It’s 2025 and trends in web3 are shifting faster than ever. If you thought 2024 was big with L2 rollups, appchains, and custom chains, wait, there’s more! Rollups are still leading the charge, with 137+ L2s and over 4-5M DAUs—about 20% of the total L2 market share. But here’s the real game-changer: the fusion of AI with rollups– DeFAI, which is creating a seismic shift in how organizations and users can perceive or interach with finance. This isn’t just a tech upgrade—it’s a whole new paradigm shift. Get ready, because DeFAI and rollups are set to dominate 2025 & beyond, and you won’t want to miss this explosion. Considering this, our article dives deeper into DeFAI and rollups, highlighting why these are 2025’s key trends and how fast it’s growing.
DeFAI is the fusion of decentralized finance and AI, enabling creation of innovative and powerful tools to simplify the complex DeFi processes and make its wide range of services accessible for everyone. DeFAI essentially aims at creating ‘automated agents’ to automate on-chain DeFi processes, such as yield optimization, automated trading, portfolio management, cross-chain swaps, and on-chain governance.
For example- a novice investor with basic DeFi (or crypto) knowledge projects can invest and make a good return on DeFAI apps. That’s because agents in DeFAI will handle all the complex processes– from data analysis to market research, and trading strategy creation. Additionally, incorporation of AI enhances security, boosts profit margins, and offers several other benefits that are missing from today’s DeFi.
While DeFAI is in its early stage, its growth is accelerating fast. DeFAI’s current market cap is $1B+ and its ecosystem is expanding with hundreds of innovative apps, L2 rollups, and infrastructure platform. We’ll discuss them later in the article.
Here’s a tweet that shows the growth of DeFi vs DeFAI. This shows the DeFAI is set to get unstoppable growth and it’s quickly stealing the trend from DeFi.
Talking about rollups, these are L2 scaling solutions that focus on the creation of custom L2/L3 chains for off-chain transaction processing, reducing the load on Layer1. With this, rollups offer benefits like fast throughput, endless customization, complete privacy, native token support, seamless integration of external services, and more.
Identify L2 rollups’ potential and its game-changing features now! Check this article:
What are Layer-2 rollup networks? Everything You Need To Know
DeFAI rollups refer to DeFi AI agents platforms or dApps that are launched and managed on top of a single-use, sovereign, and custom chain. As per project requirements, DeFAI rollups can choose to build with leading frameworks like OP Stack, Polygon CDK, Arbitrum Orbit, ZK Stack, Tezos smart rollups, Scroll, or more. Given this, DeFAI rollups can either be launched & operated on Ethereum Layer1 or their stack-specific Layer2 protocol, for example– a DeFAI rollup building with Orbit stack can be deployed on Ethereum or on the Arbitrum.
Of course, the motive behind building DeFAI rollup is to address public chain’s limitations for DeFi, such as slow transactions processing (high congestion due to shared infrastructure), deployed deposit/withdrawals, lack of modularity, high gas cost, privacy concerns, and a lot more. And, that’s the reason DeFAI rollups are expected to grow multi-folds. Let’s see what all kinds of DeFAI rollups are relevant or building in 2025.
DeFi Abstraction layers:
Abstraction layers in DeFi are created to reduce the complexity related to DeFi activities while streamlining the user experience. Although the pre-DeFAI era offers a solid infrastructure, it has been left with some friction that an AI-based DeFi abstraction layer can tackle efficiently by removing the technical barriers such as cross-chain coordination, inter-protocol interactions, or cross-blockchain activities, and so on. Solving these bottlenecks allow the DeFi abstraction layer to provide a unified experience, ensure intent-driven communication, and optimized DeFi execution. Griffain, Nuer, Slate, Wayfinder, The Hive, HeyElsa, and v1 Agent are some of the leading DeFi layers that can leverage a custom DeFAI L2 if they want modularity, a room for dedicated throughput, gas cost optimization, custom token, or more.
AI-powered DeFi applications:
AI-powered DeFi applications often seek benefits like faster transaction processing, increased security & privacy, and the ability to customize networks as per their use case requirements. These apps are created to automate activities on any DeFi platform to boost its functionality, ensure great user experience, and power more intelligent, user-centric DeFi solutions. Integration of AI will allow DeFi applications to automate trading, perform risk management, ensure fraud prevention, optimize yields, do predictive analytics, optimize liquidity, and more. Some examples of AI-powered DeFi applications include Mode Network, Boltrade, Hawkfi, Unidex exchange, and Lexidon. As you can see, most of these applications are currently on public-chain. That’s because they are in early-stage where dedicated infra, customization, or high-performance are not the critical parameters.
Looking to transition your DeFAI app on a dedicated L2? Discuss your project
Automated trade agents:
AI trade agents are specialized trading bots that are created to handle a range of trading-related activities on behalf of users, but with more flexibility and intelligence. Unlike traditional bots that works through pre-defined, static instructions– automated trade agents use advanced AI technology like GenAI and combine it with sophisticated system and algorithms to provide complete independent and dynamic strategies for trading. Cod3X, Almanak, Hey Anon, Axal, ASYM, and Project Plutus are the leading players in trade AI agents category.
As discussed, Layer2 rollups have already been established as an ultimate choice for scaling in 2024. Now, its amalgamation is happening with AI technologies. Because DeFi is the fastest growing industry with expected growth of $376.9M in 2025, DeFAI rollups have emerged as the hottest trend. However, L2 rollups are optimized to support all the industries that are integrating AI; be it gaming, DePIN, RWA, retail, or more.
Coming again to DeFAI rollups, they are less in numbers due to DeFAI being the new player. But, considering the sharp increase in awareness and success rate of DeFAI rollup projects, a good number of innovative L2 rollups are expected to built going forward. Let’s look at some of DeFAI L2 rollups building/thriving in 2025:
Mode Network- Mode Network is designed as a modular, DeFAI L2 using OP Stack, joining the OP Superchain ecosystem. With $500M+ TVL, 24M+ transactions, and 367k+ users– Mode L2 is recognized as a leader in DeFAI, offering a powerful DeFAI infrastructure to host 50+ DeFi applications, a robust framework to design on-chain DeFi agents, and excellent yield opportunities through protocols like Ionic, Layerbank, and Renzo. Optimized with OP Stack’s Bedrock upgrade, Mode Network ensures 95% less fees than Ethereum L1 while enabling other key rollup features like higher scalability, L1-inherited, and cross-chain interoperability.
Singularity L2- Singularity Finance is another project that has announced the launch of its incentivized testnet and upcoming mainnet launch of DeFAI L2 with the aim to bring the vast AI economy on-chain. To achieve this, SingularyFi offers allows to;
> Tokenize AI-compute, assets, and hardware to earn yield on it.
> Create custom DeFi AI agents on SFI L2 and spoilt the on-chain revenue across them.
> Feed data and train advanced AI models to earn from these.
Built with OP Stack and as a part of Superchain, Singularity Finance L2 archives next-level modularity, deep Ethereum integration, cross-chain interaction, and fast processing network to have achieved 700k+ daily transactions within 10 days.
Capx AI L2 – Next, there’s Capx AI– the leading optimistic rollup DeFAI Layer2 cutrrently live with testnet. Capx is built with Arbitrum Nitro stack and it uses Ethereum as base layer. Building with Nitro stack has allowed Capx AI to improve the transaction volume and throughput on the testnet, allowing CapX AI L2 to achieve 400 TPS (100 TPS for internal stress test) while accumulating 6.67M+ transactions, 3.01M+ total blocks, 428.4K total addresses, and 340.4K total transactions. Also, Capx AI chain ensures a smooth UX with its custom gas token- $GAS. Note that Capx AI chain is a part of Capx’s AI builder ecosystem consisting of Capx chain, Capx Super App, and Capx cloud.
LayerAI – Finally, we have LayerAI– the dedicated rollup L2 for DeFi data monetization in AI models. Similar to Capx, LayerAI also offers an ecosystem consisting of Layer2 blockchain, LayerVPN, LayerMarketplace, and the LayerAI data. Building with Polygon CDK allows LayerAI to ensure consistent uptime, correct execution, and dedicated throughput on the network. Plus, achieving AggLayer-based interoperability and liquidity is a huge plus. As of now, LayerAI has 6M+ app downloads, 100K+ AI agents deployed, and 12+ ecosystem products ready to use.
The integration of AI technology is no longer just a nice-to-have thing, but it’s a critical aspect in web3 as well. Tremendous growth and popularity of DeFAI is a testament to this. Rise in DeFAI adoption will definitely push more dApps towards building their own custom L2 chain. If you are planning to build one, Zeeve RaaS is your trusted RaaS partner. With Zeeve RaaS, diverse L2/L3 DeFAI rollups can save 60% in cost and 90% in time, enjoying faster time-to-market.
And the best part? Zeeve’s one-click sandbox tool lets you seamlessly deploy everything from OP Stack to Arbitrum Orbit, ZK Stack, and Polygon CDK, with 40+ modular integrations for a production-ready testnet. Jump into the sandbox now or schedule a demo with our experts for a deep dive into how Zeeve RaaS can supercharge your rollup journey! Try the sandbox yourself to check out Zeeve RaaS’ comprehensive rollup offerings. Or, you can schedule a demo call with our experts for a detailed discussion.
