- The AI-linked crypto market is worth almost $55 billion.
- We asked industry experts where they expect the industry to go next.
With artificial intelligence making headlines, pundits say adding crypto to the concoction will supercharge the trend.
Buzzy cryptocurrencies linked to AI ballooned 160% and are now worth almost $55 billion in 2024. At the same time, investors have poured hundreds of millions into projects tapping both AI and blockchain technologies.
Market watchers have reason to be bullish: Researchers estimate that the combo will add another $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
We asked industry experts what they expect from the intersection of AI and crypto in 2025.
Mark Beylin, investor, Boost VC
The crypto space is quickly becoming the battleground where open source artificial general intelligence will be developed, and this will only accelerate into 2025.
We’ll witness a tightening feedback loop driven by more attention, capital, and talent gravitating to the space, vying to participate in our generation’s most important invention.
The adversarial crypto environment will be the perfect breeding ground for a new era of hardened models which are battle tested to withstand attack vectors that aim to subvert the intentions of their developers.
Improved open source tooling will only further accelerate this trend, helping anyone deploy their own bots to fight in the grand arena.
While some agents will earn from their ability to exploit large protocols, others will simply find more efficient methods to extract value from human market participants who can’t possibly move as quickly or know as much as they do.
Even human-operated bots will struggle against a new swath of strategies which aren’t based on a-priori knowledge, but instead have risen to the top via an accelerated natural selection process whereby the best programmes have learned how to learn faster than any human could possibly imagine.
David Gogel, VP strategy & operations, dYdX Foundation
AI thrives on data, and blockchain provides verifiable, decentralised, and transparent infrastructure.
Together, they enable revolutionary use cases like AI-powered smart contracts, decentralised data marketplaces, AI-powered trading strategies and decentralised autonomous organisations, or DAOs, that adapt in real-time using AI-driven insights.
These technologies promise systems that are not only intelligent and autonomous, but also inherently trustworthy.
In 2024, we saw AI tokens surge in popularity on trading venues like dYdX, with projects at the forefront of decentralised compute and AI capturing market attention.
The success of AI agents like Terminal of Truths, which autonomously executed tasks and launched a cryptocurrency, demonstrates how far this intersection has already come in 2024.
Looking ahead, 2025 will see AI tokens and applications grow further, fueled by innovations in on-chain AI integrations and AI modelling.
Patrick Friedrich, founder, onicai
2025 will be the year when autonomous agents take off, and web3 will provide the infrastructure layer to coordinate and control them.
Large language models, or LLMs, will become significantly more efficient which enables running better and better models on decentralised networks, edge devices, embedded systems, as well as user devices like laptops and smartphones.
This will go hand in hand with specialised LLMs tailored to specific domains and unlock an even bigger wave of accessibility and utility across more industries than we’ve seen.
Web3 tooling for creating, running, and managing AI agents will empower users with the necessary ownership and control to transform AI from a service into a personal assistant.
This includes autonomous agents that independently complete tasks on behalf of their owner and thus become a form of user extension in both digital and physical spaces.
Calanthia Mei, co-founder, Masa
Memecoins are evolving into something far more powerful with the rise of AI agents.
These aren’t just for big players — even teenage crypto traders are building AI-powered memecoins to tokenise their work and participate in the cultural frenzy.
The growing demand for AI agents comes with an urgent need for robust data infrastructures to provide high-quality, relevant data and avoid bottlenecks from API rate limits.
If AI agents are projected to hit $47.1 billion by 2030, the data infrastructure layer behind them will be worth even more.
Ron Bodkin, founder and CEO, ChainML
The recent surge of memecoins tied to AI agents signals increasing demand and massive growth potential for the development of advanced AI in 2025, with our team expecting to see a major push towards agentic platforms.
There will almost certainly be volatility — this is crypto, after all.
But this trend indicates that there is overwhelming demand for more advanced AI agents that can handle increasingly complex tasks and workflows, which will, in turn, drive further innovation across the sector.
Additionally, 2025 will see the introduction of oversight and regulation of AI, particularly with Trump appointing David Sacks as his new crypto and AI czar.
What shape this oversight will take remains to be seen, but it is clear that AI will be a focus for the incoming administration.
We are hopeful that any policies implemented will seek to empower consumers without hampering advancements in the industry.”
Yannik Schrade, CEO and co-founder, Arcium
The biggest rug in history won’t be a token — it’ll be overlooking privacy.
Everything blockchain promises — freedom, autonomy, equitable economies, community-driven governance — will mean nothing without it.
Privacy should not be treated as an add-on, feature, or entirely separate application. Instead, it needed to be a foundational layer of the blockchain tech stack.
The next big technological revolution will happen at the intersection of AI and crypto.
However, there are two roads: a dystopian and a utopian one. To build a future where AI and human intelligence coexist in harmony, privacy and confidentiality must be integrated at its core.
The insights above have been edited for clarity.
Eric Johansson and Liam Kelly cover crypto funding trends for DL News. Got a tip? Email them at eric@dlnews.com and liam@dlnews.com.
