Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, a16z crypto, has set out its “Big Ideas” forecast for 2026. The firm highlighted 17 key theses that will shape the near future of cryptocurrencies and adjacent technologies.
Stablecoins and tokenisation
The firm argues the industry should prioritise “smart” on- and off-ramps for digital assets. The goal is to link stablecoins with familiar payment systems. A new wave of startups is building integrations via QR codes, global wallets and card platforms to simplify everyday spending in stablecoins.
In 2025 to date, stablecoin transaction volume hit a record $46 trillion. That is more than 20 times PayPal’s and nearly three times Visa’s—one of the world’s largest payment networks, the authors noted.
“As on/off-ramp systems evolve, with digital dollars directly connected to local payment networks and merchant tools, new behaviours will emerge. […] Stablecoins will be fundamentally transformed from a niche financial instrument into the internet’s base settlement layer,” the report says.
Tokenisation will become more “native”. In a16z’s view, rather than merely porting traditional assets to blockchains, their “synthetic” versions in the form of perpetual futures—offering deeper liquidity—will take hold.
Moreover, stablecoins will offer banks more innovative options. Legacy financial systems will be able to adopt new technologies without a wholesale rebuild of their technical architecture by integrating cryptoassets.
AI agents and payments
In parallel, the internet itself will become a “bank”. With the rise of AI agents, a16z believes that “value will begin to move as quickly as information”. Blockchains and smart contracts will turn cash flow into an online habit, making the web part of financial infrastructure.
“Smart contracts already enable payments worldwide in seconds. But in 2026 the popularisation of such basic technologies as x402 will make settlement programmable and instantaneous: agents will quickly and permissionlessly pay for data, GPU time or API calls — without invoicing, reconciliation or batch processing,” the experts explained.
As blockchains are adopted, wealth management will become accessible to all. Tokenisation and DeFi tools will automate complex investment strategies and portfolio management, lowering barriers for ordinary users.
In an era of proliferating AI agents, a key component will be a KYA — Know Your Agent system:
“Just as people need credit scores to obtain loans, agents will require cryptographically signed credentials to transact, linking them to principals and reflecting constraints and responsibility.”
In addition, AI models are being applied to scientific discovery and hard problems. This requires new infrastructure where autonomous agents interact with crypto technologies.
Yet AI’s rise imposes an “invisible tax on the open internet”, fundamentally undermining its economic foundations. Bots that scrape websites break the ad-driven model of content monetisation. New mechanisms will be needed to prevent the “erosion” of the online space.
Privacy and security
According to a16z’s forecast, privacy will become a vital defensive moat in crypto. By 2026, technologies will emerge that let users selectively disclose data to access services while preserving confidentiality—for example, proving age without revealing a date of birth.
The same applies to the near future of messaging. Messaging should shift towards decentralisation.
“Communication does not require a single intermediary company. Messaging needs open, trustless protocols. The path to this lies through network decentralisation: no private servers, no separate app, all source code open. This is best-in-class encryption — including against quantum threats,” the company said.
The market also shows demand for a new “Secret as a Service” offering that provides programmable, built-in data-access rules, client-side encryption and decentralised key management.
Blockchain security will turn proactive. a16z argues developers should shift from analysing error patterns to examining potentially vulnerable protocol properties at the design stage.
“Instead of audits and exploit discovery, we will enforce key security properties in the code itself, automatically reverting any transactions that violate them. […] Thus the once-popular idea ‘code is law’ becomes ‘specification is law’,” the authors explained.
As throughput rises, ZK systems will become consumer-grade. Zero-knowledge proofs will increasingly feature in everyday apps to protect user privacy without deep technical know-how.
Other areas
a16z expects 2026 to be a banner year for prediction markets. Such platforms will become key tools for decision-making in business and politics, as well as for hedging risk.
The firm also predicts a flowering of a media market based on staking. A novelty will be the emergence of cryptographic tools that let people and media publicly attest to their claims.
“As AI makes the creation of unlimited content cheap and easy […], simply taking people (or bots) at their word is no longer enough. Tokenised assets, staking, prediction markets and on-chain transaction history offer a sturdier basis for trust,” the company noted.
a16z believes that trading is a waypoint for crypto businesses, not the terminus. There is nothing wrong with trading, as it is an important market function, but it need not be the end goal. Builders who focus on the product side of their solutions may ultimately fare better.
One of the biggest obstacles to building advanced blockchain networks in the United States over the past decade has been legal uncertainty. However, the government is closer than ever to introducing crypto-industry regulation, the authors stressed. If enacted, such laws would promote transparency, set clear standards and replace the “enforcement roulette” with clearer, more structured provisions.
Earlier, Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan forecast a 10- to 20-fold expansion of the digital-asset market over the next decade. He cited comments by the head of the SEC, Paul Atkins, on the integration of finance and blockchain.