The crypto market is back on a roll, Bitcoin’s price finally crossed the $100,000 mark and the fundamentals seem more bullish than ever before.
For the first time in history, the U.S. will have a crypto friendly administration, with President-elect Donald Trump already nominating crypto enthusiast Paul Atkins as the SEC chair. It is also worth noting an increased interest in Bitcoin by institutions, with the likes of Microstrategy and Blackrock adding to their stockpile.
Going by these trends and the most recent price action, it is becoming apparent that 2025 will likely be a big year for the crypto ecosystem. The big question however is which projects are worth watching out for as we enter the next phase of the bull run?
In this article, we’ll highlight the top 3 hidden crypto gems of 2025. Notably, the projects fall under some of the unique narratives this bull run, including Web3 gaming, Real-World Assets (RWAs) and Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN).
1. Funtico
Designed as a full stack chain agnostic Web 3.0 gaming platform, Funtico is one of the niche crypto projects that is focused on enhancing the experience for both gamers and developers.
The Funtico Web3 gaming ecosystem features a wide array of its own proprietary games, including Formula Funtico and Heroes of the Citadel. What stands out about these two games are the incredible reward incentives, alongside the fact that they have a smoother play compared to earlier iterations of blockchain-oriented games.
It is also worth highlighting that Funtico’s Web3 gaming ecosystem also includes a tap-to-earn game dubbed Lucky Funatic, which operates as a Telegram mini-app, allowing any interested gamer to engage seamlessly; the game has over 220k monthly users as of writing.
For the developers, Funtico’s team offers a comprehensive Publisher-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework, enabling them to easily launch their Web3 games regardless of whether their background is in Web2 or Web3.
This Web3 gaming platform is definitely worth keeping tabs on, not only because of its value proposition as a more advanced ecosystem, but also the wider appeal of blockchain games. For context, this crypto sector has consistently led in DApp activity, with the latest quarterly report from DApp Radar revealing that blockchain gaming accounted for 26% of DApp activity, with over 4.4 million daily activity wallets.
2. Ondo Finance
Another upcoming crypto sector which is still largely untapped is the Real-World Asset (RWA) ecosystem; the total value of RWA on-chain has grown from $8.4 billion at the beginning of 2024 to $13.6 billion as of writing. One of the notable crypto projects that is building in this nascent space is Ondo Finance, an RWA platform whose focus is to make institutional-grade financial products more accessible and available to anyone through tokenization.
Launched in 2021, this RWA platform so far manages two tokenized offerings; the Ondo U.S. dollar yield ($USDY) which currently enjoys a total market cap of $453 million and is available on several chains, including Solana, Ethereum, Sui, Aptos, Arbitrum and Mantle. The second RWA product is the Ondo Short-Term US Government Bond Fund (OUSG) with a market cap of $183 million.
More recently, Ondo Finance also partnered with payments behemoth Paypal to enable the conversion of Ondo Short-Term US Government Treasuries (OUSG) to PayPal USD (PYUSD) and vice versa. A move that will likely be pivotal in setting the stage for more collaborations between traditional finance players and native RWA projects.
Other notable institutions that have already deployed RWA products include Blackrock and Franklin Templeton.
3. Render Network
With the DePIN narrative likely ranking among the top 5 crypto themes of 2025, Render Network is the project to watch out for in this category. The project’s native token $RENDER is currently the leading DePIN coin with a market cap of $5.3 billion according to Coingecko.
But what exactly stands out about this project? Render Network touts itself as the pioneer decentralized GPU rendering platform. The platform’s decentralized network bridges the gap between those who need additional computational power ‘creators’ and those with idle GPU space and are willing to rent it out ‘Node operators’.
“One of the more exciting propositions for us is we look at the Apple ecosystem where you have GPUs with 120 gigabytes of video memory, those are out there in the tens of millions. Tapping into that is going to be a massive win over the cost of the scaling issues we have on centralized clouds. That’s where I see huge advantages of decentralized approaches like we have.” – Jules Urback, Render’s Founder.
This type of decentralized approach introduces an ecosystem where both parties stand to gain. On one hand, we have creators leveraging idle computing resources while on the other, node operators earn a passive income in the form of $RNDR tokens.
More importantly, Render Network’s value proposition coincides with the growing demand for computing resources to train generative AI models among other types of AI applications. The latest statistics show that the amount of compute used to train leading AI systems has surged by a factor of 350 million within the past thirteen years.
Conclusion
As mentioned in the introduction, the crypto market is finally bouncing back to life. While there are quite a number of narratives that seem to be gaining the attention of investors, including memecoins and prediction markets, it is worthwhile for longer term and value investors to look more into utility-oriented products. The ones mentioned in this article are just the tip of the iceberg; 2025 will likely bring forth fortunes for those who will be savvy or lucky enough to invest or contribute their efforts towards building what moves.
