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Source:a16z crypto;Compiled by: Bitchain Vision
Press: This week a16z released its annual “Big Ideas” from its partners in Apps, American Vitality, Bio, Crypto, Growth, Infrastructure and Speedrun teams.Here are 17 observations from a16z crypto partners (and several guest writers) on crypto trends in 2026 – topics ranging from agents and artificial intelligence; stablecoins, asset tokenization and finance; privacy and security; prediction markets, SNARKs and other applications… to how we will build it.
1. About stablecoins, RWA tokenization, payment and finance
1. Better and smarter stablecoin deposit and withdrawal channels
Last year, stablecoins processed an estimated $46 trillion in transaction volume, continuing to hit record highs.For 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 quickly approaching the transaction volume of ACH, the U.S. electronic network used for financial transactions such as direct deposits.
Today, you can send stablecoins in less than a second and for less than a cent.However, the still unresolved question is how to connect these digital dollars to the financial rails that people actually use on a daily basis – in other words, the access to and from 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 local balances for digital dollars.Some companies are integrating with regional networks to enable bank-to-bank payments using QR codes, real-time payment rails and other features…while others are building more truly interoperable global wallet layers and card issuance platforms that allow users to spend stablecoins at everyday merchants.Together, these approaches 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 deposit and withdrawal channels mature and digital dollars are directly connected to local payment systems and merchant tools, new behavioral models will emerge.Cross-border workers can get paid in real time.Merchants accept U.S. dollars worldwide without a bank account.Apps can instantly settle value with users anywhere in the world.Stablecoins will fundamentally transform from a niche financial instrument to the basic settlement layer of the Internet.
——Jeremy Zhang, a16z crypto engineering team
2. Think about RWA tokenization and stablecoins in a more crypto-native way
We are seeing strong interest from banks, fintechs, and asset managers in putting U.S. stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets on-chain.As more traditional assets come on-chain, their tokenization tends to be skeuomorphic—rooted in current concepts of real-world assets that fail to take advantage of crypto-native properties.
But synthetic representations like perpetual contracts (perps) allow for deeper liquidity and are often easier to implement.Perpetual contracts also offer easy-to-understand leverage, so I believe they are the crypto-native derivatives with the strongest product-market fit.I also believe that emerging market equities are one of the most interesting asset classes suitable for perpetual contracting.(The trading liquidity of the zero-day option 0DTE market for some stocks sometimes even exceeds that of the spot market, which would be an interesting experiment in perpetual contractization.)
It all comes down to the question of “perpetualization vs. tokenization”; but regardless, we expect to see more crypto-native RWA tokenization in the coming year.
Similarly, in 2026, we will see more “native creation, not just tokenization” when it comes to stablecoins, which have become mainstream in 2025; outstanding stablecoin issuance continues to grow.
But stablecoins without strong credit infrastructure look like narrow banks, holding specific liquid assets that are considered particularly safe.While narrow banking is a valid product, I don’t think it will be the backbone of the long-term on-chain economy.
We are seeing many new asset managers, managers, and protocols starting to facilitate on-chain asset-backed lending backed by off-chain collateral.These loans often originate off-chain and are then tokenized.I think in this case, tokenization brings little benefit, except perhaps distribution to users already on the chain.This is why debt assets should be created natively on-chain rather than tokenized after being created off-chain.On-chain native creation can reduce loan servicing costs, backend build costs, and increase accessibility.The challenge here will be compliance and standardization, but builders are already working to address these issues.
——Guy Wuollet, general partner of a16z crypto
3. Stablecoins unlock the bank’s core ledger upgrade cycle—and new payment scenarios
The average bank runs software that is unrecognizable to modern developers: In the 1960s and 1970s, banks were early adopters of large software systems.The second generation of core banking software began in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., via Temenos’ GLOBUS and InfoSys’ Finacle).But all of this software is aging and upgrading is too slow.As a result, banking—particularly the core ledger, the critical database that tracks deposits, collateral, and other obligations—still often runs on mainframes, programmed in COBOL, using batch file interfaces rather than APIs.
The majority of global assets are also held on these core ledgers, which are also decades old.While these systems are battle-tested, trusted by regulators and deeply integrated into complex banking scenarios, they also hinder innovation.Adding critical functionality like 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 time for stablecoins to find product-market fit and become mainstream, but this year has seen traditional financial institutions (TradFi) embrace them at an unprecedented level.Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized treasuries, and on-chain bonds enable banks, fintech companies, and financial institutions to build new products and serve new customers.What’s more, they can do this without forcing these organizations to rewrite their legacy systems—which, while aging, have operated reliably for decades.Therefore, stablecoins provide a new way for institutions to innovate.
——Sam Broner
4. The Internet becomes a bank
As agents emerge on a large scale, and more business activities occur automatically in the background rather than through user clicks, then money – value!——The flow pattern also needs to change.
In a world where systems act based on intent rather than step-by-step instructions—moving money because an AI agent recognizes a need, fulfills an obligation, or triggers an outcome—the delivery of value must be as fast and free as information is delivered today.This is where blockchain, smart contracts and new protocols come into play.
Smart contracts can already settle a USD payment globally in seconds.However, in 2026, emerging infrastructure components like x402 will make this settlement programmable and reactive: agents pay each other instantly and permissionlessly for data, GPU time, or API calls—no invoicing, reconciliation, or batch processing required.Software updates released by developers come with built-in payment rules, limits, and audit trails—no fiat currency integration, merchant onboarding, or banks required.Prediction markets self-settlement in real time as events unfold – odds updates, agent trading, payments are completed globally in seconds… without the need for a custodian or exchange.
Once value can flow in this way, the “payment process” ceases to be a separate operating layer and becomes a network behavior: banks become part of the basic pipeline of the Internet, and assets become infrastructure.If money becomes packets that the internet can route, then the internet no longer just supports the financial system… it becomes the financial system itself.
——Christian Crawley and Pyrs Carvolth, a16z crypto marketing team
5. Wealth management for the public
Personalized wealth management services have traditionally been reserved for banks’ high-net-worth clients: providing customized advice across asset classes and personalizing investment portfolios is expensive and operationally complex.But as more asset classes are tokenized, crypto rails enable strategies — personalized through AI recommendations and co-pilots — to be executed and rebalanced instantly at extremely low cost.
It’s not just robo-advising; everyone has access to active portfolio management, not just passive management.In 2025, traditional finance increases its portfolio exposure to crypto assets (banks now recommend 2-5% allocation, 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) will use their technology stack leadership 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-earning assets for a portfolio.Holding remaining liquid balances in stablecoins rather than fiat currencies, and in tokenized money market funds rather than traditional money market funds, expands the possibilities for further earnings.
Finally, retail investors now have greater access to illiquid 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 components of a balanced portfolio—along the risk spectrum from bonds to stocks to private and alternative assets—are tokenized, they can be automatically rebalanced without the need for operations such as wire transfers.
——Maggie Hsu, a16z encryption marketing team
2. About agents and artificial intelligence
6. From “Know Your Customer” (KYC) to “Know Your Agent” (KYA)
The bottleneck of the agency economy is shifting from intelligence to identity.
In financial services, “non-human identities” now outnumber human workers 96 to 1 – yet these identities remain the ghost of the unbanked.The key missing foundational component here is KYA: Know Your Agent.
Just like humans need credit scores to obtain loans, agents will need cryptographically signed credentials to conduct transactions—tying the agent to its principals, constraints, and responsibilities.Until this exists, merchants will continue to block proxies at the firewall.An industry that has spent decades building KYC infrastructure now has just months to figure out KYA.
——Sean Neville, Circle co-founder and USDC architect; CEO of Catena Labs
7. We will use AI to conduct substantive research tasks
As a mathematical economist, it was difficult to get consumer-level AI models to understand my workflow in January. But by November, I can give abstract instructions to the models like a PhD student… and they sometimes return novel and correctly executed answers.Beyond my experience, we are starting to see AI being used more widely in research—particularly in the area of reasoning, where models are now directly assisting in discovering and autonomously solving the Putnam problem (perhaps the most difficult college-level math test in the world).
Which areas AI research will help most, and how, remains an open question.But I predict that AI research will enable and reward a new generalist research style: one that favors the ability to speculate on relationships between ideas and to quickly extrapolate from even more speculative answers.These answers may not be exact, but they can still point you in the right direction (at least under a certain topology).Ironically, this is a bit like harnessing the power of model “illusion”: when models become “smart” enough, giving them abstract space to explore can still produce meaningless content—but can sometimes open up new discoveries, just as humans are most creative in nonlinear, non-explicitly directed states.
Doing inference in this way will require a new style of AI workflow—not just agent-to-agent, but more like agent-wrapped-agent—where layers of models help researchers evaluate the methods of previous models and gradually synthesize the best from the dross.I’ve been writing papers using this approach, while others have used it to conduct patent searches, invent new art forms, or (unfortunately) find novel smart contract attacks.
However: operating ensembles of inference agents for research will require better interoperability between models, and a way to identify and appropriately compensate for each model’s contribution – two problems encryption technology can help solve.
——Scott Kominers, a16z crypto research team and professor at Harvard Business School
8. The hidden tax of the open network
The rise of AI agents is imposing a kind of invisible tax on open networks, fundamentally disrupting their economic foundations.This disruption stems from a growing misalignment between the contextual and execution layers of the Internet: Currently, AI agents extract data from ad-supported websites (the contextual layer) to facilitate users while systematically bypassing the revenue streams that fund content (such as ads and subscriptions).
To prevent the erosion of the open web (and preserve the diverse content that nourishes AI itself), we need technical and economic solutions deployed at scale.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 compensating content providers for only a small portion of the revenue they have lost due to AI cannibalizing traffic.
The network requires a new technological economic model where value can flow automatically.A key shift in the coming year will be the shift from static licensing to real-time, usage-based compensation.This means testing and scaling the system—potentially leveraging blockchain-backed nanopayments and complex attribution criteria—to automatically reward every entity that contributes information to the successful completion of an agent’s mission.
——Liz Harkavy, a16z crypto investment team
3. About privacy (and security)
9. Privacy will become the most important moat in the encryption industry
Privacy is a feature necessary to move global finance on-chain.It is also a feature that is lacking in almost every blockchain today.For most chains, privacy is largely an afterthought.
But now, privacy itself is compelling enough to differentiate one chain from all the others.Privacy also does something more important: it creates a lock-in effect; a privacy network effect, so to speak.Especially in an era where competing on performance alone is no longer enough.
Thanks to the cross-chain bridge protocol, moving from one chain to another is a breeze as long as everything is public.But once you make things private, that’s no longer the case: it’s easy to move tokens across chains, but hard to move secrets across chains.There is always a risk of being identified by someone monitoring the chain, mempool, or network traffic when entering or exiting a private area.Crossing the boundary between a private chain and a public chain – or even the boundary between two private chains – exposes all kinds of metadata, such as transaction times, scale correlations, etc., which make it easier to track someone.
Blockchains with privacy can have stronger network effects than many newer chains that are undifferentiated (the block space has become essentially the same everywhere).The reality is that if a “universal” chain doesn’t already have a thriving ecosystem, killer applications, or unfair distribution advantages, there’s very little reason for anyone to use or build on it—let alone be loyal to it.
When users are on a public chain, they can easily transact with users on other chains – it doesn’t matter which chain they join.And when users are on a privacy chain, which chain they choose is much more important, because once they join a chain, they are less likely to migrate and risk exposing their identity.This creates a winner-take-all situation.And since privacy is critical to most real-world use cases, a handful of privacy chains will likely capture the majority of the crypto world.
——Ali Yahya, general partner of a16z crypto
10. (Near-term) future communications will not only be quantum-resistant, but also decentralized
As the world prepares for quantum computing, many encryption-based messaging apps (Apple, Signal, WhatsApp) are already at the forefront and doing well.The problem is that every major messaging app relies on us trusting private servers operated by a single organization.These servers are easy targets for governments to shut down, install backdoors, or force the handover of private data.
If a country can shut down a server; if a company holds the keys to a private server; or even more, if a company owns a private server, what use is quantum encryption?Private servers require “trust me” – but not having a private server means “you don’t need to trust me”.Communication does not require a single company as an intermediary.Instant messaging requires open protocols where we don’t have to trust anyone.
The way we achieve this is through a decentralized network: no private servers.There is no single application.All open source code.Best-in-class encryption—including protection against quantum threats.With an open network, no individual, company, nonprofit, or country can take away our ability to communicate.Even if a country or company shuts down an app, 500 new versions will appear the next day.Shut down a node and, due to economic incentives (thanks to technologies like blockchain), a new node will immediately replace it.
When people own their news like they own their money—a key—everything changes.Apps may come and go, but they always control their messaging and identity; end users can now own their messaging, if not the apps themselves.
This is more important than quantum resistance and encryption; it’s ownership and decentralization.Without both, all we’re doing is building unbreakable encryption that can be turned off.
~——Shane Mac, Co-Founder and CEO of XMTP Labs
11. “Secrets as a Service”
Behind every model, agent, and automation, there is one simple dependency: data.But most of today’s data pipelines—the data that goes into or out of models—are opaque, changeable, and unauditable.This is fine for some consumer applications, but many industries and users (such as finance and healthcare) require companies to keep sensitive data private.It is also a huge hurdle for institutions currently seeking to tokenize real-world assets.
So, how do you protect privacy while enabling secure, compliant, autonomous, and globally connected innovation?There are many ways to do this, but I will 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 a centralized service or build a custom setup—which is not only time-consuming and expensive, but also prevents entities such as traditional financial institutions from taking full advantage of the features and benefits of on-chain data management.As agent systems begin to browse, transact, and make decisions autonomously, users and institutions across industries will demand cryptographic assurances rather than “best efforts trust.”
This is why I believe we need “secrets as a service”: the ability to provide programmable, native data access rules; client-side encryption; and decentralized key management to enforce who can decrypt what, under what conditions, and for how long… all enforced on-chain.Combined with a verifiable data system, secrets can become part of the underlying public infrastructure of the Internet—rather than an application-level patch patched after the fact—making privacy a core 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 affected mature protocols that have strong teams, rigorous audits, and have been in operation for many years.These incidents highlight a troubling reality: Today’s standard security practices remain largely heuristic and case-by-case.
To mature, DeFi security needs to move from error patterns to design-level attributes, from “best effort” to a “principled” approach:
On the static/pre-deployment side (testing, auditing, formal verification) this means systematically proving global invariants rather than validating manually picked local invariants.AI-assisted proof tools, currently being built by multiple teams, can help write specifications, come up with invariants, and take on the bulk of the manual proof engineering work that made this approach costly in the past.
On the dynamic/post-deployment side (runtime monitoring, runtime execution, etc.), these invariants can be translated into real-time guardrails: the last line of defense.These guardrails will be directly encoded as runtime assertions that every transaction must satisfy.
So instead of assuming every vulnerability is discovered, we now have critical security properties encoded directly into the code itself, automatically rolling back any transactions that would violate those properties.
This isn’t just theory.In practice, almost every exploit to date triggers one of these checks during execution, potentially blocking a hacker’s attack.As a result, the once popular “code is law” philosophy evolved into “spec is law”: even a new type of attack must satisfy the same security properties that maintain the integrity of the system, so the remaining attacks are either trivial or extremely difficult to execute.
——Daejun Park, a16z crypto engineering team
4. About other industries and applications
13. The prediction market becomes bigger, broader and smarter
Prediction markets have already gone mainstream, and over the next year, as they intersect with crypto and AI, they will only get bigger, broader, and smarter — while also creating important new challenges for builders to solve.
First, more contracts will be launched.This means we will be able to access real-time odds, not just for major elections or geopolitical events, but for a variety of deeply detailed outcomes and complex, interconnected events.As these new contracts surface more information 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 make them more transparent, auditable, and so on—and that’s exactly what encryption technology can enable.
To handle a much larger number of contracts, we need new ways to agree on the truth to settle contracts.Centralized platform adjudication (Did a given event actually happen? How can we confirm that?) is important, but controversial cases like the Zelensky suit market and the Venezuelan election market show its limitations.To address these edge cases and help prediction markets scale to more useful applications, novel decentralized governance and LLM oracles can help determine the truth about disputed outcomes.
In addition to LLM oracles, AI also opens up more possibilities for prediction markets.For example, AI agents trading on these platforms can search the globe for signals that provide short-term trading advantages and help surface new ways of thinking about the world and predicting the future.(Projects like Prophet Arena already herald the excitement in this field.) In addition to serving as complex political analysts for insights we can query, these agents may also reveal new things about the underlying predictors of complex social events when we examine their emergent strategies.
Will prediction markets replace polls?No; they make polling better (and polling information can be fed into prediction markets).As a political scientist, I’m most excited about how prediction markets work in conjunction with the rich and vibrant polling ecosystem – but we’ll need to rely on new technologies like AI, which can improve the polling experience; and cryptography, which can provide new ways to prove that poll/survey respondents are not bots but humans, etc.
——Andy Hall, a16z crypto research consultant and professor of political economy at Stanford University
14. The rise of staked media
The cracks in the traditional media model—and its purported objectivity—have been showing for some time.The Internet has given everyone a voice, and now more practitioners, practitioners, and builders are speaking directly to the public.Their views reflect their interests in the world, and, counterintuitively, audiences tend to respect them not because they have no interests but precisely because they have interests.
What’s new here is not the rise of social media but the arrival of cryptographic tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments.As AI makes it cheap and easy to generate unlimited content — claiming anything from any point of view or identity, real or fictional — relying solely on the words of people (or bots) 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 put money behind their views.Podcast hosts can lock tokens to show that they are not opportunistically flipping or “pump and dump.”Analysts can tie forecasts to publicly settled markets, creating an auditable record.
This is what I think of as an early form of “pledge media”: a media species that not only embraces the idea of “stake” but also provides proof.In this model, credibility comes neither from pretending to be detached nor from making unfounded claims; rather, it comes from having a stake and being able to make transparent and verifiable commitments to it.Pledge media does not replace other forms of media, it complements the media we already have.It provides a new signal: not just “trust me, I’m neutral,” but “here’s the risk I’m willing to take, and how you can check that I’m telling the truth.”
——Robert Hackett, a16z crypto editorial team
15. Crypto provides a new primitive beyond blockchain
For years, SNARKs — cryptographic proofs that let you verify a calculation is correct without re-executing it — were largely just a blockchain technology.The overhead is simply too high: Proving a computation can take a million times more work than just running it.It’s worthwhile when you spread its cost over thousands of validators, but impractical elsewhere.
That’s about to change.In 2026, the zkVM prover will cost hundreds of megabytes of memory approximately 10,000 times more—fast enough to run on a phone and cheap enough to run anywhere.Here’s why 10,000x might be the magic number: High-end GPUs have about 10,000 times the parallel throughput of laptop CPUs.By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs of CPU execution in real time.
This could unlock a vision in old research papers: verifiable cloud computing.If you’re already running CPU workloads in the cloud – because your compute isn’t GPU-enabled yet, or you lack the expertise, or for legacy reasons – you’ll be able to get cryptographic proofs of the correctness of your computations at a reasonable price overhead.The prover is 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
5. About construction
16. Trading is a transit point for crypto companies, not a terminal.
Today, it seems like every crypto company that is doing well has pivoted or is transitioning to trading, in addition to stablecoins and some core infrastructure.But if “every crypto company becomes a trading platform,” what about everyone else?Having so many players doing the same thing eats away at the mindshare of many players, leaving only a few big winners.This means that those who switch to trading too early miss out on the opportunity to build a more defensive, longer-lasting business.
While I have deep sympathy for all founders trying to make their company’s finances work, there are costs to chasing immediate product-market fit.This issue is particularly acute 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 sort of marshmallow test, so to speak.
There’s nothing wrong with trading per se—it’s an important market function—but it doesn’t have to be the final destination.Founders who focus on the “product” part of product-market fit may end up being the bigger winners.
——Arianna Simpson, general partner of a16z crypto
17. Unleashing the full potential of blockchain…when the legal architecture finally matches the technical architecture
One of the biggest obstacles to building blockchain networks in the United States over the past decade has been legal uncertainty.Securities laws are broadly interpreted and selectively enforced, forcing founders into a regulatory framework built for the company, not the network.For years, mitigating legal risks took the place of product strategy; engineers took a back seat to lawyers.
This dynamic leads to all kinds of weird twists: Founders are told to avoid transparency.Token distribution becomes legally arbitrary.Governance becomes performance.Organizational structures optimized for legal cover.Tokens are designed to have no economic value/no business model.To make matters worse, crypto projects that treat the rules lightly often outpace well-intentioned builders.
But crypto market structure legislation – which the government is closer than ever to passing – has the potential to remove all these distortions over the next year.If passed, this legislation would incentivize transparency, create clear standards, and replace “enforcement roulette” with a clearer, structured path to fundraising, token issuance, and decentralization.Stablecoin proliferation has exploded in the wake of the GENIUS Act; legislation surrounding crypto market structure would be an even more significant shift, but this time for the network.
In other words, such regulation will enable blockchain networks to operate like the web—open, autonomous, composable, trustworthy, neutral, and decentralized.
——Miles Jennings, a16z crypto policy team and general counsel
