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 guest contributors)—topics covering agents and AI; stablecoins, asset tokenization, and finance; privacy and security; prediction markets, SNARKs, and other applications…and how we will build them.
I. On Stablecoins, RWA Tokenization, Payments and Finance
1. Better and smarter stablecoin deposit and withdrawal channels
Last year, stablecoins processed an estimated $46 trillion in transactions, continuously setting new records. For comparison, this is more than 20 times the transaction volume of PayPal; nearly three times the transaction volume of Visa, one of the world's largest payment networks; and is rapidly 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 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 deposit and withdrawal 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. Others integrate with local networks, leveraging QR codes, real-time payment tracks, and other features to enable interbank payments… while still 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 adoption of stablecoins as a mainstream payment method.
As these payment gateways mature, and digital dollars are directly integrated into local payment systems and merchant tools, new behavioral patterns will emerge. 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. Think about RWA tokenization and stablecoins in a more crypto-native way
We've seen banks, fintech companies, and asset management firms showing strong interest in putting U.S. stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets on-chain. However, as more traditional assets go on-chain, their tokenization tends to be skeuomorphic—rooted in current real-world asset concepts—failing to leverage the native features of crypto.
However, synthetic representations like perpetual contracts allow for deeper liquidity and are generally easier to implement. Perpetual contracts also offer easily understood 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 perpetualization. (The fact that some stocks have zero-date options (0DTE) market liquidity sometimes even surpasses that of the spot market would be an interesting experiment in perpetualization.)
It all boils down to the question of "perpetual contracts vs. tokenization"; but in any case, we expect to see more crypto-native RWA tokenizations in the coming year.
Similarly, in 2026, when it comes to stablecoins, we will see more “native creation, not just tokenization”, as stablecoins have become mainstream in 2025; the outstanding issuance of stablecoins continues to grow.
However, stablecoins without a robust credit infrastructure resemble narrow banks, holding specific liquid assets deemed 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 believe 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 on-chain creation reduces lending servicing costs, back-end development costs, and increases accessibility. The challenges 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 upgrade cycle of the bank's core ledger—and new payment scenarios.
The software that typical banks run is difficult for modern developers to recognize: in the 1960s and 70s, banks were early adopters of large-scale software systems. Second-generation core banking software emerged 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.
The majority of global assets are also stored 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 features such as real-time payments (RTPs) can take months or even years and requires navigating layers of technological debt and regulatory complexities.
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 been reliably functioning for decades. Therefore, stablecoins offer a new avenue for institutional innovation.
—Sam Broner
4. The Internet becomes a bank
With the large-scale emergence of agents, more business activities are occurring automatically in the background rather than through user clicks, so the way funds—value!—flow also needs to change.
In a world where systems act on intent rather than step-by-step instructions—where AI agents move funds based on needs, obligations, or triggering outcomes—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. But in 2026, emerging infrastructure components like the x402 will make this settlement programmable and reactive: agents will pay each other instantly and without permission via 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 in seconds…no custodians or exchanges required.
Once value can flow in this way, the "payment process" is no longer a separate operational layer, but a network behavior: banks become part of the internet's basic pipeline, and assets become infrastructure. If money becomes data packets that the internet can route, then the internet is no longer just supporting the financial system... it becomes the financial system itself.
—Christian Crawley and Pyrs Carvolth, a16z crypto marketing team
5. Wealth management for the general public
Personalized wealth management services have traditionally been reserved for banks' high-net-worth clients: providing customized advice across asset classes and personalizing portfolios is expensive and complex. But as more asset classes are tokenized, crypto tracks enable strategies—personalized through AI recommendations and co-pilots—to be executed and rebalanced instantly at extremely low cost.
This is more than just 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 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 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 the portfolio. 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, because tokenization helps unlock these markets while maintaining compliance and reporting requirements. As the various components of a balanced 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 actions such as wire transfers.
—Maggie Hsu, a16z Crypto Marketing Team
II. On 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 entities" now outnumber human employees by a ratio of 96 to 1—yet these entities 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 conduct transactions—linking the agent to their principal, constraints, and responsibilities. Until this exists, merchants will continue to block agents at the firewall. 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 substantive research tasks.
As a mathematical economist, I struggled to get consumer-grade AI models to understand my workflow in January; but by November, I could give them abstract instructions as if they were PhD students… 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—especially 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 and how it will contribute remains an open question. However, I anticipate that AI research will foster and reward a new style of generalist research: 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 within a certain 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 would 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 worst. I've been using this approach to write papers, while others use it for patent searches, inventing new art forms, or (unfortunately) finding novel smart contract attacks.
However, operating on a collection of inference agents for research purposes will require better interoperability between models, as well as a way to identify and appropriately compensate for the contributions of each model—two issues that cryptography can help address.
—Scott Kominers, a16z crypto research team and professor at Harvard Business School
8. Hidden taxes on open networks
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 to deploy technological and economic solutions on a large 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 only compensating content providers for a small fraction of the revenue lost due to AI cannibalizing traffic.
The internet needs a new technological economic model where value can flow automatically. A 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 for the successful completion of tasks by agents.
—Liz Harkavy, a16z crypto investment team
III. Regarding Privacy (and Security)
9. Privacy will become the most important moat for the crypto industry.
Privacy is an essential feature for moving global finance on-chain. It's also a feature that almost every blockchain today lacks. For most chains, privacy is largely an afterthought.
But now, privacy itself is compelling enough to distinguish one chain from all others. Privacy does something even more significant: it creates chain-locking effects; one could call it 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 across chains 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 and scale correlations, making it easier to track someone down.
Compared to many undifferentiated new chains (where the block space has become largely the same everywhere), privacy-focused blockchains can have stronger network effects. The reality is that if a "general-purpose" chain doesn't yet 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 remain 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 becomes far 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 crucial for most real-world use cases, a few privacy blockchains may dominate the majority of the crypto world.
—Ali Yahya, General Partner of a16z crypto
10. (In the near future) Communication will not only be quantum resistant, but also decentralized.
While the world prepares for quantum computing, many encrypted messaging apps (Apple, Signal, WhatsApp) are already ahead of the curve and doing very well. The problem is that every major messaging app relies on private servers that we trust are operated by a single organization. These servers are targets that governments can easily shut down, install backdoors, or force the surrender of 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 in me"—but the absence of private servers 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 approach to achieving this is a decentralized network: no private servers. No single application. Completely open-source code. Top-notch encryption—including resistance to quantum threats. With an open network, no individual, company, non-profit organization, or nation 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. If a node is shut down, new nodes will immediately take its place 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. Apps may come and go, but they always retain control over their messages and identities; end users can now own their messages, even without owning the app 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. "Secret as a Service"
Behind every model, agent, and automation lies 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, require companies to keep sensitive data private. It's also a significant obstacle for institutions currently seeking to tokenize real-world assets.
So, how can we protect privacy while achieving secure, compliant, autonomous, and globally interconnected innovation? There are many approaches, 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 must currently 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": the ability to provide 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 application-level patch after the fact—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 affected established protocols with strong teams, rigorous audits, and years of operation. These incidents highlight a disturbing reality: current standard security practices remain largely heuristic and case-by-case.
To mature, DeFi security needs to shift from error patterns to design-level attributes, and from a "best-effort" approach to a "principled" one.
In the static/pre-deployment context (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 heavy manual proof engineering work that previously made this approach costly.
In dynamic/post-deployment aspects (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 must be satisfied for every transaction.
Therefore, instead of assuming that every vulnerability will be discovered, we now encode critical security attributes directly into the code itself, automatically rolling back any transactions that violate these attributes.
This is not just theory. In practice, almost every exploit to date has triggered one of these checks during execution, potentially preventing hacking. Therefore, 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 required to maintain system integrity, leaving the remaining attacks either small or extremely difficult to execute.
—Daejun Park, a16z crypto engineering team
IV. Other Industries and Applications
13. Predicting markets will become larger, broader, and smarter.
Prediction markets have become mainstream, and in the coming year, as they converge with cryptography and AI, they will only become larger, broader, and smarter—while also presenting builders with important new challenges 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 in-depth results 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 it to be more transparent, auditable, and so on—and this is precisely what cryptography can achieve.
To handle a much larger number of contracts, we need new ways to reach consensus on the truth for contract settlement. 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 demonstrate their limitations. To address these edge cases and help expand prediction markets to more useful applications, novel decentralized governance and LLM oracles can help determine the truth behind disputed outcomes.
Beyond LLM oracles, AI is opening up even more possibilities for prediction markets. For example, AI agents trading on these platforms can search for signals globally to offer 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 area.) In addition to 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 improve polls (and polling information can be fed into prediction markets). As a political scientist, I'm most excited about how prediction markets can work in tandem with a rich and vibrant polling ecosystem—but we'll need to rely on new technologies like AI, which can improve the survey experience; and encryption, which can provide new ways to prove that poll/survey respondents are not robots but humans, etc.
—Andy Hall, Research Advisor for a16z crypto and Professor of Political Economy at Stanford University
14. The Rise of Staked Media
The cracks in the traditional media model—and its so-called objectivity—have been apparent for some time. The internet has given everyone a voice, and now more practitioners, stakeholders, and builders 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 they 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 limitless 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 articulate their 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 "pledged media": a media species that not only embraces the concept of "stakeholder" but also provides proof. In this model, credibility comes neither from feigned detachment nor from making unfounded claims; rather, it comes from having a stake in the matter and being able to make transparent and verifiable commitments about it. Pledged media does not replace other forms of media; it complements our existing media. It provides a new signal: not just "Believe 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. Encryption technology provides a new primitive that transcends blockchain.
For years, SNARKs—cryptographic proofs that allow you to verify the correctness of a computation without re-performing it—were largely just a blockchain technology. The overhead was simply too high: proving a computation could require a million times more work than simply running it. It was worthwhile when you spread the cost across thousands of validators, but otherwise impractical.
This is about to change. By 2026, zkVM provers will reduce memory usage by approximately 10,000 times—hundreds of megabytes—to be fast enough to run on mobile phones and cheap enough to run anywhere. Here’s why a 10,000-fold increase 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 demands aren't yet sufficient for GPUs, or you lack the expertise, or due to legacy reasons—you'll be able to obtain cryptographic proofs of computational correctness at a reasonable cost. 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
V. Regarding the construction
16. Transactions are a transit point for crypto businesses, not the final destination.
Today, aside from stablecoins and some core infrastructure, it seems every well-performing crypto company is shifting or is shifting towards trading. But if "every crypto company becomes a trading platform," what about everyone else? So many players doing the same thing will erode mindshare among many others, ultimately leaving only a few big winners. This means those who shift to trading too early will miss the opportunity to build a more defensive, more sustainable business.
While I deeply sympathize with all founders trying to get their companies financially running, chasing instant product-market fit comes at a price. This is especially true in the crypto space, where the unique dynamics surrounding tokens and speculation can lead founders down a path of instant gratification in their search for product-market fit… a kind of marshmallow test, to say the least.
There's nothing wrong with transactions themselves—they're an important market function—but they're not necessarily the final destination. Founders who focus on the "product" aspect of the product-market fit are likely to be the bigger winners in the end.
—Arianna Simpson, General Partner, a16z crypto
17. Unleashing the full potential of blockchain... when the legal architecture finally matches the technological 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 disregard the rules 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 would represent an even more significant shift, but this time it targets the internet.
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
