 
 
a16z crypto believes the crypto industry will evolve beyond tokens and trading in 2026. The firm outlined three structural changes that will influence how the technology interacts with society, computation, and media.
The first shift centers on prediction markets, which are expected to become larger, broader, and significantly more intelligent.
These markets have already entered the mainstream. However, a16z projects an explosion in contract diversity, covering not just elections or geopolitical flashpoints, but precise and interconnected outcomes.
As prediction markets feed into the news cycle, they raise questions around transparency, verification, and societal impact. Crypto offers solutions through auditable systems, while decentralized governance and large language model oracles could help resolve disputed outcomes that centralized platforms struggle to adjudicate.
AI agents are also expected to be actively involved in trading on these platforms and uncovering deeper predictive signals. Moreover, prediction markets are positioned to enhance polling rather than replace it, as crypto helps verify humanness and improve survey design.
 
The second transformation involves crypto becoming a foundational primitive for industries outside blockchains. Advances in zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVM) are reducing the computational overhead of cryptographic proofs.
By 2026, zkVM provers are expected to operate at roughly 10,000 times overhead, making them efficient enough to run on everyday devices.
GPUs already offer massive parallelism, making real-time proofs of CPU execution feasible and unlocking verifiable cloud computing. This functionality allows organizations to obtain cryptographic guarantees of correctness for standard cloud workloads without rewriting code, fundamentally changing trust assumptions in cloud infrastructure.
The third shift is the emergence of staked media. As AI accelerates content generation and erodes traditional signals of credibility, cryptographic tools enable creators to make verifiable commitments.
Through token lockups, on-chain histories, and prediction markets, journalists, analysts, and commentators can publicly demonstrate skin in the game.
This model does not replace existing media, but it improves trust by anchoring credibility in transparent, provable stakes rather than claimed neutrality.