8 Major Concepts for 2026

Compiled by: Plain Blockchain

Shenzhen Stablecoins, AI, Privacy, and Other Fields January 3, 2026

a16 recently released a list of “great ideas” that its teams (Applications, US Power, Biotech, Crypto, Growth, Infrastructure, and Speedrun) believe technical developers might conquer in the coming year.

Below are some selected perspectives from members of the crypto teams (and some guest writers) on the outlook before 2026—covering themes such as Intelligent Agents and AI, Stablecoins, Tokenization, and Finance, Privacy and Security, as well as Prediction Markets and other applications.

About Entrepreneurship

1. Trading is just a “transfer station,” not the end goal of crypto business

Currently, aside from stablecoins and core infrastructure, almost every successful crypto company is shifting or has shifted toward trading activities. But if “every company becomes a trading platform,” how much room is left? A group of players competing in the same space will dilute attention, ultimately leaving only a few big winners. This means that companies that rush into trading too quickly may miss out on more moats and more sustainable business building opportunities.

While the pressure for founders to pursue immediate business growth is understandable, chasing short-term product-market fit (PMF) comes at a cost. In crypto, tokens and speculative dynamics often lead founders down the path of “instant gratification.” This is another “cotton candy test.” Trading is important, but not necessarily the ultimate destination. Founders who focus on the “product” itself may ultimately be bigger winners. — Arianna Simpson, General Partner at a16z Crypto

About Stablecoins, RWATokenization, Payments, and Finance

#### 2. Thinking about real-world assets (RWA) Tokenization and stablecoins in a more “cryptocurrency” way

We see banks and asset management firms showing strong interest in bringing stocks, commodities, and other traditional assets on-chain. But currently, this kind of tokenization is often “reification” (simply copying traditional models), inherently leveraging the features of cryptocurrencies.

In contrast, perpetual contracts (Perps) and other synthetic assets allow for liquidity in finance and are easier to realize, potentially making them the most market-fit crypto derivatives. Furthermore, in 2026, stablecoins will shift from simple “tokenization” to “birth.”

Most current stablecoins resemble “narrow bank” (holding only safe assets), which I believe won’t be the long-term backbone. Future debt assets should start being created on-chain, rather than generated off-chain and then brought on-chain. This can reduce lending service costs and post-formatting costs, and improve accessibility. — Guy Wuollet, a16z Crypto General Partner

3. Stablecoins usher in a new cycle of bank deposit upgrades and new payment scenarios

Most banking software systems in operation are likely from the 1960s-1990s, using COBOL language and batch processing interfaces, not APIs. This outdated core ledger hampers innovation.

Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and on-chain bonds have enabled financial institutions to rewrite their legacy systems that have been in place for decades, allowing the development of new products. Stablecoins provide a way for institutions to innovate without large-scale rebuilding of old systems. — Sam Bronstein

About Intelligent Agents and AI

#### 4. We will leverage AI for appropriate research tasks

As model reasoning capabilities improve, AI is being used in broader research fields, even capable of autonomously solving Putnam Mathematical Competition problems.

I expect AI research will give rise to a “generalist research style”: this style tends to infer relationships between hypotheses and can quickly deduce from speculative answers. Although this sometimes produces “hallucinations,” this non-linear collision of ideas often opens doors to discovery. Operating such a system composed of multiple reasoning agents will require better model interoperability and reasonable contribution compensation mechanisms, which is where crypto technology can help. — Scott Kominers, a16z Crypto Research Team and Harvard Business School Professor

5. The “invisible tax” on open networks

The rise of AI agents is bringing an “invisible tax” to open networks. AI agents scrape data from ad-supported websites, providing convenience but bypassing revenue sources supporting content creation (like ads and subscriptions).

To network effectively, we need large-scale deployment of real-time, usage-based compensation mechanisms. This means protecting our static licenses and moving toward nano payments implemented via blockchain, automatically rewarding entities that contribute information for AI tasks. — Liz Harkavy, a16z Crypto Investment Team

About Privacy and Security

#### 6. Privacy will become the most important moat in crypto

Privacy is key to the global transfer of finance onto the blockchain and is currently lacking in most blockchains. Now, privacy itself is enough to make a chain move.

More importantly, privacy creates “chain stickiness” (network effects). It’s easy between public chains, but once privacy is involved, cross-chain becomes difficult because the cross-chain process can easily leak metadata (such as transaction time and size). If users stay on their own chains, they are less willing to risk exposing their identities. This can lead to “winner takes all” scenarios, with a few privacy chains potentially capturing most of the crypto market. — Ali Yahya, a16z Crypto General Partner

About Other Industries and Applications

7. Prediction markets will become larger, broader, and smarter

The market has entered mainstream prediction, and by 2026, it will further integrate with crypto and AI. Besides elections, we will see consistent predictions across various fields and complex events.

To handle the massive volume of contracts, we need decentralized governance and LLM front-end to adjudicate facts. Additionally, AI agents trading on these platforms can reveal complex social prediction signals. Prediction markets won’t replace polls but will cryptographically prove respondents are human, making polls more reliable. — Andy Hall, a16z Crypto Research Advisor and Stanford Professor

8. Crypto technology introduces a new term outside blockchain: zkVM

For years, the huge computational overhead caused by SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) was mainly used in blockchain. But the situation is changing. By 2026, zkVM provers will have roughly 10,000 times less overhead, with minimal memory usage.

This is a “magic number”: high-end GPU motherboards load nearly 10,000 times more than laptop CPUs. This means a single GPU can generate proofs of CPU execution in real-time. This will unlock the vision of “verifiable cloud computing”: even if you run ordinary tasks in the cloud, you can obtain cryptographic proof of their correctness at a reasonable cost.

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