Dragonfly Partners: Large tech companies may launch crypto wallets by 2026, while fintech companies find it difficult to successfully build their own L1

The managing partner of the crypto venture firm Dragonfly, Haseeb Qureshi, recently stated that by 2026, a large tech company may integrate or acquire a crypto wallet, while more Fortune 100 companies will attempt to launch their own blockchains. However, he also pointed out that fintech companies trying to combat mainstream public chains by building their own L1 public chains are unlikely to succeed overall.

Qureshi posted on the X platform that the next wave of enterprise adoption will mainly come from banks and fintech, with some institutions possibly building more private, permissioned networks based on public chains like Avalanche, while integrating existing tools such as OP Stack, Orbit, and ZK Stack, and maintaining connections with public blockchains. Previously, financial giants like JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and IBM have explored private blockchains, but most remain in testing or limited application stages.

He also predicted that among the large tech companies dominating the internet ecosystem (such as Google, Meta, or Apple), one may launch or acquire a crypto wallet in 2026, a move that has the potential to bring billions of users into the crypto ecosystem.

However, Qureshi is not optimistic about the "public" L1s launched by fintech companies, believing that they will struggle to compete with crypto-native networks like Ethereum and Solana in key metrics such as active addresses, stablecoin liquidity, and RWA. "The best developers will still choose neutral infrastructure chains."

On the price front, Qureshi expects Bitcoin to rise above $150,000 by the end of 2026, although market dominance may decline; the stablecoin market size is expected to grow by about 60% in 2026, while USDT's share may drop from around 60% to 55%. He is also optimistic about the continued growth of prediction markets but believes that AI will struggle to form large-scale applications in the crypto space in the short term, except for security scenarios.