a16z Crypto Trends: In 2026, Will You Take One of These Three Paths to the Top?
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a16z Crypto Trends: In 2026, Will You Take One of These Three Paths to the Top?
Three Major Trends for 2026: Intelligent Prediction Markets, Cross-Industry Blockchain Applications, and the Rise of Collateralized Media
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: a16z crypto
Translation: TechFlow
This week, we will continue releasing our trend observations for 2026—stay tuned. In the meantime, feel free to subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more trend updates, industry reports, builder guides, news analysis, and other resources.
1. Prediction Markets Will Become Broader and Smarter
Prediction markets are going mainstream, and by 2026, as they deeply converge with blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), they will grow larger, broader, and smarter—while also presenting new critical challenges for developers.
First, more contracts will be listed on markets this year. This means we won’t just get real-time probabilities on major elections or geopolitical events—we’ll also gain insight into granular outcomes and complex cross-event predictions. As these new contracts surface more information and integrate into the news ecosystem—a trend already emerging—they will raise important societal questions about balancing informational value and how to better design these markets to be more transparent and auditable. These improvements can be enabled through blockchain technology.
To manage the explosion of contracts, we need new ways to coordinate facts and resolve disputes. Centralized platforms’ adjudication mechanisms (e.g., did an event actually happen? How do we verify it?) remain important, but controversial cases like the Zelenskyy lawsuit market and Venezuela election market have exposed their limitations. To address edge cases and help prediction markets expand into more useful applications, decentralized governance models and large language model (LLM)-powered oracles can be used to determine the validity of disputed outcomes.
AI also opens up new possibilities for oracles. For example, AI agents capable of trading on these platforms could scour global signals to gain advantages in short-term trading, while revealing novel ways of thinking and new methods for forecasting future events. Projects like Prophet Arena are already demonstrating the potential in this space. Beyond serving as sophisticated political analysts we can query for insights, analyzing the emergent strategies of these AI agents may reveal fundamental predictive factors behind complex social events.
Will prediction markets replace opinion polls? No. Rather than replacing polls, prediction markets will improve them—poll data itself can be fed into prediction markets. As a political economist, what fascinates me most is how prediction markets can work alongside a rich and dynamic polling ecosystem. But we’ll need new technologies like AI to enhance survey experiences, and blockchain to provide new verification methods that ensure poll participants are real humans, not bots.
—Andy Hall, a16z Crypto Research Advisor and Professor of Political Economy at Stanford University
2. This Year, Blockchain Tech Will Deliver Foundational Tools for Other Industries
For years, SNARKs (succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs—a cryptographic proof that allows verification of computation without re-executing it) have been primarily used in blockchain. The reason: SNARKs are computationally expensive. Generating a proof can take up to 1,000,000 times more work than simply running the computation. This cost is justified when verification must be distributed across thousands of nodes, but impractical in most other contexts.
This is about to change. This year, zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) provers will reduce computational overhead to around 10,000x, with memory usage down to hundreds of megabytes—fast enough to run on smartphones, and cheap enough to deploy widely across devices.
Why might “10,000x” be a key threshold? One reason: high-end GPUs offer parallel throughput roughly 10,000 times greater than laptop CPUs. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs for CPU executions in real time.
This could realize a long-standing vision from research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you’re already running CPU workloads in the cloud—perhaps because your computations aren’t GPU-optimized, you lack the expertise, or due to architectural constraints—you’ll soon be able to obtain cryptographic proofs of correctness at reasonable cost. And since provers are already optimized for GPUs, your code won’t require special adaptation.
—Justin Thaler, a16z Crypto Research Team Member and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University
3. The Rise of Staked Media: A New Paradigm for Trust
The traditional media ideal of “objectivity” is showing cracks. This shift has been brewing—the internet gave everyone a voice, and now more practitioners, builders, and insiders speak directly to the public. Their views reflect real-world stakes, and paradoxically, audiences often respect them more for their positions than for any claim to neutrality.
The new development isn’t the rise of social media, but the arrival of cryptographic tools that enable publicly verifiable commitments. As AI makes generating infinite content cheap and easy—whether under real or fake identities, asserting anything from any position—relying solely on what people (or bots) say is no longer sufficient. Tokenized assets, programmable locks, prediction markets, and on-chain histories provide a stronger foundation for trust: commentators can prove alignment between words and actions; podcast hosts can lock tokens to show they’re not engaging in speculation or “pump-and-dump”; analysts can tie forecasts to publicly settled markets, creating auditable track records.
This is the early form of what I call Staked Media: a new kind of media that not only embraces the idea of having skin in the game but provides mechanisms to prove it. In this model, credibility doesn’t come from feigned detachment or unsubstantiated claims, but from open, verifiable commitments. Staked Media won’t replace other forms of media—it will complement them. It offers a new signal: not “trust me, I’m neutral,” but “look at the risks I’m willing to take, and how you can verify the truth of what I say.”
—Robert Hackett, a16z Crypto Editorial Team
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