The 5 Major Consensus in the 2026 Crypto Market: Which Narratives Are Worth Watching

2025 is coming to an end, and many can feel a clear change — starting from mid-year, the overall story in the crypto space has gradually dimmed, and trading communities have become much quieter. Looking ahead to 2026, what new turning points will the market see, and which narratives will regain market attention?

We have reviewed over 30 industry reports on 2026, covering top research institutions such as Galaxy, Delphi Digital, a16z, Bitwise, Hashdex, Coinbase, and many seasoned KOLs’ perspectives, ultimately summarizing five of the most consensus market expectations. This review is essential reading for practitioners.

Stablecoins: From Crypto Tools to Mainstream Financial Infrastructure

The strongest consensus is on stablecoins, with almost all predictors agreeing on one judgment — by 2026, stablecoins will have completed a thorough transformation from “cryptocurrency tools” to “mainstream financial infrastructure.”

a16z provided impressive data: last year, stablecoins processed approximately $46 trillion in transactions. What does this mean? It’s 20 times PayPal’s annual transaction volume, nearly 3 times Visa’s, and gradually approaching the scale of the US ACH clearing network.

However, a16z also calmly pointed out that the real bottleneck isn’t “whether there is demand for stablecoins,” but “how these digital dollars can truly enter people’s daily financial channels” — specifically, the most complex and concrete areas like deposits and withdrawals, payments, clearing, and consumption.

They observed a wave of emerging startups addressing this issue: some use cryptography to allow users to convert local account balances into digital dollars without exposing privacy; some directly integrate regional banking networks, QR codes, and real-time payment channels, making stablecoins as easy to use as domestic transfers; others build global wallets and card issuance platforms, enabling stablecoins to be spent in everyday stores.

a16z’s conclusion is: once these deposit and withdrawal channels mature, digital dollars will directly connect to local payment systems and business tools, spawning new behavioral patterns — seamless cross-border real-time payroll, enterprises receiving global dollars without bank accounts, and applications settling value with users anywhere in the world in real time. Stablecoins will evolve from niche financial tools into the foundational clearing layer of the internet.

From a technical perspective, a16z researcher Sam Broner explained why this is almost inevitable: today’s banking systems are too outdated, with core ledgers running on mainframes, coded in COBOL, with interfaces as batch files rather than APIs. While these systems are stable and embedded in the real world, they are almost impossible to iterate quickly — adding real-time payment features might take months or even years, burdened with accumulated technical debt and management complexity. This is precisely where stablecoins can shine.

Bitwise predicts from a market size perspective: the market cap of stablecoins will double in 2026, with the key variable being the implementation of the GENIUS Act in early 2026 — which will expand growth opportunities for existing issuers and attract new competitors.

Overall, 2026 will be a critical turning point for stablecoins moving from the periphery into the mainstream.

AI Agents: From Experiment to Main Player

The second high consensus is that AI Agents will become the main participants in on-chain economic activities. Recent AI trading model competitions online have already demonstrated the potential of this field.

The logic is straightforward: as AI Agents begin to automate tasks, make decisions, and interact at high frequency, they naturally need a fast, inexpensive, permissionless way to transfer value — just like transmitting information. Traditional payment systems are designed for humans, with accounts, identities, and clearing cycles, which create friction costs for AI Agents.

Cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins combined with payment protocols like x402, are almost tailor-made for this scenario: instant clearing, support for micro-payments, programmability, permissionless. 2026 is likely to become the inaugural year for the transition of Agent economy payment infrastructure from trial to commercial scale.

a16z’s Sean Neville (a16z researcher, co-founder of Circle, and architect of USDC) pointed out the current bottleneck of the Agent economy: shifting from “not smart enough” to “lacking identity” — in the financial system, the number of non-human identities has already surpassed human employees at a ratio of 96:1, but most of these identities are “ghosts without bank accounts.” The financial industry lacks KYA (Know Your Agent).

Just as humans need credit scores to obtain loans, AI Agents need digital certificates to prove who they represent, who they are bound to, and who is responsible if issues arise. Before a KYA system is established, many institutions can only block AI Agents at the firewall level. If KYC takes decades to build, KYA might only take a few months.

Other team members from a16z added that AI Agents need encrypted channels to execute micro-payments, access data, and settle computations. The x402 standard will become the payment backbone of the Agent economy. The key assets are no longer the models themselves but scarce high-quality real data (DePAI), with projects like BitRobot, PrismaX, Shaga, Chakra cited as examples.

Galaxy Research’s Lucas Tcheyan provided very specific quantitative forecasts: by 2026, x402 standard payments will account for 30% of Base daily transaction volume, and 5% of Solana non-voting transactions, indicating larger on-chain channels used in inter-agent interactions. He believes that as AI Agents begin to trade automatically between services, standardized payment primitives will directly enter the execution layer. Base will benefit from Coinbase’s promotion of the x402 standard, while Solana, with its large developer community and user base, will be another major hub. Meanwhile, emerging payment-oriented chains like Tempo and Arc will also develop rapidly in this process.

RWA: From Bubble to Substance

Unlike the previous “everything can be on-chain” frenzy, the RWA narrative has now become much more sober. Most research institutions no longer discuss “potential market size” but emphasize one word: feasibility. Because of this, RWA has formed a more focused consensus for 2026 after calming down.

a16z analyst Guy Wuollet bluntly criticized current tokenized RWA assets: although banks, financial tech companies, and asset managers are eager to put US stocks, commodities, indices, and other traditional assets on-chain, most so-called “tokenization” is essentially physical simulation — these assets are just “wrapped in a different technology shell,” with design logic, trading methods, and risk structures still firmly rooted in traditional understanding, not leveraging the native features of crypto systems.

Galaxy Research predicts a more specific “structural breakthrough”: they are less concerned with product forms and more focused on core links in traditional finance — collateral. They forecast that next year, a large bank or broker-dealer will officially accept tokenized stocks as core collateral assets for the first time. If this happens, the significance will surpass any single product launch.

Up to now, tokenized stocks remain on the fringe, either small-scale experiments in DeFi or proof-of-concept on private blockchains of large banks, with little real integration into mainstream finance. But Galaxy points out that the situation is changing. Traditional financial infrastructure providers are accelerating migration to blockchain systems, and regulators are explicitly shifting to support this. They predict that next year, large financial institutions will accept tokenized stocks as on-chain deposited assets, legally regarded as fully equivalent to traditional securities.

Hashdex is even more bold, predicting that tokenized real assets will grow tenfold. This forecast is based on clear regulation, well-prepared traditional financial institutions, and mature technological infrastructure.

Prediction Markets: More Than Just Decentralized Gambling

As many expected, prediction markets are also seen as a promising field in 2026. But surprisingly, the reason for their optimism is no longer just “decentralized gambling,” but their potential as information aggregation and decision-making tools.

a16z’s Andy Hall (professor of political economy at Stanford) believes prediction markets have crossed the threshold of “becoming mainstream.” Next year, as they deeply intersect with crypto and AI, prediction markets will become larger, broader, and smarter. But this expansion also comes at a cost — prediction markets are being pushed into new complex layers: higher trading frequency, faster information feedback, more automated participant structures. These changes amplify value but also pose new challenges for builders, such as how to fairly adjudicate results without controversy.

Galaxy Research’s Will Owens quantified this change: he predicts that Polymarket’s weekly trading volume will continue to surpass $1.5 billion in 2026. This is not a baseless forecast. In fact, prediction markets are already one of the fastest-growing areas in crypto, with Polymarket’s nominal weekly trading volume approaching $1 billion. Three forces are driving this growth: new capital efficiency layers deepen market liquidity, AI-driven instructions increase trading frequency, and Polymarket’s improving distribution accelerates capital inflow.

Ryan Rasmussen from Bitwise is even more optimistic, predicting that the open interest of Polymarket’s contracts will surpass the historic peak during the 2024 US election. The growth drivers are clear: opening to US users brought in a large influx of new users, about $2 billion in new capital, and the market is no longer limited to politics but expanding into economics, sports, pop culture, and more.

Outside institutions, opinions from KOLs are also noteworthy. Tomasz Tunguz predicts that by 2026, the proportion of Americans using prediction markets will jump from the current 5% to 35%. In comparison, the US gambling usage rate is about 56%. This indicates that prediction markets are shifting from niche financial tools to products close to mainstream entertainment and information consumption.

But Galaxy also issued a warning amid this optimistic mood. They predict that federal investigations into prediction markets are very likely to occur. As US regulators gradually open on-chain prediction markets and trading volume and open interest grow rapidly, some “gray areas” are emerging. There have already been several scandals involving insider trading and manipulation of major sports results. Because prediction markets allow anonymous trading and do not require strict KYC (unlike traditional gambling platforms), the temptation for abuse of insider information is greater. Therefore, Galaxy believes that future investigations may be triggered not by anomalies in traditional gambling systems but by suspicious price movements on on-chain prediction markets.

Privacy Coins: The Once “Dark Horse” Reappears

As more capital, data, and automated decision-making go on-chain, information leakage has become an unacceptable cost. This trend was already evident in 2025. The privacy sector performed remarkably, with gains even surpassing Bitcoin and other mainstream coins, making the 2026 outlook for privacy coins almost a consensus among institutions, researchers, and KOLs.

Galaxy Research’s Christopher Rosa made a startling prediction: the total market cap of privacy coins will surpass $100 billion by the end of 2026. His explanation is that privacy coins gained significant attention at the end of 2025 because institutional investors deployed more capital on-chain, making on-chain privacy a top priority. Among the three major privacy coins, Zcash surged about 800%, Railgun about 204%, and Monero rose slightly by 53%.

Christopher also provided an interesting historical context: early Bitcoin developers, including Satoshi Nakamoto, studied and explored privacy technologies. In Bitcoin’s initial design discussions, there were ideas to make transactions more private or even fully anonymous. But at that time, practical zero-knowledge proof technology was still far off.

However, the era is now completely different. As zero-knowledge proof technology becomes practically usable, on-chain value surges, and more users, especially institutions, start seriously considering a previously accepted reality: do they really want all their asset balances, transaction paths, and capital structures to be permanently public to anyone? Privacy issues have shifted from an “ideal demand” to an “institutional-level practical problem.”

Mysten Labs co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun added a different perspective: he analyzed from deeper dependency relationships — data. Every model, every agent, every automation system depends on one thing — data. But currently, whether it’s input data pipelines or output results, almost all are opaque, alterable, and non-auditable. This might be acceptable for some consumer applications, but in finance and healthcare, it’s an almost insurmountable obstacle. When agent systems start autonomously browsing the web, trading, and making decisions, this problem multiplies.

Against this background, Adeniyi proposed the concept of “secrets-as-a-service.” He believes that the future isn’t about patching privacy at the application layer but building a programmable infrastructure to access source data: including executable data access rules, client-side encryption mechanisms, decentralized key management systems to define who can decrypt what data, under what conditions, and for how long. All these rules should be enforced on-chain, without relying on internal processes or manual constraints. Coupled with verifiable data systems, privacy can become a public infrastructure of the internet, rather than an add-on for applications.

Additional Observations: Topics Practitioners Should Also Watch

Besides these five mainstream consensus points, most institutions also raised some observations that, while not yet fully consensual, are equally thought-provoking.

The most interesting is the trend of value migrating to the application layer. Increasing predictions believe that the “application fat” theory is replacing the “protocol fat” theory. Value is no longer primarily accumulated in the underlying chains and general protocols but is gradually concentrating at the application layer. Not because the underlying layer isn’t important, but because the entities that directly interact with users, data, and capital flows are still the applications.

This also sparks a major debate: as Ethereum, representing “protocol fat,” aims to be the world’s computer, how will its value evolve in the “application fat” era? Some believe it will continue to benefit as an important tokenization and financial infrastructure; others think it might gradually evolve into a “dull but necessary” network, with most value absorbed by upper-layer applications.

Regarding Bitcoin, most remain optimistic about its performance in 2026, with institutional ETFs and DEX demand continuing to grow, solidifying its strategic macro asset and “digital gold” status. However, threats from quantum computing remain a real concern.