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Predictions for 2026

I hold positions in some assets and companies mentioned here. If you are building anything related to one of these ideas, I would love to chat about angel investing.

Major Assets

  1. The quantum narrative becomes a serious headwind for Bitcoin in 2026 and the community is too decentralized to put forward a credible plan.
  2. Ethereum continues its multi-year decline in mindshare and it begins showing up in material price underperformance.
  3. Solana transitions away from being a memecoin chain and becomes the dominant place for real-world synthetic assets to trade. It continues to have the largest retail footprint by user count.
  4. Monad finds its footing and becomes a relevant L1, finishing the year well above the Coinbase ICO price. None of the other execution layers launched in 2025 or early 2026 gain any durable traction or mindshare besides Tempo.
  5. Buying a basket of Binance new listings significantly underperforms buying stocks.

Applications

  1. Hyperliquid gains marketshare against centralized perps platforms but it turns out the market for BTC/ETH/ALT perps isn't growing very fast.
  2. Prediction markets fail to meaningfully expand beyond sports and major political events and as such slowly fade into the background.
  3. Some form of tokenized crypto options gets to $1B in volume onchain.
  4. Base gives up on SocialFi and becomes a normal wallet.

Infra

  1. The Robinhood L2 goes nowhere because there is less of a need for the reg arb benefits in this political environment.
  2. Base gives up being an L2.
  3. Some privacy middleware that sits below applications and vertically integrates with embedded wallets becomes quite popular.
  4. Either Coinbase or Stripe fully solves stablecoin onramps for third-party apps.

Solana

  1. Block building takes a big step toward moving in-protocol. Jito and Harmonic adjust their strategies and both launch new business lines outside of block building that are successful.
  2. We begin to see vertical integration between routers and dexes/prop AMMs.
  3. Tokenized stocks find their footing outside the US and scale significantly.

AI (Crypto)

  1. AI assistants improve substantially to the point where they become a default offering inside of most major consumer apps. By the end of the year a major point of differentiation between apps becomes the quality of the assistant.
  2. Multiple smart contracts gain significant traction that were written and tested almost entirely by Claude. The barrier to writing a smart contract feels 10x lower in 12 months than it feels right now, which leads to a mechanism designer renaissance.
  3. ChatGPT becomes more modular and agentic with plugins and a crypto use case goes viral inside of ChatGPT.

AI (Non-Crypto)

  1. Anthropic passes OpenAI in revenue and becomes the most valuable AI lab.
  2. Google figures out post-training and Gemini Flash becomes the most popular model in the world for non-coding agentic tasks.
  3. Almost every AI company that sells to enterprise realizes that it is competing with every other company and this collapse of the idea space leads to much sharper elbows.
  4. Meta launches a new consumer AI product that reaches number 1 in the App Store.
  5. (Longshot but I think underpriced relative to consensus) A new paradigm emerges beyond "give an LLM a detailed prompt and a series of specialized tools" and this dramatically shakes up which startups in the space are valuable.