The cryptocurrency has evolved quickly, and on January 7, 2025, venture capital giant a16Z Crypto has identified five key trends that will shape the cryptocurrency landscape in 2025. Here, Partner Daren Matsuoka provided thoughts on those indicators that might affect the future, including mobile wallet adoption and new transaction fee moves.
In 2024, mobile crypto wallet popularity skyrocketed, with over 35 million monthly users interplaying with apps such as Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet. Additionally, Phantom and World App, among other Solana-focused projects, are gaining traction.
Mobile Wallets Drive Crypto Adoption and Financial Inclusion
Matsuoka said mobile wallets have become an informal barometer of retail investor interest, noting app rankings mirror crypto price trends. However, their growth needs to overcome these challenges: security, privacy, and usability.
Driven by efforts to serve unbanked populations, Statista says Asia leads independent adoption of mobile wallets. He believes future innovations of mobile wallets can come from these markets and make for transformative financial inclusion.
And in 2024, as stablecoins gained mainstream adoption thanks to lower transaction fees and truly practical use cases like remittances, cross-border payments, and inflation hedging in high-inflation countries like Argentina and Turkey, stables became the focus everyone wanted to talk about.
“Stablecoins are already the cheapest way to send a dollar, and we expect enterprises will increasingly accept stablecoins for payments.”
Daren Matsuoka
But such a lack of a dominant stablecoin payment system gives rise to innovation. The reality of stablecoin is the lack of substantiation, and that’s why Visa’s development of tools to track genuine stablecoin transactions means more mainstream adoption.
Matsuoka noted “stablecoin payments are gaining momentum and could shape out as a key metric in 2025.”
Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded products (ETPs) are finally on top in 2024: the first was, and let me repeat that word, approved by regulators.
Investors have heaved in 515,000 BTC ($110 billion) and 611,000 ETH ($13 billion) into ETPs, a sum Matsuoka believes needs to be reached by Goldman Sachs and others to bring these products into retail portfolios.
By tracking the on-chain activity of ETP custodians, you can observe trends in institutional adoption and may see higher net inflows over the coming years.
The domination of centralized exchanges (CEXs) is being eaten away by decentralized exchanges (DEXs), which account for almost 11% of total spot trading volume. While this is progress, the community is still moving slowly, as it took four years to hold the market share DEXs have today.
“Recently, DEX volume hit an all-time high — driven by a major uptick in transaction volume on high-throughput chains like Coinbase’s Base and Solana as new users entered the space.”
Daren Matsuoka
And Matsuoka expects DEXs to grow in 2025, but retail investors may not jump en masse away from centralized offerings. As there is a key area, we can expect to see the evolution of DEXs.
As Dapp’s continue to rise in popularity, transaction fees will become a necessary and important marker for a blockchain network’s popularity. Though Solana’s transaction costs are orders of magnitude lower than Ethereum, it collected more in total fees than Ethereum in 2024 for the first time.
Matsuoka stresses that the fees are meant to reflect economic activity and user engagement but have to be set at the right level to avoid scaring users off. He added: “In the long game, the total dollar value of fees paid will be a key metric for measuring the industry’s progress in the long game.”
These five metrics from a16z Crypto’s roadmap for 2025 are a tangible roadmap to understand how the crypto industry is evolving. Innovations in mobile wallets, stablecoins and decentralized exchanges combined with institutional adoption of ETP’s and maturing fee markets make the future of crypto seem more promising but more complex than ever.
