Author: Benedic, founder of Meridian
Original title: Predictions for 2026
Compiled and edited by: BitpushNews
Foreword
This is my first attempt to write down 24 predictions for 2026, aiming to constrain my judgment through a public commitment. If the accuracy rate is less than 18 (i.e., more than 6 wrong) when verified next year, I will delete this article. At that time, I will evaluate each prediction and publish the results.
I hold positions in some of the assets and companies mentioned in this article, and if you are building in these areas, I look forward to discussing the possibility of angel investing with you.
mainstream assets
The quantum computing narrative will become a major obstacle for Bitcoin in 2026, as its community is too decentralized to come up with credible solutions.
Ethereum's market attention will continue its multi-year decline and begin to manifest as substantial price weakness.
Solana will shed its meme chain label and become the dominant platform for real-world synthetic asset trading, while maintaining the largest retail user base.
Monad will establish itself as an influential Layer 1, with its year-end price significantly exceeding the Coinbase ICO price. Apart from Tempo , other execution layers launching in 2025 or early 2026 will fail to gain sustained market appeal or attention.
- A strategy of buying a basket of new Binance coins will significantly underperform a strategy of buying stocks.
Application layer
Hyperliquid will gain market share in centralized perpetual contract platforms, but the overall growth rate of the BTC/ETH/ Altcoin perpetual contract market will be relatively slow.
- Prediction markets will not be able to expand significantly beyond sports and major political events, and will therefore gradually fade from the mainstream view.
- Trading volume for some form of on-chain tokenized crypto options product will reach $10 billion.
Base will abandon SocialFi and revert to a regular wallet.
Infrastructure
Robinhood 's Layer 2 will see little progress due to reduced demand for regulatory arbitrage in the current political climate.
- Base will abandon its Layer 2 positioning.
- Some kind of privacy middleware that sits below the application layer and is vertically integrated with embedded wallets will become quite popular.
- Coinbase or Stripe will completely solve the problem of stablecoin fiat currency access for third-party applications.
Solana Ecosystem
Block building will be a major step towards in-protocol integration. Jito and Harmonic will adjust their strategies and both have successfully launched new business lines outside of block building.
- We will see vertical integration between routing aggregators and decentralized exchanges/professional market makers.
- Tokenized stocks will gain a foothold and achieve significant scale in markets outside the United States.
AI (Cryptoelectronics)
AI assistants will be significantly improved and become the default feature in most mainstream consumer applications. By the end of the year, a key differentiator between applications will be the quality of their AI assistants.
Several smart contracts written and tested almost entirely by Claude will receive tremendous attention. In 12 months, the barrier to entry for writing smart contracts will feel 10 times lower than it is now, thus triggering a renaissance in mechanism design.
ChatGPT will become more modular and proxy-based (via plugins), and one of its internal cryptographic use cases will quickly gain popularity.
AI (non-cryptographic field)
- Anthropic will surpass OpenAI in revenue and become the highest-valued AI lab.
Google will solve the post-training problem, and Gemini Flash will become the most popular model for non-coding agent tasks worldwide.
Almost all AI companies selling to enterprises will realize that they are competing with each other. This collapse in the space for imagination will lead to exceptionally fierce competition.
Meta will launch a new consumer-grade AI product, which topped the App Store download charts.
- (Low probability, but I believe its value is underestimated relative to consensus) A new paradigm will emerge that goes beyond “giving LLMs detailed tips and a suite of specialized tools” and will greatly shake up which startups in the field are valuable.
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