2026: The Year of 'Crypto as a Service' and Mass Adoption

Article by Paul Veradittakit

Translated by AididiaoJP, Foresight News

2026 will be a pivotal year. We will see "crypto as an industry" fully transform into "crypto as a service."

Over the past decade, the crypto world has been filled with hype. The approval of Bitcoin ETFs in 2024 earned it mainstream financial recognition. In 2025, efforts focused on building out the underlying infrastructure. By 2026, real value will belong to companies that use blockchain to solve long-standing problems in traditional industries—while making the blockchain completely invisible to users.

The crypto unicorns of the future won’t be built on hype. They will be companies that use blockchain technology to improve product efficiency by an order of magnitude, unlocking multi-billion-dollar markets while completely hiding the complexity of the underlying technology.

When the conflict in Iran erupted, U.S. stock markets were closed for the weekend and unable to respond to the sudden global risk. But the crypto market didn’t pause—Bitcoin surged briefly to $74,000. Commodities prices were first discovered on the decentralized prediction market Hyperliquid, ahead of traditional markets opening. This is not an isolated case—similar dynamics occurred last month when China announced new policies.

Traditional hedge funds are increasingly entering this space. The cryptocurrency market’s “24/7” operation is no longer just a slogan—it’s a structural advantage that traditional finance cannot match.

Nevertheless, the current valuation of the crypto market remains significantly below what its fundamentals suggest it should be. We are undoubtedly in another bear market (this is my fourth), but this one is different: regulation is becoming clearer, institutional capital has already entered, and infrastructure is increasingly mature.

This sentiment was especially strong at the recent Consensus conference in Hong Kong. The vibrancy of the Asian market stands in stark contrast to the West, where support from bipartisan governments, new institutional capital, and a focus on consumer-facing applications have all fueled strong bullish sentiment.

What to watch for in Asia in 2026:

• Use stablecoins for cross-border payments, especially in the B2B sector. For Asia’s fragmented economic systems, crypto payments are a natural choice.
• Tokenization of gold, stocks, and real estate. Banks and fintech companies in Asia are catching up to the United States.
• Perpetual contract trading on DeFi. Driven by retail investors, its growth rate may surpass that in the West.
• Prediction markets are expected to become an important sector, although their form may differ from that in the West.

The core theme of 2026 is shifting from "crypto as an industry" to "crypto as a service." The goal is no longer for users to see the blockchain, but to make them completely forget it exists.

Over the past decade, we were obsessed with building "crypto wonders"—gas fee wars, TPS races, modular stacks, and ZK proofs. In 2024, ETFs arrived as a vote of confidence from mainstream institutions. In 2025, we laid the foundational infrastructure. In 2026, it’s time to turn the page.

The next generation of unicorns won’t be “L3 networks built for AI-NFTs.” They’ll be companies that use blockchain to boost product efficiency tenfold while completely hiding the underlying technology, thereby unlocking trillion-dollar markets.

This perfectly explains our recent investment logic:

Novig: Saying Goodbye to the "Rake" Era ($75M Series B)

Traditional sports betting is a monopolistic, distorted market. Bookmakers take high commissions from every bet, resulting in dismal user profit rates of just 2%. We led Novig’s $75 million funding round because they treat sports betting as a high-frequency financial product. Through a peer-to-peer trading model, Novig users achieve an average profit rate of 23%. Most users don’t care whether the backend uses a decentralized order book—they simply know they’re getting the best odds in the U.S. This is a vivid example of “crypto as a service.”

Based: Consumer-grade super app ($11.5M Series A)

We recently led Based’s Series A funding round. Based is a composable Web3 consumer superapp built on the Hyperliquid ecosystem. “Consumer crypto” has often been synonymous with clunky experiences—but Based is changing that, making on-chain interactions as smooth and seamless as top-tier fintech apps. Complex operations like cross-chain bridging and gas fees are fully abstracted away, leaving users unaware of the underlying complexity. All they need to focus on is the social and financial value their assets deliver.

Doppler: The default asset issuance infrastructure ($9 million seed round)

If Base and Novig are sleek new cars, then Doppler is a high-performance fuel system. We led Doppler’s $9 million seed round with the goal of making it the default infrastructure for on-chain asset issuance. It enables developers to issue assets with institutional-grade security and compliance standards, without having to build all the underlying infrastructure from scratch. Doppler is like Stripe for on-chain assets—purely practical functionality, all wrapped behind a clean API.

This trend toward "invisibility" is also reflected throughout our entire portfolio:

• Real-world assets: Tokenized government bonds are no longer an experiment in the crypto world—they are becoming the foundational liquidity backbone of global trade.
• AI agents: Blockchain provides AI agents with a trusted "layer of truth" through predicted markets and verifiable data, enabling them to interact autonomously and reliably with digital assets.
• Agent payments will accelerate all of this. Payment standards like x402 enable AI agents to complete transactions directly using crypto assets, while gradually clearer regulations around stablecoins are making this payment pathway smoother.

If you're planning to start a business in 2026, my advice is simple: stop talking endlessly about technology and focus more on the real problems you can solve. If your pitch deck places the page on consensus mechanisms before the one on customer ROI, your thinking is still stuck in 2022.

We’re looking for teams building the next Novig, Based, or Doppler—those who truly understand what “mass adoption” means: when a technology becomes so seamless that people no longer notice it exists, only then has it truly reached every household.