2025 Crypto Investment Trends and Fundraising Recommendations From IOSG Ventures, Bing Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, and HashKey Capital

As the new year begins, the global investment environment continues to change, with various emerging technologies and market trends constantly emerging.

As we enter the new year, the global investment landscape continues to shift, with emerging technologies and market trends shaping the strategies of investors across industries. In the realm of cryptocurrency, this dynamic environment presents both challenges and opportunities for project teams seeking to raise funds. To gain valuable insights into the investment trends and strategies for 2025, as well as recommendations for projects planning to raise funds, RootData, in collaboration with ChainCatcher, conducted an exclusive interview with several representative investment institutions.

In this installment, we feature insights from IOSG Ventures, Bing Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, and HashKey Capital, who shared their perspectives on promising investment sectors, the logic behind their choices, and suggestions for project teams.

Here's a summary of their insights:

* **Investment Strategies and Promising Sectors for 2025**

According to IOSG Ventures, one promising investment sector is Crypto x AI, which has attracted significant market attention and offers a wide range of possibilities. Sovereign AI (AI systems driven by decentralized crypto infrastructure) presents a revolutionary opportunity, but also carries risks. These systems can achieve true autonomy, interacting on-chain with non-custodial wallets and other agents and humans. In the future, we may even see AI agents purchasing human services for off-chain tasks.

Another promising area is DePIN, which combines crypto economic models with off-chain hardware to address challenges in traditional industries. While DePIN is a promising field, not all projects are equally viable and their success depends on the projects themselves.

IOSG is particularly interested in DePIN projects that can provide clear and measurable value (such as reducing costs, improving efficiency, or entering untapped markets). The success of DePIN often stems from the new business models it creates, which centralized systems cannot replicate. This advantage allows projects to achieve better market penetration, distribution, and accessibility. DePIN can also drive cost efficiency and better unit economics by lowering operational costs or improving resource utilization, making its decentralized model more competitive and sustainable. Additionally, capital expenditure optimization is a significant advantage of DePIN projects, as they share infrastructure costs with the community through token incentives, enabling faster scaling and broader participation.

On the other hand, we should avoid DePIN projects that misuse tokenization. Their failed token economics often lead to unsustainable ecosystems. Some projects' tokens do not bring actual efficiency improvements or enhancements over traditional methods but rely solely on token incentives to mask potential inefficiencies and subsidize usage costs in the short term. Relying solely on tokenization does not justify decentralization, and sometimes the outcomes are worse than existing centralized models.

Bing Ventures, on the other hand, is focusing on discovering the value of early-stage projects and promoting the mainstream application of blockchain technology. The logic behind this strategy is that the rapid iteration of the blockchain industry means that the earlier you participate and position yourself, the more likely you are to capture exponential growth opportunities.

Specifically, Bing Ventures is interested in the following directions:

* Early-stage project teams often have deep technical accumulation and a clear understanding of industry trends, which are important factors in determining a project's early success.

* Projects that can combine advanced blockchain technology with mass user needs and pain points, such as applications that optimize user experience and lower barriers to entry.

* Experienced teams in the industry often have deep resources and market insights when they choose to start their own ventures. These projects typically have a higher starting point and, therefore, a higher success rate.

In terms of key sectors, Bing Ventures is optimistic about the following areas, which demonstrate the comprehensive evolution of blockchain technology from underlying architecture to practical applications:

* Parallel virtual machine architecture is key to improving blockchain performance. Traditional blockchain systems' transaction processing speed is often a bottleneck, while ParallelVM offers solutions to enhance throughput through parallel execution of transactions and contracts. This has enormous application potential in transaction-intensive scenarios like DeFi and blockchain gaming. Of course, the challenges in this sector include concurrency management and security issues that still need time to resolve.

* Blockchain developers have a clear demand for more efficient and flexible virtual machines. Alternative VM breaks the limitations of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and supports more programming languages, such as Rust and Wasm, which are crucial for attracting developers and creating more complex applications. Although building the ecosystem for new architectures takes time, its potential cannot be ignored.

* As global regulations on cryptocurrencies become increasingly stringent, compliance is becoming a necessity. Projects that can simplify processes such as KYC, AML, and tax compliance while ensuring transparency will be highly sought after, especially given the trend of mainstream financial markets wanting to embrace crypto.

Waterdrip Capital believes that 2025 will be a year for Crypto to embrace large-scale adoption and regulation. For the primary market, their investment logic will be based on the following core trends:

* Compliance and Mainstreaming: The gradual clarity of the global regulatory environment and the launch of cryptocurrency ETFs signify that cryptocurrencies are moving from the margins to the mainstream financial system.

* Technological Innovation and