3 ways crypto goes beyond crypto in 2026

This entire week, we’re running our observations on what’s ahead this year… stay tuned here, and be sure to also subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more trend updates, industry reports, builder guides, news analysis, and other resources.

1. Prediction markets will go bigger and broader, plus get smarter

Prediction markets have already gone mainstream, and in 2026, they’ll only become bigger, broader, and smarter as they intersect with crypto and AI — while also posing new and important challenges for builders to resolve.

First, many more contracts will be listed this year. This means we’ll be able to access real-time odds not just for major elections or geopolitical events, but for all kinds of in-the-weeds outcomes and complex, intersecting events. As these new contracts surface more information and become part of the news ecosystem (already happening), they’ll raise important societal questions about how we balance the value of this information and how to better design them so they are more transparent, auditable, and more — which is possible with crypto.

To handle the much larger volume of contracts, we’ll need new ways of aligning on truth to resolve the contracts. Centralized platform resolution (did a given event actually happen? how do we confirm it?) is important, but disputed cases like the Zelensky suit market and the Venezuelan election market show the limits. To address these edge cases and help prediction markets scale to more useful applications, new kinds of decentralized governance and LLM oracles can help determine truth for contested outcomes.

AI opens up further possibilities beyond LLMs for oracles. For instance, AI agents trading on these platforms can scour the world for signals that help provide short-term trading edge, helping surface new ways of thinking about the world and predicting what will happen next. (Projects like Prophet Arena already hint at the excitement in this space.) Besides serving as sophisticated political analysts that we can query for insight, these agents could also reveal new things about root predictors of complex societal events when we examine their emergent strategies.

Do prediction markets replace polling? No; they make polling better (and polling information can be fed into prediction markets). As a political scientist, I’m most excited by how prediction markets can function in concert with a rich and vibrant polling ecosystem — but we’ll need to lean on new technologies like AI, which can improve the survey-taking experience; and crypto, which can provide new ways to prove that poll/ survey respondents are not bots but humans, among other things.

~Andy Hall, a16z crypto research advisor and professor of political economy, Stanford University 

2. This year, crypto will offer a new primitive for industries beyond blockchains

For years, SNARKs — cryptographic proofs that let you verify computation without re-executing it — have been largely a blockchain-only technology. The overhead was simply too high: Proving a computation could take 1,000,000X more work than just running it. Worth it when you’re amortizing across many thousands of validators, but impractical anywhere else.

That’s about to change. This year, zkVM provers will hit roughly 10,000X overhead with memory footprints in the hundreds of megabytes — fast enough to run on phones, cheap enough to run everywhere.

Here’s one reason 10,000x could be a magic number: High-end GPUs have ~10,000x more parallel throughput than a laptop CPU. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs of CPU execution in real time.

This could unlock a vision from old research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you’re running CPU workloads in the cloud anyway — because your computation isn’t heavy enough to GPU-ize, or you lack the expertise, or legacy reasons — you’ll be able to get cryptographic proofs of correctness for a reasonable price overhead. The prover is already GPU-optimized; your code doesn’t need to be.

~Justin Thaler, a16z crypto research team, and associate professor of computer science, Georgetown University

3. We’ll see the rise of staked media

Cracks in the traditional media model — with its supposed objectivity — have been showing for a while now. The internet gave everyone a voice, and more operators, practitioners, and builders are now speaking directly to the public. Their perspectives reflect their stakes in the world and, counterintuitively, audiences often respect them not despite their interests but because of them.

What’s new here isn’t the rise of social media, but the arrival of cryptographic tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments. As AI makes it cheap and easy to generate unlimited content — claiming anything from any point of view or persona, real or fabricated — simply relying on what people (or bots) say can feel insufficient. Tokenized assets, programmable lockups, prediction markets, and onchain histories offer stronger foundations for trust: A commentator can publish an argument and also prove they’re putting their money where their mouth is. A podcaster can lock tokens to show they’re not opportunistically flipping or “pumping and dumping.” An analyst can tie forecasts to markets that settle publicly, creating an auditable track record.

This is the early shape of what I think of as “staked media”: a species of media that not only embraces the idea of having skin in the game, but supplies the proof. In this model, credibility comes neither from feigning detachment nor making unsubstantiated claims; instead, it comes from having stakes that you can make transparent and verifiable commitments about. Staked media will not replace other forms of media, it supplements what we already have. It offers a new signal: Not just “trust me, I’m neutral,” but “here’s what I’m willing to risk, and how you can check that I’m telling the truth.”

~Robert Hackett, a16z crypto editorial team

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