Haseeb Qureshi, a partner at Venture Capital Dragonfly, recently published his forecast for the crypto and artificial intelligence market outlook for 2026, offering several noteworthy insights into Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, DeFi , and global stablecoin trends. According to Haseeb, Bitcoin has the potential to surpass $150,000 by the end of 2026 as institutional money continues to flow into the market, especially after spot Bitcoin ETFs have become a familiar part of the traditional financial system. However, he believes Bitcoin's dominance in the overall crypto market is likely to decline as market Capital gradually spreads to other assets, rather than remaining absolutely concentrated as in previous cycles.
Regarding smart contract platforms, Haseeb believes Ethereum and Solana will maintain their strong positions thanks to their robust developer ecosystems, large user communities, and adaptability to new trends such as AI, Tokenize of real assets, and on-chain finance. Conversely, he is quite cautious about a group of Tier 1 blockchains labeled "fintech L1," meaning projects that heavily promote services for traditional banking, payments, or finance but struggle to generate real user and application traction. In Dragonfly's view, many projects in this group may not meet initial expectations, both in terms of revenue and actual usage.
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Another key highlight of the report is the trend of large tech corporations becoming more deeply involved in the crypto wallet and blockchain infrastructure sector. Haseeb predicts that at least one Big Tech company will directly launch its own cryptocurrency wallet or acquire an existing wallet project. Simultaneously, an increasing number of Fortune 100 companies are expected to adopt "blockchain rails," using blockchain infrastructure as the foundation for payments, reconciliation, or digital asset issuance, rather than just conducting demonstration trials as in the past.
In the decentralized finance (DFC) sector, Haseeb believes the market for decentralized Derivative exchanges, particularly perpetual exchange platforms (DEXs), will enter a period of strong consolidation. Instead of dozens of competing protocols, the market may be left with only about three leading names, accounting for the majority of liquidation and users. Another notable trend is perpetual contracts tied to Tokenize stocks or stock indices, with a market share potentially exceeding 20% of total volume perps on DeFi. However, he also warns of the potential for insider trading scandals in DeFi, as the line between publicly available on-chain data and insider information becomes increasingly sensitive.
