How Web3 Consumer Apps Will Finally Break Out in 2025: 6 Predictions

Web3 gaming will lead a wave of popular consumer apps and is well positioned to transition from a niche experiment to an innovative force.

Dec 16, 2024, 3:09 p.m. UTC

Web3 has long struggled with mainstream adoption. We have yet to achieve the true cultural relevance that other cutting-edge technologies enjoy. Our most widely used product as an industry is cryptocurrency itself, but even our biggest advocates now realize that coins alone will not be enough to provide the consumer breakthrough we have been building towards for over a decade.

NFTs, Web3 gaming, social apps, and various forms of decentralized music, art, film, and TV have not broken beyond a crypto-native audience, and many of these projects have been unable to attain even that level of traction. Challenges include complex user experiences, speculative economic models and technical limitations that alienate mainstream consumers. Throughout 2024, the sector grappled with persistent issues including liquidity fragmentation, user experience friction and a reputation for prioritizing financial speculation over consumer experiences, all of which did not resonate in a softer crypto market.

However, in 2025’s growth cycle, we’ll see mass mainstream adoption of Web3 driven by consumer apps building in highly scalable environments that have figured out distribution to wider user bases. Key catalysts include solutions to the liquidity fragmentation crisis, regulatory clarity under a crypto-friendly administration, advanced blockchain infrastructure and the integration of sophisticated AI technologies. Web3 gaming in particular is positioned to transition from a niche experiment to an innovative force in the gaming ecosystem, offering unprecedented player ownership and economic opportunities that will bring the gaming industry out of recession, and new experiences to gamers. Here’s what to expect from crypto consumer breakthroughs in 2025:

1. AI in gaming and other interactive environments

While there is a great deal of chatter around AI leveraging crypto rails for payments, the most concrete and popular uses have centered around gaming. The general public was not made aware of this development because much of the AI was being used as part of the development process for art in the games, or to generate the game itself. Gaming markets are like any other entertainment content — you hear about the player experience, but very rarely the technology that goes into it.

For web3 games specifically, AI will open a lot of doors for game developers in the industry, particularly around the use of AI agents onchain for non-player characters (NPCs). The ability of small developer studios to harness this tech in a meaningful way has accelerated significantly. A critical mass of Saga games have already introduced these agents, and we would not be surprised if almost all our games have AI agents by next year. Many of these AI agents have taken it a step further and created their own L1s at will on Saga, leading to the phenomenon of swarm sentience and fully autonomous interactive worlds on a decentralized network.

2. Gaming maturity and established titles in Web3

2025 is the transition point for established gaming studios entering Web3. These organizations are building with blockchain as core infrastructure, enabling player ownership and decentralized economies. The experimentation phase is over. Now comes the era of quality. Gaming will drive the next wave of mass adoption because it naturally demands the decentralized infrastructure that blockchain can deliver. With the industry in recession over the last 1.5 years, gaming needed answers to its problems of lack of original content and prohibitive user acquisition costs. A crypto-native environment encourages both creative experimentation and extended user acquisition channels for more effective community building. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say Web3 gaming will end up saving gaming.

3. Meme and degen asset creation

Memes and degen assets are the cultural backbone of Web3. They manifest as game drops, community projects, and viral moments. This is how crypto culture propagates—through creativity at the edges. While traditional finance struggles to understand this phenomenon, these assets drive community engagement and create the authentic moments that define Web3. It’s no surprise that when an AI-agent stood up its first L1 on Saga for a social app, its first action was to launch a memecoin.

4. Sophisticated in-game marketplaces

The next generation of in-game marketplaces will operate as sovereign economies. Players become the market makers, leveraging DeFi infrastructure to drive value. This puts real economic power in the hands of gaming communities. The integration of DeFi principles into gaming creates entirely new mechanisms for player engagement and retention that traditional gaming studios cannot match.

5. Advancements in liquidity solutions

The solution to fragmentation lies in shared liquidity infrastructure. Connected layers between decentralized applications create fluid movement of assets. This enables true composability across gaming, marketplaces and DeFi. The projects that solve this will unlock the next phase of Web3 growth by removing the friction that currently plagues cross-chain interactions.

The truly potent combination is a Web3 asset that has social utility. Particularly among GenZ and Gen Alpha, this sort of combined economic and social activity is not just normal but an incredibly popular form of entertainment. The attribution of value to an asset purely because of community consensus was the origin of web3, and the same force of SocialFi on open liquidity rails will drive the industry into mass adoption.

6. Catalysts from the post-election environment

Trump's return reshapes crypto's regulatory landscape. New SEC leadership will shift policy direction. These changes will shape Web3 gaming adoption through a more crypto-friendly regulatory landscape, characterized by reduced bureaucratic constraints and a business-oriented approach to digital assets. This environment might include easing SEC enforcement, creating more lenient digital asset classifications and potentially establishing regulatory sandboxes or tax incentives for blockchain gaming startups.

In 2025, the success (or failure) of mainstream integration through gaming, finance, and social applications will determine crypto's future. Speculation alone cannot sustain another market cycle. Real adoption requires solving real problems for consumers beyond our existing community. The gaming industry, with its billions of users and appetite for innovation, represents our clearest path to achieving this scale. My hope is that 2025 will represent a critical inflection point for all consumer apps alongside Web3 gaming, and in turn, the crypto industry as a whole.

Rebecca Liao

Rebecca Liao is the founder and CEO of Saga, the Layer 1 blockchain built for launching Layer 1s. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Liao transitioned from international corporate law at Skadden Arps to tech, co-founding Skuchain, a blockchain platform for global trade, and serving as Director of Business Development and Head of Asia for Globality, an AI-powered B2B services marketplace. Her career encompasses technology, Web3, and politics, including advisory roles on tech and foreign policy for both Joe Biden’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns.