Original Translation: BitalkNews
This article summarizes the 100,000-word annual report from Messari, combining AI and human insights to outline the following 60 cryptocurrency trends for 2026.
If L1 does not experience real growth, cryptocurrency funds will increasingly flow towards Bitcoin.
ETH is still Bitcoin's "little brother" and not an independent leader. ETH has institutional and corporate support, allowing it to profit alongside Bitcoin, but it cannot yet stand on its own.
The correlation between ZEC and Bitcoin has dropped to 0.24, serving as a privacy hedge against Bitcoin.
Application-specific currencies (such as Virtuals Protocol and Zora) will emerge as a trend in 2026.
Using Virtuals Protocol as an example to introduce application-specific currencies:
When users create AI agents, a token exclusive to the agent will be issued.
All agent tokens are paired with the platform token VIRTUAL (to buy agent tokens, VIRTUAL must be used, providing liquidity).
The more popular the platform and the more useful the AI agents, the greater the demand for VIRTUAL, making it the "special currency" of this ecosystem.
Stablecoins: Transitioning from speculative tools to "currency weapons" in the U.S. The GENIUS Act (passed in 2025) introduces the first federal stablecoin regulations in the U.S., transforming stablecoins from crypto toys into tools of U.S. monetary policy.
Tether may continue to dominate the stablecoin market in developing countries, while developed countries' markets are being taken over by large institutions. Tether's profits are soaring, with a valuation approaching $500 billion. Major players like JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citibank, PayPal, Visa, and Google are all entering the stablecoin space or building infrastructure.
Cloudflare and Google are creating stablecoins and payment protocols specifically for AI agent transactions, preparing to enter a future where AI spends automatically.
With interest rates declining in 2026, yield-bearing stablecoins (such as lending interest spreads, arbitrage, and GPU collateral loans) will explode (like Ethena's USDe).
Tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) will bring trillions of assets on-chain. By 2025, the total scale of RWA will reach $18 billion, primarily consisting of government bonds and credit. DTCC (the U.S. securities clearing giant) has received SEC approval to tokenize U.S. securities. Most deployments are on Ethereum (64%), but institutions may use private chains.
Ethereum: The "settlement center" for institutions and large funds. Ethereum remains the most reliable "settlement layer."
Ethereum L2 has taken on most transactions, but token performance is poor. Base has the strongest revenue, accounting for 62% of L2. Arbitrum is the strongest in DeFi.
Solana: The king of retail and speculation continues to dominate retail trading, spot volume, and the memecoin craze.
In 2026, Ripple aims to develop XRPL into an "institutional DeFi-friendly chain," adding various compliance features at the base layer.
Stellar will focus on stablecoins and payment applications in 2026 (with ultra-low fees of $0.00055 per transaction, ready-made wallets, global fiat channels, and bulk payment platforms).
Hedera aims to become a "regulated enterprise infrastructure backbone," focusing on two directions: RWA tokenization and verifiable AI.
BNB Chain will directly guide 290 million users. Binance Alpha continues to act as a "new project incubator," prioritizing BNB Chain.
TRON will remain the king of USDT transfers in emerging markets. TRON is one of the most profitable "businesses" in the crypto space, with annual revenues exceeding $500 million. New "stablecoin-specific chains" (stablechains) are emerging to compete, but TRON has a deep moat; as long as it maintains its USDT dominance and expands its global influence, it will still be a core pillar of the stablecoin economy in 2026.
Sui is evolving from a "high-performance execution chain" to a "full-stack unified platform."
Aptos aims to be the core engine for "tokenization of all assets and 24/7 global trading without intermediaries."
Near Intents will serve as the foundational layer for cross-chain + AI agents.
Polygon is pursuing the payment track, integrating stablecoins, merchant processors, and consumer finance. Monthly payment app transactions have exceeded $1 billion (with an annual total of $6.4 billion), targeting $2.5-3 billion per month in 2026.
The stablecoin public chains Arc and Tempo are competing with SWIFT (international wire transfers), ACH (U.S. clearing), and payment processors, aiming to move large offline payments on-chain.
Arc is targeting large institutional funds (banks, capital markets' FX, tokenized assets).
Tempo is targeting funds from the Stripe ecosystem (merchants, consumer payments, payroll).
Arc could become the default track for institutional foreign exchange, tokenized assets, and B2B payments (if Circle attracts large institutions and is regulatory-friendly). Tempo could become the best track for merchants to distribute funds and cross-border settlements.
Chainlink continues to dominate as the leading DeFi oracle, but institutional data services will become a new main source of income for oracles (traditional financial data budgets are enormous, with Bloomberg earning $10.6 billion annually).
Privacy cross-chain will become a focus: THORChain plus Monero (exchanging transparent coins for privacy coins), Chainlink Confidential Compute (secure computation of sensitive institutional data before going on-chain).
In 2026, DEXs will integrate wallets, bots, launchpads, and other services. The three main profit sources for DEXs:
Wallets: Phantom earned $9.46 million in November (with a fee rate of 0.95%), with a volume of less than $1 billion but dominating most DEXs.
Trading bots: Axiom has a fee rate of 1.15%, earning $18.74 million.
Asset issuance (launchpads): Selling exclusive new coins. pump.fun earned $34.92 million with a fee rate of 0.51%, while Four.meme had a fee rate of 1.05% (backed by Binance).
In 2026, DEXs will bundle wallets, bots, launchpads, and DEXs, controlling the entire trading process and not just earning fees. Potential new revenue streams: subscriptions and premium execution fees.
- Modular lending (like Morpho) will surpass integrated lending (Aave), relying on RWA lending, high-yield stablecoins, and institutional distribution.
Why does modular have advantages?
There is significant demand for lending on long-tail assets (small coins, RWA), which integrated lending is hesitant to touch; modular can open independent vaults.
Institutions and new banks prefer to isolate risks and customize parameters.
It can serve as a backend for centralized exchanges and new banks (like Morpho collaborating with Coinbase, attracting nearly $1 billion in deposits).
Stock perpetual contracts are becoming a new trend in crypto, allowing for high-leverage stock trading while bypassing offline regulations.
Exogenous yield stablecoins: The yield from stablecoins comes from real cash flows off-chain (such as private credit, infrastructure, tokenized real estate), not government bonds. More exogenous yield products (credit, real estate, energy, etc.) will go on-chain. Yield-bearing stablecoins will become the main collateral and savings tools in DeFi.
Successful examples:
USD.Ai: Government bond-backed + AI infrastructure (GPU collateral) loans, locking in $670 million, with a yield-bearing version yielding 9.7%.
Maple syrup USDC/T: Providing super-collateralized loans to trading firms/market makers, locking in $4.5 billion, with a yield of 5.5%.
Real-world asset (RWA) collateralized lending. On-chain RWA lending relies almost entirely on home equity credit, with the Figure platform dominating (active loans of $14.1 billion). Another potential direction is merchant credit, where on-chain credit uses transparent cash flows for automatic assessment and lending, serving global merchants.
DeFi banks may become the mainstream distribution layer for crypto banks. By placing savings, trading, cards, and remittances all in one permissionless wallet, it becomes a DeFi bank.
Decentralized high-quality data collection for AI (active/passive) will be the most profitable, with decentralized compute networks (DCN) finding new paths through wholesale + verification reasoning. Medium open-source models + swarm intelligence/agents will thrive, with AI and crypto feeding into each other, leading DeAI into an "enlightenment era."
Cutting-edge data: Opportunities in the AI data scarcity era.
Publicly available free AI data is quickly being mined out, and there is an urgent need for complex, multi-modal (images + text + video + audio) + exclusive cutting-edge tasks (like robotics, computer agents) high-quality data. This presents a significant opportunity for crypto companies, with large-scale collection of exclusive data possible, divided into two categories:
Active collection: Users intentionally perform tasks to generate data (like an upgraded version of traditional annotation companies).
Passive collection: Users normally use products, inadvertently generating "digital waste" (minimal friction, large scale). An example is Grass: using idle bandwidth to scrape multi-modal data from web pages, with projected revenue reaching $12.8 million in 2025 (large AI repeatedly buying).
In 2026, these "data minting factories" will focus on a cutting-edge use case (not just collecting, but enhancing learning environments/new benchmarks), likely becoming the most profitable part of decentralized AI.
- In 2026, more companies are expected to publicly announce "collaborations with leading AI labs" for passive data collection.
Passive data collection differs from active (where users intentionally perform tasks); users generate data simply by using products, with almost zero friction, allowing for large-scale collection. The most promising example in 2025 is Shaga (a DePIN network that turns idle gaming computers into a distributed cloud gaming platform, where users contribute computing power to earn rewards). In 2026, more companies are expected to publicly announce "collaborations with leading AI labs," and traditional companies will also add crypto incentives + stablecoin payments.
By 2025, DeAI labs have trained strong mid-sized open-source models using globally distributed heterogeneous GPUs. Prime Intellect, Nous Research, Gensyn, and Pluralis are already leading labs, with more products expected to be monetized in 2026.
Lightweight agent commerce may take off in 2026. X402 is gaining popularity, and ERC-8004 provides on-chain identity for agents, while Google AP2 and OpenAI ACP (in collaboration with Stripe) are promoting agent payment protocols.
In 2026, DeFAI (AI + DeFi) may take three forms:
Vertical integration: A dedicated platform that encompasses everything (research + trading + yield + management), similar to a Bloomberg terminal, creating a data flywheel to lock in users.
Embedded AI: Large interfaces (Phantom, Axiom, exchanges) connecting to the best systems via APIs, or acquiring exclusives.
Modular coordination: Aggregating platforms coordinating thousands of specialized agents, allowing users to route to the best specialists using a "main agent," similar to an agent app store.
Bittensor: The king of the Darwin platform, using competitive incentives to attract top talent globally. The ecosystem consists of a series of independent subnets, each focusing on a specific AI task.
The smart contract security dilemma: AI is a double-edged sword.
AI helps write code, making DeFi applications easier to deploy, but it also provides hackers with powerful tools to find vulnerabilities.
Smart protocols are now adding AI defenses to protect against the large-scale weaponization of AI hackers. Security is shifting from "pre-launch audits" to "continuous proactive defense." Investment in AI defenses will surge—institutions require high-trust environments, and static audits are insufficient against dynamic AI adversaries.
- Prediction markets lack AI and will integrate in the future.
AI does not replace human judgment but serves as a "new layer of participation"—continuously aggregating information, stabilizing liquidity, and better calibrating to reduce structural biases without altering the essence of the market. Prediction markets need mature predictive infrastructure, and AI agents are a necessary layer. Current protocols are already integrating AI predictions, agent participation, and decision support.
- Vertical integration in DePIN (turning resources into complete products) is the most profitable, solving demand issues.
Most DePIN produces "commodity resources" (computing power, bandwidth, storage), which are hard to sell for big money—interchangeable, low-priced, and reliant on volume.
Winning strategy: Vertical integration—packaging resources into complete consumer/business products and selling directly to users (D2C). For example, Helium Mobile has an annual revenue of $21 million (the first in DePIN).
- Opportunities in DePIN for DePAI data collection in 2026:
AI requires real-world data (robots, autonomous driving, physical interactions), currently lacking by 2-4 orders of magnitude (only tens of thousands of hours, needing millions/tens of millions). DePAI uses DePIN to incentivize global robots/sensors to collect data faster than centralized methods. Companies like Hivemapper and DIMO are already making profits.
- New players focused on physical AI data will launch in 2026:
BitRobot: Robot data + computing power + datasets + human collaboration.
PrismaX: Robot data + remote control operations (raising $11 million).
Poseidon: High-quality long-tail data with licensing.
They directly address the pain points of large AI companies (exclusive data) and have no competitors. Issuing tokens + proving revenue could lead to explosive demand for tokens. In the long run: not just selling data, but training exclusive physical AI models/operating systems (exclusive data, higher profits).
InfraFi has the opportunity to invest on-chain in new infrastructure that traditional credit finds hard to touch (like computing power, distributed energy). USD.Ai: lending money to AI startups to buy GPUs.
The SEC believes DePIN tokens are not securities, providing clear regulation, which will lead to an explosion in DePIN entrepreneurship.
The era of consumer-grade crypto has arrived. Consumer-grade crypto includes memecoins, NFTs, social media, wallets, games, etc. The most powerful applications embed "markets" into products (memecoin/NFT culture, prediction market information, social content, collectible trading).
Prediction markets: Following the U.S. elections, trading volume in prediction markets surged from a post-election low of $1.7 billion to $9.2 billion in November. Sports and cultural trading volumes are rising the fastest.
Financialized social media has potential: Social media is the largest cake in consumer technology (the creator economy is projected to reach $480 billion by 2027). Crypto transforms content, creators, and interactions into a tradable market. In 2026, Zora is expected to perform well, driven by Coinbase.
In 2026, exotic RWAs may become a new hotspot in consumer crypto. Trading cards, sports cards, TCG cards, whiskey, clothing, CS skins, figurines, etc., will become popular on-chain.
Messari's self-developed L2 evaluation framework, Disruption Factor, concludes:
Arbitrum One ranks first (69.5): The DeFi economy is sustainable, with net capital inflows and strong ecosystem revenue, not relying on a single blockbuster app. Companies like Robinhood, Franklin Templeton, and WisdomTree have joined.
Base ranks second (67.1): Coinbase's traffic leads in users/transactions/revenue/narrative, attracting DeFi and consumer apps.
In 2026, stablecoins will enter daily life: Major platforms (Remitly, Western Union, etc.) will launch stablecoins, with supply doubling to over $600 billion, and multiple platform-specific coins (USDH, CASH, PYUSD) competing for market share, making stablecoins part of millions of daily lives.
Morpho is capturing Aave's lending market share: Morpho's modularity and risk isolation have already led to partnerships with Coinbase and Revolut, making it more suitable for institutions and new banks in 2026, capturing Aave's market share.
After memecoins, fundamentally strong altcoins have a chance for reversal.
Using prediction markets to price TGE: In 2026, prediction markets will become a direct market for institutions/users to price risks, hedge, and access real-time information.
2026 will be the year of perpetual contracts (stocks): Traditional and crypto markets will deeply intersect, with perp DEXs benefiting the most. Hyperliquid has already surpassed $28 trillion in volume, and HIP-3 allows for easy listing of new assets. Stock perps are simple, available across time zones, highly leveraged, and free from regulatory friction, attracting new users and outperforming 0DTE options. 2026 may see the emergence of a new killer application in crypto, drawing attention from traditional finance.
The biggest winner in 2026 will be wallets: All roads lead to wallets, and crypto can capture this wave (products not available in traditional markets): perpetual + prediction markets, all aggregated in wallet apps, which are closest to users. In 2026, wallets will add more (traditional financial tools), becoming the main interface for most people's financial activities.
Smart money will seek more "locking + hedging" strategies in 2026, scaling up to capture DeFi cash flows.
"Smart players": Locking veAERO in Aerodrome (earning 31% weekly yield) while simultaneously opening equivalent perpetual short positions in Hyperliquid (earning 11% funding fees). Total yield of 31% + 11% = over 40%. This is not about betting on direction but rather a synthetic yield engineering: hedging against price fluctuations and only earning real cash flows from the protocol (fees + bribes).
- The following four major tracks will accelerate in 2026:
On-chain infrastructure embedding more real finance (payments, lending, settlement).
Tokenization of traditional assets, blurring asset class boundaries.
More crypto companies going public.
Development of financial "super apps": wallets + on-chain tracks, integrating stocks, payments, and credit.
Crypto sentiment is expected to improve in 2026.
Bitcoin will continue to be the "digital gold," with its price fluctuations positively correlated with the total supply of stablecoins (the more stablecoins, the more expensive Bitcoin becomes).
Altcoins (especially L1 tokens) will no longer be "high-multiplier versions of Bitcoin," but will resemble high-growth tech stocks, relying on adoption, fees, and applications, with many falling to reasonable valuations.
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