Seven future trends for 2026: From the resurgence of application blockchains to AI-driven encrypted networks
Author: Archetype Compiled by: Tim, PANews As we approach 2026, the Archetype team is focusing on future technology trends. Application chains are feasible ——Aadharsh Pannirselvam The logic is simple: chains that are meticulously designed, built, and optimized for applications will inevitably deliver amazing experiences. And next year's best application chains will innovate starting from fundamental modules and first principles. The developers, users, institutions, and investors who have recently emerged differ significantly from previous groups entering the on-chain ecosystem: they prioritize practical experience over abstract concepts such as decentralization and censorship resistance. In practice, this cultural demand sometimes aligns with existing infrastructure, and sometimes conflicts with it. For applications like Blackbird or Farcaster, which are geared towards ordinary users and hide the details of encryption, certain aspects of the user experience are particularly important. Even centralized design decisions that were considered unorthodox three years ago, such as node co-location, a single orderer, and a custom database, now seem like reasonable choices. The same applies to projects like Hyperliquid and GTE, whose success or failure often hinges on millisecond-level speed, the smallest unit of price change, and optimal pricing. However, this does not apply to all new applications. For example, while people feel comfortable with centralization, there is a balancing force: a growing number of institutions and individuals are beginning to prioritize privacy. The needs and user experiences of encrypted applications can vary drastically, and therefore their required infrastructure should also differ. Fortunately, creating a specific chain from scratch to meet user needs is now far less complex than it was two years ago. In fact, the process today is similar to assembling a custom computer. Of course, you can choose every hard drive, fan, and cable yourself. But if you don't need that level of customization (which is often the case), you can choose a service provider like Digital Storm or Framework, which offer a variety of pre-installed custom PC solutions for different needs. If you want a compromise, you can add components yourself to the vendor's pre-selected components. These components are all compatibility tested to ensure the final device runs at high performance. This increases modularity and flexibility while eliminating unnecessary components. When integrating fundamental components such as consensus mechanisms, execution layers, data storage, and liquidity, applications build solutions that reflect different cultural characteristics. These solutions consistently reflect differentiated needs (i.e., different definitions of user experience), serve their respective audiences, and ultimately achieve value retention. The degree of differentiation is comparable to the differences between rugged laptops, business laptops, desktops, and MacBooks, but they also integrate and coexist to some extent, since these computers do not each run completely independent operating systems. More importantly, each necessary component is transformed into a knob that applications can freely adjust, allowing developers to iterate and modify it at will without worrying about causing disruptive changes to the underlying protocols. Circle's acquisition of the Malachite team from Informal Systems demonstrates that controlling the sovereignty of customized blockchain space is clearly a broader strategic priority. In the coming year, I expect to see various application and development teams able to define and own their on-chain components based on foundational building blocks and default configurations provided by companies like Commonware and Delta—essentially creating a HashiCorp or Stripe Atlas for the blockchain and blockchain space space. Ultimately, this will enable applications to directly control their own cash flow and leverage the unique advantages of their built model to deliver the best user experience in their own way, thereby creating a lasting competitive moat. Prediction markets will continue to innovate (however, only some of these will come true). —Tommy Hang One of the most notable applications in this cycle has been prediction markets. With weekly trading volumes on major platforms soaring to a record high of $20 billion, prediction markets have clearly taken a substantial step towards becoming mainstream. This momentum has spurred numerous projects in related fields, some aiming to fill gaps in the market where leaders like Polymarket and Kalshi exist, while others attempt to challenge their dominance. However, amidst the market buzz, only by distinguishing genuine innovation from market noise can we truly identify the trends to watch in 2026. From a market structure perspective, I am particularly interested in solutions that can reduce spreads and increase open interest. Although market creation remains licensed and selective, liquidity in prediction markets remains relatively weak for both market makers and traders. There are indeed real opportunities for development through improving routing systems with products such as lending, innovating liquidity models, and enhancing collateral efficiency. Trading volume across different sectors is also a key factor determining the competitiveness of different platforms. For example, in November, over 90% of Kalshi's trading volume came from sports prediction markets, highlighting the inherent competitive advantage of certain platforms in acquiring superior liquidity. In contrast, Polymarket's trading volume in crypto-related and political markets is 5-10 times that of Kalshi. However, on-chain prediction markets still have a long way to go before achieving true widespread adoption. A highly relevant example is the 2025 Super Bowl: this single event generated $23 billion in trading volume in the off-chain betting market in a single day, which is more than ten times the total daily trading volume of all current on-chain markets. Closing this gap requires sharp and insightful teams to address the core challenges of predicting markets. I will be closely monitoring the development of these teams over the coming year. Independent curators will expand the DeFi market size. ——Eskender Abebe The curatorial layer of DeFi currently exists at two extremes: purely algorithmic (hard-coded interest rate curves, fixed rebalancing rules) or purely human (risk committees, proactive managers). Autonomous curators represent a third model: AI agents (large language models + toolchains + decision loops) manage the curatorial and risk strategies of vaults, lending markets, and structured products. They not only execute fixed rules but also reason and judge risks, returns, and strategies. Take curators in the Morpho marketplace as an example: they need to define collateral policies, loan-to-value ratio caps, and risk parameters to design profitable products. Currently, this remains a bottleneck relying on human resources, but AI agents can achieve scalability. At that time, autonomous curators will directly compete with algorithmic models and human managers. When will we see a "divine intervention" in the DeFi field? When I talk to crypto fund managers about artificial intelligence, the responses typically fall into two categories: either they believe large language models are about to take over all trading desks, or they think they're illusionary toys, incapable of surviving in real markets. Both views ignore the architectural shift. Intelligent agents, through emotionless execution, systematic policy adherence, and flexible reasoning, are entering a realm where human interference is present and pure algorithms are too fragile. They are more likely to supervise or integrate underlying algorithms than simply replace them. Large language models act as the chief architects of security barriers, while deterministic code remains in the core areas requiring low-latency responses. When the cost of deep reasoning drops to a few cents, the most profitable crypto vaults will no longer depend on the smartest people, but on who has the strongest computing power. Short videos become a new business model ——Katie Chiou Short videos are rapidly becoming a primary channel for people to discover (and ultimately purchase) the content they love. TikTok Shop generated over $20 billion in gross merchandise volume in the first half of 2025, nearly doubling year-on-year, subtly cultivating a global consumer habit of viewing entertainment content as a new marketplace. In response, Instagram has transformed its Reels short video feature from a defensive product into a revenue engine. This format not only brings higher exposure but also contributes a significant share of Meta's projected advertising revenue growth in 2025. Meanwhile, the live-streaming e-commerce platform Whatnot has already proven that the conversion rate of charismatic, person-driven live-streaming sales models far surpasses that of traditional e-commerce. The core logic behind this phenomenon is simple: when people watch content in real time, their decision-making speed increases significantly. Every swipe of the screen constitutes a decision point. Major platforms are well aware of this, and therefore the boundary between recommendation feeds and the shopping checkout process is rapidly blurring. The information feed is the new shelf, and each creator is a sales channel. Artificial intelligence is pushing this trend even further. It reduces video production costs, increases content output, and allows creators and brands to more easily test ideas in real time. More content means more possibilities for conversions, and platforms are optimizing every second of video to maximize user purchase intent. Encryption technology was born to adapt to this transformation. The accelerated pace of content creation necessitates faster and more economical payment channels. As the shopping process becomes seamless and directly embedded in the content itself, a system capable of settling micro-payments, programmatically distributing revenue, and tracking contributions across a complex chain of collaborations is essential. Encryption technology was created for this model of fund transfer; it's hard to imagine how a truly scalable e-commerce era, deeply integrated with live-streaming scenarios, could be achieved without it. Blockchain will drive a new AI arms race —Danny Sursock In the past few years, the spotlight in the field of artificial intelligence has been focused on the multi-armed race between mega-corporations and startup giants, while DeAI entrepreneurs have been groping in the dark. However, while outside attention is focused elsewhere, several crypto-native teams have made great progress in the field of decentralized training and inference, and they are gradually moving from the theoretical design stage to the testing and production environment. Today, teams such as Ritual, Pluralis, Exo, Odyn, Ambient, and Bagel have entered a golden age of development. A new generation of competitors is poised to emerge, unleashing an explosive, multi-dimensional impact on the fundamental development trajectory of artificial intelligence. Models trained in a globally distributed environment can overcome scalability bottlenecks. These models employ innovative asynchronous communication and parallel processing methods, the effectiveness of which is being validated in production-scale operational tests. The combination of emerging consensus mechanisms and privacy computing components is making verifiable confidential inference a viable option in on-chain developer toolkits. The revolutionary blockchain architecture combines smart contracts with a flexible computing structure, providing an efficient operating environment for autonomous AI agents and using crypto assets as a medium of exchange. The groundwork has been completed. The current challenge lies in scaling these infrastructure layers to production scale and demonstrating why blockchain technology can drive fundamental AI innovation, rather than merely remaining at the level of philosophical, ideological, or metaphysical fundraising experiments. RWA is about to see real adoption. ——Dmitriy Berenzon RWA tokenization is now seeing widespread adoption. Although the concept of tokenization has been discussed for years, this field has finally achieved a breakthrough with the widespread acceptance of stablecoins in the mainstream market, the increasingly convenient and stable fiat currency exchange channels, and the gradually clarifying and supporting global regulatory framework. According to the latest data from the RWA.xyz platform, the total issuance of tokenized assets across all categories has now exceeded $18 billion, compared to only $3.7 billion a year ago. This growth momentum is expected to accelerate further by 2026. It should be noted that tokenization and the asset pool model are two different design patterns for tokenizing physical assets: tokenization creates an on-chain mapping of off-chain assets, while the asset pool model builds a bridge between on-chain capital and off-chain revenue. I'm excited to see tokenization and vault technology giving us access to a wide range of physical and financial assets, from commodities like gold and rare metals to private credit for working capital and payment financing, to private and public equity, and more global currencies. Let's open our minds and go even further. I'd love to see eggs, GPUs, energy derivatives, salary advances, Brazilian government bonds, Japanese yen, and more, all on-chain. It's important to clarify that this is not simply about putting more assets on the blockchain. Its core lies in upgrading the global capital allocation model through public blockchain technology, transforming the previously opaque, inefficient, and fragmented market into a new paradigm that is open, transparent, programmable, and highly liquid. Once these assets are successfully on-chain, we will enjoy the composability advantages they offer when combined with existing DeFi offerings. Finally, these assets will undoubtedly face challenges in terms of transferability, transparency, liquidity, risk management, and allocation, making the infrastructure that can mitigate these challenges equally important and exciting. A product renaissance driven by intelligent agents is on the horizon. ——Ash Egan The influence of the next generation of networks will no longer be determined by the platforms we swipe our fingers on, but rather by the intelligent agents that communicate with us. We all know that the share of bots and intelligent agents in all network activity is growing rapidly. Roughly estimated, this now accounts for about 50%, including both on-chain and off-chain activities. In the crypto space, bots are increasingly performing transactions, planning, assisting, scanning contracts, and handling a wide range of tasks on our behalf, from token trading and fund management to auditing smart contracts and developing games. This is the era of programmable, proxy networks. While we are already in it, 2026 will mark a turning point: the design of cryptographic products (in an active, open, and non-dystopian way) will be more geared towards the needs of robots than humans. While this vision is still emerging, personally, I look forward to reducing the time spent clicking between different websites and interacting more with a simple, chat-like interface to manage on-chain bots. Imagine an experience similar to Telegram, but with smart agents tailored to specific applications or tasks. These agents can formulate and execute complex strategies, gathering the most relevant information and data for me online, and providing feedback on transaction results, risks and opportunities to watch out for, and filtered information. I simply give the commands, and they lock in opportunities, filter out all distracting information, and execute precisely at the optimal time. The infrastructure supporting this vision already exists on the blockchain. By combining default open data graphs, programmatic micropayments with on-chain social graphs and cross-chain liquidity channels, we have everything needed to support a dynamic intelligent agent ecosystem. The plug-and-play nature of cryptocurrencies means less red tape and fewer dead ends for agents. The extent to which blockchain is ready for this compared to Web2 infrastructure cannot be overstated. This is perhaps the most crucial point here. It's not just about automation; it's about liberation from the closed ecosystem of Web2, from friction, and from waiting. We're witnessing this shift happening in the search space: now, about 20% of Google searches generate AI summaries, and data shows that when people see these summaries, their willingness to click on traditional search result links decreases significantly. The process of manually sifting through pages is becoming unnecessary. A programmable, autonomous web ecosystem will further extend this transformation to the applications we use, which I think is a good thing. In this era, we will experience less anxiety and less panicked trading. Time zone differences will become more blurred (the phrase "waiting for Asian markets to open" will disappear). Interacting with the on-chain world will become more convenient and expressive for every developer and user. As more assets, systems, and users are integrated onto the blockchain, this process will snowball. Increased on-chain opportunities → Increased deployment of intelligent agents → Enhanced value release, creating a cyclical pattern. However, the content and methods we use to build this intelligent network will determine whether it degenerates into superficial noise and automation or gives rise to a renaissance of enabling and dynamic products.
2025/12/11
