Boring is Beautiful: Crypto Predictions for 2026

However, crypto investors, the individuals that stuck through the technology through speculative bubbles and catastrophes like the FTX fraud, were not broadly rewarded. Why? 

What is crypto? Many people have a difficult time answering this question but ultimately blockchain technology is an infrastructure that is only now maturing sufficiently to provide mass-market utilization. Going forward, blockchains and protocols will be used by businesses to create value and improve user efficiency. The problem is that large swathes of tokens had previously been valued largely on speculation of their future use cases. Now that the future has arrived and businesses are going mainstream using blockchain technology, the threshold for token value is increasingly focusing on fundamental factors. Crypto is growing up and for many tokens, this means there will be a reckoning.  

Furthermore, as we head into a year that will be defined by strong macro tailwinds, it is likely that the flip from the technology being seen as being much more speculative to fundamental will dissuade investors looking for higher risk investments from participating. Instead, lower hanging fruit in the form of AI, quantum, rare earths and precious metals (have you seen the chart for platinum or palladium?), will continue to be a focus for investors chasing higher risk.  

So is crypto cooked in 2026? Absolutely not. In fact, although volatility will persist, there will be lots of opportunities to benefit from its adoption and acceptance as a major asset class.  What are our expectations for 2026? Let’s get cracking! 

Macro tailwinds 

There are wonderful macro analysts out there. We have our list of favourites. They mostly agree on the main points for next year. We won’t belabour the point as it’s easier for you to read them to get into the detail. The following factors look likely to play out in 2026.  

Interest rates should continue to decrease. The Trump admin is likely to put more pressure on the Fed, including through their choice of a dovish Fed chair, to continue to reduce interest rates. The shift to lower rates is unlikely to change even if inflation re-accelerates, as the administration has made clear that their primary strategy for reducing the relative debt burden and improving its prospects in the midterms is to run the economy hot, even at the cost of tolerating higher inflation.  

As AI begins to hollow out the workforce, unemployment will overtake inflation as the dominant risk, leaving governments with a singular, familiar release valve, expanding the money supply. The Trump administration has already begun making noise about “stimmies” in the form of dividends from tariffs.  

Global liquidity should also look healthy, barring any shocks. Global M2 continues to grow and although the US seems to be at the tail end of a global liquidity cycle (often a period of risk on, speculative behaviour), China seems to be on a slightly different cycle which has only just bottomed. If the US reverses course due to President Trump’s actions running things hot into the mid terms, the term tailwinds could be an understatement for risk assets.  

The net effect will likely be an economy firing on all cylinders, relatively low interest rates, stimulative fiscal measures and a global liquidity environment that encourages risk taking investment. Traditionally, if these factors all align, 2026 should be a great environment for a technology that is finally starting to see real adoption.  

Here come the big boys 

The GENIUS Act paved the way for corporate America to latch on to stablecoins. There has been a flurry of corporate giants who have already indicated an interest in launching their own stablecoins and in tech circles it has emerged as a major new theme. Currently, we are awaiting the rulemaking by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, OCC, FDIC, and NCUA in order to bring the Act into effect which is expected this year, and definitely no later than January 18, 2027.  

Furthermore, we are seeing fintech giants such as Stripe launching their own blockchains to focus on payments. If these products are built into their current processes, utilizing blockchains and stablecoins to reduce payment costs and settlement times, it is reasonable to think that they can be very powerful tools. That said, however, Golden Pear believes that many of these will struggle in the medium term (without incentives) as they will be cannibalistic to some of the current, highly profitable methodologies used by their businesses.  

At some point, probably mid to late 2026, stablecoin projects will begin rolling out in earnest and the crypto market structure bill will likely reach a crescendo in early 2026. If market structure passes, it will hopefully put the technology beyond the reach of a pendulum swing of politics in the US. Although not a certainty, and the final form of such legislation is far from predictable, almost any sort of regulatory clarity for the entire rest of crypto would be tremendously advantageous for adoption. Political insiders close to the discussions seem to indicate that they should be able to get a market structure bill passed early in 2026.  

The net effect of this regulatory clarity is that it will encourage even greater adoption by some of the world’s largest companies. We even expect that at least one of the Mag 7 will likely launch a major blockchain project, igniting excitement.  

Some tokens will thrive, many shrivel 

After many years, Bitcoin is finally edging its way into conversations alongside gold and other precious metals. Bitcoin is digital scarcity. Although it still trades like high-beta Nasdaq, its investor base has widened substantially and now includes sovereign wealth funds and endowments. When the Bitcoin ETFs first launched in the USA, hedge funds were the largest holders. Now, longer-term holders such as Advisors, RIAs, and Endowments represent a large and growing share. Recently Vanguard launched crypto ETFs on its platform and Bank of America began advising its clients to hold 1-4% of their portfolio in crypto. Furthermore, volatility of the asset was the lowest in its history, falling to 2.24% daily.  

The big question for Bitcoin is, will the USA acquire Bitcoin in its strategic reserve, or will it continue to maintain only Bitcoin that has been seized? If a Bill was passed to allow the Fed to hold and acquire Bitcoin and to spell out an acquisition schedule, as seen in Senator Lummis’ bill the BITCOIN Act, this would add the ultimate legitimacy to the asset class. However, bipartisan support of such a Bill is relatively unlikely. The remaining option would be for the Trump administration to find a “budget neutral” way to add to the Bitcoin reserve created by President Trump through executive order.  

Should Bitcoin be acquired by the US government, the price would skyrocket. We are hopeful, but unsure if this will occur in 2026 and believe that the promise of such, which is a desire of most crypto holders, could be used as a carrot to raise more funds to republican causes before midterms.  

Our projections for Bitcoin this year are relatively muted, reaching US$150,000 if no Bitcoin is purchased by the US and US$200,000 if it is.  

Ethereum is emerging from its adolescence and, against the backdrop of further institutional adoption of smart contract blockchains, should be in pole position. The revamp of Ethereum leadership and focus on scalability and privacy should make it attractive as a venue for institutions who value security, trust and tooling. We believe that Ether should outperform for these reasons.  

Solana, on the other hand, may struggle. Although it has great opportunities due to its superior scalability and throughput, especially in light of the launch of its new, Jump Trading designed, client Firedancer, it is currently in a struggle for new use cases. Memecoins, a traditional source of tremendous volume for Solana, are all but dead and most buyers lost tremendous sums and will not return. Furthermore, perpetual futures decentralized exchanges are growing in use and ought to find Solana infrastructure ideal. However, they have largely been built elsewhere – Solana benefits only very marginally from the success of this important, fast-growing, application. Alas, trailing Ethereum, Solana seems to be entering its own adolescent period. It will no doubt emerge as the technology is great, but it may take time.  

Other bright spots will be perpetual decentralized exchanges (Hyperliquid, Lighter, Aster), tokenized equities and real world assets moving onchain. Stablecoin circulation grew by more than 50% in 2025. We believe it will grow by another 50% or more this year. However, understanding how to invest in these themes will continue to be frustrating for many crypto investors. It will not be obvious and usually one will need to find proxies and look at second order effects.  

In 2026, the growth of decentralized perpetual futures protocols will be enormous and they will begin to gather users who want to take leverage on non-crypto assets. Already on offer, and growing in volume are leveraged exposure to equities indices, commodities, single equities, as well as unlisted equities (such as SpaceX, Anthropic, etc.). We believe that these markets will begin to attract enormous attention, volume and will also lead to some large market dislocations. At least one large insider trading incident will explode on the front pages and we also believe the largely untested mechanics behind running large markets on assets that cannot be traded (unlisted equities or even listed equities during periods when they are not trading) will result in at least one major issue that harms investors and casts doubt on some platforms. 

Lastly, we continue to believe in the crossover between AI and crypto. Even though this theme failed last year, we continue to believe that not only are there interesting innovations, but that in fact AI Agents will need crypto. Look at the success of the x402 standard, created by Coinbase in order to allow for permissionless payment infrastructure for AI Agents. More than 100m transactions have been processed in a few months. We believe that there will be several crypto protocols which end up being used extensively by AI Agents in 2026.  

Predicting the Future 

The irony of writing predictions about prediction markets is not lost on us. Polymarket (a crypto native protocol), Kalshi (a non-crypto native version), and new entrants like Robinhood will be cornerstones of news reporting and financial markets. The influence and valuations of these companies will be sensational. However, also creating waves will be headlines that focus attention back on why these markets were banned for so long. The mechanics for prediction markets are such that markets resolve when the outcome becomes known. This seems obvious. The issue is that “known” is a sliding scale, not absolute. There are insiders on almost every single market. The mechanism, setting incentives for markets to resolve as more participants wager on the correct outcome, are in direct opposition to insider trading regulations. Although Kalshi is CFTC regulated and Polymarket is launching operations in the US and will also need to comply with CFTC Material Non-Public Information rules, enforcement will be challenging. We are certain there will be serious Insider Dealing allegations related to prediction markets in 2026.  

Conclusion 

The good news is that a number of quite boring factors are set to influence crypto in 2026. We will witness new, albeit rational, all-time highs for key assets, adoption of the technology will accelerate and finally assets will be judged more fundamentally as businesses. The bad news is that the very mix of the above factors will create a minefield for investors. Add to this the macro environment and the volatility inherent in the next few years and crypto is sure to offer a plethora of opportunities and risks. For those that are able to see through these factors, boring will be beautiful.  

Review of 2025 Predictions 

How did we do? For the article on our 2025 prediction, have a look here.  

Here is the review! 

US national Bitcoin reserve  

We were right about its creation. However, the missing piece is whether the US will begin acquiring Bitcoin into the reserve.  

Institutional adoption  

Correct! 

Application layer growth and end user ownership  

We were pretty spot on about applications starting to capture more revenue. Look at HyperLiquid, a perps dex that captured huge fee revenue, larger than almost any other chain or protocol, for significant parts of 2025.  

AI agents X digital assets  

Our biggest miss. Although we were right about some predictions, the AI Agent X Crypto narrative reached a crescendo of speculative fervor and corrected hard. This reduced the amount of innovation, or drove it out of the spotlight. We still believe there are good opportunities in this sector in 2026 and healthier growth in the sector is still possible.  

Stablecoin proliferation  

Entirely correct – we predicted 50% growth of stablecoins in circulation, and it was exceeded by a few points.  

Capital markets and venture capital backlash  

Entirely correct as we saw large, successful IPOs and, in light of a more understanding SEC, funding dynamics have shifted as contemplated.