Original text:Wintermute
Compiled by: Ken, Chaincatcher
For decades, the internet has enabled information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. However, the transfer of value has lagged relatively behind. Money, assets, and financial agreements still circulate through fragmented infrastructures built on outdated rails, national borders, and intermediaries, which extract rent at every stage.
This gap is closing at an unprecedented speed, creating opportunities for 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 talk; it is being built, deployed, and used on a large scale.
For years, the crypto space has mainly existed on-chain, disconnected from the real economy. This is changing.Cryptography is becoming the settlement and clearing layer that the internet economy has long desired.; a system that operates 24/7, is transparent, and permissionless.
The following topics represent our outlook on the direction of digital assets in 2026, as well as the directions of founders that Wintermute Ventures is actively supporting.
Everything can be traded.
Through novel financial primitives such as prediction markets, tokenization, and derivatives,More and more assets and real resultsBecome tradable. This transformation provides a liquidity layer to areas historically lacking in markets.
Tokenization and synthetic assets bring liquidity to known assets. Prediction markets go a step further, pricing things that were previously unpriced, transforming raw information into tradable instruments.
The market is expected to continue expanding as consumer-grade products and new financial instruments, supporting hedging, outcome-linked trading, and expressing views on fine-grained events.They also begin to replace parts of the traditional financial infrastructure.
Insurance is a compelling example: result-based markets can offer cheaper and more flexible hedging solutions than traditional insurance or reinsurance by directly pricing specific risks rather than bundling them into broad products. Instead of purchasing hurricane insurance covering an entire region, users can hedge against specific wind speeds at a specific location over a specific time period. Over a longer time horizon, these idiosyncratic risks can be selected and bundled through intelligent agent workflows to meet the unique needs of individuals.
As predictive market infrastructure scales, entirely new categories of data products will emerge around topics that have never been priced. We anticipate the emergence of markets specifically designed to trade and quantify objective metrics such as sentiment, perception, and collective opinion.These emerging markets are a natural extension of decentralized finance, unlocking new ways to price and trade information itself. When everything can be traded, the infrastructure that provides liquidity, enables price discovery, and ensures settlement becomes crucial.
This structural transition concentrates value in the infrastructure layer, directly reshaping the way capital is allocated. We are actively supporting teams building core markets and settlement infrastructure, data layers for verification and attestation, and new data products emerging to enable the financialization of previously non-tradable outcomes. We also focus on novel abstraction models that make these markets programmable and composable, enabling them to be embedded in real-world workflows and replacing parts of traditional financial and insurance infrastructure.
Stablecoins become a trust layer, banks handle transitional settlements
Digital assets lack robust facilities equivalent to settlement banks and clearinghouses that play a lubricating role in traditional finance. Although stablecoins have achieved open access and programmable value, the frictions caused by fragmentation limit their applications in the absence of settlement infrastructure.
As stablecoin issuers adopt different collateral models across various ecosystems, the ability to reliably compose these assetsThe demand for interoperability layers is growing.To expand this system, the crypto industry needs an infrastructure that can enable net settlement, exchange, and settlement across stablecoins and blockchains without introducing additional credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational overhead.
Missing abstraction layerIt is about transferring exchange and credit risk to the stablecoin issuer through balance sheet-based interoperability, rather than forcing end users to manage foreign exchange, routing, or counterparty exposure when transacting across stablecoins. We view this as"Agent Bank" on the blockchainBusinesses can achieve second-level settlement and open access to application builders. We expect to see more companies position themselves as a coordination layer between issuers and applications.
The market will favor sustainable and stable income over temporary incentives.
Token-driven growth without a sustainable business model is losing its effectiveness. Companies that rely on subsidizing users or liquidity providers while operating with fragile revenue models will find it increasingly difficult to compete.
Valuation will be more closely anchored to sustainable earnings and forward-looking forecasts, moving toward a cash flow-based framework. Annualizing short-term, more volatile monthly expenses is no longer a reliable method for measuring enterprise value, as earnings quality and the consistency of incentive mechanisms will become the core of valuation.If the token lacks a reliable value capture path, it will be difficult to maintain demand after the speculative phase.
Therefore,Companies that issue tokens in the early stage will decrease. Many companies will default to an "equity-first" structure,The blockchain is mainly used as a backend infrastructure, and this part is basically invisible to users and investors. Even with tokens, issuance will increasingly tend to happen after product-market fit is clear,That is, after revenue, unit economic benefits, and distribution channels have all been validated, and the stakeholders' incentive mechanisms have also been aligned.
We believe this transition is a healthy and necessary evolution that benefits the entire ecosystem. Founders can focus on building sustainable businesses rather than prioritizing token incentives and demand too early. Investors can evaluate companies using familiar financial frameworks. Users will receive products designed for long-term value.
Decentralized finance will integrate with financial technology.
The future of finance is not decentralized finance or traditional finance: it is the integration 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 underlying technologies such as wallets, bridges, and blockchains being fully abstracted. Capital efficiency, yield, settlement speed, and transparent execution will define the next generation of financial products.
With the integration of user experience and financial technology, the industry is still rapidly expanding at the foundational level. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives are driving this growth, enabling deeper liquidity and more complex financial products.
The importance of distribution capabilities will surpass interface ownership.Successful teams will build "backend-first" infrastructure to integrate with existing platforms and channels, rather than competing as standalone applications.Personalization and automation, along with increasingly advanced artificial intelligence, will improve pricing, routing, and revenue behind the scenes. Users will not consciously choose decentralized finance. They will choose better products.
Privacy becomes a basic requirement
Privacy is gradually becoming a foundation for institutional adoption. From a regulatory burden to a regulatory enabler. Use zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation for selective disclosure, allowing participants to prove compliance without exposing the original data.
In practice, this allows banks to assess creditworthiness without access to transaction records, employers to verify employment relationships without disclosing salaries, and financial institutions to prove reserves without revealing their holdings. This vision, when extended into real-life applications, means that companies no longer need to store massive amounts of data, thus freeing them from costly and cumbersome data privacy regulations. New technologies such as private shared state, zero-knowledge transmission security protocols, and multi-party computation unlock undercollateralized lending, layered financing, and new on-chain risk products. Transferred entire categories of structured financing activities that were previously unachievable onto the blockchain.
Regulation shifts from a compliance obstacle to a distribution advantage
Regulatory clarity has shifted from an adversarial obstacle to a standardized distribution channel. While the "permissionless" nature of early decentralized finance remains an important engine for innovation, the emergence of operational frameworks such as the U.S. "Genius Act," the European "Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation," and Hong Kong's stablecoin regime is providing traditional institutions with greater clarity. By 2026, the key will no longer be whether institutions can use blockchain, but how they utilize these guidelines to replace traditional underlying architectures with high-speed on-chain channels.
These standards will drive the emergence of more compliant on-chain products, regulated in and out channels, and institutional-grade infrastructure, without enforcing full centralization, thereby increasing institutional participation.
Regions that combine clear rules with fast approvals will become increasingly attractive to capital, talent, and experimentation. thus accelerating the normalization of on-chain value distribution in native cryptocurrencies and hybrid financial products, while slow-moving institutions will fall behind.
The internet economy is built upon cryptographic technology.
The maturation of infrastructure is the central theme running through this transition. Cryptography is becoming the settlement and clearing layer of the internet economy, enabling value to flow freely, just like information. The protocols, primitives, and applications being built today are unlocking new forms of real-world economic activity and expanding the possibilities on the internet.
At Wintermute Ventures, we support founders in building this infrastructure. We look for teams with deep technical expertise and strong product thinking. We look for teams that can deliver solutions that users truly want to use. We look for teams that can operate within regulatory frameworks while also advancing the core principles of decentralized systems. We look for teams that can build business models with long-term impact.
2026 will mark a turning point. For users, cryptographic infrastructure will increasingly recede into the background while becoming the cornerstone of the global financial system. The best infrastructure empowers people silently without seeking attention.