From consolidation to rally, sharp commentary on 21 mainstream crypto narratives in 2025

Author: DeFi Warhol

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

Strong

Tokenization: RWA scale repeatedly hits new highs (around $20 billion), with more and more stocks and commodities being tokenized. As mainstream funds and custodial institutions continue to expand across major trading platforms, this is no longer just a conceptual stage.

Stablecoins: As a market with a market cap of $310 billion, stablecoins are gradually becoming the infrastructure for foreign exchange, payments, credit cards, and digital banking distribution, serving as the best bridge from the crypto world to real-world applications.

Prediction Markets: Trading volume and user numbers in prediction markets are hitting new highs. With the integration of mainstream crypto applications and traditional financial institutions, their adoption speed is accelerating.

Perpetual Contracts: Perpetual contracts still dominate crypto market trading volume, with derivatives trading far surpassing spot trading. On-chain perpetual contract platforms’ monthly trading volume has matched centralized exchanges, surpassing $1 trillion.

Top-tier

BTCFi: Bitcoin is transforming into productive capital, with billions of BTC used for staking, yield, and collateralization, among which Babylon and Lombard hold significant shares in BTC staking TVL.

Privacy: As more traditional financial capital moves on-chain, selective disclosure becomes crucial. Institutions need to achieve privacy protection that is compliant and friendly in payments, identity verification, and corporate fund flows.

AI: AI and cryptography continue to evolve, becoming essential tools for data processing, driving intelligent agents, and enabling verifiable computation, with enormous potential. The size of this industry is significant and cannot be ignored.

DeFi: DeFi is shifting towards consumer applications. Coinbase currently offers DEX trading and USDC lending services within its app via Morpho. DeFi TVL has reached a new all-time high, and emerging consumer applications are rapidly emerging.

Elite

Blockchain Abstraction: Smart accounts, intent, and embedded wallets reduce user friction, making blockchain invisible. Major improvements in user experience are critical for adoption, despite slower development.

InfoFi: Despite recent market concerns, uncertainty, and skepticism, InfoFi remains the refinery for data markets, incentive activities, and trading signals. Major progress is imminent for InfoFi—could InfoFi 2.0 be coming?

Robotics: Its prospects are grander than current progress. Hardware and deployment development speeds cannot compare to cryptocurrencies, making this more of an early-stage infrastructure phase.

ZK: It is undoubtedly a core technology, but as an investment target, it is more complex. Most value will accumulate in ecosystems capable of large-scale ZK technology application, rather than existing as an independent concept.

Software Infrastructure: Demand remains steady (e.g., RPC, indexing, interoperability, data availability), but competition has become intensely fierce. Nonetheless, high-quality projects may still emerge in this field.

NPC

Staking and Restaking: Restaking is feasible, but yields are continuously compressed, and the risk of slashing is real. Complex operations deter ordinary investors. The narrative in this sector has been overheated from the start.

DePIN: The ideal DePIN should integrate and cooperate with the real world, but many projects still struggle to achieve this. Regulatory pressure and lack of sustainable business models are hindering development.

L1 and L2: Rollups are now mainstream scaling solutions, but new public chains are developing less vigorously. Currently, most value is shifting toward applications, liquidity, and ecosystem distribution, not just another layer-1 protocol.

SocialFi: Although occasional peaks in user activity occur, user retention and long-term product-market fit have yet to be achieved. It may remain difficult to realize in the short term.

Lambo

GameFi: The Play-to-Earn model has fundamental flaws. While some blockchain games are still operational, most GameFi projects are just adding operational steps, offering worse user experience as a skin-deep DeFi.

NFT: We have seen multiple attempts to revive the NFT market, but market reactions indicate that without breakthroughs beyond JPEG images and avatars, creating new application scenarios, NFTs will remain stuck in current difficulties. Even attempts at integration in gaming have yet to make breakthroughs.

Meme Coins: The super cycle of Meme coins is lively, but liquidity is shifting toward serious projects, and their market dominance continues to decline. Retail investors are tired of being repeatedly exploited and chasing the next hundredfold myth.

Modular Blockchain: An important architecture, but poor narrative. Users are indifferent, and investors only care whether there is a clear, sustainable profit mechanism. Currently, most modular projects lack this.