2025 Encryption Landscape: The Battle of Virtual Machines, the Rise of Chain Abstraction, and a New Round of AI Explosion

Author: 0xNairolf, Crypto Kol
Original compilation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor 's note: This article looks forward to the key trends in the encryption field in 2025, including the rise of altVMs and Chain abstraction technology, promoting cross-chain transactions and a simpler user experience. The new generation of L1 platforms and Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS) will continue to develop, and AI technology, especially AI agents, will play an important role in more applications. At the same time, projects such as pendle fi and nillionnetwork will also usher in new breakthroughs, injecting new vitality into the encryption market.

The following is the original content (the original content has been edited for ease of reading and understanding):

What I’d most like to see developed in 2025 is:

altVMs

altVMs has had a great year. fuel network has successfully launched on mainnet, cartesiproject continues to move forward, and MoveVM has gained some adoption with support from Aptos, SuiNetwork and movementlabsxyz. 2025 may become the year of promise for altVMs, bringing about the next wave of on-chain application explosions.

fluentxyz and its hybrid execution approach will play a key role in this area. By fusing EVM, SVM and Wasm in one execution environment, Fluent may become the solution of choice for developers looking for the most complete and flexible way to build applications. The coolest part? This design is extensible, meaning that any virtual machine can be added, and it may eventually become the "final BOSS" of the virtual machine.

Chain abstraction

Chain abstraction hit the big time in 2024. It started out as a rough idea: create a user experience that allows users to operate as smoothly as using a single chain, even if there are hundreds of chains working together. No more days of needing to switch wallets, manage multiple gas tokens, or worst of all

• cross-chain bridges.

UniversalX released by ParticleNtwrk allows you to trade any token on any chain through a single interface. It feels like Binance, but many new products will emerge on the chain, and more importantly, many existing projects will start using these solutions plan. This narrative is well worth watching, showing a true collaboration between EverclearOrg, SOCKETProtocol and NEARProtocol, as well as sedaprotocol and routescanio, and 2025 will be the year to introduce users to these new solutions.

L1s

A year of crypto without new L1 wouldn't be that interesting, and Sui and Aptos are clearly the stars of the space in 2024. For 2025? We have a lot to look forward to. Monad xyz, berachain and Hyperliquid X may become the "holy trinity". Hyperliquid's HyperEVM release is worth watching, especially with the recent buzz surrounding Hyperliquid. How the entire Hyperliquid ecosystem connects with exchanges will be an exciting point to watch.

RaaS

This is a less discussed narrative, why? That's probably because it's a boring industry, but looking back, boring industries are often the most interesting. Rollups and L2 have been a hot topic in the crypto space in 2024, and spoiler: this trend isn’t changing anytime soon. As inkonchain and AbstractChain are released in the coming months, the debate about L2 will continue, but one thing is clear: there will be more and more L2.

Whether universal or application-specific, the numbers speak for themselves. Rollup-A-S-A-Service platforms like Calderaxyz, which has launched around 100 chains this year, offer countless integrations and customizations from day one. conduitxyz and alt layers are following the same pattern. The needs of RaaS providers are difficult to ignore.

AI

According to data from kaitoai, AI has accounted for more than 40% of the attention this year, which is crazy. My gut feeling is that this is just the beginning. ai16 zdao's Eliza GitHub repository has been one of the most talked about projects in the past few months. Could this be a way to bring new developers into the crypto space? Time will tell, but it certainly looks like an interesting Trojan Horse.

We've seen the first real-world use cases for the aixbt agent, which is built with virtuals io and has gained significant traction in the CT community while providing very accurate information. Will our future revolve around the idea of ​​reading AI agents? Who knows, but in 2025, more AI agents will be taking on tasks once performed by humans.

Other items mentioned:

pendle fi continues to grow exponentially and can now be considered a DeFi OG. $10B TVL in 2025?

kaitoai leads the pioneer of InfoFi, what will the future look like? Next year may give us the answer.

Polymer Labs will be a strong contender in the interoperability space, which I think is an important topic in 2025.

OndoFinance is bringing big players on-chain, RWA and tokenization are here to stay, but they haven’t broken through yet.

Is 2025 the year of friendlier regulations?

nillionnetwork’s mainnet is scheduled to go live in February, which could be a major breakthrough as privacy concerns increase. Extra bonus points? It may trigger a new wave of on-chain applications.

See you in 2025