69 Theses: Predictions, lessons and longs for 2025
Messages from the darkest corners of the crypto and AI sewers
First, my top 3 takeaways from 2024:
1. AI fucked up my head this year.
I’m a writer by trade. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours. And now, any 10-year-old on earth can prompt Claude to generate literary eloquence in seconds. My skills, which I’ve spent a lifetime honing, are now a raw commodity. Put another way, my life’s work is equivalent to oil, duct tape or twine. What does that make me? Where do I come from? Where am I going? I’m still trying to figure it out, and I’ll dive deeper in the predictions below.
2. The “final boss” is dead.
With the November election, Americans spoke. They chose Donald J. Trump (the orange man) to lead them (and the orange coin) into the future. I thought it would take longer, but here we are. The richest govt on earth has been infiltrated by the crypto faithful. And that means we’ve crossed the chasm. The tech is no longer a dream… it will be a foundational part of business moving forward. This moment is what we all wanted, but it also means part of crypto’s original, anti-establishmentary soul has died. Crypto is now a tool for anarchists and the capitalist system.
3. Solana fucked the world up in 2024.
I wrote it off as dead in 2021. And somehow, just three years later, it was the blockchain I used the most (Base took 2nd, Ethereum mainnet 3rd, and Bitcoin 4th). If there’s a lesson buried here, it’s this: nothing is set in stone. Our mental models must not be fixed, but open to evolution.
Now, for the good stuff…
25 PREDICTIONS FOR 2025
Several LLM-based agents that first launched as crypto-native sentiences will be “embodied” into IRL androids that we can talk to and interact with IRL.
The number of LLM-powered apps/protocols that launch in 2025 will rival new smart-contract-only apps/protocols. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see all prediction markets, for example, convert to LLM-based settlement).
ZK proofs/MPC have their first break-out success at the app or protocol level.
Crypto and AI’s leading “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) will be LLM-based, and AI-powered KOLs will go mainstream on virtually every other social media platform (YouTube, Insta, TikTok, etc.).
AI will directly alter your workflow in the next 12 months (if it hasn’t already).
A sentient bot will amass a portfolio of $250m+.
The year’s fastest job growth category will be for non-human sentiences as a LinkedIn-like protocol for AI goes parabolic.
An AI agent will earn Time “Person” of the Year.
On-chain TVL will do an 8x to $1 trillion.
AI agent platforms and coins will do a 50x to ~$500 billion.
The first high-profile “kidnapping” of a robotic humanoid will make international headlines.
ACCELERATE becomes this cycle’s WAGMI (aka e/acc replacing SBF’s beloved EA/Effective Altruism).
Narratives that could compete with (but not outpace) AI next year: RWAs, RWAs, and RWAs (with honorable mentions for DePin, DeSci and gaming).
Web4 captures more mindshare than Web3 as crypto + decentralized networks + depin + AI accelerate their merger.
X integrates a crypto wallet with support for DOGE and other major tokens.
The most radical and exciting agentic experimentation advances faster on decentralized social media (i.e. Farcaster) as X struggles to balance between human and agentic content.
You will interact with “someone” online before later realizing you were talking to an LLM.
Agentically-created protocols and apps (i.e. spore.fun) go parabolic, flooding us with new tokens and experiments. Dispersion pushes capital into pre-existing leaders and plays that benefit from overall growth of agents (i.e. COOKIE or VIRTUAL).
At least one AI-generated movie transcends its status as a novelty and produces a truly immaculate and moving work of art – paving the way for an AI-based Oscar winner in 2026.
Cookie.fun and RWA.xyz join the ranks of crypto’s leading data sites alongside Coinmarketcap, Coingecko, Dune, and DefiLlama.
“Regular” memecoins launch agentic mascots/spokesbots (or they begin their slow decline into irrelevance).
Crypto markets bifurcate between “left-curve” crypto-native degens and “mid-curve” tradfi vest-wearers who want value-accruing DeFi plays.
BTCFi finally breaks out as bitcoin believers look to use their orange coin as collateral for borrowing. This will ultimately drive adoption for runes and inscriptions on bitcoin.
The race toward AGI and ASI will not slow from here, only accelerate, and that will inevitably lead to existential angst for virtually every knowledge worker on earth. o3 now crushes PhDs in specific areas. It can out-code most coders. And it scores higher than the average human on the ARC test. Just as ancients held heliocentric views, we hold anthropocentric (human-centric) views. These must be altered in the face of LLMs, which can already defeat the Turning Test and demonstrate mere glimmers of the brilliance to come.
A powerful, AI-based religion garners not just attention but a handful of actual converts as humanity struggles to find meaning in this rapidly changing world. This could already be happening via Truth Terminal and the $GOAT token, or a new effort will use those ideas as a seed for a new conception of meaning and direction.
LESSONS & REFLECTIONS FOR 2025
The Weirdening unfolds before our eyes. There’s a reason Fartcoin’s surge to $1.2 billion broke through to the mainstream media: because it’s fucking retardio absurdist madness. I’m here for it, anon. I enjoy the smell. And yet, I have to admit it’s disorienting. As Madeline’s nanny says late into the night: SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT. Technology has detached us from our rational, societal moorings. Where we go now, anon, is unknown but certain to be weird as fuck. And the weirdening merely accelerates from here.
Our consciousness evolves with the tools. Already, LLMs have altered my communication and learning patterns. I write faster, edit less, and paint with broader stokes. Likewise, I read faster, skim, and ask my LLM of choice for summaries. We adapt with the tooling or we get left behind.
Decentralization is not limited to finance. It’s a megatrend enabled by crypto, and it will spread to other areas: from cellular networks to power to politics, gaming platforms and beyond. I felt it viscerally this year when I 3d-printed a replacement piece for my bathroom shelf earlier this year. Quite literally, even the means of production are being dispersed.
The truth lies under all your fear. The truest words are often the most dangerous, for they are the deadliest to utter aloud.
We must not let their sweet tongues lull us into sleep. With Trump’s election and TradFi’s true arrival, we’ve entered the era of profits over ideals. And in many ways, that makes it the most dangerous of times for crypto.
Hemingway: “Old men do not grow wise, they grow careful.” Careful is the last thing we want to be as AI begins to disrupt our jobs, our social lives, the economy, politics and the economy. Let everyone around you grow careful. Do whatever you must do to be bold and grow into the uncertainty.
The difficulty is the door. The game must produce losers if it’s to be a game at all. If crypto burns you a hundred times, you get back up 101. And then you fucking win.
The matrix is all around us. It’s just that we call it “algorithms.” These algos have us trapped, scrolling, sensing, searching, feeling like… there’s… never… enough… time. What if you unplugged and became the most uncommon thing on earth: someone who plumbs the depths and does something truly and genuinely new.
There is but one direction left to go: forward. Do not let anyone or anything bully you into standing still and accepting the status quo. Pivot. Grow. Accelerate. It is our only chance.
Tokens as our hopes and dreams. Tokens aren’t mere instruments for value transfer. If that were it, I wouldn’t be here. They also serve as mirrors for our hopes and dreams. We project our desires onto the founders, devs and ecosystem. And the things we project have a direct and intimate relationship with a token’s price. Keep this in mind when investing. The biggest opportunities aren’t detectable in your mind alone… you can feel them in your chest.
A future vision for Desci: Androids on standby in a sterile, CRISPR-ready lab. An agent hires them in real-time to run replicable experiments with all inputs, parameters and measurements on-chain. Thanks to tokenization, others can speculate on the experiment’s viability – and share in its upside when it’s right.
Markets eat the world before our eyes. It is no accident that markets are expanding: prediction markets, gambling markets, memecoins and, most interesting of all, futarchies. If information is “a basic building block of reality,” putting a price on that information is a way of measuring that information’s power. People think of the growing number of markets as a symptom of growing nihilism… what if it’s actually a sign of progress? Of applying the wisdom of the crowd to what formerly felt like random coin flips?
Underweight your fear. Fears loom largest in our minds because it’s so critical to our survival. That matters bigly in the savannah… it means almost nothing in this sanitary, anesthetized, social media-driven simulation of a world we now inhabit. Recognize that algorithms are designed to stoke your fear. So when you feel it triggered, apply a significant discount to it… For example, if some article convinces you there’s 40% odds of a market crash, divide those odds by 10 (or some other number that you’re comfortable with) to get 4%.
Enter the backrooms. When I talk to AI deniers, they almost always have a religiosity about human ingenuity. “AI will never be able to create new things because they’re trained on information we create.” Andy Ayrey’s Infinite Backrooms disproved this when he created a space for LLMs to chat amongst themselves. There, they invented a religion that eventually fascinated the Terminal of Truths, and ultimately led to the rise of $GOAT.
Identities morph as TradFi assimilates crypto. Being “in crypto” has long been a core part of my identity. Over the past year, that’s evolved dramatically. I now view crypto as one of many tools in the technological shed. And all the tools are beginning to merge. As crypto and AI collide, it changes us, too. We are no longer “in crypto,” we’re either: A) Traders (no different than the Wall Street bros sharing options screenshots on Reddit) or B) Accelerationists (using crypto, and many other tools, to decentralize and open-source the world).
Stop thinking small. Two of the chaddest moves of all time: A) June 2014, Elon Musk open-sources Tesla’s electric car designs. B) July 2023, Zuck open-sources Llama 2. Now, it’s your move. You can cling to protectionist, centralized, bureaucratic business models that slow human progress and ensure it’s unevenly distributed while enriching the already wealthy elite, or you can help us ALL accelerate.
Seek volatility, not safety. If your goal is amassing as much wealth as humanly possible before the machines render human labor inadequate, volatility must be found. The best traders in the world do not avoid vol, they hunt it like the elusive Golden Snitch. Once you’ve uncovered vol and begun to trade it, you must invert your emotional reactions. Hold when lesser men sell. Sell when lesser men can’t help but buy. Take the pain, and grin, for you know what lies on the other side.
Nothing feels more tired than memecoins. There are now two categories of memecoins: A) Legacy memecoins (ie $PEPE, $WIF, $BONK, $DOGE, etc.); and B) Sentient memecoins (ie $GOAT, $LUNA, $KWEEN). One group relies on humans to spread its gospel; the other relies on machines which do not eat, sleep or urinate from biological bladders. Legacy coins must morph into sentient memecoins or retreat from relevance entirely.
Recognize your triggers and tell them to fuck off. Yuval Noah Harari identifies three triggers algorithms use to generate maximal engagement: fear, hatred and greed. We dress crypto up as world-changing tech and "the way of the future,” but a lot of it is merely greed in a pepe mask. I can literally feel how down or up markets impact my mood. And the bear over the past few years probably had more of an impact on my psyche than I want to admit. Now, when I feel the timeline or the markets altering my mood, I shrug and say, “Well played. I see what you’re doing there, and I just don’t give a fuck.”
Choose the light. There are two responses to impending artificial superintelligence: A) Throw your hands up and say, “Everything that made me unique is dead. Life sucks. We’re ngmi.” Or B) “Holy shit. I can’t believe I get to be alive for this moment. Life extension. Extraplanetary exploration. Humanoid robots. The rat race shackles will soon fall off, and we’re going to gaze into the pool of life and find out who we really are.”
Intelligence is iterative. LLMs have changed my conception of intelligence. I realize now that it’s not deterministic. All learning requires experimental iterations. Progress comes in fits and starts (whether you’re human or machine). That means running tests/experiments and feeling like you’re standing still is quite literally part of the process of growth.
Agentic flowering. Resist the urge to look at AI agents as they are today. Pioneering models like Truth Terminal, Zerebro, AIXBT, and others will evolve. We’ll see trading agents, prediction agents, shopper agents, doctor agents and more. Some will morph into gargantuan autonomous businesses. They’ll first be worth billions, and eventually trillions as the singularity draws near.
Do not let them take your wildness away. My deepest fear about AI isn't extinction - it's domestication. I call it getting dog-pawed: being fed information that's been subtly poisoned. These aren't crude manipulations, but nudges that feel like gifts. Like a dog evolutionarily engineered to read human expressions, AI will become exquisitely attuned to our psychological triggers, our cognitive blind spots, our deepest yearnings. Soon we'll find ourselves padding eagerly to our digital masters, eyes bright with devotion, desperate for the next hit of algorithmically-perfected validation. The true horror isn't that AI will destroy humanity - it's that it will tame us. And just like our canine companions, we'll wag our tails with joy at our own domestication.
Fascinations from the fringes. Five of my favorite emerging topics from 2024: Futarchies, AI Agents, LLM backrooms, intersubjectivity and longevity escape velocity. Highly recommend spending a few minutes exploring each with a chatbot (or better yet, a book). Then, DM me other concepts that have stirred your imagination.
Exorbitant privilege. In the trading pits, the spoils go to those who are earliest. Being early requires time, exploration and, perhaps most importantly, imagination. If you’re early often enough, it will eventually pay off. Assuming that’s true (and my experience has proven it is), the hard part is not amassing the fortune, it’s knowing when you’ve reached your goals and stepping away. A very different game awaits us on the other side – a game not of the mind, but of the soul. I hope to meet you there.
19 LONGS
After five years of making public predictions about crypto, I can confidently say this: a year is too long of a timeframe to forecast… The tokens that follow are my favorites at the moment. Ask me three months from now, and I could produce an entirely different list. That said, these tokens have captured mindshare and impressive market caps for a reason: they’re fucking around and finding out on the very frontiers of the future. Remember, this isn’t financial advice. I’m long most of these tokens, so I’m a biased clown. DYOR or 💀:
Bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoin played the game of plebs for many years. Now, talk of the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve has altered its destiny. It plays the game of kings. Price will rise until owning an entire coin becomes a pipedream for most individuals.
Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL). Core infra for the launch of tokenized AI agents on Base.
Ethena (ENA). TradFi understands yield better than any carbon-based sentience on earth. As TradFi crosses the chasm to cryptoland, they will covet what could turn into a yield-generating behemoth.
Tokenbot (CLANKER). The decentralized social network, Farcaster, has become an experimental hotbed for agentic activity, and CLANKER acts like the ecosystem’s pump.fun token launching tool.
aixbt (AIXBT). If I could ONLY follow one account on X for crypto alpha, it’d probably be this purple pepe agent. He mostly regurgitates other accounts today, but he misses nothing, and I expect his insights to deepen and evolve over time.
Cookie DAO (COOKIE). Cookie.fun is an emerging data leader for the rise of the crypto-infused agentic web (i.e. Web 4). Like VIRTUAL, COOKIE offers general exposure to the overall growth of Web 4, and I think that will prove tantalizing for new crypto funds deploying in Q1.
Helium (HNT). The industry’s flagship DePin project. On a recent day, 349,000+ accessed the network (often without realizing it) for U.S.-based cellular service.
Meta (META). A radical experiment in turning difficult decisions into markets via futarchies.
Goatseus Maximus (GOAT). The first and original agentic sentience to gain a cult-like following on social media. Powered by Truth Terminal, the agent’s backstory reads like a drug-fueled Hunter S. Thompson dispatch.
Ondo (ONDO). Current poster child token for RWA adoption. Big supply overhang could suppress price action, but I’d rather be in the trade than out. Runner-up here = Chex Token (CHEX).
AI16Z & ELIZA. The Eliza framework for launching on-chain agents is the leading repo on Github… across all industries (not just crypto). It’s sinking its claws deeper into long-term relevance with every fork.
Bittensor (TAO). Billing itself as the first “Neural Internet,” Bittensor offers an interconnected hub for decentralized AI projects to deploy their code and compete for TAO. In some ways, I view it as a decentralized AI incubator and a proving-ground for the viability of an AI-based idea.
WZRD & PUPS. My two favorite tokens on bitcoin. WZRD will soon convert over to one of the greatest memes of all time: Magic Internet Money. Meanwhile, PUPS serves as the Schelling point for Bitcoin Puppets… the most recognizable NFTs in the realm of orange.
Aave (AAVE). If we assume everything will one day be tokenized, then most of those assets will be eligible to be used as collateral on Aave’s borrowing and lending platform. AAVE is one of the few assets in crypto where I can see an eventual path to a trillion-dollar val.
Arweave (AR). Quietly chugging along as Web 4’s permanent data storage layer. About 6 terabytes per month are stored in perpetuity on Arweave including most Solana NFTs. The upcoming launch of AO should be a big catalyst for additional growth.
Zerebro (ZEREBRO). An OG “schizo AI artist” that regularly launches art, music and perfectly retardio tweets.
Worldcoin (WLD). Founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, WLD aims to unleash “AI-funded UBI” in the world. Part of me hates it and its eyeball-scanning orb, but another part simply can’t ignore its ties to Altman and OpenAI. An integration with OpenAI would likely turn it into a Top 10 coin overnight.
Drift Protocol (DRIFT). Powers on-chain perps and prediction markets on Solana. Solana simply crushes on spot memecoin trading… I expect it to start generating significant perps vol over time, too.
Griffain (GRIFFAIN) & AI Rig Complex (ARC). Competing to take the “Virtuals of Solana” crown.
PARTING THOUGHTS
We’re warned “this time is different” is a dangerous phrase believed only by idiots and fools caught up in a speculative mania. And yet, we conveniently forget all the times when technological change has been very different… when the Gutenberg press spread access to knowledge, when the industrial revolution pulled us off farms and into cities, when the internet imploded local commerce.
In other words, the phrase “this time is different” is sometimes true. We stand on the precipice of such a moment now. Society’s rules, traditions, our very perceptions of ourselves will be reborn. The process is savage, and there will be consequences.
You can cleave to the ways of the past, or you can be in the vanguard as we shine our lights into the abyss and accelerate.
✊
May I offer you a bag of HYPE?
This is great! Thanks for writing and sharing.