Stablecoins have an annual trading volume of up to $46 trillion, far exceeding PayPal by 20 times and approaching Visa by 3 times, and this is just the prelude to a transformation. The 17 predictions from top Silicon Valley venture capital firm a16z paint a picture: cryptocurrency technology is shifting from trading speculation to building the infrastructure for the next generation of finance and the internet.

1. New Financial Arteries: The Comprehensive Rise of Stablecoins

The traditional banking system faces historic challenges. Most global assets are still stored on core ledgers that have been running for decades, programmed in COBOL, and interact through 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 approximately $46 trillion in transaction volume, which is more than 20 times that of PayPal and nearly 3 times that of Visa.

A new generation of startups is working to fill the "deposit and withdrawal channel" gap 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 globally interoperable wallet layers.

● On-chain native finance is budding: Current tokenization of real-world assets is often "reified," simply transplanting traditional asset concepts onto the chain. A more promising direction is "on-chain native issuance," where debt assets are 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 salaries in real-time, merchants can accept global dollars without a bank account, and applications can settle value instantly with global users.

2. Agent Economy: When AI Has On-Chain Identity

● The number of AI agents has far surpassed that of humans. In the financial services sector, the number of "non-human identities" exceeds human employees by a ratio of 96 to 1, but these digital identities are like "ghosts" that cannot access banking services.

● This has given rise to a new infrastructure demand: from "Know Your Customer" to "Know Your Agent". Agents need cryptographic signature credentials to transact, which bind them to their principals, constraints, and responsibilities. The time window to build this identity system may only be a few months, rather than the decades required for traditional KYC infrastructure.

● AI is taking on substantive research tasks. From struggling to understand workflows at the beginning of the year to issuing abstract instructions like a PhD advisor by the end of the year, the pace of AI model advancement is astonishing. They can even autonomously solve problems in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, one of the hardest college math exams in the world.

● This capability heralds a new type of "generalist" research style: AI can infer connections between different ideas, deduce the correct direction from speculative answers, and even leverage the power of "model hallucination" to make new discoveries.

3. Value Internet: From Information Transmission to Value Flow

● The internet is becoming the bank itself. As AI agents emerge on a large scale, more business happens automatically in the background, necessitating a complete change in how funds flow.

● In a world where systems act based on "intent" rather than step-by-step instructions, value transfer must be as fast and free as today's information transfer. Emerging foundational components like x402 will make settlement programmable and responsive.

● Agents can pay each other instantly and without permission for data, GPU time, or API calls, completely bypassing traditional invoicing, reconciliation, and batch processing. Software updates released by developers can come 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 rather a network behavior.

4. A New Era of Wealth Management for All

● Tokenization is democratizing wealth management. Traditionally, personalized wealth management services were limited to high-net-worth clients of banks, as customized advice across asset classes was costly and complex. As more asset classes are tokenized, crypto rails enable personalized strategies driven by AI recommendations and assisted driving to be executed and rebalanced instantly at very low costs.

● This is not just robo-advisory; it is active portfolio management accessible to everyone. By 2026, platforms will emerge that focus on "wealth accumulation" rather than just "wealth preservation." Fintech companies (like Revolut and Robinhood) and centralized exchanges (like Coinbase) will leverage their technological 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 remaining liquid balances in stablecoins rather than fiat and investing in tokenized money market funds further expands yield possibilities.

5. Privacy and Security: The Ultimate Moat in the Crypto Space

● Privacy is becoming the most important moat for cryptocurrencies. For most blockchains, privacy has been an afterthought, but now it is enough to make a chain stand out among many.

Privacy creates a "chain lock-in effect." In cases where information is private, migrating from one chain to another becomes difficult, as crossing the boundaries of private and public chains can leak metadata.

● Decentralized communication protocols are on the rise. As the world prepares for quantum computing, mainstream instant messaging applications, while adopting quantum encryption, still rely on trust in a single entity operating private servers.

In an open network, no individual, company, or nation can strip people of their communication capabilities; applications may disappear, but people always control their information and identity.

● DeFi security is evolving from "code is law" to "norms are law". Recent DeFi hacks targeting mature protocols indicate that standard security practices still largely rely on heuristics.

Future security approaches will focus more on design-level attributes, encoding key security properties directly as "runtime assertions" through runtime monitoring and enforcement.

6. A New Balance Between Technology and Law

● Legal frameworks are aligning with technological architectures. One of the biggest obstacles to building blockchain networks in the past decade has been legal uncertainty. Legislative efforts like the CLARITY Act aim to establish a clear regulatory framework for the digital asset market, ending the legal uncertainty that stifles innovation.

This act adopts a control-based "maturity framework," allowing blockchain projects to launch digital goods and enter public markets without bearing excessive regulatory burdens.

● Crypto companies are shifting from trading to building. Today, almost all well-performing cryptocurrency companies seem to have transitioned or are transitioning into the trading space. a16z warns that companies that pivot to trading too early may miss opportunities to build more defensible and sustainable businesses. Founders who focus on the "product" part of product-market fit may ultimately become the bigger winners.

Advancements in Jolt zkVM technology are reducing the computational costs of zero-knowledge proofs by several orders of magnitude; by the end of 2026, a single GPU may be able to generate proofs executed by a CPU in real-time. As AI agents begin to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, and as value flows freely on the internet like information, the financial system will no longer be a reflection of the real world, but rather 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 speculative tools to foundational protocols.

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