A16z: 3 Ways Cryptocurrency Technology Will Surpass Cryptocurrency Itself by 2026

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Author: a16z crypto

Translation: Felix, PANews

1. Larger market size, broader coverage, and higher intelligence

— Andy Hall, a16z Cryptocurrency Research Advisor, Professor of Political Economy at Stanford University

Prediction markets have become mainstream. By 2026, as they integrate with cryptocurrencies and AI, their scale, coverage, and intelligence will only continue to grow, bringing new and significant challenges for builders.

First, more contracts will be listed this year. This means not only real-time odds for major elections or geopolitical events but also results at various detailed levels and real-time odds for complex intertwined events. As these new contracts disclose more information and incorporate news (which is already happening), they will raise important social issues, such as how to balance the value of this information and how to design them better to be more transparent and auditable—precisely what cryptocurrencies can enable.

To handle the vast number of contracts, new consensus methods are needed to resolve issues within contracts. Centralized platforms addressing whether an event truly occurred (how to verify) are important, but controversial cases like Zelensky’s “suit incident” and Venezuela’s election markets highlight their limitations. To cope with such extreme cases and help prediction markets expand into more practical applications, decentralized governance and LLM-based oracle systems can assist in determining the truth of disputed outcomes.

AI opens up more possibilities for oracles beyond LLMs. For example, AI agents trading on these platforms can search global signals to help gain short-term trading advantages, revealing new worldviews and ways to predict future events. Besides serving as complex political analysts that can provide insights, these agents can also uncover new information about the fundamental factors behind complex social events when researching emerging strategies.

Will prediction markets replace opinion polls? No; they will improve opinion polls (and information from polls can feed into prediction markets). As a political scientist, I am most excited about how prediction markets can work synergistically with rich and vibrant polling systems—but this also depends on new technologies like AI, which can enhance the survey experience; and cryptography, which can provide new ways to verify that poll respondents are real humans and not bots.

2. This year, cryptographic technology will provide a new foundational tool for industries beyond blockchain

— Justin Thaler, a16z Crypto Research Team Member, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University

SNARKs (cryptographic proofs that can verify computations without re-executing them) have primarily been used in blockchain for years. Their overhead is enormous: proving a single computation can cost up to 1 million times more work than just running the computation directly. While this might be worthwhile with thousands of verifiers sharing the cost, it is impractical otherwise.

But this situation is about to change. This year, zkVM provers will reduce overhead to about 10,000 times, with memory usage only a few hundred megabytes—fast enough to run on smartphones and low enough in cost to operate anywhere.

The 10,000x figure is a magical number, partly because high-end GPUs have about 10,000 times the parallel throughput of laptop CPUs. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs in real-time that are equivalent to CPU execution.

This could realize a long-held vision from early research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you are running CPU workloads in the cloud—because your computational needs are too small for GPU, or you lack expertise, or for historical reasons—you will be able to obtain cryptographic proofs of correctness at a reasonable cost. Provers are optimized for GPUs; your code does not need to be optimized.

3. Witnessing the rise of “Staked Media”

— Robert Hackett, a16z Cryptocurrency Editorial Team

Traditional media models (and their so-called objectivity) have long shown cracks. The internet has empowered everyone to speak out, and more operators, practitioners, and builders are directly engaging with the public. Their viewpoints reflect their interests in the real world, and surprisingly, audiences often do not dismiss them because of conflicts of interest but rather respect them because of these relationships.

The new change is not just the rise of social media but the emergence of cryptographic tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments. As AI makes generating infinite content cheap and easy (regardless of whether the viewpoints or identities are real or fictional, anyone can claim anything), relying solely on public (or bot) speech is no longer sufficient. Tokenized assets, programmable escrow, prediction markets, and on-chain history provide a more solid foundation for trust: commentators can express opinions and prove their consistency. Podcast hosts can lock tokens to demonstrate they are not engaging in speculative hype or “pump and dump.” Analysts can link predictions to publicly settled markets, establishing auditable performance records.

This is the embryonic form of what I call “Staked Media”: a media that not only aligns with vested interests but also provides proof of such alignment. In this model, credibility is neither derived from “word of mouth” nor unfounded assertions; instead, it comes from staking that makes transparent and verifiable commitments. “Staked media” will not replace other media forms but will complement existing ones. It offers a new signal: not just “trust me, I am neutral,” but “this is the risk I am willing to take, and you can verify whether what I say is true.”

Related reading: a16z’s 2026 Prediction of 8 Major Trends in the Crypto Industry: Rise of Privacy Chains, Platform Transformation, and more