a16z Releases "17 Crypto Trends for 2026": RWA, AI Agents, and Privacy Chain Explosion

Top Venture Capital firm a16z’s crypto team releases the annual outlook “17 Crypto Trends for 2026,” highlighting that stablecoin annual trading volume has reached $46 trillion. The report focuses on RWA moving from tokenization to native on-chain issuance, upgrades in stablecoin payment infrastructure, the rise of AI agent economies, the formation of winner-takes-all on-chain privacy infrastructure, the integration of market prediction and AI, and new application scenarios such as “Staked Media.”

Stablecoins Surpass Visa: The Payment Revolution Behind $46 Trillion

(Source: a16z)

The most shocking data disclosed in the a16z report is that the annual trading volume of stablecoins has reached $46 trillion, continuously setting new records. To better understand this figure, it is over 20 times PayPal’s transaction volume, nearly three times Visa’s (one of the world’s largest payment networks), and rapidly approaching ACH (the electronic network used for direct deposits and other financial transactions in the US). Achieving this scale is no coincidence but stems from stablecoins’ overwhelming advantages in speed and cost: now you can send stablecoins in less than a second for less than a cent.

However, a16z points out that the unresolved issue is how to connect these digital currencies with people’s everyday financial systems—in other words, how to provide on-ramps and off-ramps for stablecoins. New startups are filling this gap by linking stablecoins with more familiar payment systems and local currencies. Some companies use cryptographic proofs to enable users to privately convert local balances into digital dollars; others integrate with regional networks using QR codes and real-time payment channels for interbank payments; still, some are building truly interoperable global wallet layers and card issuance platforms.

As these capital access channels mature, new transaction models will emerge. Workers can receive instant cross-border payments, merchants can accept global dollars without bank accounts, and apps can settle with users anytime and anywhere. Stablecoins will evolve from niche financial tools into the foundational settlement layer of the internet. Jeremy Zhang, a member of the a16z engineering team, emphasizes that this shift will make the flow of value as fast and free as information today.

The report also predicts that by 2026, there will be more “original rather than just tokenized” stablecoins. Stablecoins lacking robust credit infrastructure resemble narrow banking—while narrow banks are effective products, they won’t become the long-term backbone of on-chain economies. a16z favors projects that promote on-chain asset-backed lending based on off-chain collateral, with debt assets issued directly on-chain rather than tokenized after off-chain issuance.

RWA Native Issuance and the Identity Revolution with AI Agents

a16z emphasizes that structured RWAs will shift from “tokenization” to “native on-chain issuance,” improving efficiency and transparency. General Partner Guy Wuollet notes that we see strong interest from banks, fintech firms, and asset managers in bringing US stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets on-chain. However, their tokenization often remains a form of physicalization—based on existing concepts of real-world assets—without fully leveraging the native features of cryptography.

Synthetic products like perpetual futures can offer deeper liquidity and are generally easier to implement. Perpetual futures also provide easily understandable leverage, making them among the most compatible with crypto-native derivatives. Wuollet believes emerging market stocks are among the most promising assets for perpetual trading, and by 2026, we should see more crypto-native RWA tokens.

The bottleneck of the AI agent economy is shifting from intelligence to identity. Sean Neville, co-founder of Circle, points out that in financial services, the number of “non-human identities” is now 96 times that of human employees, yet these identities are like ghosts without bank accounts. The key missing element here is KYA: Know Your Agent. Just as people need credit scores to obtain loans, agents need cryptographically signed credentials to transact—linking agents with their principals, restrictions, and responsibilities.

Three Infrastructure Needs of the AI Agent Economy

KYA Identity Verification System: Cryptographically signed credentials linking agents with principals, restrictions, and responsibilities

Automated Payment Protocols: Emerging primitives like x402 enable real-time, permissionless payments of data and API fees between agents

Programmable Settlement Rules: Built-in payment rules, limits, and audit trails within smart contracts, eliminating the need for banks

Christian Crowley and Pyrs Carvolth of the a16z engineering team state that smart contracts can currently settle global USD payments within seconds. By 2026, primitives like x402 will make settlement more programmable and responsive: agents can instantly pay for data, GPU time, or API calls—without invoicing, reconciliation, or batching. Once value can flow in this manner, banks become part of the network infrastructure, and assets become infrastructure.

Winner-Takes-All in Privacy Chains and the Pledged Media Concept

a16z General Partner Ali Yahya presents the most controversial view: privacy will be the most critical moat in crypto, and privacy-enabled blockchains can generate stronger network effects. Privacy is a key factor for the global transfer of finance onto the chain and is almost absent in most existing blockchains. For most blockchains, privacy is almost an afterthought.

Yahya notes that thanks to bridging protocols, as long as all information is public, migrating from one chain to another is straightforward. But once information becomes private, the situation changes dramatically: bridging tokens is easy, but bridging keys is very difficult. Crossing the boundary between private and public chains can leak metadata such as transaction timing and transaction size correlations. Compared to many emerging blockchains with single functions and fierce competition, privacy-enabled blockchains can generate stronger network effects, creating a winner-takes-all scenario.

The a16z editorial team’s Robert Hackett introduces the concept of “Staked Media.” The cracks in traditional media are already evident, and crypto tools enable people to make publicly verifiable commitments. Tokenized assets, programmable staking, prediction markets, and on-chain history provide a more solid foundation for trust: commentators can express opinions and prove consistency, podcast hosts can lock tokens to show no speculative trading, and analysts can link predictions to publicly settled markets to create auditable performance records.

Prediction markets will become larger, broader, and smarter. a16z research advisor Andy Hol points out that to handle the vast number of contracts, we need new ways to reach consensus on the truth of contracts. New decentralized governance models and LLM-based prediction oracles can help determine the truth of disputed outcomes. AI agents can scan global signals to provide short-term trading advantages and help us discover new ways of thinking about the world and predicting future trends.

a16z policy team and General Counsel Miles Jennings emphasize that passing market structure regulation for cryptocurrencies will eliminate legal distortions. Over the past decade, the biggest obstacle to building blockchain networks in the US has been legal uncertainty, which has led to risk avoidance rather than product development. New legislation will incentivize transparency and establish clear standards, allowing blockchain networks to operate like other networks—open, autonomous, composable, trustworthy, neutral, and decentralized—evolving from “code is law” to “regulation is law.”