Read Messari's 100,000-word report on 60 crypto trends for 2026 in 10 minutes

Original compilation: BitalkNews

This article summarizes Messari's 100,000-word annual report, combining AI and human insights to outline the following 60 crypto trends for 2026.

1. If L1 does not experience real growth, crypto funds will increasingly flow to Bitcoin.

2. ETH is still Bitcoin's "little brother" and not an independent leader. ETH has institutional and corporate support, can profit alongside Bitcoin, but cannot stand completely on its own yet.

3. The correlation between ZEC and Bitcoin has dropped to 0.24, serving as a privacy hedge against Bitcoin.

4. Application-specific currencies (such as Virtuals Protocol, Zora) will emerge as a trend in 2026.

Taking Virtuals Protocol as an example of application-specific currency:

• When users create AI agents, a token exclusive to the agent will be issued.

• All agent tokens are paired with the platform token VIRTUAL (to buy agent tokens, one must use VIRTUAL, providing liquidity).

• The more popular the platform and the more useful the AI agents, the greater the demand for VIRTUAL, making it the "special currency" of this ecosystem.

1. Stablecoins: Transitioning from speculative tools to "currency weapons" for the U.S. The GENIUS Act (passed in 2025) introduces the first federal stablecoin regulations in the U.S., transforming stablecoins from crypto toys into tools of U.S. monetary policy.

2. Tether may continue to dominate the stablecoin market in developing countries, while developed markets are being taken over by large institutions. Tether's profits are soaring, with a valuation approaching $500 billion. Major players like JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citibank, PayPal, Visa, and Google are all entering the stablecoin space or building infrastructure.

3. Cloudflare and Google are building stablecoins and payment protocols specifically for AI agent transactions, preparing to enter a future where AI spends automatically.

4. With interest rates declining in 2026, yield-bearing stablecoins (such as lending spreads, arbitrage, GPU collateral loans) will explode (e.g., Ethena's USDe).

5. Tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) will bring trillions of assets on-chain. By 2025, the total scale of RWA will reach $18 billion, primarily in government bonds and credit. DTCC (the U.S. securities clearing giant) has received SEC approval to tokenize U.S. securities. Most will be deployed on Ethereum (64%), but institutions may use private chains.

6. Ethereum: The "settlement center" for institutions and big money. Ethereum remains the most reliable "settlement layer."

7. Ethereum L2 has taken on most transactions, but token performance is poor. Base has the strongest revenue, accounting for 62% of L2. Arbitrum has the strongest DeFi.

8. Solana: The king of retail and speculation continues to dominate retail trading, spot volume, and the memecoin craze.

9. In 2026, Ripple aims to make XRPL an "institutional DeFi-friendly chain," adding various compliance features at the base layer.

10. Stellar will focus on stablecoins and payment applications in 2026 (with ultra-low fees of $0.00055 per transaction, ready-made wallets, global fiat channels, and bulk payment platforms).

11. Hedera aims to be a "regulated enterprise infrastructure backbone," focusing on two directions: RWA tokenization and verifiable AI.

12. BNB Chain directs 290 million users. Binance Alpha continues to serve as a "new project incubator," prioritizing BNB Chain.

13. TRON will remain the king of USDT transfers in emerging markets. TRON is one of the most profitable "businesses" in the crypto space, with annual revenues exceeding $500 million. New "stablecoin-specific chains" (stablechains) are trying to take its market share, but TRON has a deep moat; as long as it maintains its USDT dominance and expands its global influence, it will still be a core pillar of the stablecoin economy in 2026.

14. Sui is evolving from a "high-performance execution chain" to a "full-stack unified platform."

15. Aptos aims to be the core engine for "tokenization of all assets and 24/7 global trading without intermediaries."

16. Near Intents will serve as the foundational layer for cross-chain + AI agents.

17. Polygon is pursuing the payment track, integrating stablecoins, merchant processors, and consumer finance. Monthly payment app transactions have exceeded $1 billion (with an annual total of $6.4 billion), targeting $2.5-3 billion per month in 2026.

18. The stablecoin public chains Arc and Tempo are competing with SWIFT (international wire transfers), ACH (U.S. clearing), and payment processors, aiming to move large offline payments on-chain.

Arc is targeting large institutional funds (banks, capital markets' FX, tokenized assets).

Tempo is targeting funds from the Stripe ecosystem (merchants, consumer payments, payroll).

Arc could become the default track for institutional forex, tokenized assets, and B2B payments (if Circle attracts large institutions and is regulatory-friendly). Tempo could become the best track for merchants to distribute funds and cross-border settlements.

23. Chainlink continues to dominate as the leading DeFi oracle, but institutional data services will become the new main source of revenue for oracles (traditional financial data budgets are enormous, with Bloomberg earning $10.6 billion annually).

24. Privacy cross-chain will become a focus: THORChain plus Monero (swapping transparent coins for privacy coins), Chainlink Confidential Compute (secure computation of sensitive institutional data before going on-chain).

25. In 2026, DEXs will integrate wallets, bots, launchpads, and other services. The three main profit streams for DEXs:

• Wallets: Phantom earned $9.46 million in November (with a fee rate of 0.95%), with a volume of less than $1 billion but dominating most DEXs.

• Trading bots: Axiom has a fee rate of 1.15%, earning $18.74 million.

• Asset issuance (launchpads): Selling exclusive new coins. pump.fun earned $34.92 million with a fee rate of 0.51%, while Four.meme had a fee rate of 1.05% (backed by Binance).

In 2026, DEXs will bundle wallets, bots, launchpads, and DEXs, controlling the entire trading process, not just earning fees. Potential new revenue streams include subscriptions and premium execution fees.

26. Modular lending (such as Morpho) will surpass integrated lending (Aave), relying on RWA lending, high-yield stablecoins, and institutional distribution.

Why does modular have advantages?

• There is significant demand for lending long-tail assets (small coins, RWA), which integrated lending is hesitant to touch; modular can open independent vaults.

• Institutions and new banks prefer to isolate risks and customize parameters.

• It can serve as a backend for centralized exchanges and new banks (e.g., Morpho collaborating with Coinbase, attracting nearly $1 billion in deposits).

1. Stock perpetual contracts will become a new trend in crypto, allowing for high-leverage stock trading while bypassing offline regulations.

2. Exogenous yield stablecoins: The yield from stablecoins comes from real cash flows off-chain (such as private credit, infrastructure, tokenized real estate), not government bonds. More exogenous yield products (credit, real estate, energy, etc.) will go on-chain. Yield-bearing stablecoins will become the main collateral and savings tools in DeFi.

Successful examples:

USD.Ai: Government bond-backed + AI infrastructure (GPU collateral) loans, locking up $670 million, with a yield-bearing version yielding 9.7%.

Maple syrup USDC/T: Providing over-collateralized loans to trading firms/market makers, locking up $4.5 billion, with a yield of 5.5%.

29. Real-world asset (RWA) collateralized lending. On-chain RWA lending relies almost entirely on home equity credit, with Figure dominating (active loans of $14.1 billion). Another potential direction is merchant credit, where on-chain credit uses transparent cash flows for automatic assessment and lending, serving global merchants.

30. DeFi banks may become the mainstream distribution layer for crypto banks. Putting savings, trading, cards, and remittances all in one permissionless wallet is essentially a DeFi bank.

31. Decentralized high-quality data collection for AI (active/passive) will be the most profitable, while decentralized computing networks (DCN) will find new paths through wholesale + verified reasoning. Medium open-source models + swarm intelligence/agents will thrive, with AI and crypto feeding off each other, ushering DeAI into an "enlightenment era."

32. Cutting-edge data: Opportunities in the AI data scarcity era.

Publicly available free AI data is quickly being exhausted, and there is an urgent need for high-quality data that is complex, multimodal (images + text + video + audio), and tailored for cutting-edge tasks (such as robotics, computer agents). This presents a significant opportunity for crypto companies to collect proprietary data on a large scale, categorized into two types:

Active collection: Users intentionally perform tasks to generate data (like an upgraded version of traditional annotation companies).

Passive collection: Users normally use products, inadvertently generating "digital waste" (with minimal friction and large scale). An example is Grass: using idle bandwidth to scrape multimodal data from web pages, with projected revenues reaching $12.8 million in 2025 (as major AI companies repeatedly purchase).

In 2026, such "data minting factories" will focus on a specific cutting-edge use case (not just collecting but also enhancing learning environments/new benchmarks), likely becoming the most profitable part of decentralized AI.

33. In 2026, more companies are expected to publicly announce "collaborations with leading AI labs" for passive data collection.

Passive data collection differs from active (where users intentionally perform tasks); users generate data simply by using products, with almost zero friction, allowing for massive scale. The most promising example for 2025 is Shaga (a DePIN network that turns idle gaming computers into a distributed cloud gaming platform, where users contribute computing power to earn rewards). In 2026, more companies are expected to publicly announce "collaborations with leading AI labs," and traditional companies will also add crypto incentives + stablecoin payments.

34. By 2025, DeAI labs have trained strong mid-sized open-source models using globally distributed heterogeneous GPUs. Prime Intellect, Nous Research, Gensyn, and Pluralis are already leading labs, and more products may become profitable in 2026.

35. Lightweight agent businesses may take off in 2026. X402 is gaining popularity, and ERC-8004 provides agents with on-chain identities, while Google AP2 and OpenAI ACP (in collaboration with Stripe) promote agent payment protocols.

36. In 2026, DeFAI (AI + DeFi) may take three forms:

• Vertical integration: A dedicated platform that encompasses everything (research + trading + yield + management), similar to a Bloomberg terminal, creating a data flywheel to lock in users.

• Embedded AI: Large interfaces (Phantom, Axiom, exchanges) integrating the best systems via API, or acquiring exclusive technologies.

• Modular coordination: Aggregating platforms coordinating thousands of specialized agents, allowing users to use a "main agent" to route to the best specialists, akin to an agent app store.

34. Bittensor: The king of the Darwin platform, using competitive incentives to attract top global talent. The ecosystem consists of a series of independent subnets, each focusing on a specific AI task.

35. Smart contract security challenges: AI is a double-edged sword.

AI can help write code, making DeFi applications easier to deploy, but it also provides hackers with powerful tools to find vulnerabilities.

Smart protocols should now incorporate AI defenses to prevent AI hackers from weaponizing at scale. Security is shifting from "pre-launch audits" to "continuous proactive defense." Investment in AI defenses will surge—institutions require high-trust environments, and static audits are insufficient against dynamic AI adversaries.

39. Prediction markets lack AI, and will integrate in the future.

AI does not replace human judgment but serves as a "new layer of participation"—continuously aggregating information, stabilizing liquidity, and better calibrating to reduce structural biases without changing the essence of the market. Prediction markets need mature predictive infrastructure, and AI agents are a necessary layer. Current protocols are already integrating AI predictions, agent participation, and decision support.

40. DePIN vertical integration (turning resources into complete products) is the most profitable, solving demand issues.

Most DePIN produces "commodity resources" (computing power, bandwidth, storage), which are hard to sell for big money—interchangeable, low-priced, and reliant on volume.

Winning strategy: Vertical integration—packaging resources into complete consumer/business products and selling directly to users (D2C). For example, Helium Mobile has an annual revenue of $21 million (the first in DePIN).

41. In 2026, DePIN opportunities in DePAI data collection:

AI requires real-world data (robotics, autonomous driving, physical interactions), currently lacking by 2-4 orders of magnitude (only tens of thousands of hours, needing millions/tens of millions). DePAI will incentivize global robots/sensors to collect data faster than centralized methods. Companies like Hivemapper and DIMO are already profitable.

42. In 2026, new players specifically for physical AI data will emerge:

• BitRobot: Robot data + computing power + datasets + human collaboration.

• PrismaX: Robot data + remote operation (raising $11 million).

• Poseidon: High-quality long-tail data with licensing.

They directly address major pain points for large AI companies (proprietary data) and face no competition. Issuing tokens + proving revenue may lead to explosive demand. In the long run, they will not only sell data but also train proprietary physical AI models/operating systems (exclusive data, higher profits).

43. InfraFi has the opportunity to invest on-chain in traditional credit's hard-to-reach new infrastructure (such as computing power, distributed energy). USD.Ai: Lending to AI startups to buy GPUs.

44. The SEC believes DePIN tokens are not securities, providing clear regulation, which will lead to an explosion in DePIN entrepreneurship.

45. The era of consumer-grade crypto has arrived. Consumer-grade crypto includes memecoins, NFTs, social media, wallets, games, etc. The most powerful applications embed "markets" into products (memecoin/NFT culture, prediction market information, social content, collectible trading).

46. Prediction markets: After the U.S. elections sparked interest, trading volume surged from a post-election low of $1.7 billion to $9.2 billion in November. Sports and cultural trading volumes are rising the fastest.

47. Financialized social media has potential: Social media is the largest pie in consumer technology (the creator economy is projected to reach $480 billion by 2027). Crypto transforms content, creators, and interactions into a tradable market. In 2026, Zora is expected to perform well, with Coinbase directing traffic.

48. In 2026, exotic RWAs may become a new hotspot in consumer crypto. Trading cards, sports cards, TCG cards, whiskey, clothing, CS skins, and figurines will become popular on-chain.

49. Messari's self-developed L2 evaluation framework, Disruption Factor, concludes:

Arbitrum One ranks first (69.5): The DeFi economy is sustainable, with net capital inflows and strong ecosystem revenue, not relying on a single blockbuster app. Companies like Robinhood, Franklin Templeton, and WisdomTree have joined.

Base ranks second (67.1): Coinbase directs traffic, leading in users/transactions/revenue/narrative, attracting DeFi and consumer apps.

50. In 2026, stablecoins will enter daily life: Major platforms (Remitly, Western Union, etc.) will launch stablecoins, with supply doubling to over $600 billion, and multiple platform-specific coins (USDH, CASH, PYUSD) competing for market share, making stablecoins part of millions of people's daily lives.

51. Morpho is capturing Aave's lending market share: Morpho's modularity and risk isolation have already led to collaborations with Coinbase and Revolut, making it more suitable for institutions and new banks in 2026, capturing Aave's market share.

52. After memecoins, fundamentally strong altcoins have a chance for reversal.

53. Using prediction markets to price TGE: In 2026, prediction markets will become a direct market for institutions/users to price risk, hedge, and obtain real-time information.

54. 2026 will be the year of perpetual contracts (stocks): Traditional and crypto markets will deeply intersect, with perp DEXs benefiting the most. Hyperliquid has already surpassed $28 trillion in volume, and HIP-3 allows for easy listing of new assets. Stock perps are simple, available across all time zones, highly leveraged, and free from regulatory friction, attracting new users and outperforming 0DTE options. 2026 may become a new killer application in crypto, drawing traditional finance's attention.

55. The biggest winner in 2026 will be wallets: All roads lead to wallets, and crypto can capture this wave (products not available in traditional markets): perpetual + prediction markets, all aggregated in wallet apps, which are closest to users. In 2026, wallets will add more (traditional financial tools), becoming the main interface for most people's financial activities.

56. Smart money will seek more "locking + hedging" strategies in 2026, scaling up to capture DeFi cash flows.

"Smart players": Locking veAERO in Aerodrome (earning 31% weekly yield) while simultaneously opening equivalent perpetual short positions in Hyperliquid (earning 11% funding fees). Total yield of 31% + 11% = over 40%. This is not about betting on direction but rather a synthetic yield engineering: hedging against price fluctuations while only earning real cash flows from the protocol (fees + bribes).

57. The following four major tracks will accelerate in 2026:

• On-chain infrastructure embedding more real finance (payments, lending, settlements).

• Tokenization of traditional assets, blurring asset class boundaries.

• More crypto companies will go public.

• Development of "super financial apps": wallets + on-chain tracks, integrating stocks, payments, and credit.

57. Crypto sentiment is expected to improve in 2026.

58. Bitcoin will continue to serve as "digital gold," with its price fluctuations positively correlated with the total supply of stablecoins (the more stablecoins, the more expensive Bitcoin becomes).

59. Altcoins (especially L1 tokens) will no longer be seen as "high-multiple versions of Bitcoin," but rather like high-growth tech stocks, relying on adoption, fees, and applications, with many likely falling to reasonable valuations.

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