Real assets will usher in true on-chain proliferation.

Author: Archetype

Translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow

The era of building dedicated application chains has finally arrived

Author: Aadharsh Pannirselvam

In simple terms: blockchains designed, built, and optimized for applications will bring about disruptive changes. The best application chains next year will be intentionally and carefully assembled around foundational components and basic principles.

The influx of developers, users, institutions, and capital onto the chain is different from before: they are more focused on specific cultures (i.e., definitions of user experience) rather than pursuing abstract ideals like decentralization or censorship resistance. In practice, this demand sometimes aligns with existing infrastructure and sometimes does not.

For crypto abstract applications aimed at ordinary users, such as Blackbird or Farcaster, certain centralized design decisions—like co-located node deployment, single sequencers, and custom databases—might have been seen as "heretical" three years ago, but now seem very reasonable. The same applies to stablecoin chains and trading platforms like Hyperliquid* and GTE, where success often hinges on millisecond-level latency, price fluctuations, and optimal pricing.

But this logic does not apply to all new applications.

For instance, in contrast to this acceptance of centralization, there is a growing concern among institutional and retail users regarding privacy. The demand for crypto applications and the ideal user experience may differ significantly, and thus their infrastructure should also vary.

Fortunately, building chains from scratch to meet these specific user experience definitions is no longer as complex as it was two years ago. In fact, the current process is very similar to assembling a custom computer.

Of course, you can choose every hard drive, fan, and cable yourself. But if you don't need that level of detail customization (which is likely the case for most people), you can use services like Digital Storm or Framework, which offer a range of pre-built custom computers to meet different needs. If your requirements fall somewhere in between, you can also add your own components based on those they have already selected and ensured compatibility. This approach not only provides greater modularity and flexibility but also eliminates unnecessary components while ensuring the final product runs efficiently.

As various applications assemble and adjust foundational components like consensus mechanisms, execution layers, data storage, and liquidity, they are creating forms with unique cultural characteristics that continuously reflect different needs (i.e., different definitions of user experience), serving their unique target audiences, and ultimately achieving value retention. The differences in these forms can be as significant as those between rugged ToughBooks, business-oriented ThinkPads, powerful desktops, and beautifully designed MacBooks, but they also tend to converge and coexist to some extent—after all, not every computer has its own independent operating system. Moreover, each necessary component becomes a "knob" that applications can flexibly adjust, allowing developers to optimize without worrying about making destructive changes to the parent protocol.

Given that Circle acquired Malachite from Informal Systems, it is clear that having autonomy over customized block space has now become a broader priority. In the coming year, I am very much looking forward to seeing applications and teams define and control their chain resources around foundational components and reasonable defaults provided by companies like Commonware and Delta. This model is similar to HashiCorp or Stripe Atlas but applied to the blockchain and block space domain.

Ultimately, this will enable applications to directly control their cash flow and leverage the uniqueness of their constructed forms to provide the best user experience on their own terms, creating a lasting competitive barrier.

Prediction markets will continue to innovate (but only some will succeed)

Author: Tommy Hang

In this cycle, prediction markets have become one of the most watched applications. With weekly trading volumes across all crypto sectors hitting a historic high of $2 billion, this category has clearly taken a significant step toward mainstream consumer products.

This momentum has propelled a series of related projects that aim to complement or challenge current market leaders like Polymarket and Kalshi. However, amidst this wave, distinguishing true innovation from noise will ultimately determine which projects are worth our attention in 2026.

From a market structure perspective, I am particularly looking forward to solutions that can narrow spreads and deepen open interest. Although market creation remains permissioned and selective, the liquidity of prediction markets is still relatively low for market makers and traders. There are significant opportunities to improve optimal routing systems, different liquidity models, and collateral efficiency through products like lending.

Volume categorized by type is also a key factor in determining which platforms will prevail. For example, over 90% of Kalshi's trading volume in November came from sports markets, indicating that certain platforms have a natural competitive edge in vying for advantageous liquidity. In contrast, Polymarket's trading volume in crypto-related and political markets is 5 to 10 times that of Kalshi.

However, on-chain prediction markets still have a long way to go before achieving true mass adoption. A good reference point is the Super Bowl in 2025, which alone generated $23 billion in trading volume in the off-chain betting market in just one day—over 10 times the total daily trading volume of all current on-chain markets.

To close this gap, sharp and insightful teams are needed to tackle the core issues of prediction markets. In the coming year, I will closely monitor these potential industry players.

Smart agent curators will drive DeFi expansion

Author: Eskender Abebe

The curation layer of DeFi currently exists in two extreme forms: one is fully algorithmic (hard-coded interest rate curves, fixed rebalancing rules), and the other is entirely human-dependent (risk committees, active managers). Smart agent curators represent a third model: curation and risk policies in treasury, lending markets, and structured products managed by AI agents (including large language models LLMs + tools + loops). This involves not just executing fixed rules but reasoning and decision-making regarding risk, return, and strategy.

The role of curators in the Morpho market serves as an example. Here, someone needs to define collateral policies, loan-to-value (LTV) limits, and risk parameters to generate yield products. Currently, the human factor in this process has become a bottleneck. Smart agents can scale this process. Soon, smart agent curators will compete directly with algorithmic models and human managers.

So, when will DeFi's "Move 37" moment arrive?

When I talk to crypto fund managers about AI, they typically give two starkly different responses: either they believe LLMs will soon automate every trading desk, or they think these tools are just "hallucination toys" that cannot handle real markets. But both views overlook a key architectural shift: smart agents can bring emotionless execution, systematic policy adherence, and flexible reasoning capabilities to areas where human performance is noisy and pure algorithms are too fragile. They are likely to supervise or combine lower-level algorithms rather than completely replace them. In this scenario, LLMs act more like "architects" designing safety frameworks, while deterministic code continues to handle core path tasks that are sensitive to high latency.

As the cost of deep reasoning drops to a few cents, the most profitable treasuries will no longer be those with the smartest humans but those with the most powerful computational capabilities.

Short videos become a new type of "store"

Author: Katie Chiou

Short videos are rapidly becoming the default interface for discovering (and ultimately purchasing) favorite content. TikTok Shop achieved over $20 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) in the first half of 2025, nearly doubling year-on-year, quietly transforming global users' entertainment consumption habits into a "store-like" experience.

In response, Instagram has transformed Reels from a defensive feature into a revenue engine. This short video format not only brings more exposure but also occupies an increasingly large share of Meta's projected advertising revenue for 2025. Whatnot has already proven that sales conversion rates based on live streaming and personal charisma are unattainable for traditional e-commerce.

The core logic is very simple: people make decisions faster when watching content in real-time. Every swipe of the screen becomes a decision point. Major platforms are well aware of this, and thus the boundary between recommendation feeds and checkout processes is disappearing. The information stream has become the new sales point, and each creator has become a distribution channel.

Artificial intelligence further drives this trend. AI lowers video production costs, increases content output, and enables creators and brands to test new ideas in real-time. More content means more conversion opportunities, and platforms respond to this change by optimizing purchase intent for every second of video.

Cryptocurrency plays a key role in this trend. Faster content requires faster, more efficient payment rails. As shopping becomes seamless and directly embedded in content, we need a system that can handle micropayments, programmatically allocate revenue, and track contributions in complex influence chains. Cryptocurrency is born for this liquidity. It is hard to imagine a massive commercial era with streaming as the native scene without the support of cryptocurrency.

Blockchain will drive new rules for AI expansion

Author: Danny Sursock

In recent years, the focus of AI has been on the billion-dollar arms race between mega-corporations and startup giants, while decentralized innovators have been forced to quietly explore in the shadows.

However, as mainstream attention shifts, some crypto-native teams have made significant progress in decentralized training and inference. This quiet revolution is gradually moving from theoretical stages to testing and production environments.

Today, teams like Ritual, Pluralis, Exo, Odyn, Ambient, and Bagel are ready to embrace their moment in the spotlight. This new generation of competitors is poised to unleash explosive disruptive impacts on the foundational trajectory of AI development.

By training models in a globally distributed environment and utilizing new asynchronous communication and parallelization methods that are currently in production-scale operation, the limitations of AI scalability will be thoroughly broken.

At the same time, the combination of new consensus mechanisms and privacy foundational components makes verifiable and confidential inference a realistic option in the toolbox of on-chain developers.

Moreover, revolutionary blockchain architectures will truly realize the integration of smart contracts with a highly expressive computational structure that can simplify the operation of autonomous AI agents using cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange.

The foundational work has been completed.

The current challenge is to scale these infrastructures to production levels and demonstrate that blockchain can drive fundamental AI innovations that go beyond philosophy, ideology, or superficial financing experiments.

Real assets will usher in true on-chain proliferation

Author: Dmitriy Berenzon

For years, we have heard discussions about asset tokenization. However, with the mainstream adoption of stablecoins, the emergence of smooth and robust fiat and cryptocurrency deposit and withdrawal channels, and increasingly clear regulatory support worldwide, Real World Assets (RWAs) are finally beginning to achieve large-scale application. According to RWA.xyz*, the total amount of tokenized assets across various categories has exceeded $18 billion, up from just $3.7 billion a year ago. I expect this trend to accelerate further by 2026.

It is important to note that tokenization and vaults are two different design patterns for RWAs: tokenization moves the representation of off-chain assets onto the chain, while vaults build a bridge between on-chain capital and off-chain yields.

I look forward to seeing tokenization and vaults provide on-chain access for various real and financial assets, from commodities like gold and rare metals to private credit used for working capital and payment financing, as well as private and public equities, and more global currencies. Of course, we can also innovate boldly! I hope to see assets like eggs, GPUs, energy derivatives, wage advances, Brazilian government bonds, and yen all move onto the chain!

But it should be clear that this is not just about putting more things on the chain; it is about upgrading the global capital allocation method through public blockchains. Blockchain can make those obscure, slow, and isolated markets transparent, programmable, and more liquid. Once these assets are moved onto the chain, we can enjoy the tremendous advantages brought by the composability with existing DeFi primitives.

Finally, many of these assets will inevitably face challenges in transferability, transparency, liquidity, risk management, and distribution during the process of being brought on-chain, so the infrastructure that can alleviate these issues is equally important and exciting!

Agent-driven product revival is coming

Author: Ash Egan

The future shape of the web will be less determined by the social platforms we scroll through and more shaped by the intelligent agents we converse with.

Today, bots and intelligent agents have captured a rapidly growing portion of online activity. Rough estimates suggest that this proportion is currently around 50%, encompassing both on-chain and off-chain activities. In the crypto space, bots are increasingly involved in trading, curation, assistance, scanning contracts, and executing tasks on our behalf in areas such as token trading, fund management, smart contract auditing, and game development.

This marks the arrival of a programmable, agent-driven web era. While we have been in this phase for some time, 2026 will be a turning point, as crypto product design will increasingly serve intelligent agents rather than being directly aimed at humans (in a positive, liberating, and non-dystopian way).

This future vision is gradually taking shape. Personally, I hope to reduce the time spent clicking between different websites and instead manage on-chain intelligent agents through a chat-like interface. Imagine an interface like Telegram, but the conversation is with intelligent agents tailored for specific applications or tasks. These agents can formulate and execute complex strategies, search the web for the most relevant information and data to me, and provide feedback on trading results, risks, opportunities, and filtered information. I just need to give them a task, and they will find opportunities, filter out the noise, and execute actions at the optimal time.

The on-chain infrastructure is already prepared for this. By combining default open data graphs, programmable micropayments, on-chain social graphs, and cross-chain liquidity rails, we have everything needed to support a dynamic intelligent agent ecosystem. The plug-and-play nature of the crypto space means that agents face fewer cumbersome processes and ineffective paths here. Compared to Web2 infrastructure, blockchain provides excellent conditions for this agentification.

Perhaps most importantly: this is not just about automation; it is about liberation from the islands of Web2. Liberation from friction. Liberation from waiting. We are witnessing this shift in the search domain: currently, about 20% of Google searches generate AI overviews, and data shows that when people see AI overviews, they are significantly less likely to click on traditional search result links. Manually flipping through pages is becoming unnecessary. A programmable intelligent agent network will further extend this trend, covering the applications we use, and I believe this is a positive change.

This era will reduce meaningless scrolling and panic trading. Time zone differences will gradually disappear (no longer needing to "wait for the Asian markets to wake up"). Interactions with the on-chain world will become simpler and more expressive, both for developers and ordinary users.

As more assets, systems, and users gradually move on-chain, this cycle will continuously amplify:

More on-chain opportunities → Deploy more intelligent agents → Unlock more value. The cycle repeats.

But the content we build now, and the way we build it, will determine whether this intelligent agent network becomes a layer of weak noise and automation or ignites a revival of empowering and vibrant products.

*Note: Some companies mentioned in the text are part of the Archetype portfolio.

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