Written by: Paul Veradittakit

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

2026 will be a crucial year. We will see "crypto as an industry" completely transform into "crypto as a service."

Over the past decade, the crypto world has been full of all kinds of gimmicks. The approval of the Bitcoin ETF in 2024 brought mainstream financial acknowledgment. In 2025, everyone focused on building the underlying infrastructure. By 2026, true value will belong to companies that use blockchain to solve longstanding problems in traditional industries while ensuring that users completely do not feel the presence of blockchain.

Future crypto unicorns will not rely on hype to succeed. They will be those companies that leverage blockchain technology to enhance product efficiency by an order of magnitude, thus unlocking trillion-dollar markets while completely concealing complex technology.

Crypto technology wins the "weekend"

When the Iran conflict erupted, the U.S. stock market was closed over the weekend and could not respond to the sudden global risks. However, the crypto market did not stop; Bitcoin once surged to $74,000. Commodities completed price discovery on the decentralized prediction market Hyperliquid even before traditional markets opened. This was not an isolated case—last month, the same was true when China introduced policies.

Traditional hedge funds are increasingly flocking into this space. The crypto market being "7x24 hours non-stop" is no longer just a slogan, but a structural advantage beyond the reach of traditional finance.

Nevertheless, the current valuation of the crypto market is still far below the level it should reach based on its fundamentals. There is no doubt that we are again in a bear market (the fourth I have experienced), but this time is different: regulations are becoming clearer, institutional funds have entered, and infrastructure is increasingly improving.

This feeling was particularly strong at the recent Hong Kong Consensus conference. The vitality of the Asian market sharply contrasts with the West. There, the support of the bipartisan government, newly entered institutional funds, and a commitment to consumer applications are all driving strong bullish sentiment.

Highlights of Asia in 2026:

• Cross-border payments through stablecoins, especially in the B2B sector. For Asia's relatively decentralized economic system, crypto payments are the natural choice.
• Tokenization of gold, stocks, and real estate. Asian banks and fintech companies are catching up with the pace of the U.S.
• Perpetual contract trading on DeFi. Driven by retail investors, the development speed may exceed that of the West.
• Prediction markets are expected to become an important track, although their forms may differ from those in the West.

Core trend: "Crypto as a service"

The core theme of 2026 is the shift from "crypto as an industry" to "crypto as a service." The goal is no longer for users to see blockchain, but for them to completely forget about its existence.

In the past decade, we have been eager to create "crypto spectacles"—Gas fee wars, TPS competitions, modular stacks, ZK proofs. The ETF in 2024 is a recognition ticket from mainstream institutions. By 2025, we will have laid the groundwork for the underlying infrastructure. In 2026, it is time to turn around.

Saying goodbye to the "casino" era

The new generation of unicorns will not be those "L3 networks built for AI-NFT." They will be those companies that use blockchain to enhance product efficiency tenfold while completely hiding the technology, thus unlocking trillion-dollar markets.

This exactly explains our recent investment logic:

Novig: Saying goodbye to the "cut" era ($75 million Series B)

Traditional sports betting is a monopoly distorted market. Bookmakers extract high commissions from every bet, resulting in a dismal user profitability rate of only 2%. We led Novig's $75 million investment because they treat sports betting as a high-frequency financial product. Through a peer-to-peer trading model, Novig users achieve an average profitability rate of 23%. Most users do not care whether a decentralized order book is used behind the scenes; they only know that they can get the best odds in the U.S. This is a vivid example of "crypto as a service."

Based: Consumer-level super application ($11.5 million Series A)

We recently led Based's Series A financing. This is a composable Web3 consumer-grade super application built on the Hyperliquid ecosystem. "Consumer-grade crypto" has often equated with "clumsy experience" in the past. Based is changing this by making the on-chain interaction experience as smooth as a top fintech app. Cross-chain bridging, Gas fees, and other complex operations have been abstracted away, so users do not perceive them. They only need to focus on the social and financial value that assets bring.

Doppler: The default asset issuance infrastructure ($9 million Seed Round)

If Based and Novig are the cool new cars, then Doppler is the high-performance fuel system. We led Doppler's $9 million seed round, aiming to become the default infrastructure for on-chain asset issuance. It allows developers to issue assets with institutional-grade safety and compliance standards without having to build all the underlying systems from scratch. Doppler is like the Stripe of on-chain assets—purely functional with everything packaged behind a simple API.

Why "invisibility" is more important than "viral spread"

This trend of "invisibility" also runs through our entire investment portfolio:

• Real-world assets: Tokenized government bonds are no longer experiments in the crypto world; they are becoming the cornerstone of back-end liquidity in global trade.
• AI agents: Blockchain provides a trusted "truth layer" for AI agents through prediction markets and verifiable data, enabling them to interact autonomously and reliably with digital assets.
• Agent payments will accelerate all of this. Payment standards like x402 allow AI agents to transact directly with crypto assets. The gradual clarity of stablecoin regulations makes this payment track smoother.

Advice for entrepreneurs

If you are planning to start a business in 2026, my advice is simple: stop talking excessively about technology, and focus more on what real problems you can solve. If the slide in your funding pitch about consensus mechanisms is placed before discussing customer returns, it indicates that your thinking is still stuck in 2022.

We are looking for teams that are building the next Novig, Based, or Doppler—those who truly understand what "mass adoption" means: when a technology becomes so smooth that people completely ignore its existence, that is when it truly enters households.