2026 predictions

It’s that time again—as 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to drop 2026 predictions.

I think 2026 is going to surprise, both to the upside and to the downside. Organized by category:

Macro / Chains

• $BTC is > $150K by year-end, but BTC dominance decreases in 2026.
• Despite the excitement around the recent crop of fintech chains, their metrics will underwhelm. Daily active addresses, stablecoin flows, and RWAs—Tempo, Arc, and Robinhood Chain will underdeliver, while Ethereum and Solana will overdeliver. Best developers will continue to build on neutral infra chains.
• A big tech company (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.) launches or acquires a crypto wallet in 2026.
• Many more Fortune 100s launch blockchains, although increasingly concentrated among banking and fintech players. Expect Avalanche to be a standout here, alongside OP stack, Orbit, and ZK Stack.
• Monad gets written off as dead by CT, but metrics take off in the latter part of the year after analysts have already forgotten about it.
• At least 3 other chains connect to DoubleZero to improve their latency & throughput metrics. DoubleZero hits 80%+ stake on Solana.

DeFi

• Perp DEX market share consolidates to something like 3 big venues a la HBO (market share something like 40 / 30 / 20), followed by a long tail of smaller players who compete over the leftovers (last 10%).
• Equity perps take off, becoming >20% of total DeFi perp volume by EOY.
• Significant growth in RFQ compared to CLOBs/AMMs, both on spot and perps.
• Some DeFi-related insider trading scandal hits mainstream media.

Stablecoins

• Stablecoin supply expands by ~60% in 2026, and USD remains 99%+.
• USDT dominance declines moderately to ~55%.
• Stablecoin-backed cards grow 1,000% in 2026—insanely fast growth. Becomes the dominant way that stablecoins land and expand in emerging markets. Rain is the biggest winner here.

Regulation

• Clarity Act gets signed into law in 2026 after some significant markups and horse trading. A bit of buyer’s remorse from crypto insiders.
• Dems win the house, and there is a parade of hearings about anything in crypto that touched $TRUMP / $WLFI. The underlying deals get subpoenaed. Trump insists he was never involved and didn’t know anything about it (and thus these deals are not protected by executive privilege). Anyone who signed a stupid deal gets publicly embarrassed.

Prediction Markets

• Prediction markets grow like crazy. Big legal fights over sportsbetting regulation and federal pre-emption, but nothing major gets resolved next year, so status quo continues through 2026.
• Meanwhile Polymarket continues to steamroll the culture. Prediction markets are perceived as cool and smart, and so are allowed to throw up odds everywhere.
• As Polymarket domestic expansion gets going, it starts winning more and more domestic market share from Robinhood and sportsbooks.
• The explosion of other platforms tacking on prediction markets mostly flop. 90% of prediction market offerings are totally ignored and then wind down by EOY. B2B partnership-driven distribution underperforms, direct-to-consumer outperforms. Almost all of the demand in 2026 is sourced directly from Polymarket, Robinhood, and Kalshi frontends (plus traditional sportsbooks).

AI

• Primary AI use cases in crypto remain within software engineering and security. Everything else remains a prototype.
• No good solutions to the spambot proliferation on social platforms emerges. A lot of stuff is proposed, but mostly we just eat the AI slop for 2026. Eventually it will get bad enough that people align on a solution, but not there yet.
• Wallet automation remains minimal.
• AI agents will still not be “paying each other” or spending any meaningful money in 2026.
• We see more small teams (<10 people) shipping scaled products because of coding agent force multipliers. In 2025, you needed to be Hyperliquid-level cracked devs to be this dev-efficient. In 2026, you just need to be AI-native and versed in the modern agentic stack. 2026 is dubbed the year of the agentic startup, and it hits crypto startups in a big way.
• AI becomes used for both attack & defense in cybersecurity. We see many more hacks in 2025, but smaller sizes. Defensive AI gets integrated into CI/CD pipelines and much better continuous monitoring. Security posture across the board improves, even for small teams, and the total amount hacked decreases compared to 2025.

So those are my predictions! If I had to summarize them to a two meta-theses, it’d be:

• slow and steady beats new and shiny
• the trend lines mostly continue

Let’s see how I do. Keep me honest, CT.

Disclosure: I’m an investor in many of the assets mentioned. NFA. DYOR.

Originally published on X, December 2025. Covered by CoinDesk.