With Bitcoin reaching new all-time high prices, the upcoming change of administration and the underlying infrastructure in place from past cycles, 2025 is set to become “the on-chain consumer apps year.” 

According to Hoolie Tejwani, the head of Coinbase Ventures, the venture capital arm of Coinbase, we’re now at a place where these Internet-scale blockchain applications are for the first time really possible. 

“2025 is going to be a big year for innovation, funding, and start-up activity in crypto,” Tejwani said to me in a recent interview. “The technology trends are all coalescing for a big catalyst in creativity and growth. The path to clear regulatory clarity in the U.S. will be a further accelerant.” 

Coinbase Ventures operates as a stand-alone venture arm, with a strong focus on early stage projects. They’ve made over 500 investments across the ecosystem including OpenSea, Uniswap and Farcaster. 

“We look for exceptional founders who are missionary and long-term, not short-term and mercenary,” he said. “If the idea is big enough, we’ll get behind it. We follow where the bright developer, hacker minds are spending their nights and weekends.” 

With the talent density at Coinbase, Tejwani said when folks decide they want to start something on their own in crypto, they try to be the first port of call. 

“We have many examples where investments have turned into product partnerships or broader strategic partnerships to benefit the portfolio companies, but it's not the first thing we're going out to underwrite in the investment,” he said. 

Tejwani said Coinbase Ventures will focus on stablecoins and the intersection of crypto and AI in 2025. 

“The current financial system was built before the idea of a programmable digital dollar was created,” he said. “We think there is 10 to 100x penetration potential for the stablecoin category. We were investors in Bridge, which was recently acquired by Stripe. On Tuesday, we announced our investment in BVNK, which is also pushing the frontier and stablecoin adoption. We're spending a lot of time in frontier markets, where there's a lot of demand from users for dollar denominated assets.”

He continued, “second to that is AI, which is affecting everything, and blockchains are no exception . . . We're all seeing a lot of really interesting experimentation with AI agents being deployed on use cases onchain.” 

Tejwani also shared his excitement about embedded wallets, socialFi projects and creator-based tools. “We’re seeing a new format for monetized attention and user-generated content, especially with regulatory clarity. As the design of what tokens can do gets firmed up, there's going to be some interesting things around social and attention-based token projects,” he said. 

CoinFund predictions

David Pakman, managing partner and head of venture investments at CoinFund, a crypto-native VC firm, agreed that this cycle will be consumer-driven with widespread usage. For example, stablecoin usage is up 22 times in the last two years, Gunzilla’s Off The Grid game now has more than 10 million activated wallets and the TON ecosystem has more than 36 million wallets. 

“We are likely to see multiple web3 apps (games, payment applications, social products, messaging apps) achieve tens of millions of users, with several surpassing 100 million users this cycle,” Pakman said. 

“We expect consumer adoption of crypto to meaningfully accelerate, and we will see people have more fun: on-chain gaming, socialFi and the continued evolution of DeFi and user-friendly products like wallets and payments will help crypto jump to more mainstream adoption,” he said.

SocialFi takes a hit

Rob Hadick, general partner at Dragonfly, a global cross-border venture fund, also commented on the 2025 VC market, stating it’ll pick up significantly with web2 investors showing interest again and the likelihood of the market opening up for new fund raises. However, he doesn’t believe we’ll see early 2021 or 2022 levels for quite some time. 

“The hottest verticals right now are the intersection of crypto and AI, stablecoins, and general infrastructure,” Hadick said. “Social has taken a hit, with none of the projects really working so far, and things like DeFi have been less of a focus for a lot of VCs chasing what they see as the ‘next cycle’ narratives.”