Source: Stacy Muur
Translated by: Ken, ChainCatcher
In mid-December, a16z released its annual "2026 Outlook." Below is a list of key points compiled based on the main arguments in their vision.
1. Reshaping Payments, Stablecoins, and the Financial Track
Thesis: Stablecoins will become the settlement layer of the internet, not just the settlement layer of cryptocurrencies.
The story of stablecoins has moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Today, their annual transaction volume has reached trillions of dollars, and the question is no longer whether stablecoins work, but whether they can seamlessly integrate with the real-world financial system.
a16z's argument is crucial here: stablecoins are not just money, but an upgrade to the ledger. If stablecoins can coexist with existing systems, offering real-time settlement, programmability, and global reach, banks and fintech companies would not need to rewrite the traditional software that has been in use for decades. This shifts the focus of value capture from issuing stablecoins to distribution, compliance, and integration.
Who will win in 2026?
- Embedded payment.
- Card issuance (encrypted new banking) and wallets.
- Bank-grade compliance + API.
- Global, programmable settlement.
Watchlist:
- Circle (USDC): Regulatory legitimacy + distribution + liquidity advantages. Focus areas: Payment API, bank integration, inter-broker usage.
- m0: Zero-fee USDC issuance based on modular infrastructure. Worth noting: L2-native minting, stateless proxy, browser-level stablecoin user experience.
- Ether_fi: The Hottest New Banking Competitor by 2026; Offering Earnings Through Tokenized Treasury, Cashback, and Seamless Payments; Bridging the Growth of Cryptocurrency and Fiat Currency.
- Plasma: Positioning itself as the first neobank entirely built around stablecoins, targeting global users (especially in emerging markets) to meet their daily financial reliance on USD-backed stablecoins.
- Stablecoin (Bridge) | Stripe Integration: In and out infrastructure that abstracts the crypto layer. Focus: Integration with regional payment rails.
- x402 Ecosystem: Focus: Advance programmable payments for "services for agents" and "executed by agents" through native HTTP-level settlement.
2. RWA: Native issuance, rather than mere tokenization
Argument: Tokenization alone is not enough. To truly improve efficiency, the source of funding must be moved onto the blockchain.
The first wave of real-world asset applications primarily focused on tokenizing existing off-chain instruments—such as loans, government bonds, and credit products—and distributing them to cryptocurrency users. While this improved accessibility, it largely retained the inefficiencies of the original systems: opaque underwriting processes, high service costs, slow settlement speeds, and fragmented liquidity. In many cases, tokenization was merely a new packaging of old processes.
a16z's core insight is that the true advantage of cryptocurrencies does not lie in replicating traditional financial structures, but in reimagining the credit system from the ground up. When loans are initiated on-chain, underwriting logic becomes programmable, service costs drop significantly, and risk can be priced and monitored in real time. It is precisely at this point that cryptocurrencies cease to be merely a distribution channel and begin to become financial infrastructure.
Who will win in 2026?
- On-chain underwriting
- Transparent risk pricing
- Compliance-compliant credit mechanism
- Significant liquidity (often achieved through perpetual contracts, or Perps)
Watchlist:
- Centrifuge: On-chain credit track for real-world assets; Focus: Institutional trading flows and default performance.
- Blackrock (BUIDL): A tokenized money market fund on Ethereum; focus: the inflow of funds into tokenized U.S. Treasury securities and the adoption speed by traditional finance (TradFi).
- Maple: Institutional lending with underwriter governance; Focus: Credit line expansion and net yield vs. default risk.
- Plume: Composable Credit Infrastructure for Programmable Debt; Focus: Custom Underwriting Logic and DAO Use Cases.
- Pendle: Yield-stripping of tokenized yields; Focus: Adoption of PT/YT in RWA for government bonds and private credit.
- Ondo: Tokenized Treasury and Credit Funds; Focus: Compliant USDC-to-RWA Pipeline and L2 Expansion.
- Backed: Regulated ETF and bond token wrappers; Focus: Compliance pathways native to DeFi.
3. The Internet Becomes a Bank (Smart Agents and Payments)
Argument: As AI agents begin to conduct autonomous transactions, payment systems can no longer be external systems tacked onto applications. They must be native to the internet: instant, programmable, and fully automated.
The key shift lies in moving from user-driven execution to intent-driven execution. Agents no longer click buttons or approve invoices; instead, they identify conditions, fulfill obligations, and autonomously trigger actions. In this model, traditional payment processes (invoicing, batching, reconciliation, settlement windows) are no longer operational details but structural bottlenecks.
Blockchain has introduced a different paradigm. Smart contracts are already capable of achieving global final settlement within seconds. Emerging underlying technologies are further advancing this process, making value transfer more responsive and composable: agents can immediately pay other agents for data, computation, or services once tasks are completed, with rules directly embedded in the code, eliminating the need for intermediaries to enforce them. Money is no longer a separate operational layer, but is beginning to function like network traffic, which the internet can natively handle.
Who will win in 2026?
- Agent Native Identity.
- Programmatic Payment Track.
- User Experience Without Human Intervention
Watchlist:
- Catena: Identity and compliance infrastructure for AI agents; establishing the "Know Your Agent" (KYA) standard. Focus areas: Agent onboarding, enterprise-level integration.
- Nevermined: Infrastructure for data markets with autonomous agents; enabling payments between permissioned agents for access, computation, and services. Focus areas: executable data licenses, agent monetization streams.
- KiteAI: An AI-native Agent with embedded payment capabilities and the ability to complete real-world tasks. Focus areas: intent-based automation, real economic throughput.
- ASI: Open ASI + Blockchain Convergence Layer; Cross-Agent Collaboration and Computational Power Monetization. Focus Areas: Agent Settlement Standards, Autonomous Service Economy.
- EigenCloud (via EigenAI): A deterministic AI agent for decentralized policy execution and autonomous protocol operations. Focus areas: intent-driven finance, composable economic agency.
- Fetch: A multi-Agent collaboration protocol for enabling decentralized computing and services. Focus areas: on-chain task execution, measurable Agent GDP.
- x402 Implementation: Agent settlement, protocol-level payments, and agent-to-agent transactions.
4. Privacy is the primary moat.
Argument: Privacy leads to user lock-in. Public blockchains commoditize users.
The core insight of a16z's privacy thesis is simple: blockchain space has become interchangeable, but privacy has not. Performance, fees, and throughput are no longer sustainable differentiators. If everything is public, users can freely move, liquidity can instantly bridge, and applications can compete in a zero-margin environment. Privacy breaks this symmetry.
Once users, institutions, or applications invest sensitive information such as state balances, policies, counterparties, identities, and metadata into a privacy-preserving environment, switching costs naturally arise. This creates a privacy network effect: the more activities that occur within a private domain, the higher the value of remaining within it becomes, while the risk of leaving increases due to the potential for information leakage across boundaries.
Who will win in 2026?
- Private Execution Environment
- Zero-Knowledge-Based Data Access Control
- Enable privacy protection by default, rather than as an add-on feature.
Watchlist:
- Aztec: Private Smart Contracts + ZK-Native Rollup. Focus: Developer Attraction, Private DeFi Primitives.
- Nillion: A decentralized MPC for private computation; institutional data custody use cases are breakout signals.
- Arcium: Confidential Computing Layer in the Solana Stack; Focus: Performance Scaling and Native Solana Integration.
- Aleo: A ZK cloud computing platform with native tokens; enterprise zkCloud utilization is a key performance indicator.
- Walrus and Seal: Key components of the Sui stack that enable fully on-chain data and privacy.
- Payy_link: A privacy-focused stablecoin wallet that combines cryptographic privacy with practicality, supporting sending and receiving stablecoins with no gas fees, full privacy, and optional compliance—just like with USDC.
- Zcash: Shielded transactions via ZK-SNARKs; the launch of Halo 2 and the expansion of programmable privacy are key.
- Monero: A default-privacy L1 with ring signatures; its robustness under surveillance pressure remains its core moat.
5. Security: From "Code is Law" to "Standards are Law"
Argument: Audits are insufficient to solve the problem. Enforcement at runtime will become the standard practice.
The past two years have made one thing clear: audit failures are not due to a lack of auditor capability, but rather because audits themselves are static, partial, and fundamentally unable to fully capture the dynamics of a complex system. Today, protocols operate in adversarial environments influenced by factors such as maximum extractable value (MEV), composability, oracle latency, and incentive-driven edge cases that often only emerge after deployment—and frequently under extreme market conditions.
The conclusion drawn by a16z (and currently widely accepted in the industry) is that security must be elevated to a higher level: from merely checking whether the code is correct, to enforcing system-level invariants that are absolutely inviolable. This marks a shift in security strategy from "code is law" to "specifications are law." Protocols formally define which rules must always hold (e.g., collateral limits, value conservation, solvency conditions, ordering constraints) and continuously enforce these properties—not just at deployment time.
Who will win in 2026?
- Runtime Protection Measures
- Formal specification
- Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Verification
- Continuous Monitoring
Watchlist:
- OpenZeppelin: A runtime rule execution and upgrade security platform with deep protocol integration.
- Trail of Bits: A high-level security research company transitioning to real-time invariant execution through tools.
- SpearbitDAO: A research-driven auditing collective that introduces a continuous auditing pipeline (as opposed to static snapshots).
- Cyfrin: A smart contract security company building educational pipelines and formal-methods-first tools; growing influence in the modular L2 ecosystem.
- Immunefi: A unified on-chain platform for vulnerability bounties, audits, and AI-driven threat detection to protect crypto projects from exploits.
- A startup company specializing in runtime monitoring.
6. Scaled Prediction Markets
Argument: The market will evolve from niche gambling venues into the real-time information infrastructure of the Internet.
a16z points out that the core transformation is not merely "more markets" or higher trading volumes, but rather a reconfiguration of market structure. As the cost of block space decreases, oracle performance improves, and user experience frictions are reduced, markets are no longer sporadic events tied to elections or sports events, but instead begin to function as a continuous layer for signal extraction. Everything can be added to the trading list: macroeconomic data releases, protocol upgrades, regulatory votes, corporate actions, and even probabilistic outcomes of long-tail events.
Liquidity is dispersed across thousands of micro-markets, but price discovery is improved because information is no longer constrained by polls, surveys, or centralized analysts.
Who will win in 2026?
- A prediction market that can list all possible outcomes.
- AI Agent Continuous Trading.
- Decentralized and probabilistic solutions.
Watchlist:
- Polymarket: The leading decentralized prediction platform on Polygon; with a monthly trading volume exceeding $1 billion, it holds a dominant position in the cryptocurrency industry.
- Kalshi: A U.S. exchange regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC); monthly trading volume exceeds $1.3 billion, and it has the top app downloads in the legal market.
- FractionAI: Regarded as the first AI agent prediction market, where agents can compete with real-time portfolios in a transparent on-chain environment.
- Opinion: High-growth event exchange, with monthly notional trading volume exceeding $700 million, and has made breakthrough progress in the cryptocurrency-native gambling sector.
- Myriad Markets: Decentralized event market infrastructure; trading volume exceeds $10 million, with active on-chain betting covering various niche markets.
7. zkVMs and Verifiable Computing
Argument: Prove that moving away from blockchain and into the cloud is the better choice.
The key inflection point highlighted by a16z is not just a slight increase in the speed of zero-knowledge proofs, but rather that zkVMs are crossing a threshold. This indicates that general-purpose computation is no longer a luxury unique to blockchains, but a viable system primitive, thanks to a significant reduction in proof overhead (from about 1,000,000 times to about 10,000 times), GPU-native provers, and memory footprints suitable for real-world production environments.
They jointly initiate a mechanism under which ordinary CPU workloads (cloud jobs, backend services, financial models, machine learning inference, legacy enterprise code) can be executed once and then verified anywhere, transforming trust assumptions about cloud providers, data pipelines, and off-chain execution into cryptographic guarantees rather than contractual commitments, and creating a world where correctness—not reputation—is the default security model for distributed systems.
Watchlist:
- RiscZero: A zkVM with general-purpose Rust computing capabilities; a reliable leader in the field of cloud-compatible proofs.
- Concise: SP1 zkVM (based on RISC-V/LLVM) supports any Rust/LLVM code; focuses on fast verification, light clients, and off-chain data feeding, featuring GPU-native proofs (e.g., real-time proofs on 16 GPUs), precompiles for efficiency, and recursion for on-chain and off-chain use.
- Brevis_zk: A zk co-processor for querying on-chain/off-chain data; specifically designed to generate modular proofs within applications.
- Axiom_xyz: A ZK co-processor for verifiable computation on-chain and off-chain data; supports arbitrary expressive computation off-chain (e.g., historical queries) and verifies ZK proofs on-chain.
- ZKML Stack Implementation: A framework for verifiable ML inference using ZK proofs/SNARKs (e.g., ZKML, DSperse, JSTprove); optimized circuits for production ML workloads (e.g., GPT-2, neural networks) to reduce overhead (proof/verification speed improved 5–22 times).
8. Wealth Management Goes On-Chain
Thesis: Proactive and personalized wealth management will become the norm.
With the native tokenization of assets—including income-generating cash, public equities, private credit, and illiquid alternative assets—rebalancing is no longer a discrete event, but a continuous process. This process is executed by smart contracts, responding in real time to changes in interest rates, volatility, and risk premiums, rather than quarterly meetings or advisor workflows.
An AI-assisted asset allocation engine is increasingly playing the role of a co-pilot, translating user constraints into executable strategies. Meanwhile, decentralized finance (DeFi) foundational technologies such as automated treasuries, tiered yield products, and permissioned risk-weighted asset pools provide the necessary depth of mechanisms to implement these strategies, without sacrificing compliance or capital efficiency. The result is not "robo-advising," but programmable wealth—portfolios that can self-adjust according to risk profiles, shifting from tokenized government bond rotations to credit, from beta to carry, from liquidity to illiquidity, while settlement, custody, and reporting are all abstracted away.
What is a true winner?
- Automatic Rebalancing
- Cash Earnings
- Tokenized Private Markets
Watchlist:
- Veda: A modular vault infrastructure that supports real-time, strategy-based rebalancing across yield primitives; aligns very well with this argument.
- Upshift: A licensed vault platform with risk monitoring strategies and KYC access; partially aligned with compliance RWA access direction.
- Midas: Tokenized U.S. Treasury and BTC yield strategies with on-chain reserve proofs; ideal for compliant, programmable cash flows.
- Base: Coinbase's L2 Base App integrates wallet, transactions, social feeds, mini-programs, and on-chain earnings (such as USDC APY); enabling seamless and abstracted wealth management through one-click access to DeFi and RWA.
- Morpho: A non-custodial lending vault that automatically rebalances between P2P and pool markets; compatible with programmable credit allocation and real-time yield optimization.
- Infinit: An AI-driven super app featuring agent strategies optimized for one-click automated yield, delta-neutral positions, cross-chain bridging/exchanging, and RWA compatibility; self-adjusting wealth through multi-agent collaboration, aligning with programmable portfolio directions.