30 predictions, five crypto consensuses for 2026 selected

2025 has already come to an end.

Most people can clearly feel that, starting from the second half of this year, the narrative in the crypto industry has gradually dried up, and trading groups have become much quieter. So, for the upcoming 2026, what changes will happen in the market, and which narratives will be favored by the market?

Rhythm BlockBeats analyzed more than 30 predictions for 2026, with sources including top research institutions such as Galaxy, Delphi Digital, a16z, Bitwise, Hashdex, Coinbase, as well as several industry KOLs who have long been engaged in research, product development, and investment on the front lines. From these, five unanimously optimistic 2026 narratives were summarized—make sure not to miss the sixth point if you’re a crypto worker.

Stablecoins: “Taking a Seat” at the Traditional Finance Table

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

In 2026, stablecoins will complete the transformation from a “crypto tool” to “mainstream financial infrastructure,” a point that has been recognized by almost all major forecasters.

a16z provides very direct data on this, almost “irrefutable.” They point out that stablecoins have already processed about $46 trillion in transaction volume over the past year. What does this mean? It’s about 20 times PayPal’s annual transaction volume, nearly three times that of Visa, and is closing in on the scale of the US ACH (Automated Clearing House) network.

But a16z also soberly points out that the issue is not “whether there is demand for stablecoins,” but rather how these digital dollars can truly enter the financial rails that people use every day—namely, the most concrete and labor-intensive aspects of deposits and withdrawals, payments, settlements, and consumption. They observe that a whole new generation of startups is specifically addressing this problem. Some use cryptographic proofs to allow users to convert local account balances into digital dollars without exposing privacy; some directly integrate regional banking networks, QR codes, and real-time payment rails, enabling stablecoins to be used like local transfers; others go even deeper, building truly global interoperable wallet layers and card issuing platforms, allowing stablecoins to be spent directly at everyday merchants.

Therefore, their conclusion is: “As these on/off ramps mature, digital dollars will be directly embedded into local payment systems and merchant tools, and new behavioral patterns will emerge. Workers can receive cross-border wages in real time, merchants can accept global dollars without a bank account, and applications can instantly settle value with users anywhere in the world. Stablecoins will fundamentally transform from a niche financial tool into the foundational settlement layer of the internet.”

Even more interestingly, a16z researcher Sam Broner also explained from a very “engineer’s perspective” why this is almost inevitable. They point out that most banks today run software systems that are too old for modern developers—the core ledgers still run on mainframes, use COBOL, and interfaces are batch files rather than APIs. Of course, these systems are stable, trusted by regulators, and deeply embedded in the real world, but the problem is that they can hardly evolve quickly. Even adding a real-time payment function can take months or even years, while also dealing with mountains of technical debt and regulatory complexity. And this is where stablecoins come into play.

Crypto KOL and Alongside Finance researcher Route 2 FI listed “stablecoins (traditional finance implementation and rails)” as the top direction in his narrative list, emphasizing how traditional financial institutions implement stablecoin technology and build corresponding financial rails.

Galaxy Research’s judgment is even more direct and radical. They predict that by the end of 2026, 30% of international payments will be completed via stablecoins.

Bitwise’s conclusion is almost identical, but from a market size perspective: they expect the market cap of stablecoins to double in 2026, with the key variable being the implementation of the GENIUS Act at the beginning of 2026, which will open up growth space for existing issuers and attract new players to compete.

Overall, 2026 will be a key year for stablecoins to move from the margins to the mainstream core.

AI Agents: Becoming Top Traders

The second highly consistent and more futuristic consensus is that AI agents will become major participants in on-chain economic activity. The recent AI model trading competition that attracted attention across the web also confirmed the potential of this track.

Many people underestimate the speed of this change. The logic is actually not complicated: when AI agents begin to autonomously execute tasks, make decisions, and interact with each other at high frequency, they naturally need a way to transfer value that is as fast, cheap, and permissionless as transmitting information.

Traditional payment systems are designed for humans, with accounts, identities, and settlement cycles—all of which are friction for agents.

Cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins combined with payment protocols like x402, are almost tailor-made for this scenario: instant settlement, support for micropayments, programmability, and permissionlessness. Therefore, 2026 is likely to be the first year that the payment infrastructure of the agent economy moves from proof-of-concept to real-scale usage.

a16z researcher Sean Neville, also a co-founder of Circle and architect of USDC, pointed out from another, deeper perspective the real bottleneck currently facing the AI Agent economy: the problem is shifting from “not smart enough” to “identity does not exist.” In the financial system, the number of “non-human identities” has already surpassed human employees by a ratio of 96 to 1, but these identities are almost all “ghosts without bank accounts.”

The financial industry lacks KYA (Know Your Agent, similar to KYC: Know Your Customer). Just as humans need credit scores to get loans, agents also need cryptographically signed credentials to prove who they represent, who they are bound by, and who is responsible if something goes wrong. Before KYA emerges, many merchants can only choose to block agents directly at the firewall level. While building KYC took decades in the industry, the time left for KYA may only be a few months.

Other a16z team members also pointed out in their summary that AI agents need crypto rails for micropayments, data access, and compute settlement. The x402 standard will become the payment pillar of the agent economy. The key asset is no longer the model—but scarce, high-quality real-world data (DePAI). He listed projects such as BitRobot, PrismaX, Shaga, and Chakra as examples.

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

He believes that as AI agents begin to autonomously trade across services, standardized payment primitives will directly enter the execution layer. Base will have an advantage due to Coinbase’s push for the x402 standard, while Solana will become another pole thanks to 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: Becoming More Degen

Unlike the previous “everything can be on-chain” craze, today’s RWA narrative is noticeably more sober. Most research institutions no longer discuss “how big the potential market is,” but instead repeatedly emphasize one word: executability. Precisely because of this, the consensus on RWA in 2026 is even more focused.

a16z analyst Guy Wuollet is not lenient in his criticism of current RWA tokenized assets. He points out that although we have seen banks, fintech companies, and asset managers show great interest in putting US stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets on-chain, so far, most so-called “tokenization” is essentially skeuomorphic. These assets are just “wrapped in a new technological shell,” but their design logic, trading methods, and risk structures are still firmly rooted in traditional finance’s understanding of real-world assets, rather than leveraging the native features of crypto systems.

Galaxy Research’s prediction on this issue is clearly more inclined toward “structural breakthroughs.” They do not dwell on product forms but directly focus on the core link of the traditional financial system: collateral.

They predict that in the coming year, a major bank or broker will begin accepting tokenized stocks as official collateral. If this happens, its symbolic significance will far exceed that of any single product launch. Until now, tokenized stocks have remained on the fringes—either as small-scale experiments within DeFi or as pilot projects by large banks on private blockchains, with almost no substantial connection to the mainstream financial system.

But Galaxy points out that the situation is changing. Core infrastructure providers in traditional finance are accelerating their migration to blockchain-based systems; at the same time, regulators’ attitudes toward this direction are clearly shifting to support. This year, they expect to see, for the first time, a heavyweight financial institution accept tokenized stocks of on-chain deposits and, within legal and risk frameworks, treat them as assets fully equivalent to traditional securities.

Hashdex is the most aggressive, predicting that tokenized real-world assets will grow tenfold. This prediction is based on increased regulatory clarity, readiness of traditional financial institutions, and the maturity of technical infrastructure.

Prediction Markets: More Than “Decentralized Gambling”

As most people expected, prediction markets have also become a widely favored track for 2026.

But surprisingly, the reason for optimism about prediction markets is no longer simply “decentralized gambling,” but rather their transformation into tools for information aggregation and decision-making.

a16z’s Andy Hall, a Stanford University professor of political economy, believes that prediction markets have already crossed the threshold of “whether they can become mainstream.” In the coming year, as they deeply intersect with cryptocurrencies and AI, prediction markets will become larger, broader, and smarter.

At the same time, he also emphasizes that this expansion is not without cost. Prediction markets are being pushed to a whole new level of complexity: higher trading frequency, faster information feedback, and a more automated participant structure. These changes amplify their value on the one hand, but also pose new challenges for builders, such as how to adjudicate results more fairly without causing controversy, and so on.

Galaxy Research’s Will Owens quantified this change with very specific numbers. He predicts that Polymarket’s weekly trading volume will continue to exceed $1.5 billion in 2026. This judgment is not made out of thin air. In fact, prediction markets are already one of the fastest-growing tracks in crypto, and Polymarket’s nominal weekly trading volume is already approaching $1 billion.

He believes that the continued upward momentum of this figure will be driven by three simultaneous forces: new capital efficiency layers deepening market liquidity, AI-driven order flow significantly increasing trading frequency, and Polymarket’s continuously improving distribution capabilities accelerating capital inflows.

Bitwise’s Ryan Rasmussen offers an even more aggressive judgment. He predicts that Polymarket’s open interest will surpass the historical high set during the 2024 US election. The drivers of this round of growth are very clear: opening up to US users has brought in a large number of new users, about $2 billion in new capital injection provides ample ammunition, and the types of markets are no longer limited to politics, but are expanding into economics, sports, pop culture, and other fields.

Outside of institutions, KOLs’ judgments are equally intriguing. Tomasz Tunguz believes that by 2026, the adoption rate of prediction markets among the US population will rise from the current 5% to 35%. By comparison, the adoption rate of gambling in the US is about 56%. This means that prediction markets are evolving from a niche financial tool into a product form approaching mainstream entertainment and information consumption.

But Galaxy also provides a clearly cautionary prediction amid this optimism. They believe that federal investigations surrounding prediction markets are likely to emerge.

As US regulators gradually open up on-chain prediction markets, trading volume and open interest are rising rapidly, and related gray-area incidents have already begun to surface. Several scandals have already emerged, involving insiders using non-public information to enter early or manipulating games in major sports leagues. And since prediction markets allow traders to participate pseudonymously, rather than through the strict KYC of traditional gambling platforms, the temptation for insiders to abuse privileged information is significantly amplified.

Therefore, Galaxy believes that future investigation triggers may no longer come from abnormal behavior in regulated gambling systems, but directly from suspicious price fluctuations in on-chain prediction markets themselves.

This topic also leads to a fifth consensus: privacy.

Privacy Coins: Will They Be the Next Dark Horse?

As more and more funds, data, and automated decisions are pushed on-chain, exposure itself is becoming an unacceptable cost. This has already become apparent in 2025.

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

Galaxy Research’s Christopher Rosa made a striking judgment: 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 store more funds on-chain, on-chain privacy becomes a primary consideration. Among the top three privacy coins, Zcash rose about 800% in the same quarter, Railgun rose about 204%, and Monero recorded a relatively modest 53% increase.

Christopher provided an interesting historical background: early bitcoin developers, including Satoshi Nakamoto himself, explored privacy technologies and research. In early bitcoin design discussions, there were already ideas for making transactions more private or even completely shielded. But at that time, truly usable and deployable zero-knowledge proof technology was far from mature.

But today, the situation is completely different. As zero-knowledge technology gradually becomes engineering-ready and the value carried on-chain rises significantly, more and more users, especially institutional users, are seriously re-examining a previously accepted fact: are they really willing to have all their crypto asset balances, transaction paths, and fund structures permanently public to anyone?

Privacy issues have thus shifted from an “idealistic need” to an “institutional-level practical problem.”

Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder of Mysten Labs, complements this logic from another angle. He does not start directly from asset prices or user behavior, but breaks the problem down to a more fundamental dependency: data.

In his view, every model, every agent, every automated system relies on the same thing: data. But today, most data pipelines—whether the data input into models or the results output by models—are opaque, mutable, and unauditable. For some consumer applications, this may be acceptable, but in industries like finance and healthcare, it is almost an insurmountable barrier. And as agent systems begin to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, this problem is further amplified.

Against this background, Adeniyi proposed the concept of “secrets-as-a-service.” He believes that what is needed in the future is not to patch privacy features at the application layer after the fact, but a whole set of native, programmable data access infrastructure: including executable data access rules, client-side encryption mechanisms, and decentralized key management systems to strictly define who can decrypt what data, under what conditions, and for how long. All these rules should be enforced on-chain, not dependent on internal organizational processes or manual constraints. Combined with verifiable data systems, privacy itself can become part of the public infrastructure of the internet, rather than an add-on feature of a particular application.

Additional Observations: Must-See for Crypto Workers

In addition to these main judgments, almost all institutions have also provided some interesting discussions that have not reached consensus, contributing extra observations.

The most interesting of these is the shift in the trend of value capture at the application layer. More and more predictions believe that the “fat app theory” is replacing the “fat protocol.” Value is no longer mainly deposited at the base chain and general protocol layer, but is gradually concentrating at the application layer. This is not because the underlying layer is unimportant, but because it is the application itself that truly interacts directly with users, data, and cash flow.

This also leads to another highly divisive discussion: Ethereum, which aspires to be the world’s computer, has long been the representative of the “fat protocol.” In the trend of “fat apps,” how will Ethereum’s value change?

Some believe it will continue to benefit as an important carrier of tokenization and financial infrastructure; others think it may gradually evolve into a “boring but necessary” underlying network, with most of the value being absorbed by the application layer built on top of it.

As for bitcoin, most analyses still believe it will perform excellently in 2026, with continued strengthening of institutional demand through ETF and DAT, establishing its status as a strategic macro asset and “digital gold,” but the threat posed by quantum computing is real.