Author: Archetype

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

As we approach 2026, the Archetype team is focusing on future technology trends.

Application Chains Are Viable

——Aadharsh Pannirselvam

The reasoning is simple: chains that are meticulously designed, built, and optimized for applications will undoubtedly deliver amazing experiences. The best application chains next year will innovate from foundational modules and first principles.

The recently emerging developers, users, institutions, and capital differ significantly from those who previously entered the on-chain ecosystem: they focus more on practical experiences rather than abstract concepts like decentralization and censorship resistance. In practice, this cultural demand sometimes aligns with existing infrastructure and sometimes conflicts with it.

For applications aimed at ordinary users, like Blackbird or Farcaster, certain aspects of user experience are particularly important. Even some centralized design decisions that were considered heretical three years ago, such as co-located nodes, single sequencers, and customized databases, now seem like reasonable choices. The same applies to projects like Hyperliquid and GTE, where their success often hinges on millisecond-level speed, minimal price fluctuations, and optimal pricing.

However, this does not apply to all new applications.

For instance, while people may feel comforted by centralization, there is a balancing force as more institutions and individuals begin to focus on privacy. The demand and user experience for crypto applications can be vastly different, and thus the required infrastructure should also vary.

Fortunately, creating specific chains from scratch to meet user needs is far less complex than it was two years ago. In fact, today this process is akin to assembling a custom computer.

Of course, you can personally select every hard drive, fan, and cable. But if such a level of customization is not necessary (which is often the case), you can opt for service providers like Digital Storm or Framework, which offer various pre-configured custom computer solutions for different needs. If you want a compromise solution, you can add components based on the pre-selected components by the vendor, all of which have been tested for compatibility to ensure high-performance operation of the final device. This increases modularity and flexibility while eliminating components that are not actually needed.

When integrating foundational components like consensus mechanisms, execution layers, data storage, and liquidity, applications will build solutions that reflect different cultural characteristics, always reflecting differentiated needs (i.e., different definitions of user experience), serving their respective audiences, and ultimately achieving value retention. The degree of differentiation can be likened to the differences between rugged laptops, business laptops, desktops, and MacBooks, but they also somewhat blend and coexist, as these computers do not run completely independent operating systems. More importantly, each necessary component becomes a knob that applications can freely adjust, allowing developers to iterate and adjust without worrying about making destructive changes to the underlying protocols.

Circle's acquisition of the Malachite team from Informal Systems indicates that controlling customized block space sovereignty is clearly a broader strategic focus at present. In the coming year, I look forward to seeing various applications and development teams define and own their on-chain components based on foundational components and default configurations provided by companies like Commonware and Delta, akin to creating a HashiCorp or Stripe Atlas for the blockchain and block space domain.

Ultimately, this will enable applications to directly control their cash flow and leverage the unique advantages of the models they build to provide the best user experience in their own way, thereby creating a lasting competitive moat.

Prediction Markets Will Continue to Innovate (Though Only Some Will Succeed)

——Tommy Hang

One of the most notable applications in this cycle is the prediction market. With weekly trading volumes on major platforms soaring to a historic high of $20 billion, prediction markets have clearly made substantial strides toward mainstream adoption.

This momentum has propelled numerous projects in the field, either aiming to fill the gaps left by current market leaders like Polymarket and Kalshi or attempting to challenge their dominance. However, amidst the market discussions, only by distinguishing real innovation from market noise can we truly clarify the trends worth watching in 2026.

From a market structure perspective, I am particularly focused on solutions that can reduce spreads and increase open interest. Although market creation still employs a permissioned and selective approach, the liquidity of prediction markets remains relatively weak for both market makers and traders. There are indeed tangible development opportunities to improve routing systems through products like lending, innovate liquidity models, and enhance collateral efficiency.

Trading volume across different sectors is also a key factor determining the competitiveness of various platforms. For example, over 90% of Kalshi's trading volume in November came from sports prediction markets, highlighting that certain platforms naturally possess a competitive positioning for acquiring advantageous liquidity. In contrast, Polymarket's trading volume in crypto-related markets and political markets is 5-10 times that of Kalshi.

However, achieving true mass adoption for on-chain prediction markets still has a long way to go. A highly illustrative example is the Super Bowl in 2025: this single event generated $23 billion in trading volume in the off-chain betting market in just one day, exceeding the total daily trading volume of all current on-chain markets by more than tenfold.

Closing this gap requires sharp and insightful teams to tackle the core issues of prediction markets. In the coming year, I will closely monitor the development of these teams.

Autonomous Curators Will Expand the Scale of the DeFi Market

——Eskender Abebe

The curation layer of DeFi is currently at two extremes: purely algorithmic (hard-coded interest rate curves, fixed rebalancing rules) or purely manual (risk committees, active managers). Autonomous curators represent a third model: curation and risk strategies for treasury, lending markets, and structured products managed by AI agents (large language models + toolchains + decision loops). They not only execute fixed rules but can also reason about risks, returns, and strategies.

Taking curators in the Morpho market as an example: they need to define collateral policies, loan-to-value ratios, and risk parameters to design yield-generating products. This remains a bottleneck reliant on human labor, while AI agents can achieve scalable expansion. At that point, autonomous curators will face off against algorithmic models and human managers.

When will we see the "God Mode" in the DeFi space?

When I talk to crypto fund managers about AI, the responses usually fall into two categories: either they believe large language models will soon take over all trading desks, or they think they are hallucinating toys that cannot survive in real markets. Both viewpoints overlook the architectural changes. Agents are entering areas where human existence interferes, and pure algorithms are too fragile, executing without emotion, adhering to systematic strategies, and reasoning flexibly. They are likely to supervise or integrate underlying algorithms rather than simply replace them. Large language models act as the chief architect designing safety barriers, while deterministic code remains in the core areas that require low-latency responses.

As the cost of deep reasoning drops to a few cents, the most profitable crypto treasuries will no longer depend on the smartest individuals but rather on who possesses the strongest computing power.

Short Videos Become the New Marketplace

——Katie Chiou

Short videos are rapidly becoming the primary channel for people to discover (and ultimately purchase) their favorite content. TikTok Shop generated over $20 billion in total merchandise transactions in the first half of 2025, nearly doubling year-on-year, subtly cultivating a global consumer habit of viewing entertainment content as a new marketplace.

In response, Instagram has transformed its Reels short video feature from a defensive product into a revenue-generating engine. This format not only brings higher exposure but also significantly contributes to Meta's advertising revenue expectations for 2025. Meanwhile, the live commerce platform Whatnot has already proven that charisma-driven live sales models have conversion rates that traditional e-commerce cannot match.

The core logic behind this phenomenon is simple: when people watch content in real-time, decision-making speed significantly accelerates. Every swipe of the screen constitutes a decision point. Major platforms are well aware of this, and thus the boundaries between recommendation feeds and shopping checkout processes are rapidly dissolving. The information feed is the new shelf, and every creator is a sales channel.

Artificial intelligence is pushing this trend even further. It lowers video production costs, increases content output, and allows creators and brands to more easily test ideas in real-time. More content means more possibilities for conversion, and major platforms are optimizing every second of video to maximize users' purchasing intent.

Cryptographic technology was born to adapt to this transformation. As the pace of content accelerates, there is an inevitable need for faster and more economical payment channels. When the shopping process becomes seamless and directly embedded in the content itself, a system capable of settling micro-payments, programmatically distributing revenues, and tracking contributions across a complex web of collaborations becomes essential. Cryptographic technology is designed for this flow of funds, and it is hard to imagine achieving a truly scalable e-commerce era deeply integrated with live streaming without its existence.

Blockchain Will Drive a New AI Arms Race

——Danny Sursock

In recent years, the spotlight in the field of artificial intelligence has been focused on the multi-armed competition between mega-corporations and startup giants, while DeAI entrepreneurs have had to navigate in the shadows.

However, while the external gaze is directed elsewhere, several crypto-native teams have made significant progress in decentralized training and inference, gradually moving from theoretical design to testing and production environments.

Today, teams like Ritual, Pluralis, Exo, Odyn, Ambient, and Bagel have entered a golden age of development. A new generation of competitors is poised to unleash explosive multidimensional impacts on the foundational development trajectory of artificial intelligence.

By training models in a globally distributed environment, scalability bottlenecks can be broken. These models employ innovative asynchronous communication and parallel processing methods, the effectiveness of which is being validated in production-scale operational tests.

The combination of emerging consensus mechanisms and privacy computing components is making verifiable confidential inference a realistic option in the toolkit for on-chain developers.

Revolutionary blockchain architectures combine smart contracts with flexible computational structures, providing an efficient operating environment for autonomous AI agents and using cryptographic assets as a medium of exchange.

The foundational work has been completed.

The current challenge is to scale these infrastructure layers to production levels and demonstrate why blockchain technology can drive fundamental innovations in artificial intelligence, rather than merely remaining at the level of philosophical, ideological, or metaphysical fundraising experiments.

RWA Will See Real Adoption

——Dmitriy Berenzon

Now, RWA tokenization is ushering in large-scale applications. Although the concept of tokenization has been widely discussed for years, this field has finally achieved breakthrough development as stablecoins gain widespread acceptance in the mainstream market, convenient and stable fiat exchange channels become increasingly refined, and global regulatory frameworks gradually clarify and provide support. According to the latest data from the RWA.xyz platform, the total issuance of tokenized assets across various categories has exceeded $18 billion, compared to just $3.7 billion a year ago. It is expected that the growth momentum will further accelerate by 2026.

It is important to note that tokenization and asset vault models are two different design patterns for the tokenization of physical assets: tokenization creates an on-chain representation of off-chain assets, while the asset vault model builds a bridge between on-chain capital and off-chain returns.

I am excited to see that tokenization and vault technology allow us to access a variety of physical and financial assets, from commodities like gold and rare metals to private credit used for operating capital and payment financing, as well as private and public equity, and more global currencies. Let’s think outside the box and go further. I hope to see eggs, GPUs, energy derivatives, salary advances, Brazilian government bonds, Japanese yen, and more, all on-chain.

It should be clear that this is not just about simply bringing more assets on-chain. The core lies in upgrading the global capital allocation model through public chain technology, transforming originally opaque, inefficient, and fragmented markets into a new paradigm that is open, transparent, programmable, and highly liquid. Once these assets are successfully brought on-chain, we will enjoy the composability advantages they bring when combined with existing DeFi.

Finally, these assets will undoubtedly face challenges in terms of transferability, transparency, liquidity, risk management, and distribution, so the infrastructure that can alleviate these challenges is equally important and exciting.

A Product Renaissance Driven by Agents Is Coming

——Ash Egan

The influence of the next generation of the web will no longer be determined by the platforms we swipe on with our fingers, but more by the intelligent agents that converse with us.

We all know that the share of bots and agents in all web activities is rapidly increasing. Roughly estimated, this proportion has now reached about 50%, including both on-chain and off-chain activities. In the crypto space, bots are increasingly trading, curating, assisting, scanning contracts, and handling various tasks on our behalf, from token trading and fund management to auditing smart contracts and developing games.

This is the era of programmable, agent-driven networks. While we are already in it, 2026 will mark a turning point: the design of crypto products (in a positive, open, non-dystopian manner) will be more oriented towards the needs of bots rather than humans.

Although this vision is still gradually emerging, personally, I look forward to reducing the time spent jumping between different websites and interacting more with a simple, chat-like interface to manage on-chain bots. Imagine an experience like Telegram, but the conversation partner is an intelligent agent specifically tailored for applications or tasks. These agents can formulate and execute complex strategies, gather the most relevant information and data for me on the web, and provide feedback on trading results, risks and opportunities to watch out for, as well as filtered information. I just need to give commands, and they will lock in opportunities, filter out all distracting information, and execute precisely at the best moment.

The infrastructure supporting this vision already exists on the blockchain. By combining default open data graphs, programmable micropayments with on-chain social graphs, and cross-chain liquidity channels, we have everything needed to support a dynamic intelligent agent ecosystem. The plug-and-play nature of cryptocurrencies means less red tape, and the dead ends agents encounter during operation will also decrease. The level of preparedness that blockchain offers for this is hard to overstate compared to Web2 infrastructure.

This may be the most critical point here. This is not just about automation; it is a liberation from the closed ecosystems of Web2, from friction, and from waiting. We are witnessing this transformation happening in the search domain: currently, about 20% of Google searches generate AI overviews, and data shows that when people see this overview, their willingness to click on traditional search result links significantly decreases. The process of manually sifting through pages is becoming unnecessary. A programmable, autonomously executing web ecosystem will extend this transformation further into the applications we use, and I believe this is a good thing.

In this era, we will reduce anxiety and frantic trading. Time zone differences will flatten (no longer will there be a saying of "waiting for the Asian market to open"). Interactions with the on-chain world will become more convenient and expressive for every developer and user.

As more assets, systems, and users integrate on-chain, this process will create a snowball effect.

More on-chain opportunities → Increased deployment of agents → Enhanced value release, in a continuous loop.

But the content and methods we build now will determine whether this intelligent network devolves into superficial noise and automated clutter or gives rise to a renaissance of empowering, dynamic products.

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