Original Author: Wintermute Ventures

Translation: Bibi News

For decades, the internet has allowed information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. However, the flow of "value" has always lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial contracts still rely on fragmented infrastructure, circulating through outdated tracks, national borders, and layers of intermediaries, with each step extracting costs.

This gap is being filled at an unprecedented speed.

This creates opportunities for a class of infrastructure companies that directly replace traditional clearing, settlement, and custody functions.

Infrastructure that allows value to flow as freely as information is no longer just a theoretical concept; it is being built, deployed, and used on a large scale.

For years, while crypto assets existed on-chain, they were disconnected from the real economy. Now, this situation is changing.

Crypto is becoming the missing clearing and settlement layer of the internet economy: a system that can operate 24/7, is transparent, and does not require permission from centralized gatekeepers.

The following themes represent our judgment on the direction of digital asset development in 2026 and the areas where Wintermute Ventures is actively supporting entrepreneurs.

Everything Will Become Tradable

An increasing number of assets and outcomes in the real world are becoming tradable through new financial primitives, including prediction markets, tokenization, and derivatives.

This shift provides a liquidity layer for areas that previously had no market at all.

Tokenization and synthetic assets bring liquidity to known assets; while prediction markets go further by pricing things that were previously "unpriceable," transforming raw information into tradable financial instruments.

Prediction markets are continuously expanding, both as consumer-facing products and as entirely new financial tools, supporting hedging, outcome-linked trading, and expressions of highly segmented events. They are also beginning to replace some functions of traditional financial infrastructure.

Insurance is a highly representative example: outcome-based markets can provide cheaper and more flexible hedging methods by directly pricing specific risks, compared to traditional insurance or reinsurance.

Users no longer need to purchase hurricane insurance that covers an entire area; instead, they can hedge against specific times, locations, and wind speeds.

Over a longer time scale, these highly personalized risks can be finely combined according to individual needs through workflows with agency capabilities.

As the infrastructure of prediction markets expands, entirely new data products will emerge around themes that have never been priced before.

We expect markets to emerge for trading and quantifying objective indicators such as "perception, sentiment, and collective opinion." These emerging markets are a natural extension of decentralized finance, opening up new ways to price and exchange "information itself."

When everything can be traded, the infrastructure that provides liquidity, enables price discovery, and ensures settlement will become crucial.

This structural change will concentrate value at the infrastructure layer and directly impact the way capital is allocated.

We are actively supporting teams that are building core market and settlement infrastructure, data layers for verification and proof, and new data products that support previously untradeable outcomes.

At the same time, we are also focusing on new abstract models that enable these markets to have programmability and composability, allowing them to be embedded in real-world workflows and gradually replace parts of traditional financial and insurance systems.

Stablecoins Become the Trust Layer, While Banks Handle Transitional Settlements

Digital assets currently still lack a robust system similar to settlement banks and clearing institutions in traditional finance.

Stablecoins provide an open, programmable form of value, but the fragmentation between different systems still creates friction in the absence of settlement infrastructure, limiting their scalable application.

As issuers of stablecoins with different collateral models continue to emerge across various ecosystems, the demand for a reliable interoperability layer to combine and coordinate these assets is rising.

To truly scale this system, the crypto industry needs infrastructure that can achieve net settlement, exchange, and clearing between different stablecoins and different chains, without introducing additional credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational complexity.

The missing key abstraction is to transfer exchange and credit risk to the balance sheets of stablecoin issuers, achieved through "balance sheet-based interoperability," rather than having end users bear exchange rates, path selection, or counterparty risks when trading across stablecoins.

We see this as a "chain-based agency banking system": settlements take seconds and are fully open to application developers. We expect more companies to position themselves as the coordinating layer between issuers and applications.

Markets Will Reward Sustainable Revenue, Not Short-Term Incentives

The lack of sustainable business models that rely solely on token incentives for growth is gradually becoming ineffective.

Companies that subsidize users or liquidity providers but structurally lack robust revenue models will find it increasingly difficult to compete.

Valuations will become more closely anchored to sustainable earnings and forward-looking profit expectations, gradually returning to a cash flow-based assessment framework.

Simply annualizing short-term, highly volatile monthly fees is no longer a reasonable pricing method. The quality of earnings and consistency of incentives will become core to valuations.

Tokens that lack a clear value capture path will also struggle to maintain demand outside of speculative cycles.

As a result, fewer companies will issue tokens at their inception. Many projects will prioritize equity structures, using blockchain primarily as underlying infrastructure, which will be almost "invisible" to users and investors.

When tokens are adopted, issuance will often occur after product-market fit is clear, and revenue, unit economics, and distribution channels have been validated.

We believe this is a healthy and necessary evolution.

It allows founders to focus on building long-term sustainable businesses rather than chasing token incentives too early; enables investors to evaluate using familiar financial frameworks; and provides users with products designed for long-term value.

DeFi Will Integrate with Fintech

The future of finance is neither DeFi nor traditional finance, but a fusion of both. A dual-track architecture allows fintech applications to dynamically route transactions between different systems based on cost, speed, and yield.

Breakthrough consumer products will superficially resemble traditional fintech products, with wallets, bridges, and blockchains completely abstracted away. Capital efficiency, yield levels, settlement speed, and transparent execution will define the next generation of financial products.

As user experience converges with fintech, the industry will still expand rapidly at the underlying level. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives drive this growth, enabling deeper liquidity and more complex financial products.

Distribution capabilities will be more important than "owning the interface." Winning teams will build infrastructure centered on the backend, embedding it into existing platforms and channels rather than competing as standalone applications.

Personalization and automation (increasingly driven by AI) will optimize pricing, routing, and yield in the background.

Users will not actively choose DeFi.

They will only choose—better products.

Privacy Becomes the "Basic Threshold"

Privacy is becoming a fundamental condition for institutions to adopt digital assets, with its role shifting from "regulatory burden" to "regulatory enabler."

Selective disclosure achieved through zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party secure computation allows participants to prove their compliance without exposing raw data.

In practical applications, this means:

Banks can assess creditworthiness without viewing the complete transaction history;

Employers can verify employment relationships without disclosing specific salaries;

Financial institutions can prove their reserves are sufficient without having to publicly disclose their holdings structure.

The direct extension of this vision in the real world is that companies no longer need to store large amounts of sensitive data long-term, freeing them from the high costs and burdens of data privacy compliance requirements.

New technological primitives such as private shared state, zkTLS, and MPC are unlocking previously unfeasible financial models, including under-collateralized loans, tranching, and new on-chain risk products.

This will migrate entire structural financial categories that were previously difficult to bring on-chain.

Regulation Evolves from Compliance Barrier to Distribution Advantage

Regulatory clarity has shifted from a confrontational barrier to a standardized distribution channel.

While the "permissionless" nature of early DeFi remains an important engine of innovation, regulations such as the U.S. GENIUS Act, Europe's MiCA, and Hong Kong's stablecoin regulatory framework are providing traditional institutions with clearer operational boundaries.

By 2026, the core question will no longer be "Can institutions use blockchain?" but rather how they can replace the outdated and inefficient underlying pipes of the traditional financial system with high-speed on-chain channels under these regulatory guidelines.

These standards will drive the larger-scale compliance of on-chain products, regulated deposit and withdrawal channels, and institutional-grade infrastructure without sacrificing decentralization principles or moving towards full centralization, significantly enhancing institutional participation.

Regions with clear rules and efficient approval mechanisms will continue to attract capital, talent, and experimental innovation, accelerating the normalization of on-chain value distribution in native crypto and hybrid financial products; while regions where regulatory progress is slow will gradually fall behind.

The Internet Economy Runs on Crypto

The common thread running through all these changes is the maturity of infrastructure. Crypto is becoming the clearing and settlement layer of the internet economy, allowing value to flow as freely as information.

The protocols, primitives, and applications currently being built are unleashing new forms of real economic activity and continuously expanding the boundaries of the internet's capabilities.

At Wintermute Ventures, we support entrepreneurs focused on building this infrastructure.

We seek teams with deep technical understanding and a strong product sense—delivering products that users are willing to use; capable of operating within regulatory frameworks while advancing the core principles of decentralized systems; and designing business models with long-term impact in mind.

2026 will be a significant turning point.

For users, crypto infrastructure will gradually fade into the background;

But for the global financial system, it will become indispensable.

The best infrastructure quietly empowers the world without needing to be deliberately noticed.

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