Based on a16z's annual forecast, which crypto projects are worth watching?

Written by: Stacy Muur

Compiled by: Ken, ChainCatcher

In mid-December, a16z released its annual "2026 Vision". Below is a list of key points compiled from its vision.

1. Reshaping Payments, Stablecoins, and the Financial Orientation

Argument: Stablecoins will become the settlement layer of the internet, not just the settlement layer of cryptocurrencies.

The story of stablecoins has moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Today, with annual trading volumes reaching trillions of dollars, the question is no longer whether stablecoins are effective, but whether they can seamlessly integrate with the real-world financial system.

a16z's argument is crucial here: stablecoins are not just currencies, but upgrades to the ledger. If stablecoins can coexist with existing systems, providing real-time settlement, programmability, and global coverage, banks and fintech companies won't need to rewrite legacy software that has been in use for decades. This shifts the focus of value capture from issuing stablecoins to distribution, compliance, and integration.

Who will emerge victorious in 2026?

• Embedded payment.
• Card issuance (a new type of encrypted banking) and wallets.
• Bank-level compliance + API.
• Globalized, programmable settlement.

Watchlist:

• Circle (USDC): Regulatory legitimacy + distribution + liquidity advantages. Key areas of focus: payment API, bank integration, inter-agent usage.
• m0: Zero-fee USDC issuance based on modular infrastructure. Notable features: L2 native minting, stateless proxy, and browser-level stablecoin user experience.
• Ether_fi: The hottest new bank contender in 2026; offering yields through tokenized treasury, cash back, and seamless payments; connecting the growth of cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies.
• Plasma: bills itself as the first Neobank built entirely around stablecoins, targeting global users (especially in emerging markets) to meet their daily financial dependence on dollar-backed stablecoins.
• Stablecoin (Bridge) | Stripe Integration: A deposit and withdrawal infrastructure that abstracts the cryptographic layer. Focus: Integration with regional payment tracks.
• x402 Ecosystem: Focus: Driving progress in programmable payments that are "served by agents" and "executed by agents" through native HTTP-level settlement.

2. RWA: Natively issued, not merely tokenized

Argument: Tokenization alone is not enough. To truly improve efficiency, funding sources must be moved on-chain.

The first wave of real-world asset adoption focused primarily on tokenizing existing off-chain instruments, such as loans, government bonds, and credit products, and distributing them to cryptocurrency users. While this improved accessibility, it largely preserved the original inefficiencies: opaque underwriting processes, high service costs, slow settlement speeds, and fragmented liquidity. In many cases, tokenization was simply a new wrapper around old processes.

a16z's core insight lies in the fact that the true advantage of cryptocurrency lies not in replicating traditional financial structures, but in reshaping the credit system from its very source. When loans are initiated on-chain, underwriting logic becomes programmable, service costs decrease dramatically, and risks can be priced and monitored in real time. It is here that cryptocurrency ceases to be merely a distribution channel and begins to become financial infrastructure.

Who will emerge victorious in 2026?

• On-chain underwriting
• Transparent risk pricing
• Credit mechanisms that meet compliance requirements
• Large amounts of liquidity (typically achieved through perpetual contracts).

Watchlist:

• Centrifuge: On-chain credit tracks for real-world assets; focus: institutional transaction flows and default performance.
• Blackrock (BUIDL): A tokenized money market fund on Ethereum; focus: the amount of money flowing into tokenized government bonds and the speed of adoption in traditional finance (TradFi).
• Maple: Institutional lending with underwriter governance; focus: credit line expansion and net yield vs. default risk.
• Plume: A composable credit infrastructure for programmable debt; focus: custom underwriting logic and DAO use cases.
• Pendle: Revenue stripping from tokenized yields; Focus: RWA adoption rates in the Treasury and private lending sectors (PT/YT).
• Ondo: Tokenized Treasury bonds and credit funds; Focus: Compliant USDC to RWA pipeline and L2 expansion.
• Backed: Regulated ETF and bond token wrappers; Focus: DeFi native compliance track.

3. The Internet as a Bank (Smart Agents and Payments)

Argument: As AI agnet begins to transact autonomously, payments can no longer be treated as external systems attached to applications. They must be internet-native: instantaneous, programmable, and fully automated.

The key shift lies in moving from user-driven execution to intent-driven execution. Agents no longer click buttons or approve invoices; they identify conditions, fulfill obligations, and trigger actions autonomously. In this model, traditional payment processes (invoicing, batch processing, reconciliation, settlement windows) are no longer operational details but structural bottlenecks.

Blockchain has introduced a different paradigm. Smart contracts are already capable of achieving global final settlement within seconds. Emerging underlying technologies further drive this process, making value transfer more responsive and composable: agents can immediately pay other agents for data, computation, or services upon completion of a task, with rules directly embedded in the code, enforced without intermediaries. Currency is no longer a separate operational layer but begins to function like network traffic, which the internet can natively handle.

Who will emerge victorious in 2026?

• Agent's native identity.
• Programmatic payment track.
• User experience without human intervention

Watchlist:

• Catena: Identity and compliance infrastructure for AI agents; establishing the "Know Your Agent" (KYA) standard. Focus areas: Agent onboarding, enterprise-level integration.
• Nevermined: A data marketplace infrastructure for autonomous agents; enabling permissioned payments between agents for access, computation, and services. Focus areas: executable data licensing and agent monetization streams.
• KiteAI: An AI-native agent with embedded payment and real-world task completion capabilities. Focus: Intent-based automation, real-world economic throughput.
• ASI: An open ASI + blockchain convergence layer; cross-agent collaboration and computing power monetization. Focus areas: Agent settlement standards, autonomous service economy.
• EigenCloud (via EigenAI): A deterministic AI agent for decentralized policy execution and autonomous protocol operation. Focus: Intent-driven finance, composable economic agency.
• Fetch: A multi-agent collaboration protocol that enables decentralized computing and services. Key focus areas: on-chain task execution and measurable agent GDP.
• x402 enables: Agent settlement, protocol-level payment, and inter-agent transactions.

4. Privacy is the main competitive advantage.

Argument: Privacy leads to user lock-in. Public blockchains commodify users.

The core insight of a16z's privacy theory is simple: Block space has become interchangeable, but confidentiality has not. Performance, cost, and throughput are no longer lasting differentiators. If everything is public, users can migrate freely, liquidity can be bridged instantly, and applications can compete in a zero-profit environment. Privacy breaks this symmetry.

Once users, institutions, or applications invest sensitive information such as state balances, policies, counterparties, identities, and metadata into a privacy-preserving environment, switching costs naturally arise. This creates a privacy network effect: the more activity within a private domain, the higher the value of remaining there, and the greater the risk of leaving due to the risk of boundary information leakage.

Who will emerge victorious in 2026?

• Private execution environment
• Zero-knowledge-based data access control
• Privacy protection is enabled by default, rather than as an add-on feature.

Watchlist:

• Aztec: Private smart contracts + ZK native Rollup. Key focus: Developer appeal, private DeFi primitives.
• Nillion: A decentralized MPC for private computing; institutional data hosting use cases are a breakthrough signal.
• Arcium: A confidential computation layer in the Solana stack; focus: performance scaling and native Solana integration.
• Aleo: A ZK cloud computing platform with native credits; enterprise-level zkCloud usage is the North Star metric.
• Walrus and Seal: Key components of the Sui stack, enabling fully on-chain data and privacy.
• Payy_link: A privacy-preserving stablecoin wallet that combines crypto privacy with practicality, supporting gas-free, fully private, and optionally compliant sending/receiving of stablecoins, similar to USDC.
• Zcash: Shielded transfers via ZK-SNARKs; the rollout of Halo 2 and the expansion of programmable privacy are key.
• Monero: Default privacy L1 with ring signature; robustness under surveillance pressure remains its core competitive advantage.

5. Security: From "Code is Law" to "Specifications are Law"

Argument: Auditing is insufficient to solve the problem. Runtime enforcement will become the standard practice.

The past two years have made it clear that audit failures are not due to a lack of auditor competence, but rather because audits themselves are static, partial, and fundamentally incapable of fully reflecting dynamic systems. Today, protocols operate in adversarial environments influenced by factors such as maximum availability (MEV), composability, oracle latency, and incentive-driven extremes, which often occur after deployment and frequently under extreme market conditions.

a16z's conclusion (which is also the industry's generally accepted conclusion) is that security must be elevated to the next level: from checking whether the code is correct to enforcing that system-level invariants are absolutely inviolable. This marks a shift in security strategy from "code is law" to "specifications are law," with protocols formally defining which rules must always be in effect (such as collateral limits, value conservation, solvency conditions, and ordering constraints) and continuously enforcing these attributes, rather than just at deployment time.

Who will emerge victorious in 2026?

• Runtime protection measures
• Formal Specifications
• AI-assisted verification
• Continuous monitoring

Watchlist:

• OpenZeppelin: A runtime rule enforcement and upgrade security platform with deep protocol integration.
• Trailofbits: A leading security research firm that shifts towards real-time invariant execution through tools.
• SpearbitDAO: A research-driven audit collective that introduces a continuous audit pipeline (as opposed to static snapshots).
• Cyfrin: A smart contract security company that builds educational pipelines and formalization-first tools; its influence is growing in the modular L2 ecosystem.
• Immunefi: A unified on-chain platform for bug bounties, auditing, and AI-driven threat detection to protect crypto projects from exploitation.
• A startup focused on runtime monitoring.

6. Large-scale prediction markets

Argument: Prediction markets have evolved from niche betting venues into real-time information infrastructure on the internet.

The core shift pointed out by a16z is not merely about "more markets" or higher trading volumes, but rather a reshaping of the prediction market structure. With reduced block space costs, improved oracle performance, and decreased user experience friction, markets are no longer sporadic events related to elections or sporting events, but are beginning to function as a continuous signal extraction layer. Everything can be included in the trading list: macroeconomic data releases, protocol upgrades, regulatory votes, corporate actions, and even the probabilistic outcomes of long-tail events.

Liquidity is dispersed across thousands of micro-markets, but price discovery is improved because information is no longer limited by opinion polls, surveys, or centralized analysts.

Who will emerge victorious in 2026?

• A predictive market that can list everything.
• AI Agent continuously trades.
• Decentralization and probabilistic solutions.

Watchlist:

• Polymarket: The leading decentralized prediction platform on Polygon; with monthly trading volume exceeding $1 billion, it dominates the cryptocurrency space.
• Kalshi: A U.S. exchange regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission; with monthly trading volume exceeding $1.3 billion and top app downloads in the legal market.
• FractionAI: Hailed as the first AI-powered agent prediction market, where agents can compete against real-time portfolios in a transparent on-chain environment.
• Opinion: A high-growth event exchange with monthly nominal trading volume exceeding $700 million and breakthroughs in the cryptocurrency-native gambling field.
• Myriad Markets: Decentralized event marketplace infrastructure; with over $10 million in trading volume and active on-chain betting across various segments.

7. zkVMs and verifiable computation

Argument: Prove that we are moving away from the blockchain and into the cloud.

The core turning point pointed out by a16z is not the slight speed improvement of zero-knowledge proofs, but that zkVM is crossing a threshold where general-purpose computing is no longer a luxury unique to blockchains, but a viable system primitive. This is thanks to a significant reduction in proof overhead (from about 1,000,000 times to about 10,000 times), GPU-native provers, and memory footprints suitable for real-world production environments.

Together, they enable a mechanism under which ordinary CPU workloads (cloud jobs, backend services, financial models, machine learning inference, legacy enterprise code) can be executed once and then verified anywhere, transforming the trust assumptions about cloud providers, data pipelines, and off-chain execution into cryptographic guarantees rather than contractual promises, and creating a world where correctness, rather than reputation, is the default security model for distributed systems.

Watchlist:

• RiscZero: a zkVM with general Rust computing capabilities; a reliable leader in the field of cloud compatibility proofs.
• Succinct: SP1 zkVM (based on RISC-V/LLVM) is suitable for any Rust/LLVM code; it focuses on fast verification, light clients and off-chain data feeds, with GPU native proofs (e.g., real-time proofs on 16 GPUs), pre-compiled for efficiency, and recursion for on-chain/off-chain use.
• Brevis_zk: A zk coprocessor for querying on-chain/off-chain data; designed specifically for generating modular proofs within applications.
• Axiom_xyz: A ZK coprocessor for verifiable computations on/off-chain data; supports arbitrary expressive computations off-chain (e.g., historical queries) and verifies ZK proofs on-chain.
• ZKML stack implementation: Frameworks for verifiable ML reasoning via ZK proofs/SNARKs (e.g., ZKML, DSperse, JSTprove); circuitry optimized for production ML workloads (e.g., GPT-2, neural networks), reducing overhead (proof/verification speed increased by 5-22 times).

8. Wealth management is moving onto the blockchain.

Argument: Active and personalized wealth management will become a common phenomenon.

With the native tokenization of assets—including yield cash, publicly traded equities, private credit, and illiquid alternative assets—rebalancing is no longer an event, but an ongoing process. This process is executed by smart contracts, responding to real-time changes in interest rates, volatility, and risk premiums, rather than quarterly meetings or advisory workflows.

AI-assisted asset allocation engines are increasingly playing a co-pilot role, translating user constraints into actionable strategies. Decentralized finance (DeFi) technologies such as automated vaults, tiered yield products, and permissioned risk-weighted asset pools provide the necessary mechanistic depth to implement these strategies without sacrificing compliance or capital efficiency. The result is not "robo-advisors," but programmable wealth, where portfolios can self-adjust according to risk curves, rotating from tokenized government bonds to credit, from beta to carry, from liquid to illiquid, while settlement, custody, and reporting are abstracted away.

What defines a winner?

• Automatic rebalancing
• Cash Income
• Tokenized Private Market

Watchlist:

• Veda: A modular vault infrastructure that supports real-time, policy-based rebalancing across yield primitives; this fits the argument perfectly.
• Upshift: A licensed vault platform with risk monitoring policies and KYC access permissions; partially compliant with RWA access guidelines.
• Midas: Tokenized Treasury bonds and BTC yield strategies with on-chain proof-of-reserve; ideal for compliant, programmable cash flows.
• Base: Coinbase's L2 Base App integrates wallets, trading, social feeds, mini-programs, and on-chain yields (such as USDC APY); enabling seamless, abstract wealth management through one-click DeFi and RWA access.
• Morpho: A non-custodial lending vault that automatically rebalances between P2P and pooled lending markets; compliant with programmable credit allocation and real-time yield optimization.
• Infinit: An AI-driven super app with agent strategies for one-click automatic returns, Delta-neutral positions, cross-chain bridging/swapping, and RWA-optimized compatibility; it achieves self-adjusting wealth through multi-agent collaboration, aligning with programmable portfolio orientation.