Blockworks: What are the five major changes in the crypto space in 2025?

Author: Davis Canellis, Blockworks; Translator: Wuzhu, Golden Finance

In the mid-16th century, Nostradamus made 942 prophecies in eight years.

He is said to have dictated each prophecy to his secretary as a poem. This was because he had been taking large doses of nutmeg to produce hallucinations.

Here are five cryptocurrency prophecies that may be fully realized by 2025. If they don't, they could easily be repeated for hundreds of years, just like Nostradamus's prophecy.

1. AI chatbots will gamify flash loan attacks

We rarely hear about flash loan attacks anymore.

Apparently, the US Department of Justice basically stopped them after arresting Eisenberg last year ("It's just a profitable trading strategy").

Until some evil edge lords trained an AI model to find potential targets in the dirtiest and most illiquid corners of DeFi.

After all, who’s to blame: the instant engineer or the LL.M. with a crypto wallet?

2. Bitcoin ETFs or Nation-States Will Get Hacked

Never mind that most ETFs have abstracted the actual handling of tokens away from their own responsibility — probably replaced by a WhatsApp chat with a Coinbase Custody support rep.

Next year will mark the return of major crypto hacks.

We really haven’t seen one in a while. Maybe the Ronin hack was the last one that actually did harm.

Beware of slip-ups by nation-states or ETF issuers, perhaps by stumbling onto a North Korean phishing email and getting a fake Chick-fil-A coupon.

3. The FTC Will Sue Meme Coins

You may have heard that the next SEC chairman should be more friendly to cryptocurrencies.

But that’s just the SEC. There are still a dozen U.S. agencies that may still take some real boomer action next year.

The FTC has gone after cryptocurrency companies in the past, including Celsius and Voyager, and has filed federal lawsuits against fraudsters who peddled fake investment schemes.

I’d be watching for the FTC to characterize random meme coins and start prosecuting them. The void left by Gensler will only be filled by another short-sighted regulator.

4. “Crypto Lottery” Will Become a Public Good

Crypto already has its own pseudo-lottery system: meme coins.

If you really like buying Powerball and Mega Millions, why not buy a random Pump.fun memecoin every week and hope to win big someday (if you can time it).

So it’s time for someone — perhaps from the public-interest-focused realm of Ethereum — to write an unstoppable, permissionless crypto lottery that pays out every week.

5. IRL streamers will adopt prediction markets

It’s almost too obvious to suggest that streamers like Speed ​​and KSI mint their own meme coins (or will they become social tokens?).

Say it now: major streamers will figure out how to use prediction markets to crowdsource their content.

Case in point: Speed’s suggestion that he’ll compete in the sprints at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics could be a prediction market. All of his viewers could bet on whether that’s the case, or push him to do any other challenge for that matter.