a16z Predicts 3 Ways Crypto Will Extend Beyond Itself by 2026

Author:a16z Crypto is a division of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a leading venture capital firm known

Translated by: Felix, PANews

1. The market is expected to be larger in scale, broader in coverage, and higher in terms of intelligence.

—Andy Hall, Cryptocurrency Research Advisor at a16z, Professor of Political Economy at Stanford University

Prediction markets have become mainstream, and by 2026, their integration with cryptocurrencies and AI will further enhance their scale, reach, and intelligence, while also presenting builders with new and significant challenges.

First, more contracts will be listed this year. This means not only will we be able to obtain real-time odds for major elections or geopolitical events, but also for various detailed outcomes and complex, interwoven events. As these new contracts reveal more information and integrate into the news (a process already underway), they will raise important societal questions, such as how to balance the value of this information, and how to better design these contracts to make them more transparent, auditable, and so on—something that cryptocurrency is precisely suited to achieve.

To handle the vast number of contracts, new methods for achieving consensus are needed to resolve issues within contracts. While centralized platforms are important for determining whether events actually occurred (and how to verify them), controversial cases such as Zelenskyy's "suit incident" and the Venezuela election market highlight their limitations. To address these extreme scenarios and help predictive markets expand into more practical applications, new decentralized governance and LLM oracles can assist in determining the truth in disputed outcomes.

AI opens up more possibilities for oracles beyond large language models (LLMs). For example, AI agents trading on these platforms can search for global signals, helping to gain short-term trading advantages and revealing new ways to understand the world and predict future events. In addition to functioning as sophisticated political analysts from which insights can be queried, these agents can also reveal new information about the underlying predictive factors of complex social events when their emerging strategies are studied.

Will prediction markets replace opinion polls? No; they will make opinion polls better (and information from opinion polls can be fed into prediction markets). As a political scientist, what excites me most is how prediction markets can work synergistically with a rich and dynamic opinion polling system—but this will also rely on new technologies like AI, which can improve the survey experience, and cryptography, which can offer new ways to verify that respondents in opinion polls/surveys are real people and not bots.

2. This year, cryptographic techniques will provide a new fundamental tool for industries beyond blockchain.

—Justin Thaler, a member of the a16z crypto research team and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University

SNARKs (a type of cryptographic proof that allows verification of a computation without re-executing it) have been used almost exclusively in the blockchain space for many years. The overhead is simply too high: proving a computation can take up to a million times more work than just running the computation directly. This might be worth it when the cost is shared among thousands of verifiers, but it's impractical in other scenarios.

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

10,000 times might be a magical number, one reason being that the parallel throughput of a high-end GPU is about 10,000 times higher than that of a laptop CPU. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be capable of generating proofs in real-time for computations performed by a CPU.

This brings to fruition a vision from early research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you are already running CPU workloads in the cloud—because your computation is not heavy enough to justify using a GPU, or you lack the expertise, or for historical reasons—you will now be able to obtain encrypted correctness proofs at reasonable cost. The prover is optimized for GPUs; your code does not need to be.

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 signs of cracking. The internet has given everyone the right to be heard, and an increasing number of operators, practitioners, and content creators are now communicating directly with the public. Their perspectives reflect their real-world interests, and surprisingly, audiences often do not dismiss them because of these interests, but rather respect them precisely because of these connections.

The new development 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 it cheap and easy to generate unlimited content (allowing anyone, regardless of whether their views or identities are real or fabricated, to claim anything), relying solely on public opinion (or bot-driven discourse) has become insufficient. Tokenized assets, programmable lockups, prediction markets, and on-chain histories provide a more solid foundation for trust: commentators can express opinions and prove they act consistently with them; podcasters can lock up tokens to demonstrate they are not speculatively hyping or "pump-and-dumping"; analysts can tie their predictions to publicly settled markets, thereby building auditable performance records.

This is the prototype of "staked media" as understood by individuals: a type of media that not only embraces the concept of shared interests but also provides verifiable proof. In this model, credibility does not stem from "reputation" or unsubstantiated claims, but rather from the ability to make transparent and verifiable commitments through staking. Staked media will not replace other forms of media, but rather serve as a complement to existing media. It provides a new kind of signal: not merely "trust me, I am neutral," but rather "this is the risk I am willing to take, and you can verify whether what I say is true."