Discover the future of Web3 in 2025: 20 expert predictions on trends, tech, and innovations that will shape the decentralized revolution.
This article provides 20 expert, on-the-ground predictions that paint a compelling picture of where Web3 will go in 2025. Each prediction gives insight into the moving trends in Web3, technologies that charge, and the shifting of policy that moves the needle in the ongoing development of the decentralized economy.
A New Era of Crypto Adoption: The Main Trends in Web3
Prediction 1: The U.S. Will Establish Bitcoin as a Strategic Asset
The 2024 elections reversed the landscape as far as the US government was concerned through a change of guard led by Joe Biden. So far, the administration led by Donald Trump has made one pro-cryptocurrency appointment after another to top-level government positions. Notable appointments are Vice President JD Vance, Michael Waltz as National Security Advisor, and Mary Bessent as Treasury Secretary, with other key financial hires such as Paul Atkins installed at the SEC to Jelena McWilliams at the FDIC.
The appointments are key shifts away from restrictive crypto policy and, more broadly, new recognition of Bitcoin as a strategic financial instrument.
Prediction 2: MiCA Policy Will Reshape the Crypto Landscape in Europe
The Markets in Crypto-Assets, or MiCA, will fully come into effect in 2025, establishing a single regulatory regime for crypto-assets throughout the European Union. MiCA aims to better protect investors and promote innovation while creating more transparency and accountability within the crypto market.
While these regulations are aimed at devising a stable and secure environment for market participants, this will also set a higher bar both for CEXs and custody services, possibly entailing major operational changes for such market participants due to increased legal requirements and more resources allocated toward compliance. Meanwhile, MiCA would rather attract institutional investors who value regulatory clarity and safety, boosting the legitimacy of Europe's crypto market.
MiCA will also set the stage for other regions looking to institute comprehensive crypto regulation and further entrench Europe's leadership position in setting the standard for global crypto policies. This also aligns with trends in Web3, from an increasing focus on decentralization to regulatory compliance and security around digital assets.
Prediction 3: Gold vs. Bitcoin Holdings — Companies and Governments Set for Expansion
This Web3 trend of 2025 suggests potentially large opportunities for both companies and governments to better position their Bitcoin holdings in comparison to gold. Today, private holders dominate Bitcoin ownership at 58.6%, with minimal adoption by governments (2.6%) and public companies (1.5%). In contrast, gold is more integrated into governmental reserves at 13.7% and institutional vehicles such as funds/ETFs at 5.3%.
With only 20% of Bitcoin's supply left to be mined amidst rising adoption narratives, we anticipate increased entry by institutional players toward Bitcoin, closing the ownership gap that currently exists in favor of gold. This shift will solidify Bitcoin as a strategic asset class, either alongside or replacing gold, in corporate treasuries and government reserves globally.
Web3 Market Growth Predictions
Prediction 4: The Crypto Bull Market Will Hit Its First Peak in Q1 2025 and Reach New All-Time Highs in Q4 2025
The crypto market in 2025 is expected to follow a two-peak cycle pattern. The first major surge is anticipated in the first quarter, driven by growing institutional adoption, improved scalability solutions, and increasing investor confidence in blockchain infrastructure. At this stage, we project Bitcoin (BTC) to reach around $130,000 and Ethereum (ETH) to exceed $5,000.
Prediction 5: DEX Tokens Will Experience Significant Growth
Stricter regulatory policies against centralized exchanges, one of the main trends in Web3, will increase the rate of adoption and growth in DEX tokens. As more users and traders look for other options away from the CEX platforms, the demand for the DEX tokens will definitely go up, adding to their value.
The only exception could be PancakeSwap, a subsidiary DEX of Binance, given its closeness to the centralized exchange.
Scalability and Layer 2 Innovations
Prediction 6: Over 2,000 Ethereum Layer 2 and Layer 3 Scaling Solutions Will Be Live
The roll-up-centric scaling roadmap is on the verge of completely overturning Ethereum. Application-specific rollups will begin emergence for gaming, DeFi, payments, and, yes, socials, in addition to a 17x increase in Ethereum's scalable infrastructure. Lastly, expect "corporate L2s" driven by enterprise actors such as Coinbase or Kraken to grow on-chain adoption and further reveal increased modularization of Ethereum as a whole.
Trends in Web3 indicate that the scaling factor, or total daily average UOPS, or TPS of all Ethereum scaling solutions, compared to Ethereum L1, comes at around 25x. If these projections are met, this would increase eightfold over its current value to over 200x. This growth will be partly achieved through the scaling of existing rollups but also by the emergence of new L2s and L3s.
Prediction 7: Web3 Trends 2025 Suggest that Layer 2 Solutions Will Thrive Alongside DeFi Growth
With the ever-tightening regulatory environment in the crypto space, Layer 2 solutions are set to see an exponential surge in the next year. The Crypto Travel Rule and MiCA will likely force liquidity and users onto decentralized platforms, ultimately forcing a shift from centralized entities into the DeFi ecosystems, which will create demand for DeFi tokens and platforms.
Trends in Web3 indicate that users will start seeking higher levels of scalability by looking more towards low-fee transactional fees with faster times of execution. It would make this more appealing with Arbitrum and Optimism, who have lowered costs and attained higher speed. These are solutions that address the necessary scalability of DeFi platforms to be able to satisfy growing demand from users. This means much of the growth in such adoption could result in this Layer 2 blockchain gaining a substantial market share and, therefore, setting it up for strong growth in the coming year.
Prediction 8: Solana will surpass 5,000 TPS for non-voting transactions
In fact, the performance of Solana's network will increase manifold over the coming year, with non-voting transaction throughput in the network estimated to rise above an average of 5,000 TPS by 2025. That is around 6-7x the current average of 700-800 TPS and really a testament to how well the Solana network has scaled so far, given its demand for applications in areas such as DeFi, meme coin speculation, and DePIN.
Prediction 9: Over 90% of Layer 2 Solutions Will Adopt Decentralized Data Availability Layers
While the development of Layer 2 solutions is continuously improving, the adoption of decentralized data availability (DA) layers is becoming more and more prevalent. By 2025, more than 90% of L2 solutions are expected to incorporate decentralized DA layers in their quest for scalability, security, and efficiency.
Trends in Web3 show that decentralized DA layers ensure that transaction data is reliably stored and accessible, therefore mitigating risks associated with data withholding and enhancing overall integrity at L2. Three of these projects, Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail, offer decentralized DA solutions by taking to modular architecture to separate consensus, execution, and availability for better performance of blockchains.
Decentralized DA layers solve the data availability problem native to the rollup-based solution, where the data must be available for off-chain transactions to prevent fraud, ensuring verifiability in L2 solutions. Shifts to decentralized DA layers enable L2 solutions to, for the first time ever, achieve high throughput without sacrificing robust security standards with low costs.
Advancements in ZK Proofs and Security: Web3 Trends 2025
Prediction 10: Every Ethereum block will be ZK-proofed
ZKPs are supposed to revolutionize blockchain in terms of security and scalability. Due to the functionality of enabling verifiable computation, not at the expense of data disclosure, ZK proofs represent a strong tool for keeping Ethereum blocks in check. This will ultimately mean secure and efficient ways of validation across all nodes with minimum computational overhead. Once ZK technology develops a bit more, that will be a reality: this milestone will further enhance Ethereum's infrastructure.
Prediction 11: Over 95% of ZK proofs will be generated through decentralized nodes
Decentralized proof generation is increasingly becoming a staple, ensuring a highly scalable and trustless model for the centralized one. By utilizing a decentralized network, proof generation becomes far more cost-efficient and censorship-resistant. Trends in Web3 suggest that in this shift, almost all the ZK proofs across blockchains will come from decentralized nodes, which would lower the operational risk and widen the mainstream adoption of zero-knowledge technology.
Data Privacy & Security in Web3
Prediction 12: Privacy-preserving blockchain applications will become mainstream
Increased innovation in privacy-enhancing technologies shows the importance of privacy in blockchain ecosystems. Web3 trends indicate that by 2025, privacy-preserving applications will be at the heart of Web3. Zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, and fully homomorphic encryption are technologies that would enable users to transact, collaborate, and share data without giving up confidentiality. These will further open use cases around private DeFi transactions, secure voting systems, and enterprise-grade data sharing, making privacy part and parcel of the blockchain experience.
Prediction 13: Decentralized VPN networks will capture 15% of the global market
dVPNs are becoming a pretty viable alternative to traditional virtual private networks, affording substantially improved privacy and censorship resistance assurances. Some examples of dVPN solutions, such as NymVPN and others, will make use of advanced encryption, traffic obfuscation, and decentralized node infrastructures in order to preserve user anonymity via blockchain technology. In a world with a growing demand for online privacy, driven by increased surveillance across the world, dVPNs will capture an increasingly big chunk of the VPN market, reaching up to 15% adoption by 2025, and disrupt the traditional centralized VPN industry.
Web3 Trends 2025: Consensus Protocols & P2P Networks
Prediction 14: A major blockchain network will adopt DAG-based consensus
DAG-based consensus can be a game-changing alternative in the field of traditional blockchain structures such as proof-of-stake and proof-of-work. Web3 trends highlight that since DAG does not need to create blocks sequentially, it can scale much higher with less latency. This architecture will already be used by some newcomers like Aptos, Sui, and Aleo for thousands of transactions per second.
At some time in 2025, the migration of one leading blockchain network to DAG-based consensus should provide transaction speedups of up to 3-5 times higher than more classic variations of the PoS setup. This would also add demand for scalability solutions, and by these, an increase in demand would come with the more considerable adaptation of DAG technology, which should ease congestion of its quite sought-after network and power applications needing the best real-world low-latency solutions such as gaming, DeFi, and high-volume instant settlements.
Prediction 15: QUIC-based decentralized security standards will emerge
The QUIC protocol, designed by Google, provides a faster and more reliable way of establishing connections. It is now being adapted to blockchain networks such as Solana and Sui. With QUIC, nodes can communicate with low latency and stronger security, enabling faster transaction finality and better resistance to attacks like DDoS.
Trends in Web3 suggest that by 2025, the use of QUIC-based protocols as a general standard is expected to prevail, especially with the rise of high-throughput blockchains. This shift is projected to reduce latency for P2P communications by 30% and improve transaction finality time by 20%, ensuring a smoother user experience and greater network reliability.
Web3 User Experience Evolution
Prediction 16: Rollup-powered apps will feel like L1 experiences
Rollups are considered one of the critical solutions for Layer 2 scaling and are leading into the next era of user-centric decentralized apps. Trends in Web3 indicate that while ensuring security is maintained through Ethereum, rollups offload a significant portion of computation from Layer 1. This approach keeps operations both cost-effective and fast. On a daily basis, rollups such as Arbitrum and Optimism handle millions of transactions at costs averaging 90% lower than Ethereum L1.
By 2025, rollup-powered applications are expected to achieve over 10,000 TPS, with transaction fees dropping to just pennies. This advancement will make dApps virtually indistinguishable from traditional web apps, paving the way for broader mainstream adoption and engagement.
Prediction 17: Over 30% of blockchain transactions will involve chain abstraction layers
Larger multi-chain ecosystems will likely need robust cross-chain interoperability in the future. Platforms like LayerZero and Axelar already have a chain abstraction layer that makes it easier to interact with different blockchains. These layers drive a seamless user experience, where you can swap tokens between chains or run cross-chain smart contracts without any friction.
With Web3 trends persisting on forays into 2025, chain abstraction layers are revolutionizing the blockchain world. With an increasing demand for simplified user experience and higher blockchain interconnectivity, more than 30% of all blockchain transactions are expected to be handled by means of chain abstraction layers. That’s a 15 percent increase above previous numbers. While the Web3 apps are as super simple as Web2 apps, by seamlessly integrating with chain abstraction, we further accelerate mainstream adoption.
Shifts in Blockchain Usage and Market Trends
Prediction 18: The NFT Market Will Recover, Reaching $30 Billion in Trading Volume
Having been badly hit by the bear cycle in the financial year 2022-2023, the NFT marketplace is expected to stage a remarkable recovery in 2025. It has decreased to 39% since 2023 and by 84% since 2022, but it has been picking up as the market moves from pure pump-and-dump schemes to actual community and culturally relevant projects. Such collections are at the forefront of this revival and include Pudgy Penguins, Miladys, and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).
We project NFT trading volumes to reach $30 billion in 2025, driven by:
The rise of a new generation of crypto-rich will cause people to look at NFTs as artworks or important historical artifacts rather than bubbles.
The fact that there are still collections like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club attracting attention and demand.
Ethereum’s increasing share of the NFT market share to trade 85% of NFTs in 2025 from 71% in 2024.
Such recovery lies still below the numbers of 2021 trading volumes and shifted more towards sustainability and relevance to the culture. While oftentimes, the primary use of NFTs is being reimagined as collectibles, cultural assets, and brands, the industry is set for a steadier and logically consequent phase.
Conclusion: A Web3-Powered Future
The revolution of Web3 is real; it is happening, and it is real. Web3 is creating the path for an epochal time in the digital technology world: from privacy-focused innovations to breakthroughs in scalability and the advent of decentralized platforms. Web3 is all the buzzwords painted out, but trends in Web3 are more a glimpse into the future than just the newest internet vernacular. The internet is no longer necessarily more open and accessible but inherently more secure and efficient, which, in turn, opens new possibilities.
As blockchains’ ability to scale continues to improve, Ethereum’s rollup-focused roadmap provides unmatched transaction throughput, which Solana and Layer 2 solutions are now taking to completely new levels of blockchain performance. Zero Knowledge proofs (ZKPs) democratize privacy and security. According to Web3 trends 2025, the crypto landscape will pick up its pace as more people shift from speculation to real-life value and utility through decentralized applications and platforms.
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