Why 2026 Will Get Weird

There are only a few days left of 2025 so it’s time for reflections on the year and predictions for 2026. 

Usually around this time, I’m only really exposed to crypto reflections and crypto predictions. But in 2023, ChatGPT made AI mainstream, and now just a few short years later, AI predictions and reflections have emerged alongside Crypto as a frontier technology that necessitates big minds thinking deeply about short, medium, and long-term implications and unlocks. 

This recent tweet from Andrej Karpathy is the most recent example of a frontier AI technologist ideating about the profound implications of technology design space that society is currently collectively exploring. 

But in 2026 it's not just Crypto and AI technologies that are positioning themselves to rewrite the social fabric. Robots already walk among us. Fully autonomous self-driving cars are a thing now. Breakthroughs in quantum computing and nuclear fission are accelerating as well. 

Space data centers for running AI are a real, serious conversation, and the company that wants to do that is set to IPO this coming year. The future is no longer experimental.

In 2026, the future will be put into production. 

Technology is accelerating faster than ever. As it should! This is the natural order of things – it’s not profound to say that with better technology, society progresses faster. 

But it nonetheless feels like society is at an inflection point, where we can actually watch technology’s grass grow without getting bored. Things will feel more different tomorrow than they do today. The changes will be observable, tangible, and impactful. 

Being in Crypto has prepared us for this. Crypto has moved at a lightspeed pace compared to other industries over the years, but with new tech advances in frontier fields, it finally has found new camaraderie. 

One of the core themes of the 2020s has been the collision of blistering advances in technology with the inherent sluggishness of nation-state bureaucracy and regulation. Net-new technologies like AI have benefited by a lack of incumbents and regulations to restrain progress. Meanwhile, Crypto ran headfirst into preexisting financial regulations and incumbent friction. 

Nevertheless, Crypto has held its own in 2025 and offers other emerging technologies rails to move faster, too. As we move forward, Crypto can supply these other frontier industries with capital markets that move as fast as they do. 

When will Elon Musk’s next company issue a public token on Ethereum? That notion may seem crazy today, but with stablecoins and neobanking placing wallets and dollars into the hands of everyone on planet Earth, the epicenter of capital markets should shift from centralized financial institutions to decentralized public ledgers. 

That will be the trend-shift to watch for what's left of the decade. 

Crypto needs to win the business of the next generation of frontier companies whose capital formation will shape 2030 and the rest of the 21st century.