Wintermute Ventures: In 2026, crypto will gradually become the settlement layer of the internet economy.
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Wintermute Ventures: In 2026, crypto will gradually become the settlement layer of the internet economy.
Cryptography is becoming the clearing and settlement layer of the internet economy, enabling value to flow as freely as information.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Wintermute Ventures
Translated and edited by TechFlow
TechFlow Intro: For decades, the internet has enabled information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. But value has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial agreements still move through fragmented infrastructure built on legacy rails, national boundaries, and intermediaries that extract rent at every node. Wintermute Ventures believes this gap is closing at an unprecedented pace—and crypto is becoming the clearing and settlement layer the internet economy has long needed.
This report focuses on five key themes: Everything Tradable (prediction markets, tokenization), stablecoin interoperability, tokenomics returning to fundamentals, DeFi–TradFi convergence, and privacy as a regulatory catalyst. Infrastructure maturity is the unifying thread across this transformation.
Full report below:
For decades, the internet has enabled information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. But value has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial agreements still move through fragmented infrastructure built on legacy rails, national boundaries, and intermediaries that extract rent at every node.
This gap is closing at an unprecedented pace. It creates opportunities for infrastructure companies that directly replace traditional clearing, settlement, and custody functions. Infrastructure enabling value to flow as freely as information is no longer theoretical—it is being built, deployed, and used at scale.
For years, crypto lived on-chain but remained disconnected from the real economy. That is changing. Crypto is becoming the clearing and settlement layer the internet economy has long needed—a continuously operating, transparent, and permissionless layer that does not rely on centralized gatekeepers.
The themes below represent our view of where digital assets are headed in 2026—and the areas where Wintermute Ventures actively supports founders.
1. Everything Tradable
An increasing number of assets and real-world outcomes are becoming tradable via new financial primitives—including prediction markets, tokenization, and derivatives. This shift provides a liquidity layer to domains that historically had no market at all.
Tokenization and synthetic assets bring liquidity to known assets. Prediction markets go further—pricing things previously unpriceable, transforming raw information into tradable instruments.
Prediction markets continue expanding both as consumer products and as novel financial tools—enabling hedging, outcome-linked trading, and fine-grained views on events. They are also beginning to displace parts of traditional financial infrastructure.
Insurance is a compelling example: outcome-based markets can offer cheaper, more flexible hedging than traditional insurance or reinsurance by pricing specific risks directly—not bundling them into broad products. Users can hedge against a specific wind speed at a specific location for a specific time window, rather than buying hurricane insurance covering an entire region. Over longer time horizons, these bespoke risks can be manually selected and bundled by agents into uniquely tailored workflows.
As prediction market infrastructure scales, entirely new categories of data products are emerging around topics never previously priced. We expect markets designed to trade and quantify objective perception, sentiment, and collective opinion. These emerging markets are a natural extension of decentralized finance—unlocking new ways to price and exchange information itself. When everything becomes tradable, infrastructure that provides liquidity, enables price discovery, and ensures settlement becomes critical.
This structural shift will concentrate value at the infrastructure layer—directly impacting how we allocate capital. We actively support teams building core market and settlement infrastructure, data layers for verification and proof, and novel data products that enable the financialization of previously non-tradable outcomes. We also focus on novel abstraction models that make these markets programmable and composable—so they can embed into real-world workflows and replace parts of traditional financial and insurance infrastructure.
2. Stablecoins as the Trust Layer—Banks Handle Intermediary Settlement
Digital assets lack robust equivalents to settlement banks and clearinghouses—the very institutions that lubricate traditional finance. Stablecoins deliver open access and programmable value—but without settlement infrastructure, fragmentation creates friction that limits adoption.
As stablecoin issuers proliferate across ecosystems with diverse collateral models, demand is growing for an interoperability layer capable of reliably composing these assets. To scale this system, crypto needs infrastructure that enables netting, conversion, and settlement across stablecoins and chains—without introducing additional credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational overhead.
The missing abstraction is balance-sheet-based interoperability—shifting conversion and credit risk onto stablecoin issuers, rather than forcing end users to manage FX, routing, or counterparty risk when transacting across stablecoins. We see this as the on-chain equivalent of a bank: settlement in seconds, open access for application builders—and we expect more firms to position themselves as coordination layers between issuers and applications.
3. Markets Will Reward Long-Term Revenue, Not Short-Term Incentives
Token-driven growth without sustainable business models is losing traction. Companies relying on subsidizing users or liquidity providers while operating structurally fragile revenue models will find it increasingly difficult to compete.
Valuations will anchor more closely to sustainable earnings and forward-looking projections—converging toward cash-flow-based frameworks. Annualizing volatile monthly fee spikes is no longer a credible way to value enterprises, as earnings quality and incentive alignment become central to valuation. Tokens lacking credible value-capture pathways will struggle to sustain demand beyond the speculative phase.
Accordingly, fewer companies will launch with tokens. Many will default to equity-first structures, using blockchain primarily as backend infrastructure—largely invisible to users and investors. When tokens are used, issuance will increasingly occur only after product-market fit is clear, revenue and unit economics are proven, distribution is established, and stakeholder incentives are aligned.
We believe this shift is a healthy and necessary evolution for the ecosystem. Founders can focus on building durable businesses instead of prematurely prioritizing token incentives and demand. Investors can evaluate companies using familiar financial frameworks. Users get products designed for long-term value.
4. DeFi–Fintech Convergence
The future of finance is neither DeFi nor TradFi—it’s their convergence. A dual-track architecture allows fintech applications to dynamically route transactions based on cost, speed, and yield. Breakthrough consumer applications will resemble traditional fintech products—with wallets, bridges, and chains fully abstracted away. Capital efficiency, yield, settlement speed, and transparent execution define the next generation of financial products.
While user experience converges with fintech, the industry continues expanding rapidly behind the scenes. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives drive this growth—enabling deeper liquidity and more sophisticated financial products.
Distribution will matter more than ownership of the interface. Winning teams will build backend-first infrastructure that plugs into existing platforms and channels—not compete as standalone apps. Personalization and automation—increasingly AI-enhanced—will improve pricing, routing, and yield in the background. Users won’t consciously choose DeFi. They’ll choose better products.
5. Privacy as a Regulatory Catalyst
Privacy is shifting from a regulatory obligation to a regulatory catalyst for institutional adoption. Selective disclosure using zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation enables participants to prove compliance without exposing raw data.
In practice, this lets banks assess creditworthiness without accessing transaction history, employers verify employment without revealing salary, and institutions prove reserves without disclosing positions. The tangible extension of this vision is a world where enterprises no longer need to store large volumes of data—freeing them from costly and burdensome data privacy regulations. New primitives like private shared state, zkTLS, and MPC unlock undercollateralized lending, tranching, and novel on-chain risk products—moving entire categories of structured finance on-chain, which was previously infeasible.
6. Regulation Evolves from Compliance Barrier to Distribution Advantage
Regulatory clarity has shifted from an adversarial barrier to a standardized distribution channel. While early DeFi’s “permissionless” nature remains a vital engine for innovation, operational frameworks—including the U.S. GENIUS Act, Europe’s MiCA, and Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime—provide greater clarity for traditional institutions. By 2026, the story is no longer whether institutions *can* use blockchain—but how they use these guidelines to replace legacy pipelines with high-speed on-chain rails.
These standards will catalyze a broader wave of compliant on-chain products, regulated on- and off-ramps, and institutional-grade infrastructure—without mandating full centralization—thus increasing institutional participation.
Regions combining clear rules with rapid approval will increasingly attract capital, talent, and experimentation—accelerating the normalization of on-chain value distribution across native crypto and hybrid financial products. Slower-moving jurisdictions will fall behind.
The Internet Economy on Crypto
Infrastructure maturity is the unifying thread across this transformation. Crypto is becoming the clearing and settlement layer of the internet economy—enabling value to flow as freely as information. The protocols, primitives, and applications being built today are unlocking new forms of real-world economic activity—and expanding what is possible on the internet.
At Wintermute Ventures, we back founders building this infrastructure. We look for teams that combine deep technical expertise with strong product intuition. Teams shipping solutions people genuinely want to use. Teams capable of operating within regulatory frameworks while advancing the core principles of decentralized systems. Teams designing businesses built for lasting impact.
2026 will mark an inflection point. Crypto infrastructure will recede further into the background for users—while becoming foundational to the global financial system. The best infrastructure empowers people quietly, without demanding attention.
If you’re building in any of these areas, reach out to our team.
You can also fill out the form on our website:
https://www.wintermute.com/contact/ventures
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