🧭 This is still the way

Why are we here?

At some point, perhaps even a decade ago, a case could be made that censorship resistance was the primary use case for crypto. 

Banking the unbanked is unquestionably a noble goal. So is building out global blockchain infrastructure, to the point that individuals living under totalitarian regimes or rampant inflation have an accessible and safe way out — one that protects and stores their wealth, be it in bitcoin or US-dollar stablecoins.

By all accounts, blockchains continue to thrum with those critical functions. Over the past few years, volume spikes for tokens paired with delicate international currencies are well documented, including the Venezuelan bolivar, the Ukrainian hryvnia and the Russian ruble.

And surely, there are countless anecdotes of how crypto’s permissionless nature has assisted in all sorts of different sensitive and dire situations. 

We’ll likely never hear the vast majority of them — partly due to the inherent, non-malevolent biases of the English-speaking media, which isn’t totally equipped to granularly report on how crypto is really being used around the world.

Call it narrative fatigue or degeneracy. Either way, we probably don’t think of censorship resistance as the main reason we are all here. Instead, it’s value creation.

Value creation is the most important use-case crypto has right now. It’s the reason that memecoins are so big, and why some venture capitalists have voiced negative sentiment about them — as venture capital itself has historically served as the primary source of value generation in tech.

It’s also why this space is destined to endlessly discover massively popular narratives that explode out of nowhere, and even faster than the VCs.

AI agent coins are the most obvious recent example, now closing in on a $5 billion market cap. Three months ago they didn’t exist at all. 

You might’ve read some headlines last week that suggested they’d reached a $10-billion market cap — that figure is based on a bundling of all AI coins together, including launchpads and memecoins that were dreamed up by chatbots, like Turbo, Goatseus Maximus and Fartcoin.

The chart above instead maps the biggest coins specifically linked to AI agents, such as ai16z, Zerebro and Ava. It counts coins with a market cap of about $90 million and above as of this morning.

It’s easy to draw parallels between the NFT mania of 2021 and the AI agent memecoins of 2025. Both rapidly expanded mindshare and market caps in a very short period of time, and each brought a litany of novel projects that attracted serious money.

Does all this mean crypto has lost its way?

When Neo meets The Architect at the end of Matrix Reloaded, he is told that the machines have “become exceedingly efficient” at destroying Zion, after doing so five times before.

Well, crypto markets have become exceedingly efficient at driving new projects and primitives to insane valuations.

As long as those projects and primitives are built on technologically sound (read: decentralized and permissionless) crypto rails, then to me, Zion is still very much intact.

— David

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• BTC and ETH are both up 7% in the past week (BTC: $100,900; ETH: $3,650).

• HYPE is the only top-100 coin in the red over the same period, down 4.4%.

• $96 million has flowed out of Avalanche bridges over the last seven days, with $130 million flowing into Ethereum bridges.

• All’s quiet in the validator queues: Only 218 are waiting to join the Ethereum network, down from 2,147 at the start of January.

• Liquidations are about even between longs and shorts: $130.7 million to $103.9 million in the past day.

 🧠 Predict this

There have been, quite frankly, a lot of predictions floating around, which is to be expected. 

It’s hard to filter through the noise to pull out ones that are either fun to pay attention to, or have the highest odds of success. 

On Empire this week, Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Santos recapped their predictions over the last couple of years and gave some forward-looking ones, including a bitcoin price target. 

Let’s start with the price target: $150k sometime this year. Not necessarily the biggest prediction, given that we’ve seen Bitwise and Bernstein, in their own calls, said it could go as high as $200,000 before year-end. 

With bitcoin (barely) back above $100k, it seems like the bullish vibes are coming back after a fairly bumpy ride at the end of last year. Ledn’s John Glover thinks this first quarter could see a rally up to $125,000, which would get us just under the target given by Yanowitz and Santos. 

Sounds like this prediction, if we maintain this course, is a matter of when, not if. 

One other prediction that I found feasible, and honestly quite interesting, was about stablecoins. Yanowitz came ready on this one, admitting that he had four different predictions involving stablecoins. The big one, though, is that he thinks this could be the year that we see a big bank, a tech company and a fintech company all launch their own stablecoins. 

Focusing specifically on banks, the big hurdle they’ve faced so far is just the lack of regulation in the space. It’s a topic we’ve discussed a few times here on Empire, but if we’re set to see an overhaul at the SEC and a change in the way the regulator engages with crypto-curious companies, then Yanowitz’s prediction once again may be a matter of time rather than feasibility. 

At the very least, the Empire hosts are not alone. Galaxy also predicted that we could see a number of TradFi-backed stablecoin partnerships announced this year. 

So, my question then is, who’s first?

— Katherine

• Gemini settled with the CFTC and agreed to pay $5 million to put an end to the 2022 lawsuit that accused the Winklevoss-backed exchange of misleading the commission. 

• Backpack acquired FTX EU for nearly $33 million to expand its derivatives offerings in Europe.

• Maelstrom CIO Arthur Hayes predicts we could see the bull market peak in March.

• Galaxy thinks that 2025 may finally be the year dogecoin hits $1.

• Prosecutors for the US government estimate that there may be over a million victims from the TerraUSD collapse.

Q: Will AI agents have a bigger impact on crypto than NFTs?

This one’s tricky. Mainstream-wise, no. Crypto-wise, yes. 

Let me explain. I don’t think college-age frat boys and your grandma are going to get super into AI agents, whereas NFTs managed to garner so much mainstream attention that it was widely covered and talked about. I remember, prior to fully joining crypto, sitting down with Beeple to try to understand why someone would pay so much for a piece of art they couldn’t really display in their homes. 

I don’t think AI agents have the ability to interrupt the discourse like NFTs did. They’re a bit too niche, in my opinion. But I do think that they have the ability to alter and push the crypto landscape forward in some interesting ways, perhaps even making memecoins as we know them a thing of the past. 

— Katherine 

Wait until the two corners combine.

AI agent coins (if you can even call them that) are mostly memecoins initially thought up by a customized chatbot, or utility tokens that give access to some kind of portal — usually token launchpads, data feeds or communities built around individual bots.

There are very likely agent projects dabbling in incorporating NFTs, but it’s apparently only a matter of time until the hot ball of AI money turns its Sauron eye back to the NFT space. 

NFTs might never make it back to where they were culturally in 2021. But AI-infused NFTs still have a shot.

— David