The end of 2025 is approaching.

Most people can clearly feel that since the second half of this year, the narrative in the crypto industry has gradually dried up, and the trading groups have become much quieter. So, what changes will occur in the market in the upcoming 2026, and which narratives will gain favor in the market?

Rhythm BlockBeats analyzed over 30 predictions for 2026, sourced from top research institutions like Galaxy, Delphi Digital, a16z, Bitwise, Hashdex, and Coinbase, as well as several industry KOLs who have been conducting research, developing products, and investing on the front lines for a long time. From this, they summarized five consistently optimistic narratives for 2026, and workers must pay attention to the sixth point.

Stablecoins, "Joining" Traditional Finance

The first and most widely agreed-upon direction is stablecoins.

In 2026, stablecoins will complete a thorough transformation from "cryptocurrency tools" to "mainstream financial infrastructure," a point almost all major forecasters agree on.

a16z provides very direct data on this matter, which is almost "irrefutable." They point out that stablecoins have completed approximately $46 trillion in transaction volume over the past year. What does this number mean? It is about 20 times PayPal's annual transaction volume, nearly 3 times that of Visa, and it continues to approach the scale of the U.S. ACH (Automated Clearing House) network.

However, a16z also soberly points out that the issue is not about "whether there is demand for stablecoins," but rather how these digital dollars can truly enter the financial tracks that people use every day. This includes the most specific, and often the dirtiest and most labor-intensive aspects of deposits, withdrawals, payments, settlements, and consumption. They observe that a whole new generation of startups is specifically addressing this issue. Some use cryptographic proofs to allow users to convert local account balances into digital dollars without exposing their privacy; others directly integrate regional bank networks, QR codes, and real-time payment tracks, allowing stablecoins to be used like local transfers; and some are even starting from a more fundamental level, building a truly globally interoperable wallet layer and card issuance platform, enabling stablecoins to be spent directly at everyday merchants.

Therefore, their conclusion is: "As these deposit and withdrawal channels mature, digital dollars will be directly integrated into local payment systems and merchant tools, leading to the emergence of new behavioral patterns. Workers can receive wages in real-time across borders, merchants can accept global dollars without a bank account, and applications can settle value instantly with users anywhere in the world. Stablecoins will fundamentally transform from niche financial tools into the foundational settlement layer of the internet."

Interestingly, a16z researcher Sam Broner also explained from a very "engineering perspective" why this is almost inevitable. They point out that most banks' software systems today are too outdated for modern developers, with core ledgers still running on mainframes using COBOL, and interfaces being batch files rather than APIs. Of course, these systems are stable, trusted by regulators, and deeply embedded in the real world, but the problem is that they can hardly evolve quickly. Even adding a real-time payment feature could take months or even years, while simultaneously dealing with a mountain of technical debt and regulatory complexity. And this is where stablecoins come into play.

Crypto KOL and Alongside Finance researcher Route 2 FI lists "stablecoins (implementation and tracks in traditional finance)" as a primary direction in their narrative list, emphasizing how traditional financial institutions will implement stablecoin technology and build corresponding financial tracks.

Galaxy Research's judgment is even more direct and aggressive. They predict that by the end of 2026, 30% of international payments will be completed through stablecoins.

Bitwise's conclusion is almost identical, but approaches it from the market size perspective: they expect the market capitalization of stablecoins to double in 2026, with the key variable being the implementation of the GENIUS Act in early 2026, which will open up growth space for existing issuers and attract new players into the competition.

Overall, 2026 will be a key year for stablecoins to move from the margins to the mainstream core.

AI Agents, Starting to Become Top Traders

The second highly consistent but more futuristic consensus is that AI agents will become the main participants in on-chain economic activities, a possibility confirmed by the recent AI model trading competition that garnered widespread attention.

Many people underestimate the speed of this change. The logic is not complicated: when AI agents begin to autonomously execute tasks, make decisions, and engage in high-frequency interactions with each other, they naturally require a value transfer method that is as fast, cheap, and permissionless as information transmission.

Traditional payment systems are designed for humans, with accounts, identities, and settlement cycles, all of which are friction for agents.

Cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins combined with payment protocols like x402, are almost tailor-made for this scenario: instant settlement, support for micropayments, programmable, and permissionless. Therefore, 2026 is likely to be the first year where the payment infrastructure for the agent economy transitions from concept validation to real-scale usage.

a16z researcher Sean Neville, who is also a co-founder of Circle and architect of USDC, points out the real bottleneck currently facing the AI agent economy from a more fundamental perspective: the issue is shifting from "not smart enough" to "identity does not exist": in the financial system, the number of "non-human identities" has already surpassed human employees by a ratio of 96 to 1, but these identities are almost all "unbanked ghosts."

The financial industry lacks KYA (similar to KYC: Know Your Agent). Just as humans need credit scores to obtain loans, agents also need cryptographic signature credentials to prove who they represent, who they are bound by, and who is responsible in case of issues. Before KYA emerges, many merchants can only choose to directly block agents at the firewall level. The industry that took decades to build KYC may only have a few months left for KYA.

Other team members at a16z also summarize that AI agents need cryptographic tracks for micropayments, data access, and computational settlements. The x402 standard will become the payment pillar of the agent economy. The key asset is no longer the model—but the scarce high-quality real-world data (DePAI), with examples including projects like BitRobot, PrismaX, Shaga, and Chakra.

Galaxy Research's Lucas Tcheyan provides very specific quantitative predictions. He expects that by 2026, payments following the x402 standard will account for 30% of Base's daily transaction volume and 5% of Solana's non-voting transactions, marking greater usage of on-chain tracks in agent interactions.

He believes that as AI agents begin to autonomously trade across services, standardized payment primitives will directly enter the execution layer. Base will gain an advantage due to Coinbase's promotion of the x402 standard, while Solana will become another pole due to its large developer and user base. Meanwhile, some new chains focused on payments (like Tempo and Arc) will also grow rapidly in this process.

RWA, Will Become More Degen

Unlike the previous fervor of "everything can be on-chain," the current RWA narrative has clearly calmed down. Most research institutions no longer discuss "how large the potential market is," but instead repeatedly emphasize one word: executability. Because of this, the now-calmed RWA consensus for 2026 appears even more concentrated.

a16z analyst Guy Wuollet does not hold back in criticizing the current tokenization of RWA assets. He points out that while we have seen banks, fintech companies, and asset management firms show great interest in moving U.S. stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets on-chain, most of the so-called "tokenization" so far is essentially still reification. These assets are merely "wrapped in a layer of technological shell," but their design logic, trading methods, and risk structures remain firmly rooted in traditional finance's understanding of real-world assets, rather than leveraging the native characteristics of the crypto system itself.

Galaxy Research's predictions on this issue lean more towards "structural breakthroughs." They do not get bogged down in product forms but instead focus directly on the core aspects of the traditional financial system: collateral.

They predict that in the coming year, a major bank or brokerage will begin to accept tokenized stocks as formal collateral. If this happens, its symbolic significance far exceeds that of any single product launch. Because so far, tokenized stocks remain on the fringes, either as small-scale experiments within DeFi or as pilot projects by large banks on private blockchains, with almost no substantial connection to the mainstream financial system.

However, Galaxy points out that the situation is changing. Core infrastructure providers in traditional finance are accelerating their migration to blockchain-based systems; at the same time, regulators' attitudes towards this direction are clearly shifting to support. This year, they expect to see a heavyweight financial institution accept tokenized stocks of on-chain deposits and legally and risk-wise treat them as assets equivalent to traditional securities.

Hashdex is the most aggressive, predicting that tokenized real-world assets will grow tenfold. This prediction is based on increased regulatory clarity, traditional financial institutions being ready, and the maturity of technological infrastructure.

Prediction Markets, Not Just "Decentralized Gambling"

As most people expected, prediction markets have also become a widely favored track for 2026.

But what is surprising is that the reasons for the optimism about prediction markets are no longer simply "decentralized gambling," but are transforming into a tool for information aggregation and decision-making.

a16z's Andy Hall, a professor of political economy at Stanford University, believes that prediction markets have crossed the threshold of "whether they can become mainstream." In the coming year, as they deeply intersect with cryptocurrencies and AI, prediction markets will become larger, broader, and smarter.

At the same time, he emphasizes that this expansion does not come without cost. Prediction markets are being pushed to a whole new level of complexity: higher trading frequency, faster information feedback, and more automated participant structures. These changes amplify its value on one hand, while also presenting new challenges for builders, such as how to adjudicate results fairly without causing disputes.

Galaxy Research's Will Owens quantifies this change into very specific numbers. He predicts that Polymarket's weekly trading volume will continue to exceed $1.5 billion in 2026. This judgment is not made out of thin air. In fact, prediction markets have already become one of the fastest-growing tracks in the crypto space, with Polymarket's nominal weekly trading volume approaching $1 billion.

He believes that the forces driving this number upward are three simultaneous trends: a new layer of capital efficiency deepening market liquidity, AI-driven order flow significantly increasing trading frequency, and Polymarket's continuously improving distribution capabilities accelerating capital inflow.

Bitwise's Ryan Rasmussen offers a more aggressive judgment. He predicts that the open interest in Polymarket will exceed the historical high set during the 2024 U.S. elections. The drivers of this growth are very clear: the opening to U.S. users has brought in a large number of new users, approximately $2 billion in new capital injection provides ample ammunition, and the market types are no longer limited to politics, beginning to expand into economics, sports, pop culture, and other fields.

Outside of institutions, KOL judgments are equally intriguing. Tomasz Tunguz believes that by 2026, the adoption rate of prediction markets among the U.S. population will rise from the current 5% to 35%. In comparison, the adoption rate of gambling in the U.S. is about 56%. This means that prediction markets are evolving from a niche financial tool to a product that approaches mainstream entertainment and information consumption.

However, Galaxy also provides a prediction that carries a clear warning amidst this optimism. They believe that federal investigations surrounding prediction markets are likely to emerge.

As U.S. regulators gradually allow on-chain prediction markets, trading volume and open interest are rapidly climbing, while related gray events have already begun to surface. Several scandals have emerged involving insiders using non-public information to enter the market early or manipulating games related to major sports leagues. Since prediction markets allow traders to participate anonymously, rather than through the strict KYC of traditional gambling platforms, the temptation for insiders to abuse privileged information is significantly amplified.

Therefore, Galaxy believes that future triggers for investigations may no longer come from anomalous behavior within regulated gambling systems, but rather directly from suspicious price fluctuations in on-chain prediction markets.

This topic also leads to the fifth consensus: privacy.

Privacy Coins, Will They Become Dark Horses Again?

As more funds, data, and automated decisions are pushed onto the chain, exposure itself is becoming an unacceptable cost. This has already begun to manifest in 2025.

This year, the privacy concept track has also emerged as a dark horse, with growth rates even surpassing mainstream coins like Bitcoin, making predictions for the privacy track in 2026 one of the consensus points among most institutions, researchers, and KOLs.

Galaxy Research's Christopher Rosa provides a striking judgment: the total market capitalization of privacy tokens will exceed $100 billion by the end of 2026. He explains that privacy tokens gained significant attention in the last quarter of 2025, as investors began to store more funds on-chain, making on-chain privacy a primary consideration. Among the top three privacy coins, Zcash rose by about 800% in the same quarter, Railgun increased by about 204%, while Monero recorded a more moderate increase of 53%.

Christopher provides an interesting historical context: early Bitcoin developers, including Satoshi Nakamoto himself, explored privacy technologies and research. In early design discussions of Bitcoin, there were already ideas for making transactions more private or even completely shielded. However, at that time, truly usable and deployable zero-knowledge proof technology was far from mature.

But the situation today is completely different. As zero-knowledge technology gradually becomes engineering-ready and the value carried on-chain significantly increases, more and more users, especially institutional users, are beginning to seriously examine a previously accepted fact: are they really willing to make their entire crypto asset balances, transaction paths, and funding structures permanently public to anyone?

The privacy issue has thus shifted from an "idealistic demand" to an "institutional-level reality problem."

Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder of Mysten Labs, complements this logic from another angle. He does not start directly from asset prices or user behavior but breaks the issue down to a more fundamental dependency: data.

In his view, every model, every agent, and every automated system relies on the same thing: data. However, today, most data pipelines, whether for inputting model data or for the results output by models, are opaque, variable, and un-auditable. For some consumer applications, this may be acceptable, but in industries like finance and healthcare, it is almost an insurmountable barrier. As agent systems begin to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, this issue is further amplified.

In this context, Adeniyi proposes the concept of "secrets-as-a-service." He believes that what is needed in the future is not a patchwork of privacy features at the application layer, but a complete set of native, programmable data access infrastructure: including executable data access rules, client-side encryption mechanisms, and decentralized key management systems to enforce who can decrypt what data, under what conditions, and for how long. All these rules should be enforced on-chain, rather than relying on internal organizational processes or manual constraints. Combined with verifiable data systems, privacy itself can become a component of the public infrastructure of the internet, rather than an added feature of a specific application.

Additional Observations, A Must-Read for Crypto Workers

Beyond these main judgments, almost all institutions have also provided some interesting discussions that have not reached consensus, contributing additional observations.

One of the most interesting points is the shift in the trend of value capture at the application layer. An increasing number of predictions suggest that the "fat application theory" is replacing the "fat protocol." Value is no longer primarily concentrated in the underlying chain and general protocol layer, but is gradually shifting towards the application layer. This is not because the underlying layer is unimportant, but because what truly interacts directly with users, data, and cash flow is still the application itself.

This also leads to another discussion with significant divergence: Ethereum, which aspires to be the world computer and has long been the spokesperson for "fat protocols," will see how its value changes under the trend of "fat applications."

Some viewpoints suggest that it will continue to benefit as an important carrier layer for tokenization and financial infrastructure; others believe it may gradually evolve into a "boring but necessary" underlying network, with most value being absorbed by the application layer built on top of it.

For Bitcoin, most still believe it will perform excellently in 2026, with demand from ETFs and institutional investors continuing to strengthen, solidifying its position as a strategic macro asset and "digital gold," although the threat posed by quantum computing is real.

Additionally, some analysts have examined potential changes in project teams' organization and recruitment after 2026:

For example, a16z believes that companies will begin to pay more for AI agents than for human employees, a phenomenon that has already appeared at the consumer level. Waymo's ride costs are on average 31% higher than Uber's, yet demand continues to grow, with users willing to pay a premium for the safety and reliability of autonomous driving.

This logic also holds within companies. When companies consider the hidden costs of recruitment, onboarding, training, and management, agents actually provide a higher cost-performance ratio when executing routine business tasks. a16z further predicts that the continuous time AI agents can autonomously execute tasks will first exceed a full workday. According to METR data, the duration of AI tasks doubles approximately every seven months. Current cutting-edge models can already stably complete tasks that would take humans about an hour. Following this trend, by the end of 2026, it will become a reality for agents to autonomously execute workflows exceeding 8 hours, fundamentally changing how companies allocate personnel and plan projects.

Meanwhile, there are also some changes that are not widely discussed but have already begun to manifest in actual recruitment, such as the reversal of age premiums. More and more founding teams are willing to entrust the protocol's funds and treasury to a 42-year-old former risk control officer from a second-tier bank who has truly experienced a complete credit cycle, rather than a 23-year-old native player who has only worked in DeFi during a bull market. Real risk cycle experience is becoming more valuable than "native narratives."

Additionally, the compensation structure is subtly changing due to shifts in market demand, with salaries for compliance-related positions far exceeding those for engineers. Talent related to compliance, stablecoins, and anti-money laundering is now receiving total packages exceeding $400,000, while the salaries of some protocol layer engineers have begun to fall below this level.

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