Five predictions for where crypto is headed in 2025

Crypto is, once again, exploding. Momentum born of a potentially friendlier regulatory atmosphere has met rising coin values, with Bitcoin more than doubling in value last year. Meanwhile, powered by advances to the underlying infrastructure, crypto is evolving beyond speculation and into real utility. That’s driving new use cases for AI and enabling seamless experiences across gaming and more.

Saga has emerged as a key enabler of these shifts, providing scalable, on-demand blockspace for AI, gaming, and decentralized finance (DeFi). The company’s efforts are facilitating industry acceleration — “more, faster,” as Saga puts it — expected to continue throughout 2025. With that in mind, here are a few predictions for what’s to come.

Artificial intelligence continues to work its way into more and more of our daily lives. It’s getting better at automating tasks and enhancing our work, and continued investments will only keep growing AI’s influence. But when it comes to certain real-world datasets, AI runs into some limitations. It would never be trusted with the keys to its own bank account, for instance.

But its own crypto wallet? That’s feasible. AI-driven DeFi strategies could reshape trading, lending, and asset management. AI is quickly becoming more capable than human beings at things like algorithmic trading, assessing borrower reliability, dynamically adjusting interest rates, and even portfolio management. But, to take on its growing workload with trustless execution and true autonomy, AI needs blockchain.

Although this activity represents just a small fraction of transactions today, futurists believe there will be a shift over time so that humans become a participant alongside AI agents. Saga’s AI agent chain infrastructure will prove critical to this shift, accounting for the added strain to blockchains by providing unlimited horizontal scaling to meet demand.

It used to be that there was just one blockchain. Then there were five. And then, suddenly, there were hundreds, built to house and accommodate the exploding number of cryptocurrencies. That has complicated industry growth for perhaps obvious reasons: When a user sees their currency go up in value, or when they win at a casino-like game and want to quickly cash in, there’s no obvious way to do so. It could take that user some three weeks for the currency to cross an infrastructure bridge and reach an account for a withdrawal.

But the bigger issue, still, is how fragmentation holds crypto back from preventing seamless cross-chain economies. Saga’s Liquidity Integration Layer solves this long-standing problem by creating a seamless flow of liquidity across chains. It makes liquidity composable and gasless, which renders unnecessary the consolidation in the token market that so many industry players have been calling for. The result for gamers, developers, and others is an ecosystem in which liquidity flows easily from one game to the next, from one use case to the next — realizing its utility as a safer and more transparent form of currency.

Traditional gaming has been in flux. Cost of user acquisition is skyrocketing. The boom-time growth gaming companies experienced during the pandemic has largely fallen back to earth, precipitating layoffs at a few major shops. Meanwhile, games have become more expensive to build.

So it’s no wonder that more traditional gaming companies have started steering into blockchain, seeing it as a path not only to better revenue but as a way to build a fervorous fan base. Blockchain enables real asset ownership for players, which drives higher engagement and monetization for developers. It moves gaming firms beyond predatory microtransactions and into a world of sustainable revenue models. It also enables interoperable economies that reduce friction between games.

As an infrastructure component built to enable that new reality both for web 3 developers — where it’s the layer 1 of choice for gaming — and traditional gaming platforms, Saga has seen momentum on both sides of the coin. Adoption from AAA titles is moving quickly — Saga’s in-house game publishing studio, Saga Origins, works with established leaders like Lussa and Angelic. To keep up with the demand, the company recently bolstered its internal talent, adding Samsung alum Fernando Vasconez to the fold last month.

Alongside that growing, two-sided interest in crypto, maturity in DeFi infrastructure will enable the gaming industry to move fully into a new era, overcoming the pitfalls of walled-garden blockchain games.

The foundational infrastructure provided by Saga is tailored to gaming ecosystems. That means it’s easier than ever to develop economies that span multiple games. DeFi gaming experiments fell flat during the last cycle as poor tokenomics, inflationary rewards, and a lack of liquidity cut down any chance at a functional system. With Saga’s infrastructure enabling cross-platform liquidity flows, utilizing tokens and developing a bank that flows quickly across games and platforms has been made simple. Players can now enjoy sustainable, interoperable economies that span multiple games, platforms, and chains.

The market’s swirl of new developments points to one thing: A surge in the demand for blockchain space. As one illuminating example, when the president launched his memecoin in January, the related surge on Solana reportedly caused network difficulties on the chain. That incident illuminates a larger failure of scalability present across chains.

Even beyond high-profile launches, there’s reason to believe capacity will need to scale quickly this year. The rise of AI agents alone will add significant strain to the system, and traditional L1s will struggle to keep up. Saga’s infrastructure, built to support infinite block space, is prepared to take on all that demand — and provide builders experimenting with AI the runway they need.

One thing is certain: Blockchain is becoming more ubiquitous in our daily lives, and the underlying infrastructure will have to keep up. Saga’s technical breakthroughs are enabling rapid growth across blockchain gaming, AI, and DeFi.