2026 will have five hot directions: what do financial institutions say about crypto and markets

The year just concluded saw the crypto sector cool off significantly compared to previous peaks. But what to expect from 2026? An in-depth analysis of over 30 reports from players like Galaxy Research, Coinbase, a16z, Bitwise, Delphi Digital, and Hashdex reveals five financial market forecasts with surprising convergence. Industry insiders ignoring these scenarios risk missing out on significant opportunities.

Stablecoins: from crypto tool to global financial infrastructure

The most profound transformation that 2026 will bring concerns stablecoins. The leap will not be so much in usage volume but in their structural role: they will shift from niche specialists to an essential component of mainstream finance.

Numbers already tell this story. In just the past year, the transaction volume of stablecoins reached $46 trillion—an almost incomprehensible figure compared to PayPal (about $2 trillion annually) or Visa ($15 trillion). Yet, analysts emphasize, the real bottleneck is not demand but how these digital dollars truly penetrate ordinary economic cycles: deposits, withdrawals, payments, daily settlements.

A generation of startups is tackling exactly this problem. Some use cryptographic proofs for privacy-preserving conversions between local accounts and digital dollars. Others directly integrate QR codes and regional banking networks. Still others are building interoperable global card infrastructures.

Galaxy Research predicts a concrete outcome: 30% of international payments will be made via stablecoins by the end of 2026. Bitwise doubles down, hypothesizing that total market capitalization will double in the same period, fueled by the enactment of the GENIUS Act.

What will make all this possible? The answer comes from a technical analysis by a16z: legacy banking systems remain stuck on mainframes and COBOL, with batch interfaces instead of modern APIs. Adding even a single real-time payment feature requires months of work. Stablecoins offer a native alternative: instant settlement, without intermediaries, without the technical and regulatory complexity that paralyzes traditional infrastructure.

AI Agent: when machines start trading and paying

The second pillar of financial market forecasts for 2026 concerns something even more radical: autonomous AI agents will become structural economic participants, no longer just experiments.

The logic is elegant. When agents make real-time decisions, perform tasks autonomously, and interact at very high frequency, they need the same as humans to transfer value: speed, low cost, permissionless operation. Traditional payment systems—designed around accounts, identities, and settlement cycles—introduce unacceptable frictions for machines operating in milliseconds.

But there is an even deeper issue, according to Sean Neville of a16z, co-architect of USDC. In the modern financial system, “non-human identities” already outnumber human workers at a ratio of 96 to 1, but almost all are “ghosts without bank accounts.” The concept of KYA (Know Your Agent), the equivalent of identity for machines, is missing: cryptographic credentials proving who they represent, who controls them, and who is responsible in case of issues.

The sector has spent decades building KYC. For KYA, the available time might be only a few months.

The x402 standard will become the cement of this economy. Lucas Tcheyan of Galaxy Research quantifies the phenomenon: by 2026, compliant x402 payments will account for 30% of daily volume on Base and 5% of non-voting transactions on Solana. Base will benefit from Coinbase’s push, while Solana will establish itself as the second hub thanks to its developer community.

RWA: tokenization regains sobriety

The narrative of Real World Assets has undergone a radical transformation. The initial enthusiasm for “everything can become a token” has given way to a much more pragmatic question: does it really work?

Guy Wuollet of a16z diagnoses the problem with surgical precision. To date, most so-called “tokenized assets” remain a simulation: they have simply “changed technological wrapper” while maintaining the design logic, trading mechanisms, and risk structure of the traditional financial world. They rarely leverage the native capabilities of crypto systems.

The true turning point, according to Galaxy Research, will not come from a new product but from a structural event: a major bank will accept on-chain tokenized shares as official collateral. So far, tokenized shares remain confined to DeFi experiments or pilots on private blockchains. But regulators are becoming significantly more accommodating, and traditional financial infrastructure providers are accelerating migration to blockchain-based systems.

Hashdex provides an ambitious metric: a tenfold growth of real-world assets tokenized in 2026, driven by regulatory clarity, institutional readiness, and technical maturity.

Predictive markets: when “gambling” becomes collective intelligence aggregation

Another surprise: predictive markets are not just growing as a form of decentralized betting but as decision support infrastructure and information aggregation.

Andy Hall of a16z, a political economy professor at Stanford, argues that predictive markets have crossed the threshold to become mainstream. By 2026, with deeper integration between crypto and AI, they will become larger, more sophisticated, and smarter. But this progress brings new challenges: higher trading frequencies, instant feedback, increasingly automated participation structures require new solutions to judge results fairly.

Will Owens of Galaxy Research provides a precise projection: Polymarket’s weekly volume will consistently exceed $1.5 billion in 2026. Three factors will drive this growth: deeper capital efficiencies amplifying liquidity, AI-driven order flows accelerating transaction frequency, and Polymarket’s ongoing improvement in distribution capacity.

Ryan Rasmussen of Bitwise goes further: he predicts that Polymarket’s open interest will surpass the all-time high reached during the 2024 US presidential elections. The opening to US users has brought in steady new capital flows, and the market catalog has expanded from politics to economics, sports, and pop culture.

But Galaxy also sounds an alarm: federal investigations could emerge. With the rapid increase in volume and scandals related to insider trading and manipulation of major events, regulators will likely start investigating anomalous price movements in on-chain predictive markets, where anonymity is the default.

Privacy coin: the inevitable comeback

With increasing capital, data, and automated decisions migrating on-chain, total exposure becomes an unsustainable cost. 2025 already showed the signal: privacy coins recorded increases even higher than Bitcoin and major cryptocurrencies.

Christopher Rosa of Galaxy Research provides a highly impactful forecast: the total market cap of privacy coins will surpass $100 billion by the end of 2026. Zcash increased by 800% in the last quarter of 2025, Railgun by 204%, while Monero posted a more moderate rise of 53%.

The question has shifted from idealistic to more institutional: deposits grow on-chain, and more and more investors—especially institutional—are seriously asking whether they are truly willing to make all their crypto asset balances, transaction paths, and cash flow structures public forever.

Adeniyi Abiodun of Mysten Labs delves deeper into the problem at an even more fundamental level: data. Every model, every agent, every automated system is built on data, but today, informational channels remain opaque, unreliable, and unverifiable. For consumer applications, this may be tolerable; for finance and healthcare, it is an almost insurmountable obstacle.

The solution is to think of “privacy as an infrastructural service”: executable on-chain data access rules, client-side encryption, decentralized key management systems that define who can decrypt what, under what circumstances, and for how long. Not added as an afterthought, but as a native part of the public network.

A final consideration: “fat protocols” give way to “fat applications”

Almost all institutions have raised a secondary but crucial issue: the historical trend of value capture is reversing. Traditionally, value was concentrated in base protocols and L1 layers. But in 2026, value capture begins migrating toward the application layer—the place where direct contact with users, data, and cash flows occurs.

This dynamic raises uncomfortable questions about Ethereum, the historical architect of the “fat protocols” theory. Will it continue to benefit as a fundamental infrastructure for tokenization and finance? Or will it evolve into a “boring but necessary base layer” as most value is absorbed by the application layers built on top?

For Bitcoin, the consensus remains positive: it will continue to perform well in 2026 thanks to institutional demand via ETFs, consolidating its role as a macro asset and “digital gold”—although the threat of quantum computing remains real.