The 3 Major Trends Reshaping Cryptocurrency Investment in 2026

Author: a16z crypto

Translation: Baihua Blockchain

1: More new investments, and the return of some old business models

AI continues to explode in 2025, and cryptocurrency investments also rebound later that year. I am pleased to see this trend extend into 2026. Stablecoins are undoubtedly the focus, with a large portion of trading activity concentrated in the intersection of cryptocurrencies and fintech. Notably, this includes a return to traditional business models: most stablecoin businesses no longer monetize through Token network models but instead earn revenue based on a take rate proportion of trading volume.

2: Several standout sectors in new investments: prediction markets, DeFi, and stablecoins

The first emerging area is applications and businesses built around prediction markets. As these platforms gain momentum, their auxiliary services are being established, and I believe they have enormous growth potential.

Additionally, with the possibility of some form of market structure legislation in 2026, we should see continued growth of DeFi applications in the US, along with increased interest from traditional finance (TradFi) in these markets. After the passage of the GENIUS Act, we have already seen a burst of similar trends in stablecoin businesses.

Another category is agentic, stablecoin-driven payments. The internet was not originally designed for agents, and could even be said to have been built to prevent automation activities. But as agents become primary economic actors representing user transactions, parts of the internet architecture need to be redesigned to support them. In this new agent paradigm, stablecoins are destined to become the native payment method.

3: The IPO window for cryptocurrency companies

After Q1 2025, financial institutions showed unprecedented interest in cryptocurrencies, leading to significant increases in business metrics serving this sector: including custodians, stablecoin infrastructure companies, institutional trading platforms, and more. Many of these companies are already close to the scale needed for IPO this year and are fully capable of achieving a leapfrogging listing in 2026.

Next trend: Privacy in 2026

Privacy is a prerequisite for moving global finance onto the blockchain and is expected to become the biggest moat in the crypto space. Below are our team’s (and some guest writers’) views on the future of on-chain privacy.

The problem with instant messaging apps this year is not just how to resist quantum attacks, but how to achieve decentralization

As the world prepares for quantum computing, many cryptography-based communication apps (like Apple, Signal, WhatsApp) are leading the way. The issue is that each mainstream instant messaging tool relies on trusting private servers operated by a single organization. These servers are highly susceptible to government shutdowns, backdoors, or forced data disclosures.

If a country can shut down a server, or a company holds the keys to its private servers, then what’s the use of quantum encryption? Private servers require “trust me,” whereas without private servers, it means “you don’t need to trust me.” Communication no longer needs intermediaries. Messaging requires open protocols that do not trust anyone.

The way to achieve this is through network decentralization: no private servers, no single app, fully open-source code, and top-tier encryption including quantum threat resistance. With an open network, no individual, company, nonprofit, or country can deprive us of our communication capabilities. Even if a country or company shuts down an app, 500 new versions will appear the next day. Shut down a node, and under blockchain economic incentives, new nodes will immediately fill the gap.

When people own their messages via keys as if they own money, everything changes. Apps may evolve, but people will always control their messages and identities; end users can own their messages even if they do not own the app itself. — Shane Mac, Co-founder and CEO of XMTP Labs

We will see “secrets as a service,” making privacy a core infrastructure

Behind every model, agent, and automation, there is a simple dependency: data. But today, most data pipelines—whether input to models or output from models—are opaque, volatile, and non-auditable.

This is acceptable for some consumer applications, but many industries (like finance and healthcare) require companies to keep sensitive data confidential. This is also a major obstacle currently preventing institutions from tokenizing real-world assets (RWA).

I focus on data access control: who controls sensitive data? How does it flow? Who (or what) can access it? Without data access control, anyone wanting to keep data confidential can only rely on centralized services or build custom systems—which is time-consuming, costly, and hinders traditional financial institutions from fully leveraging on-chain data management. As agent systems begin to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, users and institutions need cryptographic guarantees, not “trust me” assurances.

That’s why I believe we need “secrets as a service”: new technology that provides programmable native data access rules, client-side encryption, and decentralized key management to enforce who can decrypt, under what conditions, and for how long… all on-chain.

Combined with verifiable data systems, “secrets” will become part of the internet’s foundational public infrastructure, no longer an after-the-fact application plugin, making privacy a core infrastructure. — Adeniyi Abiodun, Chief Product Officer and Co-founder of Mysten Labs

Security testing will shift from “code is law” to “standards are law”

Last year’s DeFi hacks involved some well-established protocols with strong teams, diligent audits, and years of operation. These incidents highlight an uncomfortable reality: current standard security practices are largely heuristic and case-by-case.

To mature this year, DeFi security needs to shift from vulnerability detection to attribute-based design, moving from “try to” to “principled” approaches:

In the static/deployment phase (testing, auditing, formal verification), this means systematically proving global invariants rather than just verifying manually selected local properties. Several AI-assisted proof tools developed by multiple teams can help write specifications, propose invariants, and reduce the costly manual proof engineering of the past.

In the dynamic/post-deployment phase (runtime monitoring, runtime enforcement), these invariants can be transformed into real-time guardrails: the last line of defense. These guardrails will be encoded as runtime assertions, and every transaction must satisfy them.

Today, we no longer assume catching every vulnerability, but instead enforce key security properties directly in code, automatically rolling back any transaction that violates these properties.

This is not just theoretical. In practice, almost all exploits to date trigger these checks during execution, potentially halting malicious activity. Therefore, the once-popular “code is law” paradigm evolves into “spec is law”: even novel attacks must satisfy security properties that preserve system integrity, making remaining attacks trivial or extremely difficult to execute. — Daejun Park, Engineering Team at a16z crypto