The Great Crypto Financial Shift of 2026: From AI Agents to the Value Internet, Everything Is Being Rewritten

Have you ever thought about what the traditional financial system would look like when AI can trade autonomously, wages are received in real-time, and privacy is thoroughly protected? According to the latest 17 predictions from Silicon Valley top venture capital firm a16z, the answer might be more radical than you imagine—cryptography is evolving from a speculative tool into the infrastructure of the next-generation internet and finance.

The Ultimate Upgrade of Financial Arteries: How Stablecoins Bypass Outdated Systems

The global financial system is facing an awkward reality: most of the world’s assets are still recorded on old ledgers from decades ago, written in COBOL, communicating through batch processing rather than APIs. This is not a minor issue—it’s a systemic inefficiency.

Stablecoins are becoming an “external patch.” Last year, stablecoins handled $4.6 trillion in transactions—more than 20 times PayPal’s volume and nearly three times Visa’s. Banks and financial institutions don’t need to overhaul their legacy systems; by connecting to the stablecoin network, they can serve new customers and create new products.

Rather than a revolution, this is a gradual architectural upgrade. A new wave of startups is solving the “in and out” problem—using cryptographic proofs, regional network integration, and global interoperable wallet layers to connect stablecoins with everyday payments and local currencies. Imagine: overseas workers receiving wages in real-time, merchants globally accepting USD without bank accounts, and applications settling instantly with users—these scenarios are gradually becoming reality by 2026.

Even more interesting is the rise of “on-chain native finance.” Current tokenization is mostly “copy-paste”—transferring existing assets onto the chain. The true future is issuing new financial products like bonds and derivatives directly on the chain, rather than tokenizing them afterward.

The Identity Dilemma of AI Agents: From “Know Your Customer” to “Know Your Agent”

Here’s a shocking number: AI non-human identities in financial services are over 96 times more than human employees. But these digital identities are like ghosts—they can’t access banking services.

This has created a new demand. AI needs cryptographically signed certificates to complete transactions, which must be bound to trusted sources, permission limits, and accountability mechanisms. Traditional KYC (Know Your Customer) systems took ten years to establish, but an “understand your agent” identity system could take only a few months.

Surprisingly, AI is already performing complex research tasks. From initial confusion about task workflows at the start of the year to providing abstract guidance comparable to graduate students by year’s end—AI’s rapid progress is beyond imagination. They can even autonomously solve problems from the Putnam Mathematical Competition (one of the world’s hardest university math exams). This means AI can not only execute tasks but also perform “generalist research”—discovering connections across fields, deriving conclusions from hypotheses, and even using model “hallucinations” to find new insights.

The Internet of Value: Why Can’t Money Flow Freely Like Information?

If the internet changed the flow of information, then the future internet will become a bank. When AI systems automatically execute business processes, the way capital flows must change fundamentally.

Imagine a world driven by “intent” rather than “step-by-step instructions.” The transfer of value must be as fast and as free as the transfer of information today. New foundational protocols (like the x402 standard) will make payments programmable and reactive.

AI agents can instantly and permissionlessly pay for data, GPU time, and API calls, completely bypassing traditional invoicing, reconciliation, and batch processing workflows. Software updates can embed payment rules, credit limits, and audits directly, without fiat currency integration or bank involvement. Payments are no longer a separate operational layer but integrated into network behavior itself.

The Era of Democratized Wealth Management Is Coming

Traditional wealth management has been an exclusive game for the wealthy. One-on-one consulting is too expensive, and customized asset allocation is too complex—only high-net-worth clients could afford it.

Tokenization has changed all that. As more assets are tokenized, crypto solutions enable AI-driven advice and semi-automated strategies to execute and rebalance instantly at near-zero cost. This is not just “robo-advisors”—it’s open to everyone, actively democratizing portfolio management.

By 2026, platforms designed specifically for “wealth accumulation” rather than just “wealth preservation” will emerge. Fintech companies like Revolut, Robinhood, and centralized exchanges like Coinbase will compete for this market with technological advantages. Meanwhile, DeFi tools like Morpho Vaults will automatically diversify assets into the most risk-adjusted lending markets. Using stablecoins instead of fiat as liquidity reserves and investing in tokenized money market funds will further amplify yields.

Privacy Is the True Moat

For most blockchains, privacy has been an afterthought. But now, privacy could become a unique competitive advantage for a particular chain. Privacy creates “high switching costs”—when information is kept confidential, migrating from one chain to another becomes difficult because crossing private and public chain boundaries exposes metadata.

Decentralized communication protocols are accelerating. Mainstream messaging apps use quantum encryption but still rely on privately controlled servers. Open networks guarantee that no individual, company, or country can cut off people’s communication. Apps may fade away, but individuals will always control their information and identity.

The security paradigm of DeFi is also evolving—from “code is law” to “design attributes are law.” Recent hacks targeting mature DeFi protocols show that security practices still heavily depend on experience-based rules. Future security designs will embed key security properties as runtime assertions through real-time monitoring and enforcement, making security less reliant on post-hoc patches.

New Balance Between Regulation and Technology

If the biggest obstacle in the past decade was legal uncertainty, now the breakthrough is that legal frameworks are adapting to technological architectures. Legislation like the “CLARITY Act” has a clear goal: to establish a clear regulatory framework for digital asset markets and end the stifling ambiguity that hampers innovation. This bill uses a “maturity framework” based on control rights, allowing blockchain projects to issue digital products and access public markets without excessive regulation.

From Trading to Building: A Major Shift

This is a crucial step: almost all successful crypto companies are shifting from trading to building. a16z warns that companies focusing too early on trading may miss the opportunity to build more solid and long-term businesses. The real winners are founders who focus on “product-market fit.”

Technological progress is accelerating. The development of Jolt zkVM has reduced the cost of zero-knowledge proof computations by several orders of magnitude. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs in real-time for CPU execution. As AI agents begin autonomous review, trading, and decision-making, and as value flows freely on the internet like information, the financial system will no longer mirror the physical world but become part of the internet infrastructure.

According to a16z partner Ali Yahya, privacy will become the most critical line of defense for cryptography. This could be the pivotal moment when cryptography moves from the fringes to the mainstream and from a speculative tool to a foundational protocol.