Happy New Year from the Blockspace Media team!

For today’s newsletter, we tap into our crystal ball and give our predictions for 2025.

Blockspace’s 2025 predictions

Will’s predictions

A new pool emerges, taking 10% of Bitcoin hashrate from Foundry and Antpool

Well, maybe not a new pool per se (could be an incumbent), but Foundry and Antpool seem poised to lose some hashrate this year as new miners enter the industry. Overall, Antpool reclaims its top spot.

Numerous crypto companies go public, hurting Bitcoin mining equities appeal to investors

It’s pretty clear that the crypto-equity space is going to pop this year. But how does it affect the mining industry? With more crypto-equities to pick from, miners will have to spend even more time marketing themselves. Overall, the bitcoin mining equity space grows, but less than people consider given new competitors. 

Bitcoin dominance falls below 40%

Bitcoin dominance has held strong, roughly around 60% this year. I expect it to drop to 40% as stablecoins enter the financial mainstream and the hot ball of money cycles to altcoins.

Colin’s predictions 

Bitcoin's hashrate hits 1 zetahash, but does not exceed 1.2 ZH/s

Ok, so the first part of this prediction is an easy one. At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s hashrate is ~800 EH/s, so one zeta hash (i.e., 1,000 EH/s) is not far behind. Barring something catastrophic that affects the network – like an all-out mining ban in the United States (highly implausible) or bitcoin cratering (possible, but not highly likely) – 1 zetahash in 2024 is almost a given. How high it will go beyond that, though, is up for debate, and I think no greater than 1.2 ZH/s is a conservative call given competition for AI/HPC load in mining hotbeds like the United States.

A Strategic Bitcoin Reserve doesn’t go beyond the U.S. holding seized bitcoin

In his speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Trump pledged to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve by issuing an executive order forbidding the United States government from selling bitcoin it has seized from the Silk Road and other illicit online markets. I think it’s plausible that he keeps this promise, but I doubt that it will go beyond this. For example, I think it’s unlikely that Cynthia Lummis’ bill to establish a reserve via a purchasing program for up to one million bitcoin is likely to come to fruition.

The market tires of HP/AI pivot miners and pure play miners take the lead in 2025

I think it’s likely that the honeymoon is over for AI/HPC-pivoting miners among investors, and that pure-play public miners will get more love in 2025. That’s not to say that some miners who have made the pivot won’t do well if they execute. But execution is just the thing; 2024 was for talk, and 2025 will be for action. For the rest of the market, I’m sure plenty of investors will be happy with a keep-it-simple-stupid approach with pure play miners, especially if bitcoin continues pumping in the New Year.

Charlie’s predictions

Ordinals flip ETH NFTS

The thesis is simple: It's NFTs on the Biggest Blockchain. You have unit bias, novelty, the jpeg actually existing on-chain – not to mention that memetic energy has been leaving ETH for a while now. This would have many implications, like MagicEden becoming the largest exchange, fees increasing on Bitcoin L1, etc.

Indexer-rollup models launch on Bitcoin, and at least one of them will be massively popular

One of the underrated and least-understood trends happening on Bitcoin right now is the number of teams building rollup-like systems that do off-chain execution with indexers.

Maybe they aren't rollups in the conventional sense, but I consider them in the same category. “Indexer-side" execution is effectively the same thing as a rollup but it's really just more like a pure sequencer that occasionally posts data back to Bitcoin (this varies depending on the design). Some popular ones are Arch, OPNET, Trac, but I expect more to emerge as this trend catches on. 

While it may anger some purists and frustrate the “real” rollup teams, it really is a fun and ingenious trend to come out of the ordinals phenomenon

We will see more than 1 activation client released

While there are many opcodes which appear to have supermajority developer support (CAT/CTV/CSFS/LNHANCE ) the specific proposal suite remains unclear. There are multiple groups working concurrently on one or all of these and we could see either competing or parallel activation clients emerge.

This is my least confident prediction as the soft fork discussion evolves every few weeks, but I have not seen anyone make any similar predictions so I thought this would be interesting. No predictions about whether we actually get a successful soft fork though.

There will be a reactionary push against AI content, LLMs, particularly from the crypto ecosystem

The cambrian explosion of LLMs talking to you, replying to you, and endlessly pinging you is becoming maddening. If there are no tools or features on social media (specifically twitter) to flag/mute/filter this content, it will make the internet unusable very quickly as a million reply-guy LLMs bloom.

Additionally, if you thought the level of astroturfing for shitcoins, memecoins was bad last cycle, it’s about to get orders of magnitude worse and this time it will be nearly impossible to distinguish bot accounts.

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