This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe . In the mid-16th century, Nostradamus made 942 predictions in eight years. He’d supposedly dictated every one as a poem to his secretary. All while hallucinating on heroic doses of nutmeg. Sadly, I don’t have a secretary. But why should that stop me? Here are five crypto prophecies that will totally come true in 2025. And if not, they can easily be rehashed for hundreds of years, just like Nostradamus’s. AI chatbots will gamify flash loan attacks. We rarely hear about flash loan attacks anymore. Apparently, the US Department of Justice largely put a stop to them after they nabbed Avi “it’s just a profitable trading strategy” Eisenberg last year. That is until some diabolical edgelord trains an AI model to trawl the dingiest illiquid corners of DeFi for potential targets. After all, who’s to blame: The prompt engineer or the LLM with a crypto wallet? Either a bitcoin ETF or a nation-state will be hacked Never mind that most ETFs have abstracted the actual handling of coins far away from their own liability — presumably replaced by a WhatsApp chat with a Coinbase Custody support representative. Next year will mark a return of monumental crypto hacks. It’s indeed been a while since we saw one. Maybe the Ronin hack was the last hack that really, really hurt. Be on the lookout for a nation-state or ETF issuer to fumble the bag, perhaps by falling for a North Korean phishing email for a phony Chick-fil-A coupon. The FTC will sue a memecoin You’ve probably heard that the next SEC chair should be more friendly to crypto. But that’s just the SEC. There are still more than a dozen US agencies that could probably still pull some real boomer moves next year. Enter the Federal Trade Commission. They’ve gone after crypto companies in the past, including Celsius and Voyager, and also pushed federal cases against fraudsters peddling fake investment schemes. I’d watch for the FTC to characterize a random memecoin as such and start suing. Gensler is leaving a void that only another short-sighted regulator can fill. Crypto lotteries will emerge as public goods Crypto already has its own pseudo-lottery systems: memecoins. If you’re really into buying Powerball and Mega Millions, why not buy a random pump.fun memecoin every week and hope to one day strike it big (as long as you can time the top). So, it’s about time someone — perhaps from the very public-good-centric Ethereum space — codes an unstoppable permissionless crypto lottery that pays out once a week. And before you point out that random number generators on the blockchain are always a bad idea, study lava lamps . IRL livestreamers will adopt prediction markets To suggest that livestreamers like Speed and KSI would mint their own memecoins (or would they be social tokens?) is too obvious. Calling it now: A major streamer will figure out how to utilize prediction markets to crowdsource their content. Case in point: Speed’s suggestion that he’ll run sprints at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles could be a prediction market. And all his viewers could bet whether that’s the case — or push him toward any other challenge for that matter. Mass adoption through Twitch starts in 2025. Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter . Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter . Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more. The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.
