Cryptocurrency is becoming the clearing and settlement layer of the internet economy, allowing value to flow as freely as information.

Author: Wintermute Ventures

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: For decades, the internet has allowed information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. However, value has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial agreements still flow through fragmented infrastructure built on traditional tracks, national borders, and intermediaries that extract rent at every node. Wintermute Ventures believes this gap is closing at an unprecedented speed, with cryptocurrency becoming the clearing and settlement layer that the internet economy has always needed.

The report focuses on five major themes: everything is tradable (prediction markets, tokenization), stablecoin interoperability, a return to fundamentals in token economics, the fusion of DeFi and TradFi, and privacy becoming a regulatory driver. The maturity of infrastructure is a common thread in this transformation.

The full text is as follows:

For decades, the internet has allowed information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. However, value has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial agreements still flow through fragmented infrastructure built on traditional tracks, national borders, and intermediaries that extract rent at every node.

This gap is closing at an unprecedented speed. This creates opportunities for infrastructure companies that can directly replace traditional clearing, settlement, and custody functions. Infrastructure that allows value to flow as freely as information is no longer theoretical. It is being built, deployed, and used at scale.

For years, cryptocurrency has existed on-chain but has been disconnected from the real economy. This is changing. Cryptocurrency is becoming the clearing and settlement layer that the internet economy has always needed; a continuously operating, transparent layer that does not require permission from centralized gatekeepers.

The following themes represent what we believe will be the development direction of digital assets by 2026, and are areas that Wintermute Ventures actively supports founders in.

1. Everything is Tradable

An increasing number of assets and real-world outcomes are becoming tradable through new financial primitives, including prediction markets, tokenization, and derivatives. This shift provides a liquidity layer for areas that historically had no markets.

Tokenization and synthetic assets bring liquidity to known assets. Prediction markets go further by pricing things that were previously unpriceable, turning raw information into tradable instruments.

Prediction markets continue to expand, both as consumer products and as new financial tools, enabling hedging, outcome-linked trading, and insights into granular events. They are also beginning to replace parts of traditional financial infrastructure.

Insurance is a compelling example: outcome-based markets can provide cheaper and more flexible hedging by directly pricing specific risks rather than bundling them into broad products. Users can hedge specific wind speeds at specific locations and times, rather than purchasing hurricane insurance that covers a region. Over longer time spans, these specific risks can be manually selected and bundled into an individual's unique needs through agent workflows.

As prediction market infrastructure scales, entirely new categories of data products are emerging around previously unpriced topics. We expect markets to emerge that aim to trade and quantify objective perceptions, sentiments, and collective opinions. These emerging markets are a natural extension of decentralized finance, unlocking new ways to price and exchange information itself. When everything becomes tradable, the infrastructure that provides liquidity, enables price discovery, and ensures settlement becomes crucial.

This structural shift will concentrate value at the infrastructure layer, directly affecting how we allocate capital. We actively support teams building core market and settlement infrastructure, data layers for validation and proof, and new data products that support the financialization of previously untradable outcomes. We also focus on novel abstract models that make these markets programmable and composable, allowing them to be embedded into real-world workflows and replace parts of traditional financial and insurance infrastructure.

2. Stablecoins as the Trust Layer, with Banks Handling Intermediate Settlements

Digital assets lack strong equivalents to settlement banks and clearinghouses, which are the lubricants for traditional finance. Stablecoins enable open access and programmable value, but without settlement infrastructure, fragmentation creates friction that limits adoption.

As stablecoin issuers proliferate across different ecosystems with varying collateral models, the demand for an interoperability layer that can reliably aggregate these assets is growing. To scale this system, cryptocurrency needs infrastructure that can achieve net settlement, conversion, and clearing across stablecoins and chains without introducing additional credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational overhead.

The missing abstraction is to transfer conversion and credit risk to stablecoin issuers through balance sheet-based interoperability, rather than forcing end users to manage foreign exchange, routing, or counterparty risk when trading across stablecoins. We see this as an on-chain equivalent to banks, with settlements occurring in seconds, open access for application builders, and expect to see more companies positioning themselves as a coordinating layer between issuers and applications.

3. Markets Will Reward Long-Term Revenue Over Short-Term Incentives

Token-driven growth without sustainable business models is losing effectiveness. Companies that rely on subsidizing users or liquidity providers while operating structurally fragile revenue models will find it harder to compete.

Valuations will be more closely anchored to sustainable earnings and forward-looking projections, converging towards cash flow-based frameworks. Annualizing short-term, volatile monthly fee spikes is no longer a credible way to price businesses, as revenue quality and incentive consistency become core to valuation. Tokens without credible value capture paths will struggle to maintain demand beyond speculative phases.

As a result, fewer companies will issue tokens at inception. Many will default to equity-first structures, primarily using blockchain as backend infrastructure that is fundamentally invisible to users and investors. When tokens are used, issuance will increasingly occur only after product-market fit is clear, revenue, unit economics, and distribution have been proven, and stakeholder incentives are aligned.

We believe this shift is a healthy and necessary evolution for the entire ecosystem. Founders can focus on building enduring businesses rather than prioritizing token incentives and demand too early. Investors can evaluate companies using familiar financial frameworks. Users receive products designed for long-term value.

4. The Fusion of DeFi and Fintech

The future of finance is not DeFi or TradFi: it is the fusion of both. A dual-track architecture allows fintech applications to dynamically route transactions based on cost, speed, and yield. Breakthrough consumer applications will resemble traditional fintech products, with wallets, bridges, and chains completely abstracted away. Capital efficiency, yield, settlement speed, and transparent execution will define the next generation of financial products.

While user experience merges with fintech, the industry continues to expand rapidly behind the scenes. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives drive this growth, enabling deeper liquidity and more complex financial products.

Distribution will be more important than owning interfaces. Winning teams will build backend-first infrastructure that integrates into existing platforms and channels, rather than competing as standalone applications. Personalization and automation (increasingly enhanced by AI) will improve pricing, routing, and yield in the background. Users will not consciously choose DeFi. They will choose better products.

5. Privacy Becomes a Regulatory Driver

Privacy is becoming the foundation for institutional adoption, shifting from regulatory liability to regulatory driver. Selective disclosure using zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation allows participants to prove compliance without exposing raw data.

In practice, this enables banks to assess creditworthiness without accessing transaction histories, allows employers to verify employment without disclosing salaries, and enables institutions to prove reserves without revealing positions. The practical realization of this vision expands into a world where businesses no longer need to store vast amounts of data, freeing themselves from costly and burdensome data privacy regulations. New primitives like private shared states, zkTLS, and MPC unlock under-collateralized loans, tranching, and new on-chain risk products, moving an entire category of structural finance on-chain that was previously unfeasible.

6. Regulations Shift from Compliance Barriers to Distribution Advantages

Regulatory clarity has shifted from adversarial barriers to standardized distribution channels. While the "permissionless" nature of early DeFi remains an important engine of innovation, the arrival of operational frameworks like the GENIUS Act in the U.S., MiCA in Europe, and the stablecoin regime in Hong Kong provides greater clarity for traditional institutions. By 2026, the narrative will no longer be about whether institutions can use blockchain, but how they can use these guidelines to replace traditional pipelines for high-speed on-chain tracks.

These standards will facilitate a larger wave of compliant on-chain products, regulated deposit and withdrawal channels, and institutional-grade infrastructure without mandating complete centralization, thereby increasing institutional participation.

Regions that combine clear rules with rapid approvals will increasingly attract capital, talent, and experimentation, accelerating the normalization of on-chain value distribution in native crypto and hybrid financial products, while slower regimes will fall behind.

The Internet Economy on Crypto

The maturity of infrastructure is a common thread in this transformation. Cryptocurrency is becoming the clearing and settlement layer of the internet economy, allowing value to flow as freely as information. The protocols, primitives, and applications being built today are unlocking new forms of real economic activity and expanding the range of what is possible on the internet.

At Wintermute Ventures, we support founders building this infrastructure. We look for teams that combine deep technical understanding with strong product thinking. Teams that deliver solutions that people genuinely want to use. Teams that can operate within regulatory frameworks while advancing the core principles of decentralized systems. Teams that build businesses designed for long-term impact.

2026 will mark a turning point. Crypto infrastructure will increasingly fade into the background for users while becoming the foundation of the global financial system. The best infrastructure quietly empowers people without drawing attention.

If you are building in any of these areas, please contact our team.

You can also fill out a form on our website:

https://www.wintermute.com/contact/ventures

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。