Wintermute Ventures: Our Six Major Predictions for Digital Assets in 2026

Original author: Wintermute Ventures

Translation: Bibi News

For decades, the internet has enabled information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. But the flow of “value” has always lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial contracts still rely on fragmented infrastructure, circulating through outdated tracks, national borders, and layers of intermediaries, each extracting costs.

And this gap is being filled at an unprecedented speed.

This creates opportunities for a class of infrastructure companies—those that directly replace traditional clearing, settlement, and custody functions.

Infrastructure that allows value to flow as freely as information is no longer just a theoretical concept but is being actively built, deployed, and used at scale.

For years, while crypto assets existed on-chain, they were disconnected from the real economy. Now, this is changing.

Crypto is becoming the missing layer of clearing and settlement in the internet economy: a system that can operate 24/7, is transparent, and does not require centralized gatekeepers.

The following themes represent our judgment on the development direction of digital assets by 2026 and are areas where Wintermute Ventures is actively supporting entrepreneurs.

Everything Will Become Tradable

An increasing number of assets and real-world outcomes are becoming tradable through new financial primitives, including prediction markets, tokenization, and derivatives.

This shift provides a liquidity layer for domains that previously had no markets.

Tokenization and synthetic assets bring liquidity to known assets; prediction markets go further by pricing previously “unpriceable” things, transforming raw information into tradable financial instruments.

Prediction markets are expanding continuously, serving both as consumer-facing products and as new financial tools supporting hedging, outcome-based trading, and expression of highly segmented events. They are also beginning to replace some functions of traditional financial infrastructure.

Insurance is a prime example: outcome-based markets can directly price specific risks, offering cheaper and more flexible hedging than traditional insurance or reinsurance.

Users no longer need to buy hurricane insurance covering entire regions; instead, they can hedge against specific times, locations, and wind speeds.

Over longer time horizons, these highly personalized risks can be finely combined through workflows with proxy capabilities tailored to individual needs.

As prediction market infrastructure expands, entirely new data products will emerge around topics that were previously unpriced.

We expect markets will develop for trading and quantifying “perception, sentiment, and collective opinion” indicators. These emerging markets are a natural extension of decentralized finance, opening new ways to price and exchange “information itself.”

When everything can be traded, infrastructure that provides liquidity, enables price discovery, and ensures settlement will become crucial.

This structural change will concentrate value at the infrastructure layer and directly influence capital allocation methods.

We are actively supporting teams building core market and settlement infrastructure, data layers for verification and proof, and new data products supporting previously untradeable outcomes.

At the same time, we are paying attention to new abstraction models that enable these markets to be programmable and composable, allowing them to embed into real-world workflows and gradually replace parts of traditional finance and insurance systems.

Stablecoins Become the Trust Layer, Banks Handle Transition Period Settlements

Currently, digital assets still lack a robust system similar to settlement banks and clearinghouses in traditional finance.

Stablecoins offer an open, programmable form of value, but without settlement infrastructure, fragmentation across different systems still causes friction, limiting large-scale adoption.

As stablecoin issuers using different collateral models continue to emerge across ecosystems, the demand for a reliable interoperability layer to combine and coordinate these assets is rising.

To truly scale this system, the crypto industry needs infrastructure capable of netting, exchanging, and settling across different stablecoins and chains without adding extra credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational complexity.

The missing key abstraction is to transfer exchange and credit risk onto the balance sheets of stablecoin issuers through “asset-liability-based interoperability,” rather than forcing end users to bear exchange rate, routing, or counterparty risk when trading across stablecoins.

We see this as a “on-chain proxy banking system”: settlement takes only seconds and is fully open to application developers. We expect more companies will position themselves as coordination layers between issuers and applications.

Markets Will Reward Sustainable Revenue, Not Short-term Incentives

The approach of relying solely on token incentives and short-term growth is gradually becoming obsolete.

Companies that subsidize users or liquidity providers but lack a robust revenue model structurally will find it increasingly difficult to compete.

Valuations will become more closely anchored to sustainable earnings and forward-looking profitability expectations, gradually returning to cash flow-based valuation frameworks.

Simple annualization of short-term, highly volatile monthly fees is no longer a reasonable pricing method. Revenue quality and incentive alignment will become core to valuation.

Tokens without clear value capture pathways will also struggle to sustain demand outside of speculative cycles.

Therefore, fewer companies will issue tokens at inception. Many projects will prioritize equity structures, using blockchain mainly as underlying infrastructure, making it almost “invisible” to users and investors.

When tokens are adopted, issuance typically occurs after product-market fit, with verified revenue, unit economics, and distribution channels.

We see this as a healthy and necessary evolution.

It allows founders to focus on building long-term sustainable businesses rather than chasing token incentives prematurely; enables investors to evaluate using familiar financial frameworks; and provides users with products designed for long-term value.

DeFi Will Merge with Fintech

The future of finance is neither DeFi nor traditional finance but a fusion of both. A dual-track architecture allows fintech applications to dynamically route transactions between different systems based on cost, speed, and yield.

Breakthrough consumer products will appear similar to traditional fintech offerings on the surface, with wallets, bridges, and blockchains fully abstracted away. Capital efficiency, yield levels, settlement speed, and transparent execution will define the next generation of financial products.

While user experience converges towards fintech standards, the underlying infrastructure will continue to expand rapidly. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives drive this growth, enabling deeper liquidity and more complex financial products.

Distribution capability will become more important than “owning an interface.” Successful teams will build backend-centric infrastructure embedded into existing platforms and channels, rather than competing as standalone applications.

Personalization and automation (increasingly AI-driven) will optimize pricing, routing, and yields in the background.

Users will not actively choose DeFi.

They will simply choose—better products.

Privacy Becomes the “Fundamental Threshold”

Privacy is becoming a fundamental condition for institutional adoption of digital assets, shifting from a “regulatory burden” to a “regulatory enabler.”

Selective disclosure enabled by zero-knowledge proofs and multiparty secure computation allows participants to prove compliance without exposing raw data.

In practical terms, this means:

Banks can assess creditworthiness without viewing full transaction histories;

Employers can verify employment relationships without disclosing specific salaries;

Financial institutions can prove reserves are sufficient without revealing their holdings structure.

This vision directly extends to the real world, where companies no longer need to store large amounts of sensitive data long-term, thus escaping high-cost, burdensome data privacy compliance.

Emerging technical primitives like private shared state, zkTLS, and MPC are unlocking previously infeasible financial models, including undercollateralized loans, layered structured products (tranching), and new on-chain risk products.

This will enable the migration of entire classes of structured finance, previously difficult to bring on-chain, onto the blockchain.

Regulation Evolves from Compliance Barriers to Distribution Advantages

Regulatory clarity has shifted from an adversarial obstacle to a standardized distribution channel.

While the permissionless nature of early DeFi remains a key driver of innovation, frameworks like the US GENIUS Act, Europe’s MiCA, and Hong Kong’s stablecoin regulations are providing clearer operational boundaries for traditional institutions.

By 2026, the core issue will no longer be “whether institutions can use blockchain,” but how they can leverage these regulatory guidelines to replace outdated and inefficient traditional pipelines with high-speed on-chain channels.

These standards will promote larger-scale compliant on-chain products, regulated deposit and withdrawal channels, and institutional-grade infrastructure, all without sacrificing decentralization or moving toward full centralization, significantly increasing institutional participation.

Regions with clear rules and efficient approval mechanisms will continue to attract capital, talent, and experimental innovation, accelerating the normalization of on-chain value distribution in native crypto and hybrid financial products; regions with slow regulatory progress will fall behind gradually.

The Internet Economy Runs on Crypto

The common thread behind all these changes is the maturation of infrastructure. Crypto is becoming the clearing and settlement layer of the internet economy, enabling value to flow as freely as information.

Protocols, primitives, and applications currently being built are unlocking new forms of real economic activity and continuously expanding the boundaries of the internet’s capabilities.

At Wintermute Ventures, we support entrepreneurs focused on building this infrastructure.

We seek teams with deep technical understanding and strong product sense—delivering products that users want to use; operating within regulatory frameworks while advancing core decentralization principles; and designing business models with long-term impact in mind.

2026 will be a pivotal year.

For users, crypto infrastructure will gradually go behind the scenes;

But for the global financial system, it will become indispensable.

The most excellent infrastructure will quietly empower the world without drawing attention.