Interpreting Messari’s 190-page report: identifying key points, grasping direction, and finding opportunities

Original title:The Crypto Theses 2025

Original author: NingNing, SevenUp DAO

1. Summary

Messari’s 190-page report is composed of the current situation of encryption (macro environment, institutional status, where the users are) + track analysis (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Alt L1s +infra, DeFi, AlxCrypto, DePin, Consumer, CeFi) + analysis The Division Choice Award consists of three parts.

Messari's core analysis frameworks include: block spatial economics, ecological map valuation framework, narrative economics, Schumpeterian innovation theory, etc.

2. Macro environment

1. Economic environment and regulatory environment

After reviewing major events in the 2024 macro environment, Messari predicted the changing trends of the U.S. economic environment and encryption regulation in 2025.

• 2025 is destined to be a critical year for U.S. encryption policy reform. FIT21 and the Stablecoin Act are the major regulatory legislative cases that have attracted the most attention in the market, and will promote the transparency and standardization of the global encryption regulatory policy framework.
• Unlike the optimistic views of ETF stakeholders such as VanEck, Messari cautiously considered the possibility of a reversal of Trump’s encryption policy in the report.

But in any case, it will be friendlier than Biden’s encryption policy.

Comments: Messari’s macro environment analysis does not have any special insights, the level is average, and it is not as professional as the macro analysts on Twitter. The main function of this part is to fill up the page count.

Looking forward to the market trend in 2025, many institutions are consistent with Messari:

• That is to say, the market trend in 25 years will be a Banana ForScale, with a new high in the first half of Q1, a sharp adjustment in Q2, and recovery in Q3 and Q4 to hit a new high for the whole year.

2. What is the organization doing?

In 2024, the main battlefield for institutions will be applying for and operating Bitcoin/ETH spot ETFs and promoting RWA (mainly tokenization of U.S. debt) business. Events such as Paypal's launch of the stablecoin PYUSD, Stripe's acquisition of the stablecoin company Bridge, and other events have made the boundaries between financial technology, payment and cryptocurrency begin to blur.

In terms of investment, institutions adopt a barbell strategy composed of Al and DePin. The total financing of these two sectors increased by approximately 100% and 300% respectively compared with last year.

Incoming AI and crypto czar David Sacks is an investor in Solana, Helium, Render, and Hivemapper. It is expected that the US government will seriously consider cooperation with the DePin project in 2025.

Comment: The main theme of AIxCrypto next year will most likely be Web3AIAgent. Capital- and talent-intensive heavy industry AlxCrypto projects such as Al democratization and AGI need to make adaptive adjustments in the face of drastic changes in the environment.

DePin is the favorite of North American institutions this year, and they are particularly interested in high-quality data collection DePin and new energy DePin. One of Solana’s strategies in 2025 is still to ensure that DePin happens at Solana.

3. Where are the users on the chain?

Messari cited A16Z’s report that approximately 30 million to 60 million of the 220 million active addresses are real monthly active users.

Users are mainly distributed in Phantom wallet, stable currency, Telegram applet, Polymark prediction market, Base and Hyperliquid.

Messari believes that the growth of on-chain users in 25 years will come more from the product power of Dapps, rather than the Bitcoin ATH news event or the legend of the MeMe coin’s sudden wealth. So it's very Bullish in 25 years of adoption of chain abstractions and aggregation front-ends.

Comment: 25 years will be a turning point for Web3 from the "fat protocol" era to the "fat application" era. APPChain/chain abstraction will become the mainstream paradigm for Dapp construction.

The biggest regret of the application layer in 24 years is that Polymark successfully broke out of the circle but converted very few encryption users. It is hoped that the 25-year chain abstract super APP can successfully sell crypto-native stablecoin services, high-interest staking financial management, and cyber lottery MeMe coins to consumers, and become a super phenomenon-level Dapp that is both popular and popular.

3. Track analysis

The essence of Messari's annual outlook report is in this part, which is one of the best windows for us to observe the views of the North American institutional industry.

Bitcoin

• Messari focused on inscriptions/runes, Bitcoin programmability, and BTC Staking.
• Inscriptions/runes will be revived by the launch of the Fat Penguin Consumer Chain mainnet, OpenSea currency issuance, and the NFT Renaissance.
• There will be progress in engineering BitVM2, the key to Bitcoin programmability.
• BTC Staking has inherent disadvantages compared to ETH Staking, and the higher economic security of Bitcoin ReStaking’s AVS cannot effectively convince users to use it. The focus of the BTCStaking project in 25 years should still be on increasing the penetration rate of BTC Holders.

Ethereum

• Last year, Messari was the flagship Anti-Ethereum. This year’s attitude is much milder, acknowledging the transcendent status of ETH spot through ETF. At the same time, it was pointed out that after the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum's Blob pricing mechanism resulted in L1 being unable to effectively capture L2's DA fees, which was the main reason for Ethereum's collapse in the 24-year competition.
• However, Ethereum’s native narrative/products at the application layer, such as Friends Technology, Farcaster, Lens Protocol and Eigen Layer AVS, etc., have not been successful.
• But Messari believes that fee income is not the most important indicator to measure the value of L1, but the ecological map is. From this perspective, Ethereum is still the best L1 ecosystem.

Comment: In 25 years, Ethereum will depend on whether it can incubate high-performance parallel EVML1 (Monad)/L2 (MegaETH) comparable to Solana.

Solana

• The key milestone events of Solana in 2024 include the Firedancer client’s lightweight solution Frankendancer, the new SPL token standard, and the state compression solution ZKCompression.
• Key milestones for Solana in 25 years will be the release of the Firedancer client, wider adoption of the prediction market governance protocol MetaDAO, the new large-scale Solana-based DePin project, AlAgentSummer happening on Solana/Base, and the adoption of the SOL spot ETF.

Comment: There is no super cycle in meme coins, and the popularity of cyber lottery is a special phenomenon in a special period. The Solana ecosystem must prepare for a rainy day and diversify in time to get rid of its heavy reliance on MeMe coins in 25 years.

AltL L1s +infra

• In 2025, Monad and Sonic will join Solana and Sui in competing for high-performance monomer L1. (3,3) BeraChain, driven by the token economic model, will also launch its mainnet.
• There will be a serious excess of block space in 25 years, and the voice of Dapp developers will be further enhanced. They will no longer be restricted by the ideology of the crypto community and will be able to build consumer-oriented use cases more freely.
• After the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum’s “seven-injury punch” has brought the DA narrative of the modular public chain to an end. Celestia and Avail began to transform into a global cross-chain interoperability coordination layer.
• The next generation of L2 with high performance + AltVMs such as Mega and UniChain will also reach the battlefield.
• Avalanche ushered in the largest mainnet upgrade in history, Avalanche9000. This upgrade will bring significant performance improvements. Together with Avalanche Interchain Messaging (AlM), it will build a liquidity center with the C chain as the center. The Avalanche ecosystem will have outstanding performance in RWA and Web3 games (represented by off the grid) for 25 years.
• The 25-year outlook for Cosmos remains uncertain, and when the Interchain Foundation (ICF) will truly take control of coordination is a key checkpoint. ICF’s acquisition of Skip Protocol earlier this month may accelerate this process.
• Initia, another giant project in the Cosmos ecosystem, focuses on APPChain interoperability and ecological role benefits, and will also join the ranks of powerful suppliers of new block space in 25 years.
• 25-year-old chain abstract protocols such as @ParticleNtwrk are accelerating the transition from narrative to productization. Chain abstraction is not a single technology, but a combination of technical primitives such as cross-chain bridges, messaging platforms, intent infrastructure, ZK proof aggregators, and shared sequencers.

Comment: When analyzing the Alt L1s +infra project, the explanatory power of block space economics is unmatched.

DeFi

• When the PerpDEX trading volume/CEX ratio will catch up with the spot DEX trading volume/CEX ratio has always been the focus of DeFi enthusiasts. The emergence of Hyperliquid has rekindled everyone's hope.
• Another focus is how to trade off between vertical integration and composability when building a DeFi protocol.
• The current structure of RWA is still based on the tokenization of U.S. debt. In 25 years, RWA will have two main lines: tokenizing U.S. debt DAO idle assets and exporting on-chain yields to the traditional capital market.
• In terms of points Fi, Pendle occupies a unique and key ecological position.
• In terms of anti-MEV, in addition to FlashBot's market game model, CowSwap's intention architecture appears.

Al x Crypto

• Messari divides AlxCrypto into four types: decentralized computing network, coordination platform, AI tools and services, and applications. Of course, Messari also pays attention to AlAgentKOL and AIAgent MeMe coins.
• Messari predicts that major events worthy of attention in AIxCrypto in 25 years include: Bittensor and Dynamic TAO becoming new AI project currency issuance factories, the work of Prime Intellect and Nous Research further enhances the feasibility of decentralized computing power training, and AI Agent will be OnChainized and integrated with AI MeMe coins are completely divided.
• SentientLabs, an open source AGI project that is fighting against commercial titans, will also receive greater attention in 25 years.

DePin

• As the inventor of the term DePin, Messari now subdivides DePin into physical resource network (PRN) and digital resource network (DRN).
• Messari is very BullishPRN sector's new energy DePin project Glow, Daylight Energy Helium, DAWN, GEODNET, Hivemapper, DIMO and DRN sector's Prodia, Filecoin, Grass.
• In 25 years, Solana’s dominance in the DePin field will be challenged by Base and others.

Comment: This part contains a large number of Alpha projects with potentially high profit-loss ratios. Those interested are strongly recommended to read the original article.

Consumer

• Messari includes Web3 games, MeMe currency and its launch platform, DeSoc&SocialFi, and NFT into this part.
• I have written many articles discussing Web3 games, so I won’t go into details here. Let’s just say that Messari has observed an interesting change. The gameplay design of Web3 games has begun to shift from Play2Airdrop to Pay2Airdrop.
• MeMe Coin and its launch platform, gamification and personalized design are the new trends of MeMeCoin launch platform. In short, it is OK to develop around the positioning of MeMeCoin, a cyber lottery.
• DeSoc&SocialFi, as a former product operation, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It still hasn’t done much in 25 years. From Solana to Blink’s top protocol Send, it has transformed into AIAgent.
• The NFT Renaissance and Web3 consumer IP led by Fat Penguin, Fat Penguin and Azuki will launch consumer chains Abstractchain and Animechain respectively in 25 years

Comment: In the Consumer section, the most Bulish ones for me are Fat Penguin NFT and Consumer Chain Abstract Chain. 25 years will be the year @LucaNetz becomes a god.

CeFi

It has nothing to do with retail investors, omit.