Calvin Ayre 2025 predictions

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2024 was one of the more eventful years in the intersection of enterprise blockchain, AI and other cutting edge technologies, but 2025 promises to be even more dramatic.

2024 saw the ‘crypto’ space—I use the quotes to distinguish the financial speculators from those who believe blockchain technology was intended for a larger purpose than ‘number go up’—come roaring back after all the bankruptcies, frauds and Ponzi schemes of 2022-23. As someone who got into the original Bitcoin very early in its existence, I know that these fiat-value bubbles ultimately burst, so take some profit now and then to avoid getting soaked when the inevitable happens.

With that out of the way, let’s focus on the more interesting stuff.

No such thing as ‘free’ trade

The incoming administration in Washington, D.C. appears ready to shake up, well, everything. This includes plans to impose steep tariffs on other countries’ exports to the U.S., which could encourage some U.S. importers to reroute goods through countries that haven’t been targeted to the same degree.

Enterprise blockchain-based supply chain tracing and the tokenization of real-world assets could allow governments to more strictly enforce the movement of goods across their borders, offering publicly verifiable assurances that the goods are what they say on the label and have traveled the route they claim to have taken.

Other countries are likely to impose retaliatory tariffs on the U.S., meaning every nation will soon be applying extra scrutiny to their own ports of entry, and they all stand to benefit from utilizing immutable blockchain-based supply chain tools. Personally speaking, I’m more of a free trade guy, but you play the cards you’re dealt.

Politics by other means

Bad actors don’t feel bound by the normal rules of engagement, and the growing distrust between nation-states will likely only feed this monster. You can’t go a week without some new report of a digital drive-by—be it state-sponsored or commercial pirates—intended on either stealing proprietary information or crippling critical infrastructure. Worse, these attacks are getting a leg up from AI, making them even harder to detect and defend against.

There are blockchain-based solutions that can help mitigate these threats, which generally target centralized databases. Blockchain’s distributed nature presents a more dispersed target, while the immutability of blockchain-recorded data ensures you have a permanent record of data that can’t be erased or manipulated.

Tools already exist to publish hashes of stored data to the blockchain at regular intervals, with any change to a dataset resulting in a different hash output. This would immediately signal a data intrusion, allowing security teams to react far sooner to outside threats. And you’d have an untampered set of data to compare against any unwarranted revisions. If the bad guys are bringing guns to this knife fight, enterprise blockchain is the .44 Magnum you want riding on your hip.

This is DAO we do it

In my annual predictions one year ago, I warned that decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) were a myth and there was invariably a select group of insiders (usually VC investors) calling the shots. That view was validated this November by a U.S. federal court ruling that the Lido DAO’s institutional investors can indeed be held liable for actions stemming from the votes of the DAO ‘community.’

There is value in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, but the key is having participants who have a truer sense of community, one that extends beyond speculative betting on token ‘yield.’ This is an ideal solution for microfinance initiatives, given those communities’ traditional inability to utilize mainstream financial institutions.

DeFi, at least when it’s based on a blockchain that can process a large volume of transactions with nominal fees, can offer greater accessibility to finance without intermediaries imposing fees that preclude participation by people on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. And the transparency of transactions on the blockchain ensures that no one plays fast and loose with the community’s funding pool.

All we are saying is give Web3 a chance

Many people likely roll their eyes at the mere mention of Web3 these days, and for good reason. Most efforts in this space have failed because they tried to build on networks incapable of handling the volume of data these apps require. Like Chief Brody told Quint: you’re gonna need a bigger boat.

GameFi, in the form of play-to-earn (P2E) games, has proven a minor bright spot in the Web3 space, particularly in developing countries. But players aren’t getting rich off these games, meaning developers still have to create compelling content to keep players coming back. (Telegram-based ‘tap-to-earn’ game Hamster Kombat made a big splash this summer but has since lost ~90% of its players due to its tedious gameplay.)

In most Web2 games, centralized companies control the issuance of in-game items and limit how players can use these assets. In Web3, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can help flip this script (and shame on you if you still think NFTs are limited to crudely-rendered JPEGs).

Minting in-game assets as NFTs offers complete ownership of those assets, recorded on the blockchain for anyone to verify, allowing owners to sell/trade/transfer items as they choose. Developers can also choose to structure this system to receive royalty payments when an asset changes hands, ensuring creators don’t get left out in the cold.

Some developers are pushing Web3 gaming into the educational sector, offering kids their first taste of rudimentary coding and computer science. Using basic tools to build gladiatorial bots that battle each other, kids quickly learn what works and what doesn’t, taking them back to the drawing board to build a better mousetrap. And they’ll own their mousetraps; the platform is just the arena in which the combat occurs. So kids not only get an introduction to coding but also lessons on the importance of ownership, something that will serve them well in an increasingly digitized world.

Paging Dr. AI

A group of tech-savvy nihilists will use AI to develop a new pathogen that spreads like wildfire, bringing disease and death to all four corners of the globe. But a plucky group of scientists will turn the tables by using AI to develop an antidote, although the bigger challenge comes in convincing the COVID-weary public to roll up their sleeves and get the jab.

Oh, wait… that’s the synopsis of my new screenplay.

In all seriousness, I expect medical researchers using AI to run simulated tests will soon identify compounds that either cure or significantly reduce the impact of a major disease/affliction. Medical testing on a scale that would take a legion of humans an eternity to complete will be the first area in which AI makes a major impact on society (that is, besides high schoolers cheating on their essays). 

‘Big Pharma’ has been criticized for focusing on developing products that only manage conditions and that require users to take every day, rather than discovering new preventatives/antibiotics that need only be taken once or annually. The companies cite the prohibitive costs of hunting for cures without any certainty that such a cure exists.

AI-led testing can significantly reduce these costs, and the companies that identify and develop cures would also earn a fortune in good publicity. But if the big firms won’t take this opportunity, some frustrated junior scientists will. Be on the lookout for smaller, hungrier biotech firms employing AI to eat Big Pharma’s lunch and save our bacon.

AI copyright management

As promising as AI is on its own, it becomes a Hollywood dream team when it pairs up with enterprise blockchain technology. There’s been no shortage of media reports of authors and other creators protesting the use of their material to train AI large-language models (LLMs) without the creators’ consent or any compensation for the use of their work.

But creators can mint their proprietary content as an NFT that can then be assigned a value in self-executing smart contracts on an enterprise blockchain. The contract can specify conditions of accessing content, including how long access is granted, for what purpose, at what price, etc. The agreed-upon payment is issued to the creator, access is granted, and both parties walk away happy (or, at least, not feeling cheated).

Combo platter

Some things are just meant to go together, like chocolate and peanut butter, creating something new that’s more than the sum of its parts. Web3’s biggest prize lies in combining enterprise blockchain tech with AI and IPv6 to create Metanet.

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t resent the intrusive data-harvesting business model of most online platforms. Web3 is about converting data into assets, and your personal data—and assets based on that data—should belong to you, not some faceless conglomerate.

The original internet was a peer-to-peer paradise; it’s time to return to that model via Metanet, a new economically integrated system based on cost-effective micropayments. This will enable direct commerce between creators and their audiences, transforming the digital economy.

Metanet is that new model internet, leveraging the power of an unboundedly scalable blockchain like BSV, which has proven itself capable of handling over one million transactions per second—greater than the bandwidth of Visa and Mastercard combined, at fees measured in fractions of a cent.

Coupled with the explosion in the number of internet addresses available under IPv6, and machine learning to ensure all these micropayments get where they need to go, Metanet will make the old centralized internet behemoths look like the dinosaurs now found only in museums.

The bottom line is this: 2025 is the year that the world finally grasps why blockchain scaling matters, as well as who can do it and who can’t. As many of you know, I believe there’s no network that can match the BSV Blockchain in terms of its capacity to scale, something that ongoing tests of the Teranode scaling feature are proving in spades. Mark my words: 2025 will be the year that a game-changing app using the BSV Blockchain goes live and the world takes notice.

Watch: Bringing the Metanet to life with Teranode