of real-world assets, including stablecoins, will rise above the $500B mark. 

4_The order flow playbook – Actively routing will become market standard for consumer dapps

Highly frequented consumer dapps hold the user relationship and control the RPC to which transactions are sent. Later in 2025, it will become the market standard to monetize order flow. Leveraging this unique source of revenue enables especially early adopters to differentiate themselves from competitors by offering their services cheaper/for free to users (e.g., no swap fees, no subscription fees, gas-sponsoring, more incentives, etc.) and/or to have more funding available for the development of new products, marketing, etc. The emerging order flow playbook could even expand to offering aggregated and anonymized insights on orders to interested buyers (e.g. flows on DeFi tokens increasing, volume on memecoins decreasing, NFT orders becoming more/less frequent). Same applies to insights from intents (e.g. if there are many intents set up for recurring buys on token X, intents to buy NFTs with certain traits, top-up/liquidation intents, etc). We expect vivid debates throughout the year on how dapps may route order flows legitimately and net-positively for their users.  

5_The next iteration of social networks – Engagement networks will win marketing budgets beyond crypto projects

Engagement networks are the next iteration of social networks in which the users are rewarded for their attention and are incentivized for their actions. They are a marketplace between users who provide attention and projects that are willing to pay for that attention. Successful players in this vertical, such as our portfolio company Layer 3, are becoming a cornerstone of crypto’s marketing stack by leveraging their flywheel effect:

In 2025, new engagement networks will emerge and existing social platforms will enhance their experience by evolving to become engagement networks by directly providing value to their users. But there is more to come: Engagement networks offer superior sales/retention scores, advanced customer segmentation capabilities, and they cater to a very attractive target group for advertisers beyond crypto. We therefore expect that non-crypto-native companies will start to explore engagement networks as part of their marketing mix. Successful experiments with this new group of paying customers would herald an even more far-reaching development for crypto consumer dapps and the crypto economy as a whole: marketing budgets will slowly be reallocated towards onchain. 

6_Broad adoption – Stablecoins will bring the world GDP onchain

Stablecoins enable seamless cross-border transactions and merchant payments – 24/7, nearly instant settlement, global. Stablecoins provide the backbone to digitize and automate global trade, payments, and financial operations at scale, ultimately bringing a large part of global GDP onchain. In 2024, we saw crucial infrastructure improvements around stablecoins on B2B, B2C and C2C sides, with Safe, a Greenfield investment, being a key player. Today, stablecoins are widely used in DeFi and trade at all-time highs on both exchanges and onchain. They attract more and more interest in developing countries with unstable fiat currency or strict money market regulations. The recent acquisition of Bridge by Stripe, one of the leading payment providers to businesses, will now accelerate broad consumer and business adoption worldwide. We expect a growing supply of Euro-pegged alternatives. However, there are strong incentives for the US to push stablecoins, as USD-denominated stables are the dominant market leads and nearly all digital assets are priced in USD (Oil moment 2.0). 

7_Infrastructure’s Top 3 in mindshare growth – Bitcoin L2s, Confidential Compute/Privacy and DePin

In the Infrastructure block, three sleeping giants will finally awake and gain the utmost importance in terms of both public perception and developer attention: