The five major consensus define the 2026 new encryption landscape: stablecoins, AI Agents, privacy coins, prediction markets, and the ultimate showdown of RWA

2025 is coming to an end, and the narrative cycle of the crypto industry has reached a turning point. From the fervor of the first half of the year to the gradual quieting in the second half, the market needs new growth stories. So what exactly will happen in 2026? We have compiled over 30 forecast reports from top research institutions such as Galaxy, Delphi Digital, a16z, Bitwise, Hashdex, Coinbase, and dozens of industry KOLs who have been engaged in research, product development, and investment on the front lines for a long time. From these, we have extracted five core consensus—this is the highest consensus across the entire industry for the coming year.

The Awakening of Privacy Coins: From Niche Ideals to Institutional Necessity

An unexpected highlight of 2025 comes from the privacy sector. While Bitcoin steadily rose and mainstream coins performed moderately, privacy coins achieved strong growth surpassing the industry average. This is not a coincidence but a market response to a long-overlooked real demand.

As more funds, data, and automated decision-making move on-chain, on-chain transparency has shifted from a “feature” to an “unbearable cost.” Galaxy Research analyst Christopher Rosa made a startling prediction: The total market cap of privacy coins will surpass $10 billion by the end of 2026.

This prediction is not baseless. In the last quarter of 2025 alone, three major privacy coins demonstrated strong appeal—Zcash up 800%, Railgun up 204%, Monero up 53%. What does this reflect? It indicates that institutional investors and large holders are beginning to seriously consider a question once seen as idealistic: Am I truly willing to have all crypto asset balances, transaction paths, and fund structures permanently public?

Interestingly, this topic is not new. Early Bitcoin developers, including Satoshi Nakamoto himself, explored privacy technologies. But back then, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) were far from mature. Today, the situation is completely different— as zero-knowledge proofs move from theory to engineering practice, and on-chain value explodes, privacy needs have upgraded from “moral considerations” to “institutional-grade necessity.”

Mysten Labs co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun proposed the concept of “Data as Infrastructure” from a deeper perspective. In a future where AI Agents and automation systems flourish, every model and agent depends on data. But today, most data channels are opaque, volatile, and non-auditable. In finance or healthcare, this is almost an insurmountable obstacle. His “Secrets-as-a-Service” framework suggests that the future requires not just retrofitted privacy features but native, programmable data access infrastructure—enforcing data access rules, client-side encryption mechanisms, decentralized key management systems, with all rules enforced on-chain.

The Transformation of Prediction Markets: From Gambling to Information Aggregators

Once, prediction markets were synonymous with “decentralized gambling.” But the story in 2026 will be much more complex—prediction markets are evolving into information aggregation and decision support tools.

a16z’s Andy Hall and Stanford political economy professor believe that prediction markets have crossed the threshold of “whether they will go mainstream.” With deep integration of crypto and AI, prediction markets will become larger, broader, and smarter. But this expansion brings new complexity challenges—higher trading frequency, faster information feedback, and more automated participation structures.

How exaggerated are the numbers? Galaxy Research’s Will Owens predicts that Polymarket’s weekly trading volume will stabilize above $1.5 billion in 2026. This is not a fantasy—Polymarket’s weekly trading volume is already close to $1 billion, driven by three factors: new heights of capital efficiency and market liquidity, AI-driven increase in order flow and trading frequency, and Polymarket’s ongoing enhancement of configuration capabilities to accelerate capital inflow.

Bitwise’s Ryan Rasmussen offers a more aggressive view: Polymarket’s open interest will surpass the record high set during the 2024 US election. The driving factors are clear—US users’ openness has released a large influx of new users, with nearly $2 billion in new capital pouring in, expanding from political to economic, sports, and cultural markets across all dimensions.

Independent analyst Tomasz Tunguz also predicts that by 2026, the adoption rate of prediction markets among the US population will jump from the current 5% to 35%—approaching the 56% adoption rate of gambling in the US. In other words, prediction markets are evolving from niche financial tools into mainstream information consumption products.

But Galaxy also sounds a warning: Prediction markets may face federal investigation. As regulation relaxes and on-chain trading volume surges, some controversial incidents have frequently surfaced—insider trading with non-public information, manipulation of major sporting events. Because prediction markets allow pseudo-anonymous trading (unlike traditional gambling platforms with strict KYC), the temptation for insiders to abuse information has greatly increased. Future investigations may be triggered not just by anomalies in regulated gambling systems but directly by suspicious price fluctuations in on-chain prediction markets.

The Wake-up Call for RWA: From “Tokenization of Everything” to Execution Power

Compared to the frenzy of “everything on-chain” in the past two years, the narrative around RWA (Real-World Assets) in 2026 is much more sober—keywords shift from “market size” to “actual implementation.”

a16z analyst Guy Wuollet candidly points out the current bottleneck of RWA: Most “tokenized assets” are essentially just a different shell of technology. After being tokenized on US stocks, commodities, or indices, their trading logic and risk structures remain deeply rooted in traditional finance, without leveraging the native advantages of crypto systems.

But a real breakthrough may come from an seemingly insignificant area—collateral. Galaxy Research’s aggressive prediction is: By 2026, a major bank or broker will officially accept tokenized stocks as fully equivalent collateral within legal and risk frameworks. This milestone’s significance far exceeds any single product launch. So far, tokenized stocks have been confined to small-scale DeFi experiments or private chain pilots by large banks, with no substantial connection to mainstream financial systems. But the situation is changing—traditional financial infrastructure providers are accelerating migration to blockchain systems, and regulatory attitudes are becoming more friendly.

Hashdex is even more optimistic, predicting that tokenized real-world assets will grow 10-fold, supported by three factors: clarified regulatory frameworks, readiness of traditional financial institutions, and mature technological infrastructure.

The Payment Infrastructure Revolution of AI Agents

Many underestimate the speed of this change. As AI Agents begin autonomous task execution and high-frequency decision-making, they inherently require fast, cheap, permissionless value transfer systems—similar to information transmission.

Traditional payment systems are designed for humans, involving accounts, identities, settlement cycles, which are all friction costs for Agents. Cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins paired with protocols like x402, are tailor-made for this scenario: instant settlement, support for micro-payments, native programmability, permissionless.

2026 is likely to become the year when Agent economy payment infrastructure moves from proof of concept to large-scale application.

But what is the deeper bottleneck? a16z co-founder, Circle and USDC architect Sean Neville points out that the problem has shifted from “lack of intelligence” to “lack of identity.” In the financial system, non-human identities already outnumber human employees at a ratio of 96:1, but these identities are almost all “ghosts without bank accounts.” The financial industry lacks KYA (Know Your Agent, similar to KYC).

Just as humans need credit scores to get loans, AI Agents need cryptographic signatures as credentials to prove who they represent, who constrains them, and who is responsible if something goes wrong. Before KYA is implemented, many merchants can only block Agents at firewall levels. Decades of KYC development mean that KYA might only have a few months’ window.

The a16z team further emphasizes that Agents need cryptographic circuits for micro-payments, data access, and computation power settlement. The x402 standard will become the payment backbone of the Agent economy. The key assets are no longer models but scarce, high-quality real data (DePAI).

Galaxy Research analyst Lucas Tcheyan provides a very specific quantitative forecast: By 2026, payments compliant with the x402 standard will account for 30% of Base’s daily transaction volume and 5% of Solana’s non-voting transactions. This marks the direct entry of standardized payment primitives into the execution layer of on-chain Agent interactions. Base will benefit from Coinbase’s promotion of the x402 standard, while Solana, with its large developer and user base, will become another pole. Meanwhile, some new public chains focused on payments (such as Tempo and Arc) will rapidly rise during this process.

The Great Integration of Stablecoins: From Crypto Tools to Financial Infrastructure

The most consensual and certain narrative is about stablecoins. By 2026, stablecoins will complete their ultimate transformation from “crypto tools” to “mainstream financial infrastructure.”

Data is most convincing. a16z points out this issue with almost “indisputable” evidence: last year, stablecoins generated $4.6 trillion in transaction volume. What does this mean? It is 20 times PayPal’s annual transaction volume, 3 times Visa’s, and close to the scale of the US ACH (Automated Clearing House).

But a16z also soberly notes that the question is not “whether there is demand for stablecoins,” but how these digital dollars will truly enter people’s daily financial cycles—the most specific and complex parts: access, payments, settlement, and consumption.

They observe that a new generation of startups is focusing on this problem. Some use cryptographic proofs to enable users to convert local account balances into digital dollars without exposing privacy; some directly integrate regional banking networks, QR codes, real-time payment systems, turning stablecoins into local transfers; others are building truly interoperable global wallets and card platforms at a deeper level, allowing stablecoins to be spent directly at everyday merchants.

The profound conclusion is: “As these channels mature, digital dollars will be directly integrated into local payment systems and merchant tools, creating new behavioral patterns. Employees can receive cross-border real-time wages, merchants can accept global dollars without bank accounts, and applications can settle value instantly with users anywhere in the world. Stablecoins will evolve from niche financial tools into the foundational layer of internet settlement infrastructure.”

a16z researcher Sam Broner explains this process from an “engineering” perspective: Modern banking software systems are already outdated for today’s developers. The core ledgers still run on mainframes, using COBOL, with interfaces still batch processing rather than APIs. These systems are stable, reliable, and deeply embedded in reality, but almost impossible to evolve quickly. Adding real-time payment features alone can take months or even years, with huge technical debt and regulatory complexity. Stablecoins fill this gap perfectly.

Route 2 FI, a research firm, also lists “stablecoins (traditional financial implementation and circuits)” as a major narrative for 2026, emphasizing that traditional financial institutions will adopt stablecoin technology and build corresponding financial circuits.

Galaxy Research’s prediction is the most direct and aggressive: By the end of 2026, 30% of international payments will be completed via stablecoins. Bitwise’s conclusion echoes this but focuses on market size: predicting that stablecoin market cap will double by 2026, with key variables including the enactment of the GENIUS Act in early 2026 creating new growth opportunities and attracting competitors.

In short, 2026 will be a critical turning point for stablecoins moving from the periphery to the core.

Beyond Consensus: The Major Shift in Application Layer Value Capture

Beyond the five major consensus points, almost all institutions have proposed an interesting but not fully consensual view—a paradigm shift from “fat protocols” to “fat applications.”

Value is no longer primarily concentrated in the base layer and general protocols but gradually shifting to the application layer. This is not because the base layer is unimportant, but because the entities that truly interact with users, data, and cash flow are still the applications themselves.

This also sparks a highly controversial discussion: Ethereum, the flagship aiming to become the “world computer,” has always embodied the “fat protocol” paradigm. But in the trend of “fat applications,” how will its value evolve? Some believe it will continue to benefit as the foundation for tokenization and financial infrastructure; others think it may gradually evolve into a “boring but necessary” base network, with most value absorbed by upper-layer applications.

As for Bitcoin, most analyses expect it to continue performing strongly in 2026, reinforced by institutional demand through ETFs and spot ETFs, consolidating its position as a “macro asset” and “digital gold.” But the threat of quantum computing remains real.