ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

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From a more traditional and universal perspective, we look at the real utility of innovative AI Agents, stablecoins, and public blockchains, as well as future trends.

Original source: Web3 Xiaolu

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

As we stand on the cusp of a new era of unprecedented growth, ARK Invest’s “Big Ideas for 2025” illuminates the complex convergence of five technology-enabled innovation platforms evolving today: artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, public blockchain, and multi-omics sequencing. These platforms are driving exponential advancements across industries and catalyzing a step-change in global economic growth.

The ARK Invest 2025 report presents 11 big ideas that illustrate the dramatic changes taking place today that are expected to dramatically increase productivity, revolutionize industries, and create long-term investment opportunities with profound implications for investors, businesses, and society as a whole.

Therefore, we have sorted out the parts of the 2025 report on AI Agent, stablecoin, and public blockchain, presenting a way to look at such issues from the perspective of Wall Street funds. This perspective allows us to get rid of the current PVP status of the crypto market and look at the real utility and future trends of innovative AI Agent, stablecoin, and public blockchain from a more traditional and universal perspective.

Take Aways:

AI Agent will change people’s search and shopping logic, and will be carried by digital wallets;

Digital wallets can further integrate traditional banking financial services such as savings, lending, insurance, investment, and consumption. Through the AI Agent innovation paradigm, they can move the value chain of global e-commerce and digital consumption of downstream platforms upstream.

Combined with the utility of AI, the valuation of digital wallet companies will be improved. Importantly, digital wallets here can not only cover the vast existing user base of Web2 and form a closed value loop through AI Agent, but also seamlessly access innovative applications of Web3, bringing greater economic benefits to users;

The annual transaction volume of stablecoins is close to that of Visa and Mastercard, and its supply and the number of active stablecoin addresses hit an all-time high in 2024;

Innovations around blockchain-based stablecoins will continue to emerge and become one of the important ways to export US dollars. It is estimated that by 2030, the market value of stablecoins may grow to 1.4 trillion US dollars;

In this field, with the continuous improvement of innovative financial infrastructure and its integration with traditional financial infrastructure, coupled with the assistance of AI, we will inevitably see more investment and mergers and acquisitions from the traditional financial level.

1. Five major innovation platforms to accelerate economic growth

Macroeconomic growth changes follow historical patterns. After 100,000 years of economic stagnation from the beginning of human history, innovations (especially writing) allowed empires to connect continents, quadrupling real growth rates by 1000 AD. Thereafter, agricultural innovations enabled increased population density and specialization of the labor force, causing growth rates to double to 0.3% per year by 1500.

In the 400 years before 1900, as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution swept the world, annual GDP growth doubled again, to 0.6%. Then the Second Industrial Revolution, marked by electrification, cars, and telephones, ushered in modernity and quintupled growth rates to an average of 3% over the past 125 years.

Today, technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and smart robotics could boost productivity again and push economic growth to another level in the next five to ten years. By 2030, ARK Invest expects growth to reach 7.3%, compared to the IMFs 3.1%.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

Against this backdrop, the convergence of multiple technology platforms, including artificial intelligence, public blockchain, and others, is increasing, with network density growing by 30% over the past year.

Public Blockchains

After mass adoption of public blockchains, all currencies and contracts may migrate to public blockchains, enabling verification of scarcity and proof of ownership of digital assets. The traditional financial system may reconfigure assets to accommodate the rise of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. These technologies increase transparency, reduce the impact of capital and regulatory controls, and reduce the cost of contract execution.

In such a world, as more assets can be monetized more easily and businesses and consumers adapt to the new financial infrastructure, digital wallets that hold everyone’s assets will become increasingly important.

AI

As data evolves, AI computing systems and software can solve tough problems, automate knowledge work, and accelerate the integration of AI technology into every economic sector. The adoption of neural networks should be more important than electrification and could create tens of trillions of dollars in value. At scale, these systems will require unprecedented computing resources, and AI-specific computing hardware will dominate the next generation of cloud data centers that train and operate AI models.

The potential for end users is clear: fleets of AI-driven smart devices will permeate people’s lives, changing the way they consume, work, and play. AI adoption should transform every industry, impact every business, and catalyze every innovation platform.

2. AI Agent redefines consumer interaction and enterprise work processes

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

AI Agents understand intent through natural language, use reasoning and appropriate context for planning, use tools to take actions to achieve intent, and improve through iteration and continuous learning. As AI models become smarter, AI Agents will use more and more complex tools to complete higher-value tasks.

AI Agents will accelerate the adoption of more digital applications and bring about an epoch-making shift in human-computer interaction. Whether it is hardware sales or software subscriptions, the combination of AI Agents will promote the large-scale application of AI. For example, embedding AI Agents in the operating system of consumer-grade hardware will allow consumers to entrust all discoveries and research to AI, saving a lot of time.

2.1 AI Agent will change people’s search and shopping logic

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

AI Agents may become the gateway to personal search, and if search shifts to personal AI Agents, their advertising revenue may surge. By 2030, ARK Invest believes that AI advertising revenue may account for more than 54% of the $1.1 trillion digital advertising market, directly grabbing market share from traditional search giants like Google.

Digital advertising. Carefully curated AI feedback results will provide opportunities for digital advertising. If the search business shifts to personal AI agents, AI agent advertising revenue may surge. ARK Invest believes that by 2030, AI advertising revenue will account for more than 54% of the $1.1 trillion digital advertising market.

Online shopping. By 2030, AI Agents’ shopping volume could approach 25% of the global online shopping reach. Consumers using AI Agents in shopping will simplify product discovery, provide personalized solutions, and facilitate purchases. ARK Invest’s research shows that by 2030, AI Agents could promote nearly $9 trillion in total online shopping worldwide.

2.2 Digital wallets will help AI Agents achieve a closed value loop

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

ARK Invest research shows that digital wallets empowered by AI agents will take share from traditional payment methods such as credit and debit cards and may account for 72% of all e-commerce transactions by 2030. Digital wallets are integrating financial services and e-commerce. Based on their consumer-oriented businesses, the market values leading digital wallet platforms such as Block, Robinhood and SoFi at $1,800 per user.

In addition to the digital wallets ability to integrate traditional banking financial services such as savings, lending, insurance, investment, and consumption, with the help of the AI Agent innovation paradigm, the digital wallet can take over the value chain of global e-commerce and digital consumption of downstream platforms, thereby moving the value chain upstream.

As a result, the previous one-click checkout model of e-commerce platforms such as Amazon may give way to the query once and buy model of AI Agent wallet.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

2.3 The valuation of digital wallet companies will be improved

Based on lead generation rates and the impact of AI Agent’s innovation paradigm, AI Agents could generate $40 billion to $200 billion in global revenue for digital wallet platforms by 2030 (ARK’s base and bullish cases, respectively). AI Agents could add $50 to $200 in enterprise value (EV) per user of US digital wallets by 2030.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

In terms of internal cost reduction and efficiency gains, companies deploying AI Agents should be able to increase the number of units while maintaining the same workforce and/or optimize the workforce for higher-value activities. As artificial intelligence advances, AI Agents may handle a higher proportion of the workload and complete higher-value tasks independently.

At the same time, as AI costs fall, more and more low-priced and efficient AI Agent products will emerge. New products from OpenAI and Salesforce are supplementing human customer service representatives in a cost-effective way. Even if the fixed cost of each conversation is $1, as long as AI agents can handle 35% of customer service inquiries, it can save companies a lot of money. AI agents should also reduce onboarding and recruitment costs and seat-based software costs, while being easier to scale than manual labor.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

3. Stablecoins reshape the digital asset sector

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

As one of the fastest growing areas of digital assets, stablecoins are expected to surpass Mastercard and Visa in terms of transaction volume in 2024. Despite a two-year bear market that saw a more than 70% drop in market value, the growth of stablecoins has not been interrupted.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

3.1 Stablecoin transaction volume is close to Visa and Mastercard

According to a report by ARK Invest, the annualized transaction volume of stablecoins will reach $15.6 trillion in 2024, which is approximately 119% and 200% of Visa and Mastercard respectively. The monthly transaction volume reaches 110 million, accounting for approximately 0.41% and 0.72% of the transaction volume processed by Visa and Mastercard. In other words, the value of stablecoins per transaction is much higher than that of Visa and Mastercard.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

(visaonchainanalytics.com/transactions)

Since stablecoins can be used for a variety of use cases and transactions can be initiated manually by end users or programmatically by bots, there is a lot of noise in stablecoin data. Therefore, Visa adjusts the stablecoin data to remove inorganic activities from bots and other artificial inflationary behaviors.

According to Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard: Overvie, the adjusted annualized stablecoin transaction volume will reach $5.62 trillion in 2024. We analyze this based on data from the first 12 months ending February 2025:

Original data:

The annualized transaction volume of stablecoins is 32.3 trillion US dollars, with a total of 4.9 billion transactions and each transaction volume of 6,592 US dollars. Corresponding to the total amount of 200 billion stablecoins, the capital turnover rate is 161.5.

Adjusted data (excluding robot operations and high-frequency data behaviors):

The annualized transaction volume of stablecoins is 6.1 trillion US dollars, with a total of 1.3 billion transactions and each transaction volume of 4,692 US dollars. Corresponding to the total amount of 200 billion stablecoins, the capital turnover rate is 30.5.

Therefore, according to Visas data, the adjusted stablecoin transaction volume is close to Mastercards annual transaction volume level, and the value of each transaction is higher.

(If the data is wrong or there are other statistical calibers, please feel free to communicate and correct me)

3.2 Stablecoin supply and number of active stablecoin addresses hit record highs in 2024

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?Despite statistical discrepancies, the overall market value of stablecoins has exceeded $200 billion and continues to rise. Solana, Tron, Ethereum, and Base are the leading blockchains driving stablecoin transaction volume growth in 2024. December 2024 set a new record with daily transaction volume of $270 billion and monthly transaction volume of $2.7 trillion, highlighting the rapid growth of the industry.

After the drop in 2023, UDST (Tether) continues to dominate the stablecoin space, followed by USDC (Circle). Together, they account for 90% of the total supply. Multi-chain stablecoins have penetrated almost all major L1 blockchains. The current stablecoin supply is $203 billion, accounting for about 0.97% of the US M2* money supply. In December 2024, active stablecoin addresses reached 23 million, a record high. Tron is the leading network measured by monthly active addresses and is favored by emerging markets for its low transaction fees.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

L2 blockchains are attracting the interest of retail investors due to their lower costs and higher efficiency. Retail investors are flocking to Layer 2 for cheaper and more convenient stablecoin transactions, increasing the market share of blockchains such as Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism. Meanwhile, whales and institutions continue to operate on Ethereums base layer. Transactions below $100 dominate on Base and Optimism, while transactions above $100 dominate on Ethereums base layer.

3.3 Peer-to-peer transactions and personal wallet storage dominate stablecoin use cases

EOA wallets — standard Ethereum addresses used for peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions and asset storage — account for 60% of USDC usage, while centralized exchanges account for 11%, cross-chain bridge L2 solutions account for 7%, and decentralized exchanges (DEX) and money markets each account for 1.7%.

As DeFi usage surges in the coming years, DEXs, cross-chain bridges, and money markets are likely to take back market share from P2P. While the usage of lending markets, DEXs, and cross-chain bridges fluctuates with market cycles, P2P trading and storage are more resilient because there is a higher product-market fit beyond trading.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

3.4 Four stablecoin issuers dominate stablecoin revenue

With fewer than 200 employees, Tether reported $5.2 billion in profits in the first half of 2024, including USDT, the rest of its products and services, and unrealized gains on its digital assets—clearly one of the most capital-efficient businesses in history. Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) account for 60% of the revenue generated by the top five networks and applications. Overall, stablecoins USDT, USDC, DAI/USDS, and USDE generated $3.35 billion in revenue in the second half of 2024, or $6.7 billion on an annualized basis.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

Circle and Tether have been generating billions of dollars in revenue from treasuries and other securities used as collateral for their stablecoins. However, in 2024, in response to competition and demand, Yield Bearing Stablecoins operating outside the United States began passing on a significant portion of their interest income to users. Circle and Tether are unlikely to follow this trend unless absolutely necessary. Although still small, yield-bearing stablecoins are the fastest growing category in the stablecoin market.

3.5 Stablecoins will accelerate growth and digest US debt

To balance the “de-dollarization”, stablecoins are increasing the demand for US government debt as collateral. In a world moving towards deglobalization and de-dollarization, stablecoins may drive stable demand for US Treasuries. As of December 2024, Tether and Circle have become the 20th largest holders of US Treasuries. In populous emerging markets such as Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, and India, individuals and companies are adopting stablecoins as a store of value, a means of payment, and a cross-border currency. Stablecoins may become one of the most effective ways to export dollars.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

With a current market cap of $203 billion and 0.17% of the global M2** supply, stablecoins could grow to $1.4 trillion and 0.9%, respectively, by 2030. If so, stablecoins would become the 13th-largest currency in circulation, second only to Spain and ahead of the Netherlands.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

4. Public blockchain and smart contracts: reducing costs and creating new use cases at the application layer

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

As the digital asset space becomes more complex, smart contracts are driving innovation in a growing number of industries. The ecosystem is rapidly evolving to meet diverse and dynamic needs - from user-centric applications such as gaming and SocialFi, to advanced financial instruments such as derivatives and structured products, to decentralized infrastructure networks that power wireless connectivity and energy storage.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

These technology stacks all need to seek a blockchain with lower costs and higher efficiency for deployment. This has resulted in two current market scenarios: either deployed on Solanas high-throughput L1 or deployed on Ethereums L2.ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

4.1 Ethereum ecosystem is shifting to L2

The dramatic drop in transaction costs has led to a surge in L2 activity, pulling users away from Ethereum’s base layer. L2 accounts for 85% of daily active addresses transacting in the Ethereum ecosystem. Activity on L2 has caused Ethereum’s daily transaction volume to increase from 3 million to 15 million by 2024, a 400% increase.ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

Among them, Base is the fastest growing Ethereum L2 blockchain. Within a year of its launch, Base surpassed all other Ethereum L2 solutions in growth and market share. In 2024, Base accounted for 46% of active users and generated 63% of fees in Ethereum L2. With a TVL of $15 billion and more than 300 applications deployed, Base has made a significant contribution to Coinbases cash flow.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

Despite this, Ethereum’s base layer still dominates high-value storage and settlement. Institutions, high-value users, and whales primarily settle their trades on the Ethereum base layer. The unit economics of the Ethereum base layer are unmatched, measured by total locked value (TVL) and decentralized exchange (DEX) volume per user.

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?

4.2 Solana’s share has increased based on multiple metrics due to retail adoption

ARK Invest 2025 Report: What does Wood think about Crypto, AI Agents and Stablecoins?After hitting a bear market low of $8 in 2023, Solana has seen a dramatic turnaround relative to other L1s. Daily active users, revenue, number of transactions, and total value locked (TVL) have all hit new all-time highs or increased by an order of magnitude. Solana is the only L1 that is competitive with Ethereum and Bitcoin on metrics like daily active addresses and revenue.

Solana and Base lead in developer adoption and mindshare. Of the 39,139 new crypto developers added in 2024, Solana leads with 7,625 developers, surpassing the Ethereum mainnet. Base has 4,287 developers, ranking sixth overall, surpassing Arbitrum and Starknet to become the leading Layer 2 solution on Ethereum.

This article is from a submission and does not represent the Daily position. If reprinted, please indicate the source.

ODAILY reminds readers to establish correct monetary and investment concepts, rationally view blockchain, and effectively improve risk awareness; We can actively report and report any illegal or criminal clues discovered to relevant departments.

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