Enterprise agency a16z has launched its annual crypto predictions, outlining a sweeping shift in how blockchains, AI brokers, and world funds will function by 2026.
The analysis highlights three core forces — autonomous brokers, disappearing cost rails, and a brand new period of privacy-first blockchains. All of those developments collectively sign a structural redesign of the web’s monetary layer.
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AI Brokers Will Drive a Huge Shift
Essentially the most consequential shift, in response to a16z, is the rise of AI brokers as financial individuals. For each human in monetary providers, brokers now outnumber staff practically 100 to 1.
Nevertheless, these autonomous methods nonetheless lack identification, permissions, or compliance buildings. The agency argues that 2026 will introduce the primary model of KYA: Know Your Agent, a cryptographic identification layer linking brokers to their homeowners, constraints, and liabilities.
With out this, brokers will stay “unbanked ghosts,” unable to transact safely or entry actual markets. With it, they grow to be programmable market actors able to spending, buying and selling, and settling worth in actual time.
Funds Vanish into the Web’s Plumbing
This shift drives the second main prediction: funds will vanish into the community itself. As AI brokers set off transactions mechanically — shopping for information, paying for GPU time, or settling API calls — cash should transfer with the identical pace and granularity as data.
Rising primitives like x402 allow worth switch to happen immediately, permissionlessly, and with out intermediaries.
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On this mannequin, funds cease being an utility layer and grow to be a local community habits. Banks, stablecoins, and settlement methods grow to be invisible infrastructure working beneath agent-to-agent commerce.
Privateness Chains Will Dominate
Privateness kinds the third pillar of a16z’s 2026 outlook. The agency argues that privateness will grow to be the strongest moat in crypto, far outweighing efficiency or throughput.
Extra particularly, as soon as transactions grow to be personal, customers face actual friction when switching chains as a result of shifting secrets and techniques leaks metadata. This creates “privateness lock-in,” a winner-take-most impact for the chains that get privateness proper.
Arthur Hayes echoed the identical level earlier, stating that institutional adoption can not scale on public-by-default blockchains.
“These giant establishments don’t need their data public or susceptible to going public,” he stated, noting that Layer-2 privateness options could emerge first whereas Ethereum stays the underlying safety substrate.
Different a16z crypto predictions spotlight rising stablecoin infrastructure, the shift from tokenization to on-chain origination, verifiable cloud computing by way of sooner SNARKs, and the emergence of “staked media,” the place commentators show credibility by way of on-chain commitments.