The year 2025 marks a definitive industry inflection point, transitioning from a decade dominated by infrastructure development to one driven by application adoption. This shift signifies Web3’s move past its foundational, technology-centric phase into a period focused on delivering tangible value and user-centric products. The maturation of underlying conditions enables this transition. As highlighted in a16z’s “State of Crypto 2025,” mainstream blockchain networks have significantly improved, with processing capacity soaring from single-digit TPS a few years ago to over 3,400 TPS today, while transaction fees have plummeted from tens of dollars to mere cents or fractions thereof. This progress removes technical barriers for developers and users, indicating that public blockchain infrastructure is sufficiently robust. The next decade’s focus will shift toward application deployment, public goods, open-source tooling, and structured financing. A clearer, though evolving, regulatory landscape in key jurisdictions like the United States and Hong Kong provides another critical foundation. Progress on frameworks for crypto assets, stablecoins, and compliant custody is fostering a stage of consensus on innovation within compliance boundaries. This clarity is encouraging capital deployment and enabling the scaling of foundational modules like regulated stablecoins, payment rails, and custody solutions, creating a more viable environment for diverse applications. With reduced policy uncertainty and diminished infrastructure constraints, a significant internal shift is occurring: economic value is migrating from the network layer to the application layer. Success metrics for blockchain networks are increasingly based on genuine user engagement and real economic activity, not merely ecosystem narratives. Against this backdrop, three core utility pillars for Web3 are emerging in 2025: 1. **As an Asset Layer:** Stablecoins, digitally-native assets (DAT), real-world assets (RWA), and on-chain payments constitute the primary gateway for mass adoption. Stablecoins form a global, high-speed dollar settlement network, on-chain payments are being reinvented, and RWA introduces traditional yield streams onto the blockchain, transforming it into a layer for distributing real-world returns. 2. **As a Marketplace:** Platforms like Hyperliquid and Solana now account for 53% of all revenue-generating transaction volume, demonstrating that high-frequency trading, derivatives, and prediction markets are becoming key economic engines. These price discovery markets are central to driving liquidity, infrastructure optimization, and user culture. 3. **As a Computation and Coordination Network:** Blockchain is beginning to empower artificial intelligence (AI) by serving as a coordination layer for verifying computations, managing model ownership, ensuring data provenance, and facilitating decentralized inference networks. The discourse is shifting from “what can blockchains do” to “what can AI do on-chain.” This evolution supports industry observations that the “glorious era of infrastructure is in the past,” and the sector has “undoubtedly entered the application age.” Analysts note that while application-layer investment cycles were premature in the past seven years, the next seven years will differ fundamentally due to enhanced technical capabilities and a more defined regulatory environment. The central question for 2025 is not whether applications will arrive, but that the necessary conditions for their emergence are now in place. With faster networks, lower costs, clearer regulations, and returning user attention, the next decade will be defined by real-world business models operating on-chain. Infrastructure remains essential but is no longer the central narrative; the focus must now return to core product value. The application era for Web3 is not on the horizon—it has begun.