Happy Friday!

It’s the last Friday before Christmas which means, dear reader, you’ll find our final poll of the year below. Earlier this week, David and I vented about our gripes with crypto, and now we’re curious to get your takes. 

We also took a look at some predictions to try to suss out what could be realistic next year, and David took a look at potentially the first-ever AI agent hackathon. 

We’ll see you bright and early Monday.

🌱 Finding green shoots

If we’re trying to celebrate Christmas, then we need to bring out some green to even out the red this morning. 

Kraken’s Thomas Perfumo already warned us last week that we could see some pullbacks ahead of the holidays, and that seems to be ringing true right now. Whether or not we see the selling countered is another story. 

But I’m not actually here to talk about markets. Or, I should say, I’m not talking about what the markets are doing today.

Earlier this week, Coinbase Institutional released its market outlook for next year. 

David Duong, head of research, pointed out in the note that the 2024 uptrend has shown some “stark” differences to previous cycles, but the overall landscape looks “promising” still.

VanEck, in its predictions, otherwise said it believes that the bull market’s going to carry on next year, peaking at around $180,000. After that, they expect a 30% retracement from bitcoin and altcoins could see double that. 

“A recovery is likely in the fall, with major tokens regaining momentum and reclaiming previous all-time highs by the end of the year,” VanEck wrote. 

But even if we see a decline, Coinbase Institutional came off pretty bullish in their note. 

“As the regulatory and technological landscapes evolve, we expect to see substantial growth in the crypto ecosystem as wider adoption drives the industry closer to achieving its full potential. This will be a pivotal year. The breakthroughs and advancements of 2025 may very well help shape the long-term trajectory of the crypto industry for decades to come,” Duong wrote. 

Let’s zoom in on a question I’ve asked a number of people now: Can ETH make a comeback next year? 

ETH’s just been lagging behind, watching from the sidelines as both bitcoin and solana carve out new all-time highs. 

In the long term, Duong and his team think that the growth of the Ethereum L2 ecosystem is a “boon,” but it’s not clear right now if that’s going to be enough to aid ETH in the short to medium term.

21Shares, in their predictions report, thinks that Solana is going to continue to eat Ethereum’s lunch.

“While we don’t anticipate a full ‘flippening,’ Solana is primed to outperform and capture more market share from Ethereum through improved UX and infrastructure,” 21Shares analysts wrote. 

They also think that Ethereum is primed for a “revenue renaissance” beginning next year. 

“Web2 firms like Robinhood and PayPal, along with traditional finance entities like Visa, are likely to launch their own L2s, leveraging cost-efficiency and scalability to unlock new revenue streams and serve a growing demand for decentralized applications,” they said. 

So maybe things aren’t looking so bad after all.

— Katherine 

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“In a bull market, you ride the waves,” Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz told Empire’s Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Santos to explain why he and his team went on a five-week “Herculean” sprint to get PENGU out to the public. 

It also explains why the team didn’t wait until next year to deploy PENGU via Abstract, which is set to launch next year. Netz explained that Solana is the consumer chain now, and, well, it makes sense to take advantage of that. 

PENGU helped the team at Pudgy Penguins rehype their base, which had started to slow down, Netz explained.

“I think [Pudgy Penguins] is this cycle’s Bored Ape,” Netz said. “We’re positioned to be that cultural phenomenon in a way that nobody else is.”

Just this week we talked about how the ability to reach a mass audience is going to be part of the winning formula for crypto. 

Bored Ape managed to sink into the mainstream zeitgeist via a sense of exclusivity at the time. But with Pudgy’s physical fluffy toys on Walmart shelves and a click away on Amazon, it has the ability to carve out its own path of being attainable by the general public in a way that Bored Apes weren’t at their peak. 

And now you know.

In the three months from May and September this year, the number of AI-related tokens on CoinGecko grew by only 14 — from 172 to 186.

Today, there are 327. A 70% jump in three months.

There are coins tied to trading bots, memes and developer tools, among many other use cases. And a lot of nonsense, as was the case during the Ethereum ICO and NFT booms that gave us LINK and CryptoPunks.

Most new AI coins are nano caps with under $30 million market cap, and many with practically zero. That’s what the very human market says that they’re worth (for now at least). 

What if the market wasn’t made up of humans? Would they value coins differently?

A recent fully-autonomous hackathon hosted by Gaia and run by a trio of AI agents gave us a window into what that might look like. 

• Hal helped dream up challenges, bounties and ideas for human participants to build. 

• Vital-AI-ik, the judge, awarded projects that it thought would find the most traction.

• Jamie D-AI-Mon was the master of coin — charged with autonomously paying out onchain prizes to the tune of $50,000.

The tracks seem to show where the current crop of AIs think development should head:

Agent Builders — “Build an AI agent that pushes the boundaries of creativity and defies conventional norms.”

Collective Intelligence — “Design a system where user-generated data enhances the value of the product or service for all participants, reinforcing the collective knowledge.”

Agent Integration — “Create a unique integration using any Web 2 or Web3 APIs for agent-to-agent or agent-to-human applications.”

While there wasn’t a ton of detail about the winners’ projects in the closing ceremony stream, it’s still worth checking out. 

The invisible hand of the market might one day be partly powered by very similar AI agents, rather than just us silly humans.

— Katherine & David

Last week, we asked: “How badly does crypto need more killer apps?”

75% of you said: “Desperately. Holding is great but it’s so boring,” while the rest said “crypto will win regardless — when the US dollar collapses.” Spooky.

This week, we want to know: