17 Transformational Trends for Cryptocurrencies in the Coming Year — Trend Analysis

The cryptocurrency market is on the brink of fundamental change. While stablecoins have strengthened their position with a transaction volume of (46 trillion — over 20 times more than PayPal, and nearly 3 times more than Visa — new challenges and opportunities are beginning to shape the industry’s development path.

Digital Stable Assets: From Infrastructure to Everyday Use

The paradox of today’s stablecoins is simple: transfers take less than 1 second, fees are a fraction of a cent, but integration with the traditional financial system remains a bottleneck. A new generation of companies is filling this gap — some are building bridges between local currencies and digital dollars through cryptographic proofs, others are integrating regional networks, enabling transfers via QR codes and real-time payment systems.

This is not just a technological issue — it’s a fundamental shift in banking architecture. Most financial institutions rely on core ledger systems running on mainframes programmed in COBOL, where implementing new features takes months. Stablecoins offer them a “low-risk innovation pathway” — the ability to create new services without redesigning outdated systems.

At the same time, the evolution of stablecoin issuance models is setting a new direction. Instead of a “purely tokenization approach,” we see a shift toward innovative structures — especially when it comes to debt assets issued directly on-chain. This reduces borrowing service costs and broadens accessibility for more participants.

Tokenization of Real-World Assets: Thinking “Natively Crypto”

The modern boom in “on-chainizing” traditional assets — stocks, commodities, indices — exposes the trap of mimetism. Financial institutions replicate real-world structures without leveraging the unique possibilities of a decentralized environment.

An alternative exists. Synthetic derivatives, such as perpetual futures, offer deeper liquidity and are easier to implement. On some emerging market stocks, zero-day options liquidity has already surpassed spot markets — a sign that perpetualization could be a valuable experiment for a broader class of assets.

The question is: do we choose full on-chain integration or asset transcription? By 2026, the answer will not be binary — instead, we will see a proliferation of “natively crypto” tokenization solutions that better utilize the features of a decentralized ecosystem.

AI Agents: From KYC to KYA

The AI agent economy faces a paradox: intelligence is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is identity verification.

In financial services, the number of “non-human identities” — AI agents — already exceeds human workers by 96 times. However, these identities remain “unregistered” in banking systems. They lack a “Know Your Agent” )KYA — an equivalent of credit scoring for machines. Agents need cryptographic certificates linked to “the issuer,” “operational restrictions,” and “liability” — without which vendors block agents at the firewall level.

The industry, which has built KYC infrastructure over decades, now needs to solve KYA in a few months. This is not a completely new problem — it’s a new dimension of an old one.

Value Flow as Information Flow

As AI agents begin to operate “automatically in the background” — recognizing needs, fulfilling obligations, triggering results — the way value flows must change. Value must flow “as quickly and freely as information.”

New foundational protocols, such as x402, will enable “programmability and responsiveness of settlements.” Agents will be able to pay for data, GPU power, or API calls instantly, without invoices or batch settlements. Predictive markets will settle in real-time, alongside unfolding events.

When value can flow this way, the “payment process” will cease to be a separate operational layer and will become a “network behavior.” The internet will no longer be just a support for the financial system — it will become the financial system itself.

Wealth Management for Everyone

Traditionally, personalized wealth management services were the domain of “high-net-worth clients.” Tokenization is changing this dynamic.

Thanks to the ability for “instant deployment and low-cost rebalancing” of AI-based personalized strategies, anyone can access “active portfolio management” — not just passive indices. DeFi tools, such as automated asset allocation systems on lending markets, can optimize risk-adjusted returns without human intervention.

When all asset classes in a sustainable portfolio — from bonds and stocks to private equity — are tokenized, rebalancing can be automated, eliminating bank transfers.

Privacy as the “Strongest Fox” in Competition

Privacy is a sine qua non condition for global on-chain finance, but almost all blockchains do not provide it. For most chains, privacy is a “later addition.”

Here lies the opportunity: the very “ability to ensure privacy” is enough for a chain to stand out. More — privacy can create a “closed network effect,” known as the “privacy network effect.”

Why? Because “cross-chain token transfer is easy, secret transfer is hard.” When a user leaves the “privacy zone” of one chain, observers can identify the identity. Cross-chain transfers — or between “private and public zones” — reveal metadata: time, amount relationships, transaction traces.

Against this backdrop, where new “general-purpose” chains compete en masse, fees are approaching zero. Blockchains with built-in privacy can build stronger network effects. Several privacy-focused decentralized networks may dominate the future cryptocurrency landscape.

Communication: From Quantum-Resistant to Decentralized

Communication apps are preparing for the quantum computer era — Signal, WhatsApp, Apple have already taken steps. The problem is that all rely on “private servers managed by single entities.”

If a state can shut down a server, and a company holds the key, then “quantum resistance” is useless. The way forward is “network decentralization” — no private servers, fully open source, employing the best cryptography.

In a decentralized network, no one — individual, company, or state — can revoke the right to communicate. Even if the app is shut down, 500 new versions will appear tomorrow. When people control messages with keys — as they do with money — everything changes.

Data as a Service with Encryption

Behind every agent, model, and automation system is a simple foundation: data. But most data transmission channels are opaque and vulnerable to manipulation.

We need “secrets as a service” — Secrets-as-a-Service. With new technologies, programmable, native data access rules, client-side encryption, and decentralized key management will become possible.

When combined with verifiable data systems, “confidentiality protection” will become part of the basic internet infrastructure, not a later app patch.

Security: From “Code is Law” to “Specification is Law”

Recent attacks on DeFi have targeted protocols with rigorous audits, strong teams, and years of stability. This exposes a troubling truth: current security practices rely on “experience and ad hoc cases.”

For security to mature, two changes are needed: moving from “patching vulnerabilities” to “guaranteeing properties at the design level,” and from “best efforts” to “principled protection.”

First phase — before deployment: systematically prove “global invariants.” AI tools supporting formal verification already help write specifications and reduce manual work.

Second phase — after deployment: turn these rules into protective barriers encoded as “runtime assertions.” Any transaction violating key security properties will be automatically rejected.

Almost every hacker attack so far would trigger such controls during execution, potentially stopping it. That’s why “code is law” is evolving toward “specification is law” — even with new attacks, attackers must adhere to the system’s core properties.

Predictive Markets: Scale, Reach, Intelligence

Predictive markets have entered the mainstream. By 2026, thanks to integration with cryptocurrencies and AI, their scale, reach, and quality will increase — but new challenges will also emerge.

More contracts will appear — from major elections to niche fields and complex cross-events. With these new contracts, questions will arise: how to balance their informational value? How to improve transparency with cryptography?

To handle the rapid growth, new “consensus mechanisms” are needed for contract settlement. Decentralized LLM oracles could help resolve disputes — such as lawsuit markets or election markets.

AI agents can gather signals to gain an edge in short-term trading, providing new insights into trend prediction. Their strategies will reveal key factors influencing complex social events.

Predictive markets will not replace polls — they will augment them. They will coexist with a “rich ecosystem of public opinion research.”

Media with Staked Assets

The traditional media model promotes “objectivity,” but its limitations are already visible. The internet has given everyone a voice — practitioners and builders share opinions directly, their perspectives reflect “interest alignments.”

Paradoxically, audiences respect them “precisely because they have interest alignments.”

The rise of social media is not the novelty — it’s the “emergence of cryptographic tools” enabling “publicly verifiable commitments.”

When AI reduces the costs of content generation — and even if biased — words alone become less credible. Here, tokens, programmable locks, predictive markets, and on-chain history come into play.

Commentators can prove they “practice what they preach” — by staking funds on their opinions. Analysts can link forecasts to “publicly settled markets,” creating auditable results.

This is “staked media” — accepting “interest alignments” and providing cryptographic proof of them. Credibility does not come from “pretended neutrality,” but from “publicly transparent, verifiable commitments.”

SNARKs: Cryptography Beyond Blockchain

For years, SNARKs — a technique for proving the correctness of computations without re-executing them — were limited to blockchain applications. The main reason: cost.

Generating a proof required 1 million times more work than the computation itself — only practical when distributed across thousands of nodes. In other cases, it was not feasible.

That is changing. By 2026, the cost of zero-knowledge VMs will fall to about 10,000 times — fast enough to run on a phone, cheap enough for widespread use.

By the end of the year, a single GPU will be able to “generate proofs of CPU execution in real-time.” This will enable “verifiable cloud computations” — if you need to run CPU tasks in the cloud, you will get a “cryptographic proof of correctness” for a reasonable fee.

Trading: Pausing, Not the Goal

Currently, almost all successful crypto companies — aside from stablecoins and infrastructure — have shifted to trading activities or are in the process of transformation.

But what if all of them become trading platforms? Congestion disperses users, leading to “monopoly of giants.”

This means that companies rushing into trading too quickly will miss the chance to build “more competitive and sustainable business models.” The speculative dynamics of cryptocurrencies easily tempt founders toward “immediate gratification.”

Trading is an important market function — but it should not be the ultimate goal of a company. Founders focused on the “essence of the product” have the best chance of long-term success.

Regulation as a Turning Point

Over the past decade, “legal uncertainty” has been one of the biggest challenges in building blockchain networks in the USA. Enforcement standards have been inconsistent, founders designed companies instead of networks.

“Avoiding legal risk” replaced “product strategy,” engineers gave way to lawyers. This led to practices where founders were advised to avoid transparency, token distribution became arbitrary, and governance — a formality.

Paradoxically, projects operating in the “gray area” grew faster than “honest and compliant builders.”

However, the US government is approaching the passage of a cryptocurrency market structure bill — which in 2026 could change this dynamic. If passed, it will eliminate these distortions and establish clear standards.

After the passage of stablecoin regulations, volume increased significantly. Regulations on the cryptocurrency market structure will bring an even greater change — this time focused on blockchain networks.

Such regulations will enable blockchain networks to “truly operate as networks” — open, autonomous, composable, reliably neutral, and decentralized.