The five major transformations in the 2026 crypto market: from stablecoins to privacy, these trends are irreversible

The year 2025 has come to an end, and the overall narrative momentum in the crypto industry has significantly waned, with market enthusiasm cooling down accordingly. As we enter 2026, what kind of turning point will this ecosystem experience? By reviewing over 30 insights from top research institutions and industry veteran analysts, we have identified five widely accepted industry trends—these changes will fundamentally reshape the underlying logic of crypto finance.

AI agents become the protagonists of on-chain economy

The most forward-looking consensus is that artificial intelligence agents will become the main participants in the blockchain economy. When AI systems begin to autonomously perform tasks and interact with each other at high frequency, they naturally require a fast, low-cost, permissionless value transfer mechanism. Traditional payment systems are designed for humans, full of friction costs such as authentication, account linking, and settlement cycles, which are fatal inefficiencies for machine agents.

Cryptographic assets—especially stablecoins combined with payment protocols—are perfectly tailored for this scenario. Instant settlement, micro-payment capabilities, fully programmable, permissionless—these features will move from proof of concept to large-scale practical application in 2026.

What are the key technological breakthroughs? Widespread adoption of standardized payment protocols. Industry expects such standardized payments to account for 30% of daily transaction volume on a mainstream chain, with non-voting transactions on another high-performance chain reaching about 5%. This means on-chain interactions based on payment protocols will see exponential growth. Meanwhile, the competition for high-quality real-world data will become a true scarce resource in the AI economy, with the value of such data assets far exceeding the models themselves.

The AI agent economy also faces a severely underestimated bottleneck: identity issues. In traditional financial systems, the number of “non-human identities” already exceeds human employees at a ratio of 96:1, but almost all of these identities are “ghosts without bank accounts.” When AI systems need to obtain credit, participate in transactions, and assume responsibilities, the entire industry lacks a standardized identity verification system. In the coming months, solutions to this problem will be critical in determining which chains gain dominance.

The “entry” moment of stablecoins

The upgrade of stablecoins from fringe tools to mainstream financial infrastructure is the most widely agreed-upon topic this year. The most compelling data: in the past year, stablecoins completed approximately $46 trillion in transactions—20 times PayPal’s annual volume, nearly 3 times Visa’s, and approaching the scale of the US ACH clearing network.

But the key issue is not “whether there is demand,” but how to truly integrate these digital dollars into people’s daily financial channels—covering deposit and withdrawal, payments, clearing, and consumption.

A wave of new startups is tackling this challenge. Some use cryptographic proofs to enable users to convert local account balances into digital dollars without exposing privacy; some directly integrate regional banking networks, QR codes, and real-time payment systems, allowing stablecoins to be used for local transfers; others start from a more fundamental level, building truly global interoperable wallets and issuance layers, enabling stablecoins to be directly used in everyday commercial scenarios.

Once these entry and exit points mature, digital dollars will be embedded directly into local payment systems and business tools, creating entirely new behavioral patterns: employees can receive cross-border salaries in real time, merchants can accept global dollars without bank accounts, and applications can settle value instantly with users worldwide. Stablecoins will upgrade from niche financial tools to the foundational settlement layer of the internet.

Why is this almost inevitable? The technical debt of traditional banking systems is too heavy. Main ledgers still run on mainframes, programmed in COBOL, with interfaces based on batch files rather than APIs. These systems are stable, reliable, and regulator-friendly, but evolve very slowly—adding real-time payment features can take months or even years. Stablecoins are precisely the bypass solution for this aging system.

Industry expects that by the end of 2026, 30% of international payments will be completed via stablecoins. The market cap of stablecoins is expected to double, driven mainly by the improvement of regulatory frameworks, which will open growth opportunities for existing issuers and attract new competitors.

RWA moves from experiment to real application

Unlike the restless “tokenization of everything” phase earlier, the current narrative of RWA (Real-World Asset Tokenization) is much more cautious. Research institutions no longer discuss “how big the potential market is,” but focus on one word: feasibility.

Most so-called “tokenized assets” today are essentially just a different technical wrapper; their design logic, trading methods, and risk structures still strictly follow traditional asset understanding, without truly leveraging blockchain’s native features.

A real breakthrough may come from an seemingly insignificant area: collateral. Industry broadly expects that by 2026, a major bank or broker will start accepting on-chain tokenized stocks as official collateral, a milestone far beyond any single product.

So far, tokenized stocks are either small experiments within DeFi or pilots on private blockchains of large banks, completely isolated from mainstream financial systems. But this is changing. Core providers of traditional financial infrastructure are accelerating their migration to blockchain systems, and regulators are showing increasingly clear support.

Once a financial institution officially recognizes on-chain tokenized assets as legally equivalent and risk-equivalent to traditional securities, RWA will truly enter the mainstream. Industry is very optimistic about this timeline, expecting such breakthroughs to occur within this year. Some aggressive predictions even suggest that the growth of tokenized real-world assets could reach tenfold, driven by clearer regulation, readiness of traditional institutions, and mature technological infrastructure.

The “second spring” of prediction markets

Another highly anticipated track in 2026 is prediction markets, but interestingly, the reasons for optimism have shifted. It’s no longer just about “decentralized gambling platforms,” but evolving into information aggregation and decision-making tools.

Prediction markets have surpassed the threshold of “mainstreaming,” entering a new phase of deep integration with crypto and AI. However, this expansion comes with increased complexity: higher trading frequency, faster information feedback, and more automated participant structures. This amplifies value but also presents new challenges for builders—how to more fairly arbitrate results and avoid disputes.

Data shows that a major prediction platform’s weekly trading volume is expected to exceed $1.5 trillion, still significantly higher than the current nearly $1 trillion level. Three forces are driving this growth: deeper capital efficiency innovations boosting liquidity, AI-driven order flow significantly increasing trading frequency, and platform distribution capabilities accelerating capital inflow.

More aggressive predictions suggest that the open interest of this platform’s contracts could surpass the record high set during the 2024 US election. The growth drivers are clear: US users’ openness to attract large new user bases, with $2 trillion in new funds providing ample “ammunition,” and market categories expanding from politics to economics, sports, entertainment, and more.

Market observers’ data is even more interesting: the adoption rate of prediction markets among the US population is expected to rise from the current 5% to 35%, while the adoption rate of traditional gambling is about 56%. This indicates that prediction markets are evolving from niche financial tools toward products close to mainstream entertainment and information consumption.

But among the optimistic voices, there are also warnings. As regulators gradually permit on-chain prediction markets and trading volume and open interest grow rapidly, incidents in the gray area have already emerged—insiders exploiting non-public information to front-run, manipulating sports results, and frequent scandals. Because prediction markets allow pseudo-anonymous participation rather than strict KYC like traditional gambling platforms, the temptation for insiders to abuse informational privileges is greatly amplified.

Federal investigations may not come from the heavily regulated gambling systems but from suspicious price movements in on-chain prediction markets. This risk also raises the fifth consensus topic.

The “new generation” of privacy coins

As more funds, data, and automated decision flows move on-chain, complete transparency has become an unbearable burden. This was already evident in 2025, with the privacy track emerging as a dark horse, with gains even surpassing mainstream coins like Bitcoin.

Therefore, the revival of privacy coins in 2026 is the most widely accepted consensus. Industry expects that by the end of the year, the total market cap of privacy coins will exceed $100 billion. This prediction is supported by the fact that as investors store more funds on-chain and privacy becomes a primary concern, user sentiment has undergone a fundamental shift.

This shift stems from a simple yet profound question: Do I really want all my crypto asset balances, transaction paths, and fund structures to be permanently public? Privacy is no longer an “idealistic appeal” but a “practical issue for institutions.”

From a historical perspective, early Bitcoin developers, including Satoshi Nakamoto himself, explored privacy technologies. Bitcoin’s initial design discussed how to make transactions more private or even fully hidden. But at that time, privacy technologies like zero-knowledge proofs were far from mature.

Today, it’s a completely different landscape. Zero-knowledge proof technology has reached engineering maturity, on-chain stored value has increased significantly, and more users—especially institutions—are beginning to question a long-held assumption.

The deep driving force behind privacy issues also comes from data. Every model, every agent, every automation system relies on the same thing: data. But most current data channels—whether for model inputs or output results—are opaque, volatile, and unauditable. This is acceptable for consumer applications but nearly insurmountable in finance or healthcare.

As agent systems begin to autonomously navigate, operate, and decide, this problem is magnified. The solution should not be to add privacy features after the fact at the application layer but to build a comprehensive native, programmable data access infrastructure—defining executable access rules, end-to-end encryption, decentralized key management—precisely specifying who can decrypt what data, under what conditions, and for how long. These rules must be enforced on-chain, not relying on internal organizational processes or manual restrictions.

Combined with verifiable data systems, privacy can become part of the internet’s public infrastructure, not just an add-on for specific applications.

Additional observation: value reconfiguration at the application layer

Beyond the five themes above, an emerging but not yet fully consensus trend is: application layer is absorbing value from the base layer. The “fat application theory” is gradually replacing the “fat protocol theory.” Value is no longer concentrated on the base chain and general protocols but is migrating to the application layer.

This does not mean the base layer is unimportant, but the places that truly interact with users, data, and cash flows are within applications themselves. This has sparked a highly contrasting debate: how will certain blockchains that have long positioned themselves as “world computers” and insist on “fat protocols” maintain valuation amid the “fat application” trend? Some believe they will continue to benefit from tokenization and their role as financial infrastructure; others think they may evolve into “boring but essential” underlying networks, with most value absorbed by upper-layer applications.

The performance of Bitcoin is expected to be relatively consistent—by 2026, it should perform well, with institutional demand reinforced by ETFs and similar tools, establishing its role as a macro hedge asset and “digital gold,” despite the real threat posed by quantum computing.