a16z: 17 Exciting New Directions in Crypto for 2026

Edited by: Sonal Chokshi , a16z

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

Stablecoins, RWA, Payments and Finance

Better and smarter stablecoin deposit and withdrawal channels

Last year, stablecoin trading volume was estimated at $46 trillion, continuously setting new records. Specifically, this is more than 20 times the transaction volume of payment platform PayPal; nearly 3 times the transaction volume of Visa, one of the world's largest payment networks; and is rapidly approaching the transaction volume of the US Automated Clearing House (ACH), an electronic network that processes financial transactions such as direct deposits.

Today, stablecoin transfers can be completed in less than a second and cost less than a cent. However, the unresolved issue is how to connect these cryptocurrencies with the financial infrastructure people actually use in their daily lives. In other words, it's about establishing a channel for exchanging stablecoins with traditional currencies.

A new generation of startups is filling this gap, linking stablecoins to mainstream payment systems and local currencies. Some companies use cryptographic verification technology to allow people to exchange local account balances for digital dollars. Others are integrating with regional payment networks, enabling interbank transfers using features like QR codes and real-time payment systems. Still others are building truly interoperable global digital wallet layers and card issuance platforms, allowing users to use stablecoins for payments at everyday merchants. These innovations collectively broaden the reach of the digital dollar economy and promise to accelerate the adoption of stablecoins as a mainstream payment method.

As these payment channels mature, the digital dollar is beginning to integrate directly into local payment systems and merchant toolkits, giving rise to entirely new business models. Workers can receive cross-border wages in real time, merchants can receive globally circulating digital dollars without bank accounts, and payment applications can achieve instant value settlement with users worldwide. Stablecoins will fundamentally transform from fringe financial instruments into a foundational settlement layer for the internet.

—Jeremy Zhang, a16z crypto engineering team

Understanding RWA and Stablecoins in a More Crypto-Native Way

We have observed a strong interest among banks, fintech companies, and asset management firms in putting traditional assets such as US stocks, commodities, and indices on the blockchain. However, as more traditional assets are put on the blockchain, their tokenization often remains superficial, confined to the current concepts of real-world assets, and fails to fully utilize the native features of crypto.

However, synthetic products like perpetual contracts offer deeper liquidity and are generally easier to implement. Perpetual contracts also provide easily understood leverage, making them, I believe, the crypto-native derivatives with the strongest product-market fit. Furthermore, I believe emerging market equities are one of the most suitable asset classes for perpetual contractification. (The liquidity of some stocks' zero-day options markets often even surpasses that of the spot market, providing an engaging case study for perpetual contractification.)

Ultimately, this boils down to a choice between "perpetual contracts and tokenization." Regardless, we expect to see more crypto-native RWA asset tokenization in the coming year.

Following a similar line of thought, by 2026 we will see more stablecoins "natively issued, not just tokenized." Stablecoins will become mainstream by 2025, with the number of issued stablecoins continuing to grow.

However, stablecoins lacking a strong credit infrastructure resemble narrow banks, holding specific liquid assets that are considered ultra-safe. While narrow banks are a legitimate financial product, I don't believe they will become the backbone of the on-chain economy in the long run.

Recently, many new asset managers, curators, and protocols have emerged, offering asset-backed loans on-chain using off-chain assets as collateral. These loans are typically initiated off-chain first and then tokenized. I believe tokenization offers little benefit in this regard, except perhaps the possibility of allocation to users already on-chain. This is why debt assets should be initiated on-chain, not off-chain and then tokenized. On-chain initiation reduces loan management costs, back-end structure costs, and improves accessibility. The challenging aspects will be compliance and standardization, but builders are already working to address these issues.

—Guy Wuollet, General Partner, a16z crypto

Stablecoins have ushered in a cycle of bank ledger upgrades and new payment scenarios.

The software systems that banks operate on are often unfamiliar to modern developers: in the 1960s and 70s, the banking industry was a pioneer in large-scale software systems. Second-generation core banking systems emerged in the 1980s and 90s (e.g., through Temenos' GLOBUS and InfoSys' Finacle). However, these software systems are now outdated and updated slowly. Therefore, the banking industry, especially its critical core ledger systems for recording deposits, collateral, and other liabilities, still often runs on mainframes, uses COBOL programming, and interacts through batch file interfaces rather than APIs.

The vast majority of global assets rely on these decades-old core ledgers. While these systems are time-tested, trusted by regulators, and deeply integrated into complex banking scenarios, they also hinder innovation. Adding critical functionalities such as real-time payments can take months or even years and requires overcoming layers of accumulated technical debt and regulatory complexities.

This is the significance of stablecoins. The past few years have not only seen stablecoins find a product-market fit and enter the mainstream, but this year traditional financial institutions have also embraced them with unprecedented enthusiasm. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized government bonds, and on-chain bonds enable banks, fintech companies, and financial institutions to develop new products and serve new customers. More importantly, they don't force these institutions to rewrite traditional systems that, while outdated, have been running stably for decades. Therefore, stablecoins provide a new path for institutional innovation.

—Sam Broner

Internet banking

When intelligent agents emerge on a large scale, and more and more business activities are carried out automatically in the background rather than by user clicks, the way money flows into value will need to change.

In a world driven by intent rather than step-by-step instructions, AI agents can mobilize funds by recognizing needs, fulfilling obligations, or triggering outcomes; value must flow as quickly and freely as information is transmitted today. This is precisely where blockchain, smart contracts, and on-chain protocols come into play.

Smart contracts can already settle global USD payments in seconds. But by 2026, emerging primitives like x402 will make settlement programmable and responsive: agents can make instant, permissionless payments via data, GPU computing power, or API calls without the need for invoicing, reconciliation, or batch processing. Software updates released by developers will come with built-in payment rules, limits, and audit trails, eliminating the need for fiat currency integration, merchant onboarding, or financial institution involvement. Prediction markets will be able to self-liquidate in real time as events unfold, such as dynamically updated odds, free trading by agents, and global payout settlements completed in seconds—all without the need for custodians or exchanges.

Once value can flow in this way, the "payment flow" is no longer a separate operational layer, but transforms into a network behavior: banks become the basic conduits of the internet, and assets become infrastructure. When money is transformed into internet-routable information packets, the internet is not only the support for the financial system, but it becomes the financial system itself.

—Christian Crowley and Pyrs Carvolth, a16z crypto GTM team

Democratization of wealth management

Traditionally, personalized wealth management services have been the exclusive domain of banks' high-net-worth clients: providing customized advice and achieving personalized portfolio allocation across different asset classes is not only costly but also extremely complex. However, with more asset classes becoming tokenized, personalized strategies, combined with AI recommendations and collaborative systems, can be executed and rebalanced instantly and at low cost through encrypted channels.

This extends beyond robo-advisors; active portfolio management is now accessible to everyone, moving beyond passive management. In 2025, traditional financial institutions increased their exposure to cryptocurrencies (directly or through ETPs), but this is just the beginning. By 2026, we will see platforms emerge designed for "wealth growth," not just "wealth preservation." Fintech companies (like Revolut and Robinhood) and centralized exchanges (like Coinbase) will leverage their technological advantages to capture more market share.

Meanwhile, DeFi tools like Morpho Vaults can automatically allocate assets to lending markets with the best risk-adjusted returns, providing core income-generating asset allocation for portfolios. Holding remaining liquidity balances in stablecoins instead of fiat currencies and investing them in RWA money market funds instead of traditional money market funds can further enhance the potential for returns.

Finally, retail investors can now more easily invest in less liquid private market assets such as private credit, pre-IPO companies, and private equity. Tokenization helps unlock the potential of these markets while still meeting compliance and reporting requirements. As various assets in a balanced portfolio are tokenized (ranging from bonds and equities to private and alternative investments), the portfolio can be automatically rebalanced without the need for fund transfers.

—Maggie Hsu, a16z crypto GTM team

AI and Agents

From Know Your Customer (KYC) to Know Your Agent (KYA)

The constraints on the intelligent agent economy are gradually shifting from the level of intelligence to identity authentication.

In the financial services industry, the number of "non-human identities" exceeds that of human employees by 96 times, yet these identities remain accountless ghosts. The crucial foundation missing here is KYA: Know Your Agent.

Just as humans need credit scores to obtain loans, agents (AI agents) also need cryptographically signed credentials to conduct transactions. These credentials link the agent to its authorized entity, operational restrictions, and liability. Until this mechanism is perfected, merchants will continue to block agents at the firewall level. The KYC infrastructure built over decades must now solve the KYA problem within months.

—Sean Neville, co-founder of Circle, USDC architect, and current CEO of Catena Labs

We will use artificial intelligence to complete our research.

As a mathematical economist, I struggled to get general artificial intelligence models to understand my workflows in January. By November, I was able to give them abstract instructions, much like I would instruct doctoral students, and they sometimes even provided novel and correct answers. Beyond my personal experience, we are witnessing AI being applied in a wider range of research fields, particularly in reasoning, where current models not only directly assist in scientific discovery but can also autonomously solve Putnam Mathematics Competition problems (possibly the most difficult mathematics exam at the university level globally).

The question of which fields these research aids will benefit most and how they will function remains open. However, I anticipate that AI research will foster and reward a new, erudite research paradigm: one that favors the ability to infer connections between different concepts and to quickly extrapolate from more speculative answers. These answers may not be precise, but they can still point in the right direction (at least within a certain topology). Ironically, this is somewhat like harnessing the power of model illusion: when models are "intelligent" enough, giving them the abstract space to think divergently may still produce meaningless content, but sometimes it can lead to groundbreaking discoveries, just as humans are most creative in non-linear, non-preconceived thinking.

Reasoning in this way requires a new AI workflow, not just interactions between individual agents, but a nested agent model. This involves using multi-layered models to help researchers evaluate early research approaches, gradually weeding out falsehoods and extracting valuable content. I've used this method for writing papers, while others use it for patent searches, creating new art forms, or (unfortunately) discovering new smart contract attacks.

However, research systems that run such nested agent systems require better interoperability between models and a mechanism to identify and reasonably compensate for the contributions of each model. These are precisely the two key problems that cryptographic technology is expected to help solve.

—Scott Kominers, member of the a16z cryptography research team, professor at Harvard Business School

Hidden taxes on open networks

The rise of AI agents is imposing a hidden tax on the open web, fundamentally disrupting its economic foundation. This disruption stems from the growing misalignment between the internet's contextual and execution layers: currently, AI agents extract data from advertising-dependent websites (the contextual layer), providing convenience to users while systematically bypassing revenue streams that support content creation (such as advertising and subscription models).

To prevent the open web from being eroded and to protect the diverse content driving the development of artificial intelligence, we need to deploy technological and economic solutions on a large scale. This could include next-generation sponsorship schemes, attribution systems, or other novel funding models. Existing AI licensing agreements are also proving to be stopgap measures, often compensating content providers only a fraction of the revenue lost due to AI eroding traffic.

The internet needs a new technological economic model where value can flow automatically. A key shift in the coming year will be from static licensing to real-time, usage-based compensation mechanisms. This means testing and rolling out systems that could leverage blockchain-enabled nanometer-scale payments and sophisticated traceability standards to automatically reward each entity that provides information for intelligent agents to successfully complete tasks.

—Liz Harkavy, a16z crypto investment team

Privacy and security

Privacy will become the most important moat in the crypto space.

Privacy is a critical requirement for the on-chain operation of global finance, but it is also a feature lacking in almost all existing blockchains today. For most blockchains, privacy features are merely supplementary functions considered after the fact.

Today, however, privacy itself is enough to distinguish one blockchain from all others. Furthermore, privacy plays an even more important role: it creates an on-chain locking effect, which we might call the privacy network effect. This is especially important in a world where performance alone is no longer enough to gain a competitive edge.

Bridging protocols make migration between different blockchains effortless, provided all information is public. However, the situation is entirely different when it comes to private information: bridging tokens is easy, but bridging clandestinely is extremely difficult. There is always a risk of being identified by someone monitoring the blockchain, mempool, or network traffic when entering or leaving a private space. Crossing the boundaries between private and public chains, or even between two private chains, can leak various metadata, such as correlations in transaction time and size, making it much easier to track others.

Compared to numerous homogeneous new blockchains (whose fees are likely to be driven to zero due to competition, as the block space is essentially indistinguishable between chains), privacy-focused blockchains often generate stronger network effects. The reality is that if a "general-purpose" public blockchain lacks a thriving ecosystem, killer applications, or distributed advantages, then users or developers have almost no reason to use it or build on it, let alone remain loyal.

When users use public blockchains, they can easily transact with users on other blockchains, and the choice of which blockchain to join is not important. However, when users use private blockchains, the choice of which blockchain to join becomes crucial, because once a user joins a particular blockchain, the likelihood of migrating is low, and they bear the risk of privacy exposure, creating a winner-takes-all situation. Since privacy protection is critical to most real-world applications, a few privacy-preserving blockchains may dominate the entire crypto market.

—Ali Yahya, General Partner of a16z crypto

Future messaging will not only need to be quantum resistant, but also need to be decentralized.

As the world prepares for the quantum age, many encryption-based communication applications (such as Apple's iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp) have led the way and made outstanding contributions. However, the problem lies in the fact that all mainstream communication software relies on our trust in private servers operated by a single organization. These servers are highly vulnerable to government shutdowns, backdoor implants, or coercion to hand over private data.

What's the use of quantum encryption if a country can shut down a personal server, if a company possesses the keys to a private server, or even if a company owns a private server? Private servers require people to "trust me," but the absence of private servers means "you don't need to trust me." Communication doesn't need a company acting as an intermediary. Information transmission requires open protocols; we don't need to trust anyone.

We achieve this through a decentralized network: no private servers, no reliance on a single application, all open-source code, and top-tier encryption, including protection against quantum computing threats. In an open network, no individual, company, non-profit organization, or nation can deprive us of our communication capabilities. Even if a country or company shuts down an application, 500 new versions will emerge the next day. Even if a node is shut down, economic incentives based on technologies like blockchain will immediately replace it.

Everything will change when people can own their information through private keys, just like they own currency. Applications may come and go, but people will forever control their information and identity. End users will truly own their information, even if they don't own the application itself.

This is not just about transcending quantum defense and encryption; it's also about ownership and decentralization. Without either, what we build is nothing more than a seemingly unbreakable encryption system that can still be shut down at any time.

—Shane Mac, Co-founder and CEO of XMTP Labs

Privacy as a Service

Underpinning every model, agent, and automated process is a simple element: data. However, today, most data pipelines, whether input or output data to models, are opaque, volatile, and difficult to audit. This may be feasible for some consumer applications, but for many industries and users (such as finance and healthcare), enterprises must protect the privacy of sensitive data. This is also a major obstacle faced by many institutions currently hoping to tokenize RWA.

So how do we promote secure, compliant, autonomous, and globally interconnected innovation while protecting privacy? There are many ways, but I want to focus on data access control: Who controls sensitive data? How does it flow? And who (or what) can access it?

In the absence of data access control mechanisms, users who wish to ensure data confidentiality currently have no choice but to rely on centralized service platforms or build customized systems. This approach is not only time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly, but also hinders traditional financial institutions and other entities from fully leveraging the functional advantages of on-chain data management. As intelligent agent systems begin to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, users and institutions across industries will require encrypted verification mechanisms, rather than simply relying on a "best-effort trust model."

This is precisely why I believe we need "privacy as a service": these new technologies can provide programmable native data access rules, client-side encryption, and decentralized key management, precisely controlling who can decrypt which data under what conditions and within what timeframe, all executed on-chain. Combined with verifiable data systems, data privacy protection will thus be upgraded to a core component of the internet's basic public infrastructure, rather than just an application-layer patch for post-hoc remediation, making privacy protection a true core infrastructure.

—Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Mysten Labs

From "code is law" to "rules are law"

Recently, several battle-tested DeFi protocols have been hacked, despite these projects having strong teams, rigorous auditing processes, and years of stable operation experience. These incidents highlight a disturbing reality: current industry security standards still largely rely on case-by-case and experience-based judgment.

To mature, DeFi security needs to shift from vulnerability patterns to the design level, and from a "best-effort" approach to a "principled" one.

In static deployment and pre-deployment phases (testing, auditing, formal verification), this means systematically verifying global invariants, rather than just manually selected local invariants. Several teams are currently developing AI-assisted proof tools that can help write technical specifications, propose invariant hypotheses, and significantly reduce the manual proof processes that previously made such verifications too costly.

In the dynamic, post-deployment phase (runtime monitoring, runtime execution, etc.), these invariant conditions can be transformed into dynamic guardrails, the last line of defense. These guardrails will be directly encoded into runtime assertions that every transaction must satisfy.

In this way, we will no longer assume that all vulnerabilities can be discovered, but instead enforce key security attributes in the code, and any transaction that violates these attributes will be automatically rolled back.

This is not just theory. In practice, almost all exploit attacks trigger one of the security checks during execution, potentially preventing hackers from attacking. Therefore, the once-popular "code is law" concept has evolved into "rules are law": even new attack methods must meet the security attribute requirements of maintaining system integrity, so the remaining attack methods are either insignificant or extremely difficult to execute.

—Daejun Park, a16z crypto engineering team

Other tracks and applications

Predicting markets will become larger, broader, and smarter.

Prediction markets have gradually become mainstream, and next year, with their integration with cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, they will only become larger, broader, and smarter, but at the same time, they will also bring new challenges to entrepreneurs.

First, more contracts will be listed. This means we'll be able to access not only real-time odds on major elections or geopolitical events, but also real-time odds on various unconventional outcomes and complex, overlapping events. As these new contracts emerge, bringing more information and becoming part of the news ecosystem (which is already a reality), they will raise important social questions about how to weigh the value of this information and how to optimize their design to be more transparent, auditable, and versatile—all things that cryptocurrencies can enable.

To address the surge in the number of contracts, we need new consensus mechanisms to verify their authenticity. Centralized platform adjudication (e.g., did a specific event occur? How is this confirmed?) is crucial, but its limitations have been exposed in controversial cases like the Zelensky lawsuit and the Venezuelan election. To resolve these marginal cases and help prediction markets expand into more practical applications, novel decentralized governance mechanisms and large-scale language model oracles will help determine the truth in controversial outcomes.

The potential of artificial intelligence in predictive capabilities is already astonishing. For example, AI agents operating on these platforms can scan trading signals globally to gain short-term trading advantages, which helps to uncover new dimensions of understanding the world and improve the ability to predict future events. These agents can not only serve as advanced political analysts available for human consultation, but when we study their strategies, we can also reveal predictive factors of complex social events.

Can prediction markets replace polls? No, they can make polls better (and polling information can be fed into prediction markets). As a political scientist, I'm most interested in how prediction markets can work in tandem with a rich and dynamic polling ecosystem, but we need to leverage new technologies like artificial intelligence to improve the survey experience, and cryptocurrencies to provide new ways to prove that poll respondents are real people, not bots, and so on.

—Andy Hall, Research Advisor at a16z crypto, Professor of Political Economy at Stanford University

The Rise of Betting Media

The so-called objectivity, a crack that has appeared in the traditional media model, has been present for some time. The internet has given everyone a voice, and more operators, practitioners, and builders are now speaking directly to the public. Their views reflect their interests in the world, and contrary to intuition, audiences respect them, not only not minding that they have their own interests to consider, but are actually welcomed for that very reason.

The innovation here isn't the rise of social media, but the advent of cryptographic tools that enable people to make publicly verifiable commitments. Artificial intelligence makes it cheap and easy to generate an unlimited amount of content, claiming anything from any perspective or identity (real or fictitious), and relying solely on human (or bot) pronouncements may not be enough. Tokenized assets, programmable lock-up periods, prediction markets, and on-chain historical records provide a more solid foundation for trust: a commentator can publish an argument while demonstrating that they are consistently investing real money. A podcast host can lock up tokens to show they aren't opportunistically buying and selling quickly or "pump and dumping." An analyst can link predictions to publicly settled markets, creating an auditable trail.

I believe this is an early form of "betting media": this type of media not only endorses the concept of "personal stake" but also provides corresponding evidence. In this model, credibility comes neither from feigned neutrality nor empty assertions, but from the actual stakes you're willing to publicly commit to verifiable promises. Betting media will not replace other media forms; it complements existing media. It offers a new signal: no longer "Believe me, I am neutral," but rather "This is a risk I'm willing to take; you can verify the truth of my words in this way."

—Robert Hackett, a16z crypto editorial team

Cryptocurrencies provide a new building block whose applications extend beyond blockchain.

For years, SNARKs (a cryptographic proof technique that verifies computation results without re-performing the computation) have been primarily confined to the blockchain space. Their overhead is simply too high: generating a computational proof can require a million times more work than directly performing the computation. This overhead is worthwhile when spread across tens of thousands of verification nodes, but impractical in any other scenario.

This is about to change. By 2026, the overhead of zkVM provers will drop by approximately 10,000 times, requiring only a few hundred megabytes of memory. They will be fast enough to run smoothly on mobile devices and cost low enough to be deployed virtually anywhere. This 10,000-fold increase is potentially crucial because high-end GPUs offer approximately 10,000 times the parallel throughput of laptop CPUs. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs that would otherwise be executed by a CPU in real time.

This could unlock a vision from older research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you're already running CPU workloads in the cloud, whether due to insufficient computational resources for GPUs, lack of expertise, or legacy systems, you'll be able to obtain cryptographic proofs of the correctness of your computations at a reasonable price. The prover itself is already optimized for GPUs, requiring no adjustments to your code.

—Justin Thaler, a16z crypto research team, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Georgetown University

Light on transactions, heavy on construction

Treating transactions as transit points rather than final destinations is the business philosophy of crypto companies.

Today, aside from stablecoins and some core infrastructure, it seems every well-performing crypto company is shifting towards or planning to shift towards trading. But what will the industry look like if "every crypto company becomes a trading platform"? A multitude of companies doing the same thing will only lead to cannibalism among most participants, leaving only a few winners. This means that companies rushing into trading miss the opportunity to build more defensive and sustainable business models.

While I deeply sympathize with founders struggling to keep their businesses financially afloat, the pursuit of immediate product-market fit comes at a cost. This is particularly pronounced in the crypto space. The unique atmosphere surrounding tokens and speculation often leads founders astray in their search for instant gratification in their pursuit of product-market fit. It's like a marshmallow experiment.

Transactions themselves are not inherently wrong; they are an important function of the market. However, they don't have to be the final destination. Founders who focus on the "product" aspect of product-market fit are perhaps more likely to emerge as the ultimate winners.

—Arianna Simpson, General Partner, a16z crypto

How to unleash the full potential of blockchain after law and technology are aligned?

One of the biggest obstacles to building blockchain in the US over the past decade has been legal uncertainty. Securities laws have been abused and selectively enforced, forcing founders to follow regulatory frameworks designed for ordinary companies, not for blockchain. For years, companies have prioritized mitigating legal risks over product strategy, engineers have taken a backseat, and lawyers have become the main players.

This situation has given rise to many strange phenomena: founders are warned to maintain opacity. Token distribution becomes arbitrary, relying entirely on legal circumvention. Governance mechanisms degenerate into mere showmanship. Organizational structures prioritize compliance over effectiveness. Token designs deliberately avoid economic value and even business models. Worse still, those crypto projects that skirt the edges of the rules often outperform those with integrity as the builders.

However, the government is closer than ever to passing regulations governing the crypto market structure, potentially eliminating all these distortions next year. If passed, the bill will incentivize industry transparency, establish clear standards, and provide a clearer, structured path for financing, token issuance, and decentralization, replacing the current "enforcement roulette" style of regulation. Stablecoins have already seen explosive growth since the passage of the GENIUS bill; legislation surrounding the crypto market structure will bring even more significant changes, primarily targeting the network ecosystem.

In other words, this type of regulation will enable blockchain to truly function as a network, remaining open, autonomous, composable, trustworthy, neutral, and decentralized.

—Miles Jennings, a16z Crypto Policy Team and General Counsel