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Crypto in 2025 is looking less like a rebellious teenager and more like a young adult at the big kids’ table (albeit one still wearing a hoodie). Andreessen Horowitz’s “State of Crypto 2025” report dubs this “the year crypto went mainstream,” and for good reason. From stablecoins suddenly acting as the fastest money on the internet to AI and crypto teaming up in unexpected ways, the once-fringe industry is stepping into the spotlight.
In this article, we’ll dive into two major themes from the report – the mainstreaming of stablecoins and the convergence of AI and crypto – with a conversational (and occasionally irreverent) spin. Buckle up: 2025 was the year crypto got comfortable in the mainstream, but not without raising a few new questions along the way.
Just a couple of years ago, stablecoins – cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the US dollar – were mostly used by crypto traders shuffling funds between exchanges. How times have changed. In 2025, stablecoins “became the backbone of the onchain economy”, transforming into the fintech equivalent of a room-temperature superconductor for money (to quote Stripe’s CEO). In plain English: moving dollars across the world has never been faster, cheaper, or more open.
What does mainstream stablecoin adoption look like? Consider these jaw-dropping stats and developments from the past year:
Stablecoins handled about $46 trillion in transaction volume in the last year – a 106% jump from the year prior. For context, that’s nearly 3× Visa’s annual volume, and it’s quickly closing in on the grand total of ACH transfers (the U.S. banking system’s own plumbing). Even on an “adjusted” basis (filtering out things like bots or one exchange shuffling coins between wallets), stablecoins carried $9 trillion in real value – 5× PayPal’s yearly throughput and over half of Visa’s. In short, stablecoins aren’t just playing in the big leagues; by some measures, they’re outpacing the incumbents.
The total stablecoin supply hit an all-time high above $300 billion circulating. Remarkably, over 1% of all U.S. dollars in existence now live on public blockchains as tokenized dollars. In September 2025 alone, adjusted on-chain stablecoin transactions neared $1.25 trillion in a single month, a new record. And unlike the crypto crazes of the past, this surge isn’t just speculative trading – the growth in stablecoin volume has decoupled from crypto trading volumes, indicating people are actually using stablecoins for everyday payments and transfers, not just moving money between exchanges.
Stablecoins have truly gone global. They’re now arguably the fastest, cheapest, most global way to send a dollar – often settling in under a second for less than a penny in fees. Need to pay a contractor in another country, top up a relative’s phone across borders, or protect savings from local inflation? Stablecoins are increasingly the go-to solution in places from Argentina to Nigeria, where users can preserve value in USD and transfer money without the usual friction of banks or remittance services. A16z’s report notes this rapid adoption in emerging markets, where volatile local currencies and expensive remittances make stablecoins a no-brainer alternative. It’s a bit ironic – crypto’s killer app in 2025 is basically moving dollars. But for millions of people, that’s a lifesaver.
If stablecoins represent crypto’s coming-of-age moment in finance, the convergence of AI and crypto is its bold foray into futuristic frontiers. These are 2025’s two hottest tech buzzwords, so naturally people started asking: what if we mash them together? 😜 Beyond the hype, the a16z report highlights some genuinely fascinating intersections where crypto can help address AI’s emerging challenges. Think of it as Web3 meeting Skynet – hopefully to make both smarter and more open, not to trigger the apocalypse. So what’s this AI-crypto love story about?
At a high level, AI’s boom (thanks, ChatGPT) created new problems and opportunities. Who will own and control AI’s output and infrastructure? How will autonomous AI “agents” operate in the economy? Crypto’s ethos of decentralization and its programmable money Lego set might be part of the answer. In 2025 we saw the first real glimmers of this crossover:
With AI generating content, code, even deepfakes, verifying what’s real becomes critical. Blockchain networks, which excel at immutable record-keeping, can timestamp and track the provenance of data or media. For example, an artwork’s NFT could carry an audit trail of whether it was human-made or AI-generated, and who owns its IP rights. The report notes that from tracking creative IP licensing to data provenance, crypto may be a solution to some of AI’s toughest trust issues. Instead of relying on a centralized authority to certify “this AI model was trained on licensed data,” a blockchain could embed that info in an open ledger. It’s early, but expect to hear more about “authenticity infrastructure” (as a response to the coming wave of AI-created everything).
In an AI-permeated internet, knowing you’re interacting with a real human (and not a clever bot) becomes gold. Crypto projects are tackling this via decentralized identity. A prime example is Worldcoin’s World ID, which by 2025 had verified over 17 million people as unique humans via orb-shaped eye-scanners. It’s a controversial approach, but the goal is a “Proof of Personhood” credential – so when you sign into a service or post online, you could cryptographically prove you’re flesh-and-blood. This could help networks differentiate people from AI bots at scale. (Cue the joke: “I’m not a robot” checkboxes might get replaced with “I scanned my eyeball on the blockchain.”) Jokes aside, decentralized ID and biometrics are a serious effort to keep the future internet from becoming an AI spam fest. Whether Worldcoin’s model is the right one is up for debate, but the problem it addresses is very real.
Perhaps the wildest idea – giving AI agents the ability to handle money. If your smart fridge or AI digital assistant could routinely buy things or sell services on your behalf, how would it do that? Today, an AI can’t walk into a bank to open an account, and you probably don’t want to just hand it your credit card. Enter crypto. Blockchain-based wallets and smart contracts don’t care whether you’re a human or a machine. They just require the right keys. A16z’s report calls out new protocol standards like “x402” (a riff on HTTP 402 Payment Required) emerging as the financial backbone for autonomous AI agents. These standards would let AI agents make micro-transactions, pay for API calls, and settle payments with no intermediaries – effectively, bots paying bots, securely and transparently. Gartner even projects this “agentic economy” could reach $30 trillion by 2030 (yes, with a T – although take such far-future forecasts with a grain of salt). We already see early steps: Stripe’s “Agent Toolkit” allows an AI agent to spin up a one-time virtual credit card to perform an e-commerce transaction. It’s being used by an AI shopping assistant (Perplexity.ai) to autonomously purchase items within set limits.
So, are AI and crypto truly a power couple or just a fling? In 2025 we saw the first date, not the wedding. The potential is huge (and genuinely exciting) – imagine AI agents transacting seamlessly on crypto rails, or using tokens to crowdsource data and compute for model training. This could unlock economies and use cases we haven’t seen before.
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Alex Kreger Founder and CEO at UXDA Financial UX Design
Stanley Epstein Associate at Citadel Advantage Group
Vitaliy Abayev Chief Operational Officer at DCM
Scott Dawson CEO at DECTA
This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author.
Stanley Epstein Associate at Citadel Advantage Group
Julija Jevstignejeva Deputy Head of Marketing at Walletto UAB
Stanley Epstein Associate at Citadel Advantage Group
Carlo R.W. De Meijer The Meyer Financial Services Advisory (MIFS) at MIFSA
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