The Transformation of the 2026 Crypto Ecosystem: From Trading to Infrastructure

Stablecoins have become the new backbone of the financial network. Last year, stablecoin trading volume surpassed $46 trillion—enough to say everything: it is 20 times the volume of PayPal transactions and nearly three times that of Visa. And this is only the beginning of the transformation. Top Silicon Valley venture capital firm a16z’s 17 forecasts indicate that cryptography is shifting from speculative trading to the next generation of financial and internet infrastructure.

Stablecoins Reshape the Financial Foundation Layer

The historic difficulties faced by traditional banking systems are now exposed. Many assets worldwide still reside in account systems built decades ago—coded in COBOL, connected via batch file interfaces rather than APIs.

Stablecoins are becoming the “patch” for this outdated system. Financial institutions can create new products and serve new customers without rewriting legacy systems. The $46 trillion in transactions processed last year not only expanded the imagination of payment clearing but also attracted a new wave of entrepreneurs. They are building something: a “fiat on-ramp” connecting stablecoins with everyday finance. Through cryptographic proofs, regional network integration, and global interoperable wallet layers, digital dollars are connecting to the real world in familiar payment forms and local currencies.

On-chain native finance is emerging. Currently, RWA tokenization is often just “physical mapping”—bringing off-chain assets onto the chain. But a more promising direction is “on-chain native issuance”: debt assets are generated directly on the blockchain, rather than tokenized afterward. The application scenarios for stablecoins are accelerating. In the future, remote workers will be able to receive real-time wages, entrepreneurs can receive dollars across borders without bank accounts, and applications can settle value instantly with global users.

Identity Crisis and Solutions for AI Agents

The number of AI agents has far exceeded that of humans. In financial services, the ratio of “non-human identities” has reached an astonishing 96:1—yet these digital identities are like “ghosts” unable to access traditional banking services.

This has created new infrastructure needs: evolving from “Know Your Customer” to “Know Your Agent.” Agents need cryptographic signatures as credentials to execute transactions, binding them to trust, restrictions, and accountability. Building this identity system could take months rather than a decade—much faster than traditional KYC infrastructure.

AI’s progress in executing real research tasks is remarkable. From workflows that were hard to understand at the start of the year to providing abstract guidance like PhD students by year’s end, the iteration speed of AI models is astonishing. They can even independently solve problems from the Putnam Mathematical Competition—one of the most difficult university math exams worldwide.

This capability heralds the birth of a new “general” research paradigm: AI can predict the relationships between various concepts, find the correct direction from rough answers, and even open new avenues of discovery through the power of “model hallucination.”

The Internet Becomes a Bank, and Value Flows as a New Infrastructure

As AI agents emerge on a large scale, more and more operations will run automatically in the background, fundamentally changing the flow of funds.

In a world driven by “intent” rather than step-by-step instructions, value transfer needs to be as fast and free as today’s information transmission. Infrastructure components like x402 make computation programmable and responsive. Agents can pay each other instantly and without authorization for data, GPU time, or API calls—completely bypassing traditional invoicing, accounting, and batch processes. Developers can embed payment rules, limits, and audit trails into software updates—without fiat currency integration or bank involvement. Payments are no longer an operational layer but become part of the network’s actions themselves.

Democratization of Wealth Management and a New Era of Token Economy

Tokenization is breaking the elite monopoly on wealth management. In the past, personalized wealth management services were only available to high-net-worth clients of banks because cross-asset customized advice was costly and complex.

As more assets are tokenized, AI-driven advice and auxiliary management strategies can be executed and rebalanced instantly at very low cost via cryptography. This is not just about robo-advisors but empowering everyone with active portfolio management capabilities. By 2026, platforms focused on “wealth growth” rather than “wealth preservation” will emerge. Fintech companies like Revolut and Robinhood, along with centralized exchanges like Coinbase, are capturing the market with technological advantages.

Meanwhile, DeFi tools like Morpho Vaults can automatically allocate assets to the most risk-adjusted and yield-optimized lending markets. Using stablecoins instead of fiat to maintain liquidity balances, and investing in tokenized money market funds, further expands yield opportunities. This new wealth-accumulation ecosystem is reshaping asset allocation logic for individuals and institutions alike.

Privacy and Security: The Last Bastion of Cryptography

Privacy is becoming the most critical defensive trench in cryptocurrency. Many blockchains once viewed privacy as an afterthought, but now it has evolved into a core element distinguishing one chain from others. Privacy creates a “chain-locking effect”: if data is kept private, cross-chain migration becomes more difficult because crossing the boundaries between private and public chains exposes metadata.

Decentralized communication protocols are emerging. As the world prepares for quantum computing, although mainstream instant messaging apps use quantum encryption, they still rely on privately controlled servers by a single organization. The ideal open network is one where no individual, company, or government can cut off people’s communication rights. Apps may disappear, but people will always control their data and identities.

DeFi security is transitioning from “code as law” to “standard legal practices.” Recent DeFi hacking incidents targeting emerging protocols show that standard security practices are still mainly based on heuristics. Future security strategies will focus more on design attributes, using runtime monitoring and enforcement to encode core security features as “runtime verification.”

New Balance Between Technology and Law

Legal frameworks are adapting to technological architectures. Over the past decade, one of the biggest obstacles to blockchain development in the US has been legal uncertainty. Legislation like the “CLARITY Act” aims to create clear regulatory frameworks for digital asset markets, ending the ambiguous laws that stifle innovation. The act adopts a “readiness framework” based on regulation, allowing blockchain projects to issue digital commodities and enter open markets without excessive regulatory burdens.

Crypto companies are shifting from trading to building. Today, almost all mature crypto firms are involved in or moving into trading. a16z warns: companies that shift to trading too early may instead establish a more solid business foundation. If founders focus on the “product” part of “product-market fit,” they may ultimately become the biggest winners. Jolt zkVM’s progress is reducing the computational cost of zero-knowledge proofs by several orders of magnitude—by the end of 2026, a single GPU could generate proofs at CPU levels in real time.

When AI agents begin browsing, trading, and making decisions independently on the network, and value flows freely like information, the financial system will no longer mirror the physical world but will become an embedded infrastructure of the internet itself. a16z partner Ali Yahya emphasizes that privacy may be the most important defensive trench in cryptography, and this could be the key turning point for crypto moving from the fringes to the mainstream, evolving from a speculative tool to a foundational protocol.