Messari 2026 encryption trend report highlights: From currency narratives to "disruption factors"

Messari has released the “Crypto Theses 2026” report, which predicts future trends in public chains, Decentralized Finance, AI, DePIN, and TradFi sectors. From Messari's perspective, 2026 will be a key year for Crypto Assets to shift from “speculation” to “system-level integration.”

To facilitate reading, we have streamlined the original text and extracted the core conclusions and viewpoints for a quick insight into the next trend.

Crypto Assets are the foundation of the entire industry.

• Bitcoin has clearly distinguished itself from all other crypto assets and is undoubtedly the most representative and mature “Crypto Assets” currently.
• The relative underperformance of BTC in the second half of this year is partly due to the increased selling pressure from early and large holders. We do not believe this underperformance will evolve into a long-term structural issue, and Bitcoin's “currency narrative” is expected to remain solid in the foreseeable future.
• The valuation of L1 is gradually decoupling from the fundamentals. The revenue of L1 has significantly declined year-on-year, and its valuation increasingly relies on an assumption of “currency premium.” With a few exceptions, we expect most L1s to underperform BTC.
• ETH remains one of the most controversial assets. Concerns about its value capture ability have not been completely eliminated, but the market performance in the second half of 2025 indicates that the market is willing to regard ETH as a coin similar to BTC to some extent. If the crypto bull market returns in 2026, Ethereum's Data Availability Tokens (DATs) could迎来‘second life’.
• ZEC is increasingly being priced as a “privacy-focused crypto asset” rather than just a niche privacy coin. This makes it a complementary hedge asset to BTC in an era of heightened surveillance, deepening institutionalization, and intensified financial repression.
• Application layers may begin to choose to establish their own currency systems, rather than relying on the native assets of the networks they operate on. Applications with social attributes and strong network effects are particularly likely to move in this direction.

The Convergence of TradFi x encryption

• The “GENIUS Act” reshapes the positioning of stablecoins: stablecoins transition from being crypto-native trading tools to components of the U.S. monetary policy system, thereby igniting competition among banks, fintech companies, and tech giants for control of the infrastructure (payment and settlement rails) of the “digital dollar.”
• Tether's valuation of approximately $500 billion reflects its strong profitability, but the “GENIUS Act” also brings heavyweight players like JPMorgan and Google into the same arena. We expect Tether to continue to maintain its dominant position in economies characterized by relatively loose compliance requirements and “dollarization,” while traditional institutions with brand, compliance, and distribution advantages will capture the majority share in developed markets.
• Banks are “marrying” stablecoins into existing payment systems, while Cloudflare and Google are building the underlying infrastructure for the almost non-existent “agentic commerce.” As AI Agent-driven transactions scale on these tracks, the integration of technology, finance, and AI is expected to become the dominant narrative by 2026.
• The decline in interest rates will drive capital towards crypto-native yield opportunities, including funding spreads, token arbitrage, and lending collateralized by GPUs. This round of the yield cycle will rely more on real cash flows rather than token inflation, thus creating a more robust and sustainable yield structure.
• In 2025, the tokenization scale of RWA (Real World Assets) has reached 18 billion USD, mainly concentrated in the fields of U.S. Treasury bonds and credit assets—these are the earliest directions to achieve product-market fit (PMF). As DTCC obtains authorization from the SEC to tokenize U.S. securities, this scale will further expand, with the potential to bring trillions of dollars of assets onto cryptocurrency infrastructure.

Decentralized Internet Finance

• Active Market Making AMMs (Prop AMMs) and CLOBs (Centralized Limit Order Books) will replace passive AMMs, becoming the mainstream architecture of DEX. With the expansion of on-chain infrastructure, these architectures can provide better transaction quality and narrower spreads.
• Modular lending protocols (such as Morpho) will surpass integrated (monolithic) lending platforms. By offering flexible, isolated vaults, they better align with the risk and compliance preferences of institutions and neobanks.
• Equity Perpetual Contracts (Equity Perps) are expected to achieve breakthroughs in 2026, providing global users with high leverage and borderless stock exposure while avoiding friction caused by off-chain regulations.
• Interest-bearing stablecoins will replace “passive” stablecoins, becoming the core collateral asset in Decentralized Finance, narrowing the gap between reserve earnings and actual returns for users.
• DeFi Banks (DeFiBanks) will emerge as a response to new types of banking in the crypto world, packaging savings, payments, and lending functions into high-margin, fully self-custodied applications.

Decentralized AI

• The continuous explosion of computing power demand + the enhancement of open-source model capabilities are opening up new sources of income for decentralized computing power networks.
• Decentralized Data Foundries If they can establish an absolute advantage in a key application scenario at a cutting edge, they will become the most profitable participants in the entire deAI technology stack.
• DeAI Laboratory will form a “faith-like” community following around medium-sized open-source models with significant differentiation. This model scale range continues to demonstrate a strong model–market fit.
• Darwinian Networks (referring to the mechanisms of “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection”) will promote the destigmatization of the Crypto Assets industry through a positive feedback loop: attracting top talent while drawing in institutional-level demand, thereby continuously strengthening itself.
• AI Agent Co-pilots will package the DeFAI technology stack into a unified “terminal entry”, relying on a powerful data flywheel to directly challenge the existing mainstream consumer-grade front-end entry.
• As the prediction market scales, AI Agent provides a path for continuous information aggregation, more stable liquidity, and higher quality pricing calibration—significantly reducing systemic bias without changing the fundamental structure of the market.

DePIN is the Frontier

• Vertically integrated DePIN networks (from underlying resources to finished products aimed at enterprises/consumers) are best positioned to achieve sustainable income and higher profit margins, fundamentally addressing demand-side issues.
• As the demand for scarce Real-World Data accelerates, the DePAI data collection protocol is expected to achieve breakthroughs in 2026. With the DePIN incentive mechanism, its data collection speed and scale will be significantly better than centralized solutions.
• InfraFi will become an explosive DePIN adjacent track: by introducing on-chain capital into new infrastructure areas that traditional private credit has difficulty covering (such as debt financing), it will bridge the gap between funds and real infrastructure.
• Clear regulations will significantly expand the builder community for DePIN and accelerate enterprise-level participation—on one hand, reducing the uncertainty in token design, and on the other hand, making the deeply integrated DePIN business model feasible for enterprises.
• By 2026, DePIN is expected to achieve over $100 million in on-chain verifiable revenue: on one hand, the annual revenue of mature protocols will leap from the tens of millions to over $100 million; on the other hand, a new batch of blue-chip DePIN projects will complete their TGE (Token Generation Event).

The Time for Consumer Crypto is Now

• The value stack of transaction fees has shifted from “chain” to “application”. As block space is no longer a bottleneck, consumer-grade encryption is evolving into an application-centric economy: applications capture the majority of revenue and can finally be genuinely optimized around user experience.
• The PMF at the consumer level is most clearly manifested in the scenario of “market as product.” Memecoins / NFTs and prediction markets exist because they embed ownership and pricing mechanisms directly into cultural behaviors and information acquisition processes, rather than forcibly integrating encryption capabilities into existing applications.
• The prediction market has completed the transition from election scenarios to ongoing usage. The year 2025 validates the non-political demand (sports / Crypto Assets / culture), while distribution-level partners (such as Robinhood) become key accelerators of demand surges.
• Financialized social interactions are still in their early stages, but there is real design space. The opportunity lies not in “decentralized social” itself, but in making content, creators, and interaction relationships tradable, thus creating a whole new user experience.
• “Atypical RWA” is becoming a new consumer-grade entry point. Tokenization is starting to improve the non-financial goods market (such as collectible cards and gashapon), and is showing a clear path towards on-chain liquidity, verifiable provenance, and composable financial layers, reshaping the collectibles space.

Disruption Factor (DF): Evaluating the proof of concept framework for Layer 2 protocols.

The crypto world has never lacked activity. New chains, new tokens, new narratives—each cycle brings explosive growth in innovation and noise. However, there is one question that remains difficult to answer: which projects truly have the opportunity to make a lasting impact?

During the development of Messari, we have experimented with various best available frameworks, ranging from traditional valuation methods to network and market structure models, striving to find a reliable and straightforward project evaluation method. The same flaw has appeared in every practice: the winning methods of protocols differ from traditional companies, and there is no single traditional analytical perspective that can reliably measure whether a project accumulates lasting advantages in the long term.

Messari introduced the concept framework of the Disruption Factor (DF) to address this issue. The construction of the Disruption Factor follows four guiding principles: transparency; customizability; long-termism; open source and evolution.

The disruption factor measures the depth to which a crypto project integrates into the real world and mainstream user behavior. It not only evaluates on-chain activities but also assesses whether these activities effectively replace traditional systems, attract non-crypto-native users, and convert into sticky long-term adoption.

This proof of concept evaluated 13 L2s. The results show a clear “barbell” pattern: Arbitrum One (70) and Base (67) stand out as the leaders; OP Mainnet (58) is in the second tier; the remaining projects scored below 49, indicating that many L2s are still in early stages, niche areas, or yet to prove their durability.

Written by: Messari

原标题：The Crypto Theses 2026

Compilation / Editing: ODIG Invest