Venture firm a16z has released its annual crypto predictions, outlining a sea change in how blockchains, AI agents, and global payments will operate by 2026.
The research highlights three central forces: autonomous agents, disappearing payment paths, and a new era of privacy-first blockchains. All of these developments together point to a structural redesign of the financial layer of the Internet.
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AI agents will force massive change
The most important change, according to a16z, is the rise of AI agents as economic participants. For every human being in financial services, agents now outnumber workers by almost 100 to 1.
However, these autonomous systems still lack identity, permissions, or compliance structures. The firm maintains that in 2026 the first version of KYA: Meet your agenta cryptographic identity layer that links agents to their owners, limitations and responsibilities.
Without this, agents will remain “unbanked ghosts,” unable to securely transact or access real markets. With it, they become programmable market players capable of spending, trading and liquidating value in real time.
Payments disappear into Internet pipes
This change drives the second important prediction: payments will disappear in the network itself. As AI agents automatically trigger transactions (buying data, paying for GPU time, or resolving API calls), money must move with the same speed and granularity as information.
Emergent primitives like x402 allow value transfer to occur instantaneously, permissionlessly, and without intermediaries.
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In this model, payments are no longer an application layer and become a native behavior of the network. Banks, stablecoins, and settlement systems become invisible infrastructures that operate under agent-to-dealer trading.
Privacy chains will dominate
Privacy forms the third pillar of a16z’s outlook for 2026. The firm maintains that privacy will become the strongest moat of cryptocurrencies, far surpassing performance or performance.
More specifically, once transactions become private, users face real friction when switching chains because moving secrets leaks metadata. This creates a “privacy lock,” a winner-takes-most effect for chains that get privacy right.
Arthur Hayes echoed the same point earlier, stating that institutional adoption cannot scale on public blockchains by default.
“These large institutions don’t want their information to be public or at risk of becoming public,” he said, noting that Layer 2 privacy solutions may emerge first, while Ethereum remains the underlying security substrate.
Other crypto predictions from a16z highlight the rise of stablecoin infrastructure, the shift from tokenization to on-chain origination, verifiable cloud computing via faster SNARKs, and the rise of “staking media,” where commentators demonstrate credibility through on-chain commitments.