17 Trends for Crypto's 2026
Crypto is entering a new phase of maturity.
After a decade defined by experimentation, speculation, and repeated infrastructure resets, 2026 will be the year when durable market structure matters more than narratives.
These 17 predictions outline how capital formation, consumer distribution, and protocol design evolve as crypto shifts from a niche financial subculture into the substrate of global finance.
Read through my predictions and then hear me discuss them with David & Ryan on today's Bankless podcast.
🗣️ Tokens become pseudo-equities, leading to a new renaissance
Crypto’s institutional bid was funneled into DATs, ETFs, and crypto equities like Galaxy, Circle, Bullish, Robinhood, and Coinbase. Why? A combination of regulatory constraints, many large allocators’ custodians did not support crypto, and, more importantly, the classic market full of lemons problem. The market was rife with scams, rugs, and sketchy legal structures, with none of the standardized practices found in equities.
By 2026, tokens will mature in terms of legal structures and tokenholder rights, standardize accounting, and prioritize investor relations, making it materially easier for large allocators to purchase individual altcoins.
🗣️ Buybacks will mostly stop
No high-growth startup in the history of startups has ever used free cash flow to repurchase stock. Every penny should intuitively be used to fuel growth.
Buybacks were historically valuable because they demonstrated alignment between tokenholders and equity holders. However, with newer structures, holders can have a high degree of confidence in real ownership and enforceable rights, which makes buybacks less important. The market is also no longer placing much value on buyback programs. Helium recently reduced its buybacks, and others are likely to follow.
🗣️ ICOs see parabolic return, >$1B in ICOs raised
ICOs will accelerate as Sonar, MetaDAO, Legion, and others unlock a new class of launch primitives. In parallel, the onchain capital formation stack will rapidly mature, closing the gap with today’s traditional fundraising infrastructure and, in many cases, surpassing it.
Top-tier projects will still raise one to two rounds in private markets before conducting an ICO, rather than relying solely on ICO capital and launching a token very early in the company’s life cycle.
🗣️ Existing winners massively compound
In particular, Aave, Morpho, ENA, and Pendle will compound. These are teams that continually ship and have the most lindy products in crypto that cannot simply be vampire-attacked by a points program. I expect to see metrics 2-3x this year.
🗣️ Morpho triples its market share, ~10% to >30%
Morpho is positioned for a breakout year, driven primarily by its modular architecture, which is particularly well suited for institutions coming onchain and for borrowing and lending against a broader set of long-tail assets. Unlike Aave, Morpho’s activity is increasingly decoupled from ETH price movements, signaling more durable and use-case-driven demand. Finally, Morpho is well positioned to continue executing on the “DeFi mullet” thesis by enabling fintechs to offer high-yield “earn” products and allowing users to natively borrow USDC against assets like BTC and ETH.
🗣️ At least 6 fintech unicorns will implement DeFi lending
At least 6 fintech unicorns will integrate DeFi lending. User-facing products will continue to resemble traditional fintech applications, while the backend runs entirely on open DeFi rails. The Steakhouse x Coinbase integration offers an early blueprint for how neobanks can embed DeFi lending at scale.
🗣️ CEXes lose power under the ICM meta
Under the ICM meta, centralized exchanges will steadily lose power as pre-TGE perpetuals, hyper-efficient DEXes, improved fiat onramps, and increasing regulatory clarity reduce their role as gatekeepers. Listing authority will shift away from discretionary committees toward more permissionless, criteria-based spot listings, pushing power back to the free market. At the same time, CEXes face growing competition from neobanks, wallets, and other consumer-facing frontends that increasingly own the user relationship. In response, long-horizon projects will increasingly go fully onchain from the start and only later use CEX listings as a growth lever, paying a fraction of historical listing fees as exchanges compete to attract high-quality assets. To remain competitive, CEXes will be forced to prioritize listing sustainable projects that improve platform durability and reduce user churn.
🗣️ Coinbase and Robinhood continue to ship
Robinhood shipped 11 new products crossing $100M in run rate, is the 2nd highest performer in the S&P 500, and continues to ship a number of new product lines at crazy velocity. I fully expect the growth to continue through 2026.
Coinbase will abandon content coins, re-evaluate the north star of Base and how/if to use Base token as a lever for growth. Armstrong explicitly described wanting Coinbase to be a “bank replacement for people.”
I predict Coinbase will separate Coinbase into “Coinbase” and “Coinbase Banking.” A separation of speculative products and core banking features as Robinhood has done.
🗣️ The Ethereum and Solana duopoly strengthens
By 2026, the Ethereum–Solana duopoly will be increasingly clear. Ethereum will continue to serve as the base layer for lower-risk DeFi, RWAs, and institutional-grade money markets, while Solana becomes the center of crypto-native consumer applications and advances toward a “decentralized NASDAQ” vision, supported by upgrades like Firedancer and Alpenglow.
In contrast, most general-purpose alt L1s and L2s will struggle to attract sustained users and liquidity without heavy incentive spend. Ethereum, in particular, is positioned for a rebound as regulatory clarity improves, key legislation such as the Clarity Act progresses, and fundamentals strengthen through rising REV, TVL, and institutional demand via DATs and ETFs.
🗣️ Polymarket ends the year with 50% higher OI than Kalshi, no POLY token
FanDuel is launching a prediction market in partnership with the CME, while Robinhood is entering the space with SIG and DraftKings. Any platform with incumbent distribution and the necessary licensing can and likely will integrate prediction markets if the unit economics prove sustainable.
Today, more than 50% of open interest on Kalshi is driven by sports, while Polymarket sees roughly 30 to 40% of its open interest in politics. By volume, Kalshi is now approximately 90% sports, whereas Polymarket is more evenly split across politics, crypto, and sports. As competition in sports prediction markets intensifies, Kalshi’s market share is likely to face pressure.
As the category continues to seek regulatory clarity from the CFTC around whether prediction markets are classified as gaming or derivatives, Polymarket is likely to delay the launch of the POLY token.
🗣️ Onchain options have their Hyperliquid moment
To date, onchain options have been held back by fragmented liquidity, unintuitive Greeks, and restrictive margining. The next breakout venue will unify liquidity, simplify risk primitives, and redesign margining in a way that makes options accessible to a broader audience. At that point, options can finally become a mass-market instrument and the foundation for a new wave of structured products.
Hyperliquid provides the playbook. It meaningfully improved market microstructure, pioneered HLP to bootstrap liquidity, and iterated aggressively on UI and UX. Onchain options will need to follow the same path to reach escape velocity.
🗣️ The venue of price discovery will move onchain for certain assets
For specific crypto assets, onchain venues start leading CEX in setting price. Liquidity, latency, and transparency advantages will continue to compound and the trend will be accelerated by propAMMs, improvement in Solana microstructure and newer execution environments with sub-10 millisecond latency. Offchain markets begin following onchain ticks.
🗣️ One consumer app triggers a massive onboarding wave
A single breakout consumer application will onboard millions of new users onchain, echoing past moments like Axie, Stepn, Top Shot, Pump, and Polymarket. The next winner will likely combine regulatory arbitrage with DeFi’s capital efficiency, potentially through primitives like onchain parlays or other novel financial products.
As Apple Pay-to-onchain flows become instant and seamless, consumer capital will move directly onto crypto rails at scale. Deposits could exceed $10 billion, marking the end of fragmented, unreliable onramps and janky ACH flows.
🗣️ Proof-of-personhood becomes a requirement
As AI agents flood the internet, verified human identity will become the scarcest and most valuable resource. Privacy-preserving proof-of-personhood, whether via biometrics or passport NFC verification, will increasingly become a standard requirement across emerging applications. Access to points programs, ICOs, rewards in DePIN networks, and even participation in DAO governance will depend on proving that a user is a real, unique human.
🗣️ Continuation of the Fat Wallet Thesis
The “fat wallet” thesis argues that wallets, rather than protocols, will capture an increasing share of value in crypto over time. When a wallet consolidates trading, swaps, perpetuals, prediction markets, and fiat onramps into a single, seamless experience, users have little reason to leave. This positions the wallet as the primary consumer-facing interface and the default entry point into crypto. As protocol complexity continues to be abstracted away, users interact less with individual applications and more with the wallet itself.
Over time, wallets will begin to incorporate traditional financial tools alongside onchain functionality. By 2026, wallets are likely to evolve into the central hub for most of an individual’s financial activity. Value accrual will follow distribution, convenience, and control of the end user relationship. There is an increasing premium on owning the user layer, as wallets sit at the intersection of stablecoins, MEV, protocol access, and asset issuance.
🗣️ Opus 4.5 unlocks a step-function increase in builder velocity, 1 sub-5-person unicorn this year
Advances in frontier models are dramatically compressing the idea-to-production cycle. Small teams can now ship faster, iterate more frequently, and take far more shots on goal, increasing the likelihood that the next breakout consumer crypto app emerges. It is already common to see one- to 2 person teams in private markets writing production-grade code, building full frontends, and shipping end-to-end products. With tools like Opus 4.5 and Claude, builders can now prototype, audit, and deploy smart contracts directly into production, lowering the threshold for building venture-scale companies and making the first sub-five-person unicorn increasingly plausible this year.
🗣️ “Crypto is dead”
Crypto will increasingly move away from serving the terminally online, incentive-driven user, defined by points programs, meta-games, narratives, and Discord grinding. Instead, builders will focus on crypto as ubiquitous infrastructure that is largely invisible to end users. Blockchains will quietly power functions such as cross-border settlement, lending, yield generation, tokenized equities, and private credit without requiring users to engage with crypto-native abstractions. This shift will be driven in part by token fatigue and in part by changes in market structure that reward real utility over speculation. Adoption will begin in the most predatory and inefficient segments of finance, where crypto offers clear cost and transparency advantages. From there, it will progressively work its way deeper into the financial system.
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