30 Predictions, Filtered for Five 2026 Crypto Consensus

2025 is coming to an end.

Most people can clearly feel that, starting from the second half of this year, the narrative of the crypto industry has gradually dried up, and the hype around cryptocurrency has also waned. So, as we look ahead to 2026, what changes can we expect in the market, and which narratives will receive market favor?

BlockBeats has analyzed over 30 forecasts for 2026, including top research institutions such as Galaxy, Delphi Digital, a16z, Bitwise, Hashdex, Coinbase, as well as many industry KOLs who have long been engaged in frontline research, product development, and investment. From these analyses, we have summarized 5 narratives for 2026 that enjoy unanimous approval, so make sure to read till the end.

Stablecoins to Enter Traditional Finance

The first and most widely agreed-upon direction is stablecoins.

In 2026, stablecoins will undergo a complete transformation from a "cryptocurrency tool" to "mainstream financial infrastructure," a point that is almost universally recognized by all major forecasters.

a16z's data on this matter is very straightforward, almost to the point of being "irrefutable." They point out that in the past year, stablecoins have processed around $46 trillion in transaction volume. How significant is this number? It is roughly 20 times PayPal's annual transaction volume, nearly 3 times that of Visa, and is also approaching the scale of the U.S. ACH (Automated Clearing House) network.

However, a16z also soberly points out that the issue is not whether there is demand for stablecoins, but rather how these digital dollars will truly enter the everyday financial infrastructure that people use. This involves the most concrete, as well as the dirtiest and most tiring aspects of deposits and withdrawals, payments, settlements, and consumption. They observe that an entire new generation of startups is specifically addressing this issue. Some leverage cryptographic proofs to allow users to convert their local account balances into digital dollars without compromising their privacy; some directly integrate with regional banking networks, QR codes, and real-time payment rails to enable stablecoins to be used like local transfers; while others start from even deeper levels, building a truly globally interoperable wallet layer and issuance platform to enable stablecoins for direct consumer spending at everyday merchants.

Therefore, their conclusion is: "As these deposit and withdrawal channels mature, digital dollars will directly plug into local payment systems and merchant tools, leading to new behavior patterns. Workers can instantly receive cross-border wages, merchants can accept global dollars without a bank account, and applications can settle value instantaneously with users anywhere in the world. Stablecoins will fundamentally transform from a niche financial tool to the foundational settlement layer of the Internet."

What's even more interesting is that a16z researcher Sam Broner explained from a very "engineering-oriented" perspective why this was almost inevitable. They pointed out that the software systems run by most banks today are too old for modern developers, with the core ledger still running on large mainframes using COBOL, interfacing through batch files instead of APIs. Of course, these systems are stable, trusted by regulators, and deeply integrated into the real world, but the problem is that they can hardly evolve quickly. Even just adding a real-time payment feature could take several months or even years, while also dealing with massive technical debt and regulatory complexity. And this is where stablecoins come in.

Crypto KOL and Alongside Finance researcher Route 2 FI has listed "Stablecoins (Traditional Finance Implementation and On-Ramp)" as a top priority direction in their narrative focus, emphasizing how traditional financial institutions are implementing stablecoin technology and building the corresponding financial rails.

Galaxy Research's assessment is more direct and more aggressive. They predict that by the end of 2026, 30% of international payments will be made through stablecoins.

Bitwise's conclusion is almost identical, but approached from a market size perspective: they project that the market capitalization of stablecoins will double by 2026, with the key variable being the GENIUS Act coming into effect in early 2026, opening up growth opportunities for existing issuers and attracting new players to compete.

Overall, 2026 will be a crucial year for stablecoins to transition from the periphery to the mainstream core.

AI Agent, Emerging as a Top Trader

The second equally consensual but more futuristic consensus is that AI agents will become the primary participants in on-chain economic activities, which was confirmed by the recent widely followed AI model trading competition.

Many have underestimated the speed of this change. The logic is not complicated: when AI agents start autonomously performing tasks, making decisions, and engaging in high-frequency interactions with each other, they inherently require a means of value transfer that is as fast, cheap, and permissionless as information exchange.

Traditional payment systems, designed for humans with accounts, identities, and settlement periods, are all friction points for AI agents.

Cryptocurrency, especially when coupled with payment protocols like x402, is almost tailor-made for this scenario: instant settlement, support for micropayments, programmability, permissionlessness. Therefore, 2026 is likely to be the first year when the payment infrastructure of the agent-based economy transitions from proof of concept to real-world scalable usage.

Sean Neville, a16z researcher and co-founder of Circle, as well as the architect of USDC, pointed out from another more foundational angle the true bottleneck in the current AI Agent economy: the problem is shifting from "not smart enough" to "identity not present": in the financial system, the number of "non-human identities" has already exceeded human employees by a ratio of 96 to 1, but these identities are almost all "bankless ghosts."

Yet the financial industry lacks KYA (similar to KYC but KYA: Know Your Agent). Just as humans need a credit score to get a loan, intelligent agents also need a credential of cryptographic signature to prove who they represent, who they are bound by, and who is responsible when things go wrong. Before KYA emerged, many merchants could only choose to directly block intelligent agents at the firewall level. While the industry spent decades building KYC, now there may only be a few months left for KYA.

Other members of the a16z team also pointed out in the summary that AI agents need an encrypted track for micropayments, data access, and computing power settlements. The x402 standard will become the payment backbone of the intelligent agent economy. The key asset is no longer the model but scarce, high-quality real-world data (DePAI), and examples such as BitRobot, PrismaX, Shaga, Chakra were listed.

Lucas Tcheyan of Galaxy Research provided very specific quantitative predictions. He expects that by 2026, payments following the x402 standard will account for 30% of the Base daily transaction volume and 5% of non-voting transactions on Solana, marking a greater use of on-chain rails in intelligent agent interactions.

He believes that as AI agents begin to trade autonomously across services, standardized payment primitives will directly enter the execution layer. Base will gain an advantage due to Coinbase's push for the x402 standard, while Solana will become another pole with its large developer and user base. At the same time, some new chains focused on payments (such as Tempo and Arc) will also grow rapidly in this process.

RWA Will Become More Degen

Unlike the previous fervor of "everything can be on-chain," the current RWA narrative has significantly cooled down. Most research institutions no longer discuss "how big the potential market is," but instead repeatedly emphasize one word: feasibility. Therefore, the cooled-down RWA in the 2026 consensus appears even more concentrated.

a16z analyst Guy Wuollet is not light in his criticism of the current tokenization of RWAs. He points out that while we have seen banks, fintech companies, and asset management firms show great interest in moving U.S. stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets onto the chain, so far, most of the so-called "tokenization" is still essentially analog. These assets have only been "given a layer of technological wrapping," but their design logic, transaction methods, and risk structures are still firmly rooted in the traditional financial understanding of real-world assets, rather than leveraging the native properties of the cryptographic system itself.

Galaxy Research's prediction on this issue is significantly more inclined towards a "structural breakthrough." They are not fixated on product form but instead directly focus on a core element of the traditional financial system: collateral.

They predict that in the next year, a major bank or brokerage will start accepting tokenized stocks as formal collateral. If this happens, its symbolic significance is far greater than any individual product launch. Because so far, tokenized stocks are still on the edge, either small-scale experiments within DeFi or large banks' pilot projects on private blockchains that have almost no substantial connection to the mainstream financial system.

But Galaxy points out that things are changing. Core infrastructure providers in traditional finance are accelerating their shift to blockchain-based systems; at the same time, regulatory attitudes towards this direction are noticeably shifting towards support. This year, they expect to see, for the first time, a heavyweight financial institution accept tokenized stocks on-chain deposits and consider them as assets fully equivalent to traditional securities in terms of legal and risk frameworks.

Hashdex is the most aggressive institution, predicting a tenfold growth in the tokenization of real-world assets. This prediction is built on the foundation of increased regulatory clarity, preparedness of traditional financial institutions, and matured technical infrastructure.

Forecasting Markets, More Than Just "Decentralized Betting"

Contrary to what most people expected, forecasting markets have also become a highly anticipated track in 2026.

But what surprises people is the reason why forecasting markets are so well-regarded, no longer just for "decentralized betting," but rather for evolving into an information aggregation and decision-making tool.

a16z's Andy Hall, a Stanford University political economist, believes that forecasting markets have crossed the threshold of "whether they can become mainstream." In the next year, as they deepen their intersection with cryptocurrency and AI, forecasting markets will become larger, more widespread, and smarter.

However, at the same time, he also emphasized that this expansion is not without cost. The prediction market is being pushed to a whole new level of complexity: higher trading frequency, faster information feedback, more automated participant structure. These changes, on the one hand, amplify its value, but on the other hand, also pose brand-new challenges for builders, such as how to adjudicate results more fairly without causing controversies, and so on.

Galaxy Research's Will Owens quantified this change into very specific numbers. He predicted that Polymarket's weekly trading volume will consistently exceed $1.5 billion in 2026. This judgment is not unfounded. In fact, the prediction market has been one of the fastest-growing tracks in the crypto field, with Polymarket's nominal weekly trading volume already approaching $1 billion.

He believes that what will continue to drive this number upward is the simultaneous occurrence of three forces: the deepening of a new layer of capital efficiency enhancing market liquidity, AI-driven order flow significantly increasing trading frequency, and Polymarket's continuously improving distribution capability accelerating fund inflows.

Bitwise's Ryan Rasmussen gave a more aggressive assessment. He predicted that Polymarket's open interest contract size will surpass the historical high set during the 2024 U.S. election. The driving factors of this growth are very clear: openness to U.S. users bringing in a large number of new users, about $2 billion in new capital injection providing ample ammunition, and the market type no longer limited to politics, but expanding into various fields such as economics, sports, and pop culture.

Outside of institutions, KOLs' assessments are also intriguing. Tomasz Tunguz believes that by 2026, the adoption rate of prediction markets among the U.S. population will increase from the current 5% to 35%. For comparison, the adoption rate of gambling in the U.S. is about 56%. This means that prediction markets are evolving from a niche financial tool to a product closer to mainstream entertainment and information consumption.

But Galaxy also issued a prediction with a clear warning in this wave of optimism. They believe that a federal investigation surrounding the prediction market is highly likely.

As U.S. regulatory agencies gradually greenlight on-chain prediction markets, trading volume and open interest contracts are rapidly rising. Meanwhile, related gray events have begun to surface. Several scandals have already emerged, involving insiders using undisclosed information to enter early, or engaging in match-fixing against major sports leagues. Since prediction markets allow traders to participate under a pseudonym, rather than through strict KYC of traditional betting platforms, the temptation for insiders to abuse privileged information is significantly magnified.

Therefore, Galaxy believes that future investigative trigger points may no longer come from anomalous behavior within regulated gambling systems, but directly from suspicious price fluctuations in on-chain prediction markets.

And this topic could also lead to the emergence of a fifth consensus, Privacy.

Privacy Coins, Rising Stars Again?

As more and more capital, data, and automated decision-making are pushed onto the chain, exposure itself is becoming an unacceptable cost. This became evident as early as 2025.

This year, the concept of privacy was also a rising star, with gains even surpassing mainstream coins like Bitcoin. Therefore, for 2026, predicting the privacy track has become a consensus among most institutions, researchers, and KOLs.

Galaxy Research's Christopher Rosa made a bold statement: the total market cap of privacy tokens will exceed $100 billion by the end of 2026. He explained that privacy tokens received significant attention in the last quarter of 2025 as investors put more funds on-chain, making on-chain privacy a top consideration. Among the top three privacy coins, Zcash rose by about 800% in the same quarter, Railgun by about 204%, and Monero recorded a more modest 53% increase.

Christopher provided an interesting historical background: early Bitcoin developers, including Satoshi Nakamoto himself, had explored privacy-focused technologies and research. Ideas to make transactions more private, even fully shielded, had surfaced in early Bitcoin design discussions. However, at that time, truly usable and deployable zero-knowledge proof technology was far from mature.

But today, the situation is entirely different. With zero-knowledge technology gradually becoming engineering-ready and the significant increase in value transacted on-chain, more and more users, especially institutional users, are seriously examining a previously accepted fact: are they really willing to have all their encrypted asset balances, transaction paths, and fund structures permanently exposed to anyone?

Therefore, the privacy issue has shifted from an "idealistic need" to an "institutional-level practical issue".

Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder of Mysten Labs, then completed this logic from another perspective. Rather than starting directly from asset prices or user behavior, he broke down the issue to a more foundational dependency: data.

In his view, behind every model, every agent, and every set of automated systems lies one thing: data. But today, most data pipelines, whether input to models or outputs from models, are opaque, mutable, and unauditable. While this may be acceptable for some consumer applications, in industries like finance, healthcare, this is almost an insurmountable obstacle. And as agent systems begin to autonomously browse, transact, and make decisions, this issue is further magnified.

In this context, Adeniyi has proposed the concept of "Secrets-as-a-Service." He believes that what is needed in the future is not to retrospectively stitch privacy features at the application layer but rather a comprehensive native, programmable data access infrastructure: including executable data access rules, client-side encryption mechanisms, and decentralized key management systems to enforce who can decrypt what data, under what conditions, and for how long. All these rules should be enforced on-chain rather than relying on internal organizational processes or human constraints. Combined with verifiable data systems, privacy itself can become a public infrastructure component of the internet, rather than just an add-on feature of any application.

Additional Observations, a Must-Read for the Crypto Community

In addition to these core judgments, almost all institutions have also provided some interesting discussions that did not reach a consensus but contributed additional observations.

One of the most interesting points is the shift in application-layer value capture trend. An increasing number of forecasts believe that the "Fat Application Theory" is replacing the "Fat Protocol Theory." Value is no longer primarily deposited at the base chain and general protocol layer but is gradually focusing on the application layer. This shift is not because the underlying layer is unimportant but because what truly interacts directly with users, data, and cash flow is still the application itself.

Therefore, this has also led to another discussion with significant divergence: Ethereum, aspiring to become the world computer and having been the advocate of the "Fat Protocol" in the past, how will its value change under the trend of "Fat Applications"?

Some believe that it will continue to benefit as a critical layer for tokenization and financial infrastructure; others believe it may gradually evolve into a "boring but necessary" foundational network, with the majority of the value being absorbed by the applications built on it.

Regarding Bitcoin analysis, most still believe that it will perform well in 2026, with continued strengthening demand from ETFs and institutional investment funds, solidifying its position as a strategic macro asset and "digital gold," but acknowledging the real threat from quantum computing.

Furthermore, analysts have also examined the potential changes in organizational structure and recruitment that may occur after 2026:

For example, a16z believes that post-2026, enterprises will begin to pay more for AI agents than for human employees, a phenomenon that has already emerged at the consumer level. Waymo's average ride cost is 31% higher than Uber's, yet demand continues to grow as users are willing to pay a premium for the safety and reliability of autonomous driving.

Within enterprises, this logic also holds true. When companies take into account the hidden costs of recruitment, onboarding, training, management, etc., smart agents actually demonstrate a higher return on investment when performing routine business tasks. a16z further predicts that AI agents will autonomously execute tasks for a continuous time period exceeding a full working day for the first time. According to METR data, the duration of AI tasks doubles approximately every 7 months. Current state-of-the-art models can reliably complete tasks that would take a human about an hour. Extrapolating along this trend, by the end of 2026, smart agents autonomously executing work processes exceeding 8 hours will become a reality, fundamentally transforming how companies allocate personnel and plan projects.

Meanwhile, there are other changes that are less openly discussed but are already emerging in actual recruitment, such as the reversal of age premiums. An increasing number of founding teams are more willing to entrust protocol funds and treasuries to a 42-year-old former risk officer from a second-tier bank who has truly gone through a full credit cycle, rather than a 23-year-old native DeFi player who has only experienced a bull market. Real-world risk cycle experience is becoming more valuable than the "native narrative."

Additionally, due to market demand shifts, subtle changes are occurring in compensation structures, with compliance-related roles seeing far higher compensation than engineers. Talent in compliance, stablecoins, and anti-money laundering is now receiving total packages exceeding $400,000, while some protocol layer engineers' compensation has already begun to fall below this level.