The annual trading volume of stablecoins has reached $46 trillion, more than 20 times that of PayPal and nearly 3 times that of Visa, and this is only the prelude to the transformation. Seventeen predictions from top Silicon Valley VC a16z paint a picture: crypto technology is shifting from trading speculation to building the infrastructure for the next generation of finance and the internet.
1. The New Financial Artery: The Comprehensive Rise of Stablecoins
The traditional banking system is facing a historic challenge. Most global assets are still stored on core ledgers that have been operating for decades, programmed in COBOL, and interacting via batch file interfaces rather than APIs.
● Stablecoins are becoming the "upgrade patch" for the financial system: They allow financial institutions to build new products and serve new customers without rewriting legacy systems. Last year, stablecoins processed about $46 trillion in transaction volume, more than 20 times that of PayPal and nearly 3 times that of Visa.
A new generation of startups is working to fill the gap in "on/off ramps" between stablecoins and everyday finance. They connect digital dollars to familiar payment systems and local currencies through cryptographic proofs, regional network integration, and the construction of a global interoperable wallet layer.
● On-chain native finance is budding: Current real-world asset tokenization is often "skeuomorphic," simply transplanting traditional asset concepts onto the chain. A more promising direction is "on-chain native issuance," such as debt assets being initiated directly on-chain, rather than being generated off-chain and then tokenized.
The application scenarios for stablecoins are rapidly expanding. In the future, cross-border workers can receive real-time payments, merchants can accept global dollars without a bank account, and applications can instantly settle value with global users.
2. Agent Economy: When AI Owns On-Chain Identity
● The number of AI agents has far surpassed that of humans. In the financial services sector, "non-human identities" outnumber human employees by a ratio of 96 to 1, but these digital identities are like "ghosts" unable to access banking services.
● This has spawned a whole new infrastructure need: from "Know Your Customer" to "Know Your Agent". Agents need cryptographically signed credentials to transact, binding them to principals, constraints, and responsibilities. The window to build this identity system may be only a few months, rather than the decades required for traditional KYC infrastructure.
● AI is undertaking substantive research tasks. From being unable to understand workflows at the beginning of the year, to being able to issue abstract instructions like guiding a PhD student by the end of the year, the progress of AI models is astonishing. They can even autonomously solve problems from the Putnam Mathematical Competition, one of the world's most difficult university math exams.
● This capability heralds a new style of "polymath" research: AI can infer connections between different ideas, deduce the right direction from speculative answers, and even leverage the power of "model hallucinations" to open up new discoveries.
3. The Internet of Value: From Information Transmission to Value Flow
● The internet is becoming the bank itself. With the large-scale emergence of AI agents, more business is happening automatically in the background, and the way funds flow needs to be completely transformed.
● In a world where systems act based on "intent" rather than step-by-step instructions, value transfer must be as fast and free as information transfer today. Emerging foundational components like x402 will make settlement programmable and responsive.
● Agents can instantly and permissionlessly pay each other for data, GPU time, or API calls, completely bypassing traditional invoicing, reconciliation, and batch processing. Developers can release software updates with built-in payment rules, limits, and audit trails, without the need for fiat integration or bank intervention. The payment process will no longer be a separate operational layer, but will become a network behavior.
4. A New Era of Wealth Management for All
● Tokenization is democratizing wealth management. Traditionally, personalized wealth management services were only available to high-net-worth clients of banks, as customized advice across asset classes was expensive and complex to operate. As more asset classes are tokenized, crypto rails enable AI-recommended and assisted personalized strategies to be executed and rebalanced instantly at extremely low cost.
● This is not just robo-advisory, but active portfolio management accessible to everyone. By 2026, platforms will emerge that are built for "wealth accumulation" rather than just "wealth preservation." Fintech companies (such as Revolut and Robinhood) and centralized exchanges (such as Coinbase) will leverage their tech stack advantages to capture a larger share of this market.
● Meanwhile, DeFi tools like Morpho Vaults will automatically allocate assets to lending markets with the best risk-adjusted returns. Holding surplus liquidity as stablecoins instead of fiat, and investing in tokenized money market funds, further expands yield possibilities.
5. Privacy and Security: The Ultimate Moat in Crypto
● Privacy is becoming the most important moat for cryptocurrencies. For most blockchains, privacy was almost an afterthought, but now it is enough to make a chain stand out from the rest.
Privacy creates a "chain lock-in effect." When information is private, migrating from one chain to another becomes difficult, as crossing the boundary between private and public chains leaks metadata.
● Decentralized communication protocols are on the rise. As the world prepares for quantum computing, mainstream instant messaging apps, while adopting quantum encryption, still rely on trust in a single institution operating private servers.
In open networks, no individual, company, or country can deprive people of their ability to communicate. Applications may disappear, but people always control their own information and identity.
● DeFi security is evolving from "code is law" to "norms are law". Recent DeFi hacks targeting mature protocols show that standard security practices still largely rely on rules of thumb.
Future security approaches will focus more on design-level attributes, directly encoding key security properties as "runtime assertions" through runtime monitoring and enforcement.
6. A New Balance Between Technology and Law
● Legal frameworks are aligning with technical architectures. Over the past decade, one of the biggest obstacles to building blockchain networks in the US has been legal uncertainty. Legislative efforts such as the CLARITY Act aim to establish a clear regulatory framework for digital asset markets, ending the legal uncertainty that stifles innovation.
This act adopts a control-based "maturity framework," allowing blockchain projects to launch digital commodities and enter public markets without bearing the burden of excessive regulation.
● Crypto companies are shifting from trading to building. Today, almost all well-developed crypto companies seem to have already entered or are transitioning into the trading sector. a16z warns that companies that turn to trading too early may miss the opportunity to build more defensible and enduring businesses. Founders who focus on the "product" part of product-market fit may ultimately become bigger winners.
Advances in Jolt zkVM technology are reducing the computational cost of zero-knowledge proofs by several orders of magnitude. By the end of 2026, a single GPU may be able to generate proofs of CPU execution in real time. When AI agents begin to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, and when value flows freely on the internet like information, the financial system will no longer be a mapping of the real world, but will become an infrastructure integrated into the internet itself.
a16z partner Ali Yahya points out that privacy will become the most important moat for cryptocurrencies, and this may be the key turning point for crypto technology to move from the margins to the mainstream, evolving from a speculative tool to a foundational protocol.
