Where will AI and encryption go in 2025? Six experts say

Author: E. Johansson, L. Kelly, DL News; Translator: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

As artificial intelligence dominates the headlines, experts say adding cryptocurrency to the mix will accelerate the trend.

Popular AI-related cryptocurrencies surged 160% to be worth nearly $55 billion by 2024. Meanwhile, investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into projects that leverage AI and blockchain technology.

Market watchers have reason to be bullish on the trend: Researchers estimate that the combination could add another $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

We asked industry experts what they expect from the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency in 2025.

Mark Beylin, Investor at Boost VC

The crypto space is quickly becoming a battleground for developing open source general artificial intelligence, a trend that will only accelerate in 2025.

We will witness an increasingly tight feedback loop, with more attention, capital, and talent flocking to the space to compete for a piece of the most important invention of our generation.

Adversarial crypto environments will become the perfect breeding ground for a new era of hardened models that are battle-tested to withstand attack vectors designed to subvert the intent of the developers.

Improved open source tooling will only further accelerate this trend, helping anyone deploy their own bots to fight on the big stage.

While some agents will use their ability to exploit large protocols to profit, others will simply find more efficient ways to extract value from human market participants who cannot possibly move as fast or know as much as they do.

Even human-operated bots will struggle with a host of new strategies that are not based on prior knowledge but have risen to the top through an accelerated process of natural selection, where the best programs have learned how to learn faster than anyone could imagine.

David Gogel, Vice President of Strategy and Operations, dYdX Foundation

AI thrives on data, and blockchain provides a verifiable, decentralized, and transparent infrastructure.

Together, they enable revolutionary use cases such as AI-driven smart contracts, decentralized data marketplaces, AI-driven trading strategies, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that use AI-driven insights to adapt in real time.

These technologies promise systems that are not only intelligent and autonomous, but also inherently trustworthy.

In 2024, we saw AI tokens gain popularity on trading venues like dYdX, and projects at the forefront of decentralized computing and AI attracted market attention.

The success of Terminal of Truths, an AI agent that autonomously performs tasks and launches a cryptocurrency, shows how far this intersection has come in 2024.

Looking ahead, 2025 will see further development of AI tokens and applications, fueled by innovations in on-chain AI integration and AI modeling.

Patrick Friedrich, Founder of onicai

2025 will be the year autonomous agents take off, and web3 will provide the infrastructure layer that coordinates and controls them.

Large Language Models (LLMs) will become more efficient, enabling better and better models to run on decentralized networks, edge devices, embedded systems, and user devices like laptops and smartphones.

This will go hand in hand with specialized LLMs for specific domains, and unleash a greater wave of accessibility and utility across more industries than we have ever seen.

Web3 tools for creating, running, and managing AI agents will give users the necessary ownership and control to transform AI from a service to a personal assistant.

This includes autonomous agents that independently complete tasks on behalf of their owners, becoming a form of user extension in digital and physical space.

Calanthia Mei, Co-founder, Masa

With the rise of AI agents, memes are evolving into something much more powerful.

These aren’t just for the big players — even teenage crypto traders are building AI-driven memes to mark their work and participate in the cultural frenzy.

The growing demand for AI agents comes with a pressing need for robust data infrastructure to deliver high-quality, relevant data and avoid bottlenecks caused by API rate limits.

If AI agents are projected to reach $47.1 billion by 2030, the data infrastructure layer behind them will be even more valuable.

Ron Bodkin, Founder and CEO, ChainML

The recent surge in memes related to AI agents indicates that 2025 is a year of increasing demand for advanced AI development, with huge growth potential, and our team expects significant developments in agent platforms.

There will almost certainly be volatility—this is cryptocurrency, after all.

But this trend suggests there is a huge demand for more advanced AI agents that can handle increasingly complex tasks and workflows, which in turn will drive further innovation across the industry.

In addition, 2025 will see the introduction of oversight and regulation of AI, especially with Trump appointing David Sacks as his new crypto and AI czar.

What form this oversight will take remains to be seen, but it’s clear that AI will be a key focus of the new administration.

We hope that any policies implemented will seek to empower consumers without hindering industry progress. ”

Yannik Schrade, CEO and Co-founder of Arcium

History’s biggest obstacle won’t be tokens — it will be ignoring privacy.

Without it, everything blockchain promises — freedom, self-governance, fair economics, community-driven governance — will mean nothing.

Privacy shouldn’t be seen as an add-on, a feature, or an entirely separate application. Instead, it needs to be a foundational layer of the blockchain technology stack.

The next big technological revolution will happen at the intersection of AI and crypto.

However, there are two paths: one dystopian, one utopian. To build a future where AI and human intelligence coexist in harmony, privacy and confidentiality must be at its core.