In 2025, Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise, predicts that AI and the tokenization of real-world assets will drive the rise of niche businesses.
This shift, coupled with the thawing of mergers and acquisitions and increased corporate Bitcoin adoption, could significantly benefit the crypto market.
Bitwise forecasts that these developments will shape a new long-tail capital market by 2025.
In his posts on January 5, Horsley conveyed that he sees the world as being “on the precipice of change” as 2025 approaches.
In a post on X, Horsley argued that while tokenization’s demand-side benefits, such as making money market funds more accessible, have dominated the conversation, the real game-changer will emerge on the supply side.
Horsley argued that tokenization’s revolutionary power might come from giving smaller, previously underserved businesses access to capital markets.
Edwin Mata, Brickken’s founder and CEO, predicts that RWA tokenization will take center stage in the crypto space in 2025.
“Real-world asset tokenization is transforming traditional markets by enabling assets like real estate, debt and equity to be digitized and traded on the blockchain,” he said.
“I think AI may lead to an explosion of companies and tokenized companies,” Horsley said in a separate post sharing his thoughts on artificial intelligence advances in the coming year.
“AI could massively increase the number of niche businesses. These could never go public but could tokenize. It could be a major new long-tail capital market.”
Horsley foresees that the concept of “Bitcoin Standard Corporations,” where companies hold BTC on their balance sheets, will dominate in 2025. “2025 is going to see a lot of corporations joining the Bitcoin standard,” Horsley said.
Read also: Bitwise moves to expand Bitcoin investment options with new ETF
MicroStrategy, holding 446,400 BTC, valued at roughly $43.7 billion, remains the top corporate BTC holder and has hinted at making another purchase on Monday.
Several smaller companies shared in late 2024 that they launched strategies to incorporate Bitcoin into their treasury holdings.
The Trump administration in the US, set to take power, might “unfreeze“ mergers and acquisitions for big corporations, benefiting crypto, according to Horsley.
On January 6, Horsley posted on X that large corporations, such as the “magnificent 7″—including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—might soon fully utilize their market cap.
“The big may get bigger, and the middle may shrink,” he said before adding, “If that happens, I think it will accelerate crypto” on the premise that large corporations operate under self-interest rather than that of their users.
“The conceptual premise of crypto is not trusting large institutions to do what’s in your best interest. The big getting bigger accentuates this.”
