What to Expect in 2026: Five Predictions the Crypto Industry Cannot Ignore

With 2025 now behind us, the enthusiasm that characterized the second half of the year in the cryptocurrency sector is gradually fading. Trading groups have gone silent, and the narrative has been exhausted. But what will really happen in the next 12 months? We have examined over 30 analyses from institutions such as Galaxy, Delphi Digital, a16z, Bitwise, Hashdex, and Coinbase, along with contributions from researchers and operators working daily on these topics. From this overview, five key directions emerge on which there is sector-wide consensus.

Stablecoins will redefine the global financial infrastructure

The first and most shared scenario concerns stablecoins. In 2026, they will evolve from mere speculative tools to true pillars of the global financial infrastructure.

The numbers make this clear: stablecoins have already handled about $46 trillion in transaction volume in the past year. To understand the real significance of this figure, consider that it is about 20 times the annual volume of PayPal, nearly 3 times that of Visa, and approaching the size of the entire US ACH network. Yet the real knot to untie is not whether demand exists—that is clear—but how these digital dollars can effectively integrate into daily financial flows: withdrawals and deposits, everyday transactions, settlements, and consumption.

A new generation of startups is focusing their efforts precisely on this gap. Some use zero-knowledge cryptography to enable customers to convert local balances into digital dollars while preserving privacy. Others are building direct bridges between local banking networks and stablecoins, using QR codes and instant payment systems. Some are developing truly interoperable global wallets and card issuance platforms, allowing stablecoins to be spent directly at ordinary merchants.

Once these entry and exit channels mature, digital dollars will directly merge with local payment systems. Workers will receive cross-border salaries in real time, merchants will accept global currencies without bank accounts, and applications will instantly settle transactions with users worldwide.

From a deeper technical perspective, the reason for this inevitability is simple: current banking systems are obsolete. Mainframes still run on COBOL, interfaces are batch files rather than APIs. They are stable and regulated, but almost impossible to evolve quickly—adding a simple real-time payment feature can take months or years. Here, stablecoins find their natural space: they are modern, fast, programmable.

Traditional financial institutions are already taking their first steps, implementing stablecoin-based technologies and building related circuits. Galaxy Research predicts that by the end of 2026, 30% of international payments will be made via stablecoins. Bitwise goes further: the market capitalization of stablecoins will double during the year, also driven by the implementation of the GENIUS Act in the early months, which will open new growth opportunities.

AI agents need crypto-native payment infrastructures

The second major narrative concerns how autonomous intelligent agents will become the main players in on-chain economy. Recent global AI-based trading competitions confirm: the potential is real.

The reasoning is straightforward: when AI agents begin to perform tasks autonomously, make decisions, and interact at high frequency among themselves, they need a value transfer mechanism that is fast, cheap, and unrestricted—just like data transmission systems. Traditional payment systems, designed for identified individuals and regulatory cycles, create insurmountable friction for agents. Cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins paired with protocols like x402, are tailor-made for this: instant settlement, support for micro-payments, full programmability, no access barriers.

2026 could be the year when the payment infrastructure for the agent economy moves out of the experimental phase and into widespread use.

But a new bottleneck emerges: the problem is no longer “insufficient intelligence” but “lack of identity.” In today’s financial system, non-human entities outnumber human employees 96 to 1, yet almost all remain “ghosts without bank access.” There is no equivalent KYC framework for agents: the KYA (Know Your Agent). AI agents need cryptographic credentials that prove who they represent, who they are bound to, and who is responsible for them.

While it took decades for the sector to develop KYC, implementing KYA could be achieved in a few months. This means that the x402 standard will become fundamental. The critical asset will no longer be the AI model but high-quality, rare, verifiable data (DePAI), on which projects like BitRobot, PrismaX, and Chakra are already building.

Galaxy Research quantifies this phenomenon: x402-compliant payments will account for 30% of Base’s daily volume and 5% of non-vote transactions on Solana. As agents begin to trade autonomously, standardized payment primitives will directly enter execution. Base will benefit from Coinbase’s promotion of the standard; Solana will benefit from its large developer community. Emerging blockchains focused on payments, such as Tempo and Arc, will grow rapidly in this context.

RWAs will evolve from pure tokens to true system integration

The third consensus forecast concerns real-world assets (RWA), but with a significant change in perspective. The initial enthusiasm for “everything can be tokenized” is giving way to a strict focus on what is truly feasible.

So far, most tokenization has been mainly cosmetic: assets that have “changed technological attire” but remain built according to traditional logic. They do not leverage the native features of crypto systems nor fundamentally modify product design or risk structure.

Galaxy Research predicts a structural turning point: in 2026, a major bank or broker will officially accept on-chain deposited tokenized shares as collateral. This would be symbolically more significant than any single product launched, because it would break the isolation between DeFi experiments and the mainstream financial sector.

Today, traditional institutions are accelerating their migration to blockchain infrastructures, and regulators are showing a clearly more favorable attitude. Galaxy predicts that this will be the first time a large financial institution considers tokenized shares equivalent, from a legal and risk perspective, to traditional securities.

Hashdex is even more optimistic: it foresees a tenfold growth in real-world assets tokenized, supported by increasing regulatory clarity, institutional readiness, and infrastructure maturity.

Predictive markets will become information aggregation tools, not just betting

The fourth shared narrative concerns predictive markets. The surprising element is that they are no longer seen simply as “decentralized gambling,” but as sophisticated tools for aggregation and decision support.

Andy Hall of a16z, a political economist at Stanford, believes that predictive markets have already crossed the threshold to become mainstream. By 2026, with deeper integration with AI systems, they will become larger, broader, and smarter. However, this expansion involves costs: higher trading frequencies, instant informational feedback, automated participation structures. These dynamics amplify value but pose new challenges, such as fairly determining outcomes without controversy.

The numbers are impressive. Polymarket will have a weekly volume consistently exceeding $1.5 billion, according to Galaxy Research. This is not speculative: Polymarket already handles about $1 billion in weekly nominal volume. Three forces will drive this growth: new capital efficiencies deepening liquidity, AI-driven order flows significantly increasing trading frequency, and Polymarket’s expanding distribution capacity accelerating capital inflows.

Bitwise is even more aggressive: it predicts that Polymarket’s open interest will surpass the all-time high reached during the 2024 US presidential elections. The reason: opening to US users attracted many new participants, with about $2 billion in fresh capital, and market types are expanding from politics to economics, sports, and pop culture.

Tomasz Tunguz predicts that the adoption rate of predictive markets among the US population will rise from the current 5% to 35%. For context, gambling in the US has an adoption rate of 56%. Predictive markets are evolving from niche financial tools to mainstream entertainment and informational products.

However, Galaxy issues a clear warning: federal investigations may emerge. With rapidly increasing volume and open interest, controversial events also appear: insiders using non-public information, manipulations of sporting events. Since predictive markets allow pseudonymous participation, unlike the strict KYC of traditional casinos, the temptation to abuse privileged information grows. Galaxy believes that future triggers for investigations could come not from anomalies in regulated systems but directly from suspicious price movements in on-chain markets.

Privacy will become an institutional priority, no longer idealistic

The fifth narrative concerns privacy coins. With increasing amounts of capital, data, and automated decisions moving on-chain, total exposure is becoming an unacceptable cost.

In 2025, the privacy sector has already been a surprise, with gains even surpassing Bitcoin and major cryptocurrencies. By 2026, almost all institutions and researchers foresee further growth in privacy.

Christopher Rosa of Galaxy Research provides a strong forecast: the total market cap of privacy coins will exceed $100 billion by the end of 2026. The last quarter of 2025 already showed convincing signs: among the three main privacy coins, Zcash grew by 800%, Railgun by 204%, Monero by 53%.

An interesting historical context: the earliest Bitcoin developers, including Satoshi Nakamoto, explored privacy technologies. In Bitcoin’s original design, it was already hypothesized to make transactions more private or fully shielded. But at the time, zero-knowledge proof technologies were not mature or implementable. Today, the situation is completely reversed. With zero-knowledge technology becoming engineering-practical and on-chain value soaring, more and more users, especially institutional ones, are seriously asking a question once taken for granted: are they truly willing to make all their crypto assets’ balances, transaction paths, and fund structures permanently public?

The privacy issue has thus shifted from “idealistic necessity” to “real institutional need.”

Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder of Mysten Labs, adds an even deeper perspective: the foundation of everything is data. Every model, every agent, every automated system relies on data. But today, most data channels—both inbound and outbound—are opaque, unstable, non-auditable. For consumer apps, this may be acceptable; in finance or healthcare, it is almost an insurmountable obstacle. As agent systems begin to navigate, trade, and decide autonomously, the problem amplifies.

Abiodun proposes “secrets-as-a-service”: native, programmable data access infrastructures, with executable data access rules, client-side encryption, decentralized key management systems. These rules should be applied on-chain, not entrusted to internal processes. By combining verifiable data systems, privacy can become part of the public internet infrastructure.

Additional observations: value will concentrate on applications, not protocols

Beyond these five main narratives, almost all institutions shared additional noteworthy insights. The most interesting concerns the paradigm shift in value capture.

The thesis of “fat protocols” is giving way to that of “fat applications”: value is no longer primarily concentrated in the base layers and generic protocols, but is shifting toward the application layer. Not because base layers have become less important, but because the real contact with users, data, and cash flows occurs through applications.

This raises a controversial question for Ethereum, which aspires to become the world computer and has always embodied the “fat protocols” thesis. How will its value change with this trend? Some believe it will continue to benefit as a fundamental layer for tokenization and financial infrastructure. Others think it will evolve into an “anonymous but necessary base network,” with most of the value absorbed by the application layer built on top.

Regarding Bitcoin, most analyses predict it will continue to perform well in 2026, with increasing institutional demand via ETFs, consolidating its role as a macro asset and “digital gold.” The only real threat remains quantum computing.