Messari has released "The Crypto Theses 2026," which predicts future trends in public chains, DeFi, AI, DePIN, and TradFi. From Messari's perspective, 2026 will be a pivotal year for cryptocurrency, marking a shift from "speculation" to "system-level integration."
To facilitate reading, we have condensed the original text, extracting the most core conclusions and viewpoints for quick insights into the next big opportunity.
Cryptomoney is the Foundation of the Entire Industry
Bitcoin has clearly distinguished itself from all other crypto assets and is undoubtedly the most representative and mature "cryptomoney" today.
The relative underperformance of BTC in the second half of this year is partly due to increased selling pressure from early, large holders. We do not believe this underperformance will evolve into a long-term structural issue; Bitcoin's "monetary narrative" will remain solid in the foreseeable future.
The valuation of L1 is gradually decoupling from fundamentals. L1 revenues have significantly declined year-on-year, and their valuations increasingly rely on a "monetary premium" assumption. With few exceptions, we expect most L1s to underperform BTC.
ETH remains the most controversial asset. Concerns about its value capture ability have not been fully alleviated, but market performance in the second half of 2025 indicates that the market is willing to view ETH as a cryptocurrency similar to BTC to some extent. If a crypto bull market returns in 2026, Ethereum's Data Availability Tokens (DATs) may experience a "second life."
ZEC is increasingly being priced as a "privacy cryptocurrency" rather than just a niche privacy coin. This positions it as a complementary hedge asset to BTC in an era of heightened surveillance, deepening institutionalization, and increasing financial repression.
Application layers may begin to choose to establish their own monetary systems rather than relying on the native assets of the networks they operate on. Applications with social attributes and strong network effects are particularly likely to move in this direction.
The Convergence of TradFi x Crypto
The "GENIUS Act" has reshaped the positioning of stablecoins: stablecoins have transitioned from being crypto-native trading tools to components of the U.S. monetary policy system, igniting competition among banks, fintech companies, and tech giants for control of the "digital dollar" infrastructure (payment and settlement rails).
Tether's valuation of approximately $500 billion reflects its strong profitability, but the "GENIUS Act" has also brought heavyweight players like JPMorgan and Google into the same arena. We expect Tether to maintain its dominance in economies characterized by relatively loose compliance requirements and "dollarization," while traditional institutions with brand, compliance, and distribution advantages will capture the majority share in developed markets.
Banks are integrating stablecoins into existing payment systems, while Cloudflare and Google are building underlying infrastructure for the almost non-existent "agentic commerce." As AI Agent-driven transactions scale on these rails, the convergence of technology, finance, and AI is expected to become the dominant narrative in 2026.
Declining interest rates will drive capital towards crypto-native yield opportunities, including funding spreads, token arbitrage, and GPU-collateralized lending. This round of yield cycles will rely more on real cash flows rather than token inflation, thereby constructing a more robust and sustainable yield structure.
In 2025, the tokenization of RWA (Real-World Assets) reached $18 billion, primarily concentrated in U.S. Treasury and credit assets—these are the earliest directions to achieve product-market fit (PMF). As DTCC receives SEC authorization to tokenize U.S. securities, this scale is expected to expand further, potentially bringing trillions of dollars of assets onto crypto infrastructure.
Decentralized Internet Finance
Proactive AMMs (Prop AMMs) and CLOBs (Centralized Limit Order Books) will replace passive AMMs, becoming the mainstream architecture of DEXs. As on-chain infrastructure expands, these architectures can provide better execution quality and narrower spreads.
Modular lending protocols (like Morpho) will surpass integrated (monolithic) lending platforms. By providing flexible, isolated vaults, they will better align with the risk and compliance preferences of institutions and neobanks.
Equity Perpetual Contracts are expected to break through in 2026, providing global users with high leverage, borderless stock exposure while avoiding friction from off-chain regulation.
Yield-bearing stablecoins will replace "passive" stablecoins, becoming the core collateral asset of DeFi, narrowing the gap between reserve yields and actual user returns.
DeFi Banks will emerge as a response from the crypto world to new banks, packaging savings, payments, and lending functions into high-margin, fully self-custodied applications.
Decentralized AI
The ongoing explosion in computing power demand + improvements in open-source model capabilities are opening new revenue streams for decentralized computing networks.
Decentralized Data Foundries that can establish absolute advantages in a specific cutting-edge application scenario will become the most profitable participants in the entire deAI tech stack.
DeAI Labs will form "faith-like" community followings around medium-scale open-source models with clear differentiation. This model size range continues to show strong model-market fit.
Darwinian Networks will promote the destigmatization of the crypto industry through a positive cycle: attracting top talent and introducing institutional demand, thereby continuously strengthening themselves.
AI Agent Co-pilots will package the DeFAI tech stack into a unified "terminal entry," leveraging a powerful data flywheel to directly challenge existing mainstream consumer-facing front-end entries.
As prediction markets scale, AI Agents provide pathways for continuous information aggregation, more stable liquidity, and higher quality pricing calibration—significantly reducing systemic bias without altering the fundamental market structure.
DePIN is the Frontier
Vertically integrated DePIN networks (from underlying resources to finished products aimed at enterprises/consumers) are most capable of achieving sustainable revenue and higher profit margins, fundamentally addressing demand-side issues.
As the demand for scarce real-world data accelerates, DePAI data collection protocols are expected to break through in 2026. With DePIN-style incentive mechanisms, their data collection speed and scale will significantly outperform centralized solutions.
InfraFi will become an explosive adjacent track to DePIN: by bringing on-chain capital into new infrastructure areas (like debt financing) that traditional private credit struggles to cover, it will open channels between capital and real infrastructure.
Clear regulations will significantly expand the builder community for DePIN and accelerate enterprise-level participation—on one hand, reducing the uncertainty of token design, and on the other, making deeply integrated DePIN business models feasible for enterprises.
By 2026, DePIN is expected to achieve over $100 million in on-chain verifiable revenue: on one hand, the annual revenue of mature protocols will leap from tens of millions to over a hundred million; on the other hand, a new batch of blue-chip DePIN projects will complete their TGE (Token Generation Event).
The Time for Consumer Crypto is Now
The fee value stack has shifted from "chain" to "application." When block space is no longer a bottleneck, consumer crypto is evolving into an application-centric economy: applications capture the main revenue and can finally optimize around user experience.
The clearest PMF at the consumer level appears in "market as product" scenarios. Memecoins/NFTs and prediction markets exist because they embed ownership and pricing mechanisms directly into cultural behaviors and information acquisition processes, rather than awkwardly grafting crypto capabilities onto existing applications.
Prediction markets have completed the leap from election scenarios to continuous use. 2025 validated non-political demand (sports/crypto/culture), while distribution-level partners (like Robinhood) became key accelerators of demand explosion.
Financialized social interactions are still in their early stages, but there is real design space. The opportunity lies not in "decentralized social" itself, but in making content, creators, and interactions tradable, thereby creating a whole new user experience.
"Atypical RWA" is becoming a new consumer-level entry point. Tokenization is beginning to improve non-financial goods markets (like collectible cards and gacha), showing a clear path to on-chain liquidity, verifiable provenance, and composable financial layers, reshaping the collectibles track.
Disruption Factor (DF): A Conceptual Validation Framework for Evaluating Layer 2 Protocols
The crypto world has never lacked activity. New chains, new tokens, new narratives—each cycle brings explosive growth in innovation and noise. However, one question remains difficult to answer: which projects truly have the opportunity to create lasting impact?
In the development of Messari, we have tried various best available frameworks, from traditional valuation methods to network and market structure models, striving to find a reliable and straightforward project evaluation method. Each practice revealed the same flaw: the way protocols succeed differs from traditional companies, and no single traditional analytical perspective can reliably measure whether a project is accumulating lasting advantages over the long term.
Messari introduces the concept framework of Disruption Factor (DF) to address this issue. The construction of the Disruption Factor follows four guiding principles: transparency; customizability; long-termism; open-source and evolution.
The Disruption Factor measures the depth of a crypto project’s integration into the real world and mainstream user behavior. It assesses not only on-chain activity but also whether these activities effectively replace traditional systems, attract non-crypto-native users, and convert into sticky long-term adoption.
This conceptual validation scored 13 L2s. The results show a clear "barbell" pattern: Arbitrum One (70) and Base (67) stand out as leaders; OP Mainnet (58) is in the second tier; the remaining projects are all below 49, indicating that many L2s are still in early stages, niche areas, or yet to prove their durability.
Written by: Messari
Original Title: The Crypto Theses 2026
Compiled by: ODIG Invest
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