Author: a16z crypto

Translated by: Felix, PANews

1. Predictive markets will have a larger scale, broader coverage, and higher intelligence

——Andy Hall, a16z cryptocurrency research advisor, Professor of Political Economy at Stanford University

Predictive markets have become mainstream, and by 2026, as they integrate with cryptocurrencies and AI, their scale, coverage, and intelligence will only further enhance, presenting new and significant challenges for builders.

First, there will be more contracts launched this year. This means that not only can real-time odds for major elections or geopolitical events be obtained, but also real-time odds for various detailed outcomes and complex intertwined events. As these new contracts disclose more information and integrate into the news (which is already happening), they will raise important social issues, such as how to balance the value of this information and how to better design them to be more transparent and auditable—something that cryptocurrencies can achieve.

To handle the vast number of contracts, new methods of consensus will be needed to resolve issues within the contracts. While centralized platforms addressing whether events actually occurred (how to confirm) is important, controversial cases like Zelensky's "suit incident" and the Venezuelan election market highlight their limitations. To address these extreme situations and help predictive markets expand into more practical application scenarios, new decentralized governance and LLM oracles can help determine the truth of disputed outcomes.

AI opens up more possibilities beyond LLM for oracles. For example, AI agents trading on these platforms can search for global signals, helping to gain short-term trading advantages, thereby revealing new worldviews and ways to predict future events. Besides acting as complex political analysts that can query insights, when studying the emerging strategies of these agents, they can also reveal new information about the fundamental predictive factors of complex social events.

Will predictive markets replace polls? No; they will make polls better (and poll information can be conveyed to predictive markets). As a political scientist, what excites me most is how predictive markets can work in synergy with rich and vibrant polling systems—but this still relies on new technologies like AI, which can improve the polling experience; and cryptographic technology, which can provide new ways to prove that poll/survey respondents are real people and not bots.

2. This year, cryptographic technology will provide a new foundational tool for industries beyond blockchain

——Justin Thaler, member of the a16z crypto research team, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University

SNARKs (a type of cryptographic proof that verifies computations without re-executing them) have essentially only been used in the blockchain space for years. The overhead is simply too high: proving a computation can take up to a million times more work than directly running the computation. This may be worthwhile when thousands of validators share the costs, but in other cases, it is impractical.

However, this is about to change. This year, the overhead of zkVM provers will drop to about 10,000 times, with memory usage only in the hundreds of megabytes—fast enough to run on mobile phones and cheap enough to run anywhere.

10,000 times may be a magical number, one reason being that the parallel throughput of high-end GPUs is about 10,000 times higher than that of laptop CPUs. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs in real-time that a CPU executes.

This is expected to realize a vision from early research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you have been running CPU workloads in the cloud—because your computational load is insufficient to use a GPU, or you lack expertise, or for historical reasons—you will be able to obtain cryptographic correctness proofs at a reasonable cost. Provers have been optimized for GPUs; your code does not need to be optimized.

3. Witness the rise of "staking media"

——Robert Hackett, a16z cryptocurrency editorial team

The traditional media model (and its so-called objectivity) has long shown cracks. The internet has given everyone a voice, and more and more operators, practitioners, and builders are beginning to engage directly with the public. Their views reflect their interests in the real world, and surprisingly, audiences often do not choose to dismiss them because of their vested interests, but rather respect them because of those relationships.

The new change here is not the rise of social media, but the emergence of cryptographic tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments. As AI makes generating infinite content cheap and convenient (any content can be claimed regardless of whether the viewpoint or identity is real or fictional), merely relying on the masses (or bots) has become insufficient. Tokenized assets, programmable lock-ups, predictive markets, and on-chain historical records provide a more solid foundation for trust: commentators can express opinions and prove they are consistent in their words and actions. Podcasters can lock tokens to indicate that they are not engaging in speculative hype or "pump and dump." Analysts can link predictions to publicly settled markets, thereby establishing auditable performance records.

This is the embryonic form of what individuals understand as "staking media": a media that not only aligns with the idea of vested interests but also provides corresponding proof. In this model, credibility comes neither from "word of mouth" nor from baseless assertions; rather, it comes from having the ability to make transparent and verifiable commitments. "Staking media" will not replace other forms of media but will complement existing media. It provides a new signal: not just "trust me, I am neutral," but "this is the risk I am willing to take, and you can verify whether what I say is true."

Related reading: a16z's 8 Major Trends Predictions for the Crypto Industry in 2026: The Rise of Privacy Chains, Transformation of Trading Platforms, etc.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。