a16z: 17 Major Crypto Trends Predicted for 2026

Source: a16z crypto; Compiled by: Jinse Finance

Note: This week, a16z released its annual "Big Ideas" from partners on its Apps, US Vitality, Bio, Crypto, Growth, Infrastructure, and Speedrun teams. Below are 17 observations on crypto trends in 2026 from several a16z crypto partners (and several invited contributors)—topics covering agency and AI; stablecoins, asset tokenization, and finance; privacy and security; prediction markets, SNARKs, and other applications… to how we will build.

I. About Stablecoins, RWA Tokenization, Payments, and Finance

1. Better, Smarter Stablecoin Deposits and Withdrawals

Last year, stablecoins processed an estimated $46 trillion in transactions, continuously setting new records.

In comparison, this is more than 20 times the transaction volume of PayPal; nearly 3 times the transaction volume of Visa, one of the world's largest payment networks; and is rapidly approaching the transaction volume of ACH, the electronic network used in the United States for financial transactions such as direct deposits. Today, you can send stablecoins in less than a second for less than a cent. However, the unresolved issue is how to connect these digital dollars to the financial tracks people actually use in their daily lives—in other words, the inflow and outflow channels for stablecoins. A new generation of startups is filling this gap, connecting stablecoins to more familiar payment systems and local currencies. Some companies use cryptographic proofs to allow people to privately exchange their local balances for digital dollars. Some integrate with regional networks, using QR codes, real-time payment tracks, and other features to enable interbank payments… while others are building more truly interoperable global wallet layers and card-issuing platforms, allowing users to use stablecoins at everyday merchants. These approaches collectively broaden who can participate in the digital dollar economy and could accelerate the more direct use of stablecoins as a mainstream payment method. As these inflow and outflow channels mature, digital dollars will directly integrate with local payment systems and merchant tools, leading to new behavioral patterns. Cross-border workers can receive their wages in real time. Merchants can accept global dollars without bank accounts. Applications can instantly settle value with users anywhere in the world. Stablecoins will fundamentally transform from a niche financial instrument into a foundational settlement layer for the internet. —Jeremy Zhang, a16z crypto engineering team 2. Thinking about RWA tokenization and stablecoins in a more crypto-native way We see banks, fintech companies, and asset management firms showing strong interest in putting US stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets on-chain. As more traditional assets go on-chain, their tokenization tends to be skeuomorphic—rooted in current real-world asset concepts, failing to leverage crypto-native features. But synthetic representations like perpetual contracts allow for deeper liquidity and are generally easier to implement. Perpetual contracts also offer easily understandable leverage, so I believe they are the most product-market fit among crypto-native derivatives. I also believe emerging market equities are one of the most interesting asset classes suitable for perpetual contractification. (The liquidity of some stocks' zero-day options (0DTE) markets sometimes even surpasses that of the spot market, which would be an interesting experiment for perpetual contractification.) It all comes down to the "perpetual contractification vs. tokenization" question; but in any case, we expect to see more crypto-native RWA tokenization in the coming year. Similarly, in 2026, when it comes to stablecoins, we will see more "native creation, not just tokenization," with stablecoins already mainstream in 2025; outstanding stablecoin issuance continues to grow. However, stablecoins without a strong credit infrastructure resemble narrow banks, holding specific liquid assets considered particularly safe. While narrow banks are an effective product, I don't believe they will be the backbone of the long-term on-chain economy. We're seeing many new asset management firms, managers, and protocols facilitating on-chain asset-backed lending backed by off-chain collateral. These loans typically originate off-chain and are then tokenized. I think the benefits of tokenization in this case are minimal, perhaps only in terms of distribution to users already on-chain. This is why debt assets should be created natively on-chain, rather than created off-chain and then tokenized. Native creation on-chain can reduce lending servicing costs, back-end construction costs, and increase accessibility. The challenges here will be compliance and standardization, but builders are already working on addressing these issues. —Guy Wuollet, General Partner, a16z crypto 3. Stablecoins Unlock Bank Core Ledger Upgrade Cycles—and New Payment Scenarios The software that ordinary banks run is difficult for modern developers to recognize: in the 1960s and 70s, banks were early adopters of large software systems. Second-generation core banking software originated in the 1980s and 90s (e.g., through Temenos' GLOBUS and InfoSys' Finacle). But all of this software is aging and upgrades are too slow. Therefore, the banking industry—especially core ledgers, these critical databases that track deposits, collateral, and other obligations—still often runs on mainframes, programmed in COBOL, and uses batch file interfaces instead of APIs. A large portion of global assets are also stored on these equally decades-old core ledgers. While these systems are battle-tested, trusted by regulators, and deeply integrated into complex banking scenarios, they also hinder innovation. Adding critical functionality such as real-time payments (RTP) can take months or even years and requires navigating layers of technical debt and regulatory complexity. This is where stablecoins come in. Not only have the past few years been a period of product-market fit and mainstream adoption for stablecoins, but this year, traditional financial institutions (TradFi) have embraced them to an unprecedented degree. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized government bonds, and on-chain bonds enable banks, fintech companies, and financial institutions to build new products and serve new customers. More importantly, they can do this without forcing these organizations to rewrite their legacy systems—systems that, while aging, have operated reliably for decades. Therefore, stablecoins offer a new avenue for institutional innovation. —Sam Broner 4. The Internet as a Bank As agents emerge on a massive scale, more business activity occurs automatically in the background rather than through user clicks, and the way money—value!—flows also needs to change. In a world where systems act on intent rather than step-by-step instructions—because AI agents move funds based on needs, fulfill obligations, or trigger results—the transfer of value must be as fast and free as the transfer of information is today. This is where blockchain, smart contracts, and new protocols come into play. Smart contracts can already settle a dollar payment globally in seconds. However, by 2026, emerging foundational components like the x402 will make this settlement programmable and reactive: agents will pay each other instantly and without permission for data, GPU time, or API calls—no invoices, reconciliations, or batch processing required. Developer-released software updates will come with built-in payment rules, limits, and audit trails—no fiat currency integration, merchant onboarding, or banks needed. Prediction markets will self-settle in real time as events unfold—odds updates, agent trading, and payments completed globally within seconds…no custodians or exchanges required. Once value can flow in this way, the “payment process” will no longer be a separate operational layer but a network behavior: banks will become part of the internet’s basic pipeline, and assets will become infrastructure. If money becomes data packets that the internet can route, then the internet will no longer merely support the financial system…it will become the financial system itself.

——Christian Crawley and Pyrs Carvolth, a16z crypto marketing team

5. Mass-marketed wealth management

Personalized wealth management services have traditionally been reserved for high-net-worth clients of banks: providing customized advice across asset classes and personalizing portfolios is expensive and complex. But as more asset classes are tokenized, the crypto track enables strategies—personalized through AI recommendations and co-pilots—to be executed and rebalanced instantly at extremely low cost.

This is not just about robo-advisors; everyone can access active portfolio management, not just passive management. In 2025, traditional finance increased its portfolio exposure to crypto assets (banks now recommend allocating 2-5%, directly or through ETPs), but this is just the beginning; in 2026, we will see platforms built for “wealth accumulation”—not just “wealth preservation”—as fintech companies (like Revolut and Robinhood) and centralized exchanges (like Coinbase) leverage their technological stack advantages to capture more of this market.

Meanwhile, DeFi tools like Morpho Vaults automatically allocate assets to lending markets with the best risk-adjusted returns—providing a core allocation of interest-bearing assets for portfolios. Holding remaining liquid balances in stablecoins instead of fiat currencies, and in tokenized money market funds instead of traditional money market funds, expands the possibilities for further yield generation. Finally, retail investors now have easier access to less liquid private market assets, such as private credit, pre-IPO companies, and private equity, as tokenization helps unlock these markets while maintaining compliance and reporting requirements. As the various components of a portfolio balancing the portfolio (along the risk spectrum from bonds to equities to private and alternative assets) are tokenized, they can be automatically rebalanced without the need for operations such as wire transfers. —Maggie Hsu, a16z Crypto Marketing Team II. About Agents and Artificial Intelligence 6. From Know Your Customer (KYC) to Know Your Agent (KYA) The bottleneck in the agent economy is shifting from intelligence to identity. In financial services, “non-human identities” now outnumber human employees by a ratio of 96 to 1—yet these identities remain ghosts unserved by banks. The crucial missing component here is KYA: Know Your Agent. Just as humans need credit scores to get loans, agents will need cryptographically signed credentials to transact—linking agents to their principals, constraints, and responsibilities. Until this exists, merchants will continue to block agents at their firewalls. The industry, which has spent decades building KYC infrastructure, now has only months to figure out KYA. —Sean Neville, Co-founder of Circle and USDC Architect; CEO of Catena Labs 7. We will use AI for substantial research tasks. As a mathematical economist, it was difficult to get consumer-grade AI models to understand my workflow in January; but by November, I could give models abstract instructions like I would to a PhD student…and they would sometimes return novel and correctly executed answers. Beyond my experience, we are beginning to see AI being used more broadly in research—particularly in the field of reasoning, where models are now directly assisting in the discovery and autonomous solving of the Putnam problem (perhaps the world's most difficult college-level math exam). Which fields AI research will most benefit from and how it will contribute remains an open question. But I anticipate that AI research will foster and reward a new, generalist research style: one that favors the ability to infer relationships between ideas and to quickly deduce from even more speculative answers. These answers may not be accurate, but they can still point in the right direction (at least under some topology). Ironically, this is somewhat like harnessing the power of model "illusion": when models become "smart" enough, giving them space for abstraction can still yield meaningless content—but sometimes it can also lead to new discoveries, much like how humans are most creative in non-linear, undirected states. Reasoning in this way will require a new AI workflow style—not just agent-to-agent, but more like agent-wrapped-agent—where layers of models help researchers evaluate previous models and gradually synthesize the best from the worst. I've been using this method to write papers, while others use it for patent searches, inventing new art forms, or (unfortunately) finding novel smart contract attacks. However: operating a collection of reasoning agents for research will require better interoperability between models, and a way to identify and properly compensate each model's contribution—two problems that cryptography can help solve. —Scott Kominers, a16z crypto research team and professor at Harvard Business School 8. The Hidden Tax on the Open Web The rise of AI agents is imposing a hidden tax on the open web, fundamentally disrupting its economic foundation. This disruption stems from a growing misalignment between the internet's contextual and execution layers: currently, AI agents extract data from ad-supported websites (the contextual layer) to provide convenience to users, while systematically bypassing the revenue streams that fund content (such as advertising and subscriptions). To prevent the erosion of the open web (and preserve the diverse content that nourishes AI itself), we need large-scale deployment of technological and economic solutions. This could include models such as next-generation sponsored content, micro-attribution systems, or other novel funding models. Existing AI licensing agreements have also proven to be a financially unsustainable stopgap measure, often only compensating content providers for a small fraction of the revenue lost due to AI cannibalizing traffic. The network needs a new technological economic model where value can flow automatically. The key shift in the coming year will be from static licensing to real-time, usage-based compensation. This means testing and scaling systems—potentially leveraging blockchain-backed nanopayments and sophisticated attribution criteria—to automatically reward each entity that contributes information to the agent's successful completion of tasks. —Liz Harkavy, a16z crypto investment team III. On Privacy (and Security) 9. Privacy Will Become the Most Important Moat for the Crypto Industry Privacy is a necessary feature for moving global finance on-chain. It is also a feature that almost every blockchain lacks today. For most chains, privacy is largely an afterthought. But now, privacy itself is compelling enough to differentiate one chain from all others. Privacy does something even more important: it creates chain lock-in; arguably, a privacy network effect. This is especially true in an era where performance competition alone is no longer sufficient. Thanks to cross-chain bridge protocols, moving from one chain to another is effortless as long as everything is public. However, once you make things private, this is no longer the case: transferring tokens across chains is easy, but transferring secrets is difficult. There is always a risk of being identified by someone monitoring chains, mempools, or network traffic when entering or leaving privacy zones. Crossing the boundary between privacy chains and public chains—or even between two privacy chains—leaks various metadata such as transaction times, scale correlations, etc., making it easier to track someone down. Compared to many undifferentiated new chains (where block spaces have become essentially identical everywhere), privacy-focused blockchains can have stronger network effects. The reality is that if a “general-purpose” chain doesn’t have a thriving ecosystem, killer applications, or unfair distribution advantages, then there are few reasons for anyone to use or build on it—let alone be loyal to it. When users are on a public blockchain, they can easily transact with users on other blockchains—it doesn't matter which blockchain they join. However, when users are on a privacy blockchain, their choice of blockchain is much more important, because once they join a blockchain, they are less likely to migrate and risk exposing their identity. This creates a winner-takes-all situation. And because privacy is critical to most real-world use cases, a few privacy blockchains may dominate the majority of the crypto world. —Ali Yahya, General Partner, a16z crypto 10. (Near-term) Future Communication Will Not Only Be Quantum-Resistant, But Decentralized While the world prepares for quantum computing, many crypto-based communication applications (Apple, Signal, WhatsApp) are already ahead of the curve and doing very well. The problem is that every major communication application relies on private servers that we trust are operated by a single organization. These servers are targets that governments can easily shut down, backdoor, or force to hand over private data. What's the point of quantum encryption if a country can shut down servers; if a company has the key to a private server; or even if a company owns a private server? Private servers require "trust me"—but without private servers, it means "you don't need to trust me." Communication doesn't need a single company as an intermediary. Instant messaging requires open protocols; we don't have to trust anyone. Our path to this is a decentralized network: no private servers. No single application. All open-source code. Top-notch encryption—including resistance to quantum threats. With open networks, no individual, company, nonprofit, or country can deprive us of our ability to communicate. Even if a country or company shuts down an application, 500 new versions will appear the next day. Shutting down a node will immediately be replaced by a new one due to economic incentives (thanks to technologies like blockchain). When people own their messages like they own their money—possess a key—everything will change. Applications may come and go, but they always control their messages and identities; end users can now own their messages, even without owning the application itself. This is more important than quantum resistance and encryption; it's about ownership and decentralization. Without both, all we do is build unbreakable encryption that can be shut down. —Shane Mac, Co-founder and CEO of XMTP Labs 11. "Secrecy as a Service" Behind every model, agent, and automation, there's a simple dependency: data. But most data pipelines today—the data that inputs to or outputs to models—are opaque, modifiable, and unauditable. This isn't a problem for some consumer applications, but many industries and users, such as finance and healthcare, demand that companies keep sensitive data private. It's also a huge hurdle for institutions currently seeking to tokenize real-world assets. So, how can we protect privacy while achieving secure, compliant, autonomous, and globally interoperable innovation? There are many approaches, but I'll focus on data access control: Who controls sensitive data? How does it move? And who (or what) can access it? Without data access controls, anyone wishing to maintain data confidentiality currently must use centralized services or build custom settings—a time-consuming and expensive process that prevents traditional financial institutions and other entities from fully leveraging the features and advantages of on-chain data management. As proxy systems begin to browse, transact, and make decisions autonomously, users and institutions across industries will require cryptographic guarantees, not just "best effort trust." This is why I believe we need "secrets as a service": capable of providing programmable, native data access rules; client-side encryption; and decentralized key management that enforces who can decrypt what content under what conditions, and for how long—all executed on-chain. Combined with verifiable data systems, secrets can become part of the internet's fundamental infrastructure—rather than an afterthought patch at the application level—making privacy a core part of the infrastructure.

——Adeniyi Abiodun, Chief Product Officer and Co-founder of Mysten Labs

12. From “code is law” to “spec is law”

Recent DeFi hacks have impacted mature protocols with strong teams, rigorous audits, and years of operation. These events highlight a disturbing reality: today's standard security practices remain largely heuristic and case-by-case.

To mature, DeFi security needs to shift from error patterns to design-level properties, from a “best-effort” approach to a “principled” approach:

In the static/pre-deployment aspect (testing, auditing, formal verification), this means systematically proving global invariants, rather than verifying manually selected local invariants. AI-assisted proof tools currently being built by multiple teams can help write specifications, propose invariants, and take over the large amount of manual proof engineering work that previously made this approach costly.

In the dynamic/post-deployment aspect (runtime monitoring, runtime execution, etc.), these invariants can be transformed into real-time guardrails: the last line of defense.

These guardrails will be directly encoded as runtime assertions that every transaction must satisfy. Therefore, instead of assuming every vulnerability will be discovered, we now encode critical security properties directly into the code itself, automatically rolling back any transactions that violate these properties. This is not just theory. In practice, almost every exploit to date has triggered one of these checks during execution, potentially preventing hacking. Thus, the once-popular "code is law" concept has evolved into "spec is law": even a new type of attack must satisfy the same security properties that maintain system integrity, so the remaining attacks are either small or extremely difficult to execute. —Daejun Park, a16z crypto engineering team. IV. On Other Industries and Applications 13. Prediction Markets Are Getting Bigger, Broader, and Smarter Prediction markets have become mainstream, and in the coming year, as they converge with cryptography and AI, they will only become bigger, broader, and smarter—presenting new and important challenges for builders to address. First, more contracts will be launched. This means we will be able to obtain real-time odds, not only for major elections or geopolitical events, but also for a wide range of detailed outcomes and complex, interconnected events. As these new contracts bring more information to the surface and become part of the news ecosystem (which is already happening), they will raise important social questions about how we balance the value of this information and how to better design them to be more transparent, auditable, and so on—and this is precisely what crypto can do. To handle a much larger number of contracts, we need new ways to agree on the truth to settle contracts. Centralized platform rulings (did a given event really happen? How do we confirm it?) are important, but controversial cases like the Zelensky suit market and the Venezuelan election market have shown their limitations. To address these edge cases and help prediction markets expand to more useful applications, new forms of decentralized governance and LLM oracles can help determine the truth behind controversial outcomes. Beyond LLM oracles, AI opens up even more possibilities for prediction markets. For example, AI agents trading on these platforms can search for signals globally to provide short-term trading advantages, helping to emerge new ways of thinking about the world and predicting the future. (Projects like Prophet Arena have already foreshadowed the excitement in this field.) Beyond acting as sophisticated political analysts whose insights we can query, these agents may also reveal new things about the fundamental predictors of complex social events when we examine their emergent strategies. Will prediction markets replace polls? No; they will make polls better (and polling information can be fed into prediction markets). As a political scientist, what excites me most is how prediction markets can work in tandem with a rich and vibrant polling ecosystem—but we will need to rely on new technologies like AI, which can improve the survey experience; and cryptography, which can provide new ways to prove that poll/survey respondents are not robots but humans, etc. —Andy Hall, Research Advisor at a16z crypto and Professor of Political Economy at Stanford University 14. The Rise of Staked Media The cracks in traditional media models—and their so-called objectivity—have been apparent for some time. The internet has given everyone a voice, and now more practitioners, builders, and professionals are speaking directly to the public. Their views reflect their interests in the world, and, counterintuitively, audiences often respect them not because they have no interests, but precisely because their interests are relevant. The novelty here isn't the rise of social media, but the advent of cryptographic tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments. As AI makes generating unlimited content—claiming anything from any perspective or identity (real or fiction)—cheap and easy, relying solely on human (or bot) pronouncements may prove insufficient. Tokenized assets, programmable locking, prediction markets, and on-chain history provide a stronger foundation for trust: commentators can make arguments while demonstrating their willingness to invest in their views. Podcast hosts can lock tokens to show they aren't opportunistically flipping or "pumping and dumping." Analysts can link predictions to publicly settled markets, creating auditable records. This is what I see as an early form of "staking media": a media species that not only embraces the idea of ​​"relevance" but also provides proof. In this model, credibility comes neither from feigned detachment nor from making unfounded claims; rather, it comes from having an interest and being able to make transparent and verifiable commitments about it. Staking media doesn't replace other forms of media; it complements our existing media. It provides a new signal: not just "Trust me, I am neutral," but "This is the risk I'm willing to take, and how you can verify that I'm telling the truth." —Robert Hackett, a16z crypto editorial team 15. Cryptography Offers a New Primitive Beyond Blockchain For years, SNARK—a cryptographic proof that allows you to verify the correctness of something without re-performing the computation—was largely just a blockchain technology. Its overhead was simply too high: proving a computation could require a million times more work than just running it. It was worthwhile when you spread its cost across thousands of validators, but impractical elsewhere. This is about to change. By 2026, zkVM provers will reduce memory usage by approximately 10,000 times—fast enough to run on a mobile phone and cheap enough to run anywhere. Here's why 10,000 times can be a magic number: high-end GPUs have approximately 10,000 times the parallel throughput of laptop CPUs. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs that CPUs execute in real time. This could unlock a vision from older research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you're already running CPU workloads in the cloud—because your computational load isn't yet GPU-optimized, or you lack the expertise, or for legacy reasons—you'll be able to obtain cryptographic proofs of computational correctness at a reasonable cost. The provers are already optimized for GPUs; your code doesn't need to be.

—Justin Thaler, a16z crypto research team, and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University

V. On Building

16. Trading is a transit point, not a final destination, for crypto businesses

Today, it seems that every well-performing crypto company, apart from stablecoins and some core infrastructure, is turning to or is turning to trading. But if "every crypto company becomes a trading platform," what about everyone else? So many players doing the same thing will erode the mind share of many participants, leaving only a few big winners. This means that those who turn to trading too early miss the opportunity to build a more defensive, more sustainable business.

While I deeply sympathize with all founders trying to get their companies financially working, chasing instant product-market fit comes at a price. This problem is particularly pronounced in the crypto space, where the unique dynamics surrounding tokens and speculation can lead founders down a path of instant gratification in their journey to find product-market fit… a kind of marshmallow test, to say the least.

The transaction itself isn't wrong—it's an important market function—but it's not necessarily the final destination. Founders who focus on the "product" aspect of the product-market fit may ultimately be the bigger winners. —Arianna Simpson, General Partner, a16z crypto 17. Unleashing the Full Potential of Blockchain…When Legal Architecture Finally Matches Technical Architecture One of the biggest obstacles to building blockchain networks in the US over the past decade has been legal uncertainty. Expanded interpretations and selective enforcement of securities laws have forced founders into a regulatory framework built for the company, not the network. For years, mitigating legal risks has replaced product strategy; engineers have taken a backseat to lawyers. This dynamic has led to a variety of strange distortions: founders are told to avoid transparency. Token distribution becomes legally arbitrary. Governance becomes a performance. Organizational structures are optimized for legal cover. Tokens are designed to have no economic value/no business model. Worse still, crypto projects that treat the rules carelessly often outmaneuver well-intentioned builders. But crypto market structure legislation—which the government is closer to passing than ever before—has the potential to eliminate all these distortions next year. If passed, this legislation will incentivize transparency, create clear standards, and replace “enforcement roulette” with a clearer, more structured path for fundraising, token issuance, and decentralization. Following the GENIUS Act, the proliferation of stablecoins has exploded; legislation surrounding crypto market structure will be an even more significant shift, but this time it’s about the network. In other words, such regulation will enable blockchain networks to function like networks—open, autonomous, composable, trustworthy, neutral, and decentralized. —Miles Jennings, a16z Crypto Policy Team and General Counsel