DWF Ventures predicts four major trends for 2025: DeFi, AI, Stablecoins, and Consumer Apps
Original Article Title: DWF Ventures' Selection of 2025 Narratives
Original Article Source: DWF Ventures
Original Article Compilation: How, Odaily Planet Daily
In 2024, the crypto industry saw increased attention from institutional investors, and ETFs and stablecoins also experienced steady growth. Therefore, DWF Ventures is optimistic about the overall crypto industry in 2025 and predicts that investment inflows will shift towards on-chain. DWF Ventures' focus on 2025 trends:
· Stablecoins
· DeFi
· Consumer-Facing Applications
· AI
Stablecoins
Tether and Circle have long dominated the growth of stablecoins. While stablecoins are primarily used as a medium of exchange and payment, we believe their role as assets is gradually strengthening. The profitability of Tether and Circle has attracted more traditional fintech companies to enter the stablecoin space.
· Stripe's acquisition of Stablecoin further demonstrates traditional fintech companies' strong interest in this market.
· PayPal is focusing on PYUSD and is driving its application on Solana by offering yields of up to 20%.
· The collaboration with BlackRock to launch USDtb has provided exposure for RWA yields through the Usual platform, while the launch of iUSDe marks a further integration—bringing regulated high DeFi yields into traditional finance for the first time.
In addition, DWF Labs is also incubating a high-yield stablecoin project called Falcoin Stable, scheduled to launch this year.
Therefore, we believe that with the accelerated entry of institutions, the application of stablecoins will experience explosive growth in 2025, and yield growth will benefit all users.
DeFi
With the growth of stablecoins, DeFi has also seen significant progress. The usage of many DeFi protocols has rapidly increased, and the protocol revenue of Aave and Pendle has reached new highs.
The trading volume of DEX/CEX spot and perpetual contracts has also doubled since the beginning of the year, mainly driven by platforms such as Uniswap, Raydium Protocol, and Hyperliquid.
With more liquidity flowing into the ecosystem, we will see more innovation, especially in the yield layer and lending mechanisms.
With technological advancements in throughput, latency, and execution, as well as upcoming projects like Monad, MegaETH, and Hyperliquid's HyperEVM, the momentum of DeFi innovation will be further enhanced.
Consumer-Facing Applications
Consumer-facing applications aim to reduce the entry barriers for non-crypto-native users.
The TON mini-app is an example where users can quickly onboard using the Telegram platform without creating a wallet or backing up a seed phrase, ultimately guiding users into the on-chain world.
A mobile-centric experience is on the rise, with prominent protocols like Jupiter and trading tools like Moonshot, Photon, BONKbot, ApePro gaining popularity. Therefore, this will be a trend in 2025, where protocols that can enhance user experience and introduce more retention mechanisms will gain a larger market share.
Artificial Intelligence
Over the past few months, AI Agents have surged within the crypto community, with aixbt consistently topping the charts. These bots process information and generate content at an astonishing speed, operating around the clock without the need for rest, far exceeding human capabilities.
Currently, AI Agents are involved in multiple areas, including discovering security vulnerabilities, code assessment, no-code frameworks, data analysis, fund investments, etc. We believe that with the more human-like behavior implemented by OpenAI's o1, the next wave of innovation will bring more interesting applications, especially in commercialization.
The number of AI Agents will continue to grow, and the competition will intensify. Finding the right Product-Market Fit (PMF) will be a key differentiator. With the widespread adoption of AI Agents, decentralized AI infrastructure will rapidly develop in various aspects of the crypto space.
You may also like

Consumer-grade Crypto Global Survey: Users, Revenue, and Track Distribution

Prediction Markets Under Bias

Stolen: $290 million, Three Parties Refusing to Acknowledge, Who Should Foot the Bill for the KelpDAO Incident Resolution?

ASTEROID Pumped 10,000x in Three Days, Is Meme Season Back on Ethereum?

ChainCatcher Hong Kong Themed Forum Highlights: Decoding the Growth Engine Under the Integration of Crypto Assets and Smart Economy

Why can this institution still grow by 150% when the scale of leading crypto VCs has shrunk significantly?

Anthropic's $1 trillion, compared to DeepSeek's $100 billion

Geopolitical Risk Persists, Is Bitcoin Becoming a Key Barometer?

Annualized 11.5%, Wall Street Buzzing: Is MicroStrategy's STRC Bitcoin's Savior or Destroyer?

An Obscure Open Source AI Tool Alerted on Kelp DAO's $292 million Bug 12 Days Ago

Mixin has launched USTD-margined perpetual contracts, bringing derivative trading into the chat scene.
The privacy-focused crypto wallet Mixin announced today the launch of its U-based perpetual contract (a derivative priced in USDT). Unlike traditional exchanges, Mixin has taken a new approach by "liberating" derivative trading from isolated matching engines and embedding it into the instant messaging environment.
Users can directly open positions within the app with leverage of up to 200x, while sharing positions, discussing strategies, and copy trading within private communities. Trading, social interaction, and asset management are integrated into the same interface.
Based on its non-custodial architecture, Mixin has eliminated friction from the traditional onboarding process, allowing users to participate in perpetual contract trading without identity verification.
The trading process has been streamlined into five steps:
· Choose the trading asset
· Select long or short
· Input position size and leverage
· Confirm order details
· Confirm and open the position
The interface provides real-time visualization of price, position, and profit and loss (PnL), allowing users to complete trades without switching between multiple modules.
Mixin has directly integrated social features into the derivative trading environment. Users can create private trading communities and interact around real-time positions:
· End-to-end encrypted private groups supporting up to 1024 members
· End-to-end encrypted voice communication
· One-click position sharing
· One-click trade copying
On the execution side, Mixin aggregates liquidity from multiple sources and accesses decentralized protocol and external market liquidity through a unified trading interface.
By combining social interaction with trade execution, Mixin enables users to collaborate, share, and execute trading strategies instantly within the same environment.
Mixin has also introduced a referral incentive system based on trading behavior:
· Users can join with an invite code
· Up to 60% of trading fees as referral rewards
· Incentive mechanism designed for long-term, sustainable earnings
This model aims to drive user-driven network expansion and organic growth.
Mixin's derivative transactions are built on top of its existing self-custody wallet infrastructure, with core features including:
· Separation of transaction account and asset storage
· User full control over assets
· Platform does not custody user funds
· Built-in privacy mechanisms to reduce data exposure
The system aims to strike a balance between transaction efficiency, asset security, and privacy protection.
Against the background of perpetual contracts becoming a mainstream trading tool, Mixin is exploring a different development direction by lowering barriers, enhancing social and privacy attributes.
The platform does not only view transactions as execution actions but positions them as a networked activity: transactions have social attributes, strategies can be shared, and relationships between individuals also become part of the financial system.
Mixin's design is based on a user-initiated, user-controlled model. The platform neither custodies assets nor executes transactions on behalf of users.
This model aligns with a statement issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 13, 2026, titled "Staff Statement on Whether Partial User Interface Used in Preparing Cryptocurrency Securities Transactions May Require Broker-Dealer Registration."
The statement indicates that, under the premise where transactions are entirely initiated and controlled by users, non-custodial service providers that offer neutral interfaces may not need to register as broker-dealers or exchanges.
Mixin is a decentralized, self-custodial privacy wallet designed to provide secure and efficient digital asset management services.
Its core capabilities include:
· Aggregation: integrating multi-chain assets and routing between different transaction paths to simplify user operations
· High liquidity access: connecting to various liquidity sources, including decentralized protocols and external markets
· Decentralization: achieving full user control over assets without relying on custodial intermediaries
· Privacy protection: safeguarding assets and data through MPC, CryptoNote, and end-to-end encrypted communication
Mixin has been in operation for over 8 years, supporting over 40 blockchains and more than 10,000 assets, with a global user base exceeding 10 million and an on-chain self-custodied asset scale of over $1 billion.

$600 million stolen in 20 days, ushering in the era of AI hackers in the crypto world

Vitalik's 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Summit Speech: Ethereum's Ultimate Vision as the "World Computer" and Future Roadmap

On the same day Aave introduced rsETH, why did Spark decide to exit?

Full Post-Mortem of the KelpDAO Incident: Why Did Aave, Which Was Not Compromised, End Up in Crisis Situation?

After a $290 million DeFi liquidation, is the security promise still there?

ZachXBT's post ignites RAVE nearing zero, what is the truth behind the insider control?


