17 Web3 Trends for 2026: a16z Report on the Future of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain

In the traditional financial system, cash flow is complicated, slow, and expensive. By 2026, this will change — and it all starts with stablecoins. The year 2024 showed that stablecoin transaction volume reached nearly $46 trillion, more than 20 times the volume of PayPal. This number is no coincidence — it’s a signal that digital dollars are ready to transform global payment systems.

But a stablecoin alone is not enough. It lacks legal and infrastructural frameworks connecting these digital assets with everyday financial channels. New startups are building bridges: integrating stablecoins with local payment systems, QR codes, and interbank transfer networks. Workers will receive cross-border wages instantly; merchants will accept global dollars without a bank account. This is not the future — it’s happening right now.

Tokenization is changing the game: from skeuomorphism to crypto-native instruments

We see traditional banks, fintechs, and asset managers migrating stocks, commodities, and indices onto the blockchain. The problem is that most of these tokenizations directly mimic real assets instead of leveraging cryptographic capabilities.

More promising approaches? Perpetual futures (Perps). These synthetic instruments allow for deeper liquidity and are easier to implement. Emerging market stocks are particularly interesting — zero-day-to-expiry options sometimes surpass spot markets in liquidity, creating new opportunities for perpetuals.

At the same time, as stablecoins enter the mainstream in 2025, 2026 will be the year of native issuance, not just tokenization. Instead of tokenizing off-chain loans, new asset management firms will issue debt instruments directly on the blockchain. Why? It reduces operational costs, simplifies backend complexity, and increases accessibility.

Aging banking — blockchain as a catalyst for modernization

The banking software used today by large institutions dates back to the 1960s, 70s, and even 80s. Mainframes, COBOL, batch file interfaces instead of APIs. The entire global financial infrastructure sits on these decades-old systems — proven, but hampering innovation.

Adding features like real-time payments takes months, often years. Here lies an opportunity. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and on-chain bonds enable financial institutions to build new products without rewriting outdated infrastructure. This is a new channel for innovation in a sector that has been stagnant for decades.

The internet becomes a financial system

When AI agents instead of humans transfer money — both among themselves and with the outside world — value flows must become as fast and direct as information flows.

Smart contracts can already settle $1 globally in seconds. By 2026, primitives like x402 will make this settlement programmable and automatic. Agents will pay each other for data, GPU time, API calls — without intermediaries, invoices, or batch processing.

Prediction markets will settle in real-time during event development. Prices will update, agents will trade, and settlement will happen globally — without trustees. When value can flow so freely, banks will become part of the internet’s core infrastructure. The internet itself will become a financial system.

Wealth management for everyone — not just the wealthy

Traditionally, personalized wealth management was only available to high-net-worth clients. Now, thanks to tokenization, AI, and automation, anyone can have active portfolio management in real-time — at very low costs.

Platforms built in 2026 will focus on wealth accumulation, not just protection. Fintechs (Revolut, Robinhood) and centralized exchanges (Coinbase) will leverage their technical advantages. DeFi tools like Morpho Vaults will automatically allocate assets to the best lending markets. Retail investors will access private loans, pre-IPO companies, and private equity — all without tedious bank transfers.

From KYC to KYA: “Know Your Agent”

In an AI agent economy, the bottleneck is not intelligence but identity and accountability. Non-human identities already outnumber human workers 96:1. The problem? They are still “ghosts” that are not open.

Just as humans have credit scores, agents will need cryptographically signed attestations — linking the agent to its operator, restrictions, and accountability. The missing primitive here is KYA (Know Your Agent). The industry has built KYC infrastructure over decades; KYA will have only a few months to develop.

AI in real scientific research

AI models are changing the rules in many fields — especially in the sciences. Researchers are already using AI not just as assistants but as partners in solving real research problems. Models can solve Putnam problems (considered the hardest math exam) — or at least discuss approaches with high effectiveness.

Paradoxically, even model “hallucinations” can be useful — when they are “smart enough,” chaotic clashes of ideas sometimes lead to discoveries. This requires a new approach: agent-wrapping-agent, where a model layer helps evaluate methods of previous models.

Handling such complex research agents will require better interoperability of models and ways to reward each of their contributions — and here, cryptocurrencies can help solve the problem.

The intangible tax on open networks

AI agents pull data from ad-funded websites, and by providing user convenience, systematically bypass revenue streams supporting content (ads, subscriptions). This disruption undermines the economic base of open networks.

The solution is not singular but will require new models: sponsored content, micro-transaction systems, new forms of funding. Current AI licensing agreements proved financially unsustainable. The network needs a techno-economic model where value flows automatically — not static licenses, but real-time compensation based on actual usage.

Privacy as the strongest competitive moat

Privacy is a key feature for moving finance onto blockchain — and here lies the biggest gap. Almost all existing blockchains are transparent by default.

This changes the dynamics: when everything is public, chain-hopping is trivial. But when something becomes private, bridging becomes difficult. Tokens can be bridged — secrets, no longer. This creates a natural closed effect — users will rarely choose to leave a private chain, risking exposure.

In a world where performance no longer distinguishes chains, privacy creates a network effect and a “winner-takes-all” dynamic. A small number of truly private chains could dominate the crypto market.

Communication: quantum-resistant + decentralization

Most major communication apps (Apple, Signal, WhatsApp) are already preparing for quantum computers. The problem? Each relies on private servers managed by a single organization. Such servers are easy targets for governments.

We need open communication protocols based on decentralized networks: no private servers, no single app, all open source, with the best cryptography.

In an open network, no single company can cut off our ability to communicate. Shut down one node — the blockchain and economic mechanisms will launch a new one. When people hold their messages like money — with a private key — everything changes. Apps come and go; people always retain control.

Secrets as a service: access control to data

Behind every model, agent, and automation lies a simple dependency: data. But today, most data channels are opaque, variable, and non-auditable — a problem especially in finance, medicine, and real-world asset tokenization.

We need secrets as a service: technology offering programmable, native access rules; client-side encryption; decentralized key management. Everything enforced on-chain — dictating who, under what conditions, and how long can decrypt data. This makes privacy a core infrastructure, not just an app-level patch.

From “code is law” to “spec is law”: safety through specifications

Recent attacks on DeFi even targeted protocols with dedicated teams and audits. Security standards are mostly heuristic. To mature, security must shift from “patching” to property-based design.

This requires systematic proof of global invariants — not manual checking of selected local properties. Teams are building AI tools to support proofing, helping write specifications and automate costly manual proofs.

Once implemented, these invariants become real-time barriers: every transaction must satisfy them. Runtime assertions automatically revert transactions that violate them. In practice, almost every past attack would be stopped. “Code is law” evolves into “spec is law” — other attacks must satisfy these properties to remain ineffective.

Prediction markets: bigger, broader, smarter

Prediction markets have entered the mainstream. By 2026, intersecting with crypto and AI, they will be even larger. More contracts will appear — not just elections or geopolitics, but diversified, complex, interconnected events. This raises new social challenges: how to balance the value of this information and design more transparent markets.

To resolve disputes (like the “Zelensky Suit Market”), we need decentralized governance mechanisms and LLM-based verdicts. AI opens new possibilities: agents automatically bet, synthesize new contracts, dynamically adjust markets. This makes markets smarter, more reactive — and can unlock applications like real-time risk assessment and automated hedging.

Staked Media: media with financial stakes

The traditional media model is breaking. The internet gave everyone a voice, but now, as content generation becomes cheap and easy thanks to AI (real or fake), relying solely on words seems insufficient.

Tokenized assets, programmable locks, prediction markets, and on-chain history provide a more solid trust foundation. Staked Media are media that not only adopt the “skin in the game” principle but also provide proof. Commentators lock tokens to prove they are not manipulating; analysts link forecasts to publicly settled markets.

Credibility no longer comes from pretending to be unbiased — it derives from having a stake and transparent commitments that can be verified. This is a new trust signal.

SNARKs: decentralized proofs leaving the blockchain

For years, SNARKs — cryptographic proofs verifying computations without re-executing them — were mainly a blockchain technology. Their overhead was too high: proving could require 1,000,000 times more work than executing.

That is changing. By 2026, proof overhead in zkVMs will drop to about 10,000 times, and memory usage to hundreds of megabytes — a level enabling them to run on phones. This is a magic number: GPU throughput is roughly 10,000 times higher than a laptop CPU.

By the end of 2026, a single GPU will generate proofs for CPU computations in real time. This unlocks verifiable cloud processing — if you run CPU workloads in the cloud, you can now get cryptographic proof of correctness at a reasonable cost.

Trading is a stop, not the end goal

It seems that today, every successful crypto company has turned into a trading platform. But when everyone does the same, market attention is fragmented — a few big players win. Founders rushing into trading risk missing the chance to build a more resilient, sustainable business.

This problem is especially visible in crypto, where token dynamics push toward chasing immediate PMF (product-market fit). It’s a “delayed gratification test” — but trading itself is not the goal. Founders focusing on “product” in PMF may ultimately come out with better positions.

Legislation as a release for blockchain potential

Over the past decade, the biggest challenge for blockchain networks in the US was legal uncertainty. Securities law was extended selectively, forcing founders to operate within legal frameworks designed for “companies,” not “networks.”

Minimizing legal risk replaced product strategy; engineers deferred to lawyers. This led to strange distortions: transparency was discouraged; token distribution was arbitrary; showy governance; structures optimized for protection.

However, regulations on crypto market structure — with a higher chance of passing than ever — could eliminate these distortions. After the GENIUS Act, stablecoin adoption exploded; market structure legislation will be an even bigger change for networks. It will enable blockchains to operate as networks: open, autonomous, composable, reliably neutral, and decentralized.