Yes, I know, you are probably sick and tired of seeing people’s 2026 predictions. Or maybe you enjoy them, idk. People do really like making predictions. Its kind of part of our nature. I don’t typically like to make them but this year feels different.
AI is here. ChatGPT is used by virtually everyone. Claude is as well and they keep pushing out new updats. We even have robots right, with Waymo self-driving cars.
If you watch Stranger Things, you’ll remember that scene in one of the early Seasons where the Demogorgon Monster was first discovered by some of the residents of Hawkins, Indiana, wrecking immense havoc across the city, trying to ultimately destroy the whole world. And the CIA and Russians are involved. Well, once they found out, they knew they couldn’t just share this information with Hawkins residents. People would think they were utterly crazy. So instead they said they needed to make this information palatable by saying that there was a chemical leak in the water. This is not outside of the realm of reality. People know it has happened before.
So, same with AI predictions. I would sound crazy if I said AI will ravenously eat jobs across all industries from legal to healthcare to ecommerce. Software developers will be replaced. Heck, in a few years time, Uber drivers may be replaced too. We’ll have robots. This is happening (link to BlackDragon VC fund).
So instead, I need to make this revolutionary shift palatable.
What excites me about AI is not necessarily the moonshot science fiction kind of change we will see, but the more incrememntal shift that will happen with products and tools that I use today.
In crypto, that’s more natural language processing to abstract the technical complexity of interacting with crypto as payments. Beautiful and intuitive UI/UX is a must. We see it in products from NEAR and Optimism. NEAR Intents for example and a new product from Optimism going into production soon called Actions that abstracts the complexity of normal Defi actions like lending, borrowing, swapping, and payments. Its become habitual and easy for crypto natives, but for the rest of the world that isn’t “red pilled” on crypto yet, it’s still a difficult paradigm to understand.
I think too about this tweet on marketing that I saw about crypto marketing channels that will disrupt traditional marketing. Essentially once crypto advertising becomes allowed so many protocols will start advertising their consumer apps.
Imagine streaming your favorite show on Peacock and starting to see adds for crypto…many of the consumer crypto apps are trading or gambling related (e.g, prediction markets for sports, politics, etc.) so this is dangerous and I am worried about this. Its kind of like tobacco companies starting to advertise again. Morally, I am against this, and I am not excited about this.
What I am excited about are crypto products that will be more seamless, behind the scenes, enabling actually useful things. So like I said the products that excite me that are to come out are ones which will make my day-to-day life easier. Like an AI assistant. Its annoying right now to have to pull out my phone and type or voice something. So like an Amazon Alexa or Google Home but better?? This is probably more CES stuff..
The phases of crypto adoption: - Already, crypto is common for speculation and gambling. Sports betting, prediction markets (polymarket), trading on Coinbase or Robinhood (crypto as another “asset class”, bring trading to the masses) - when family and friends talk to me about crypto, this is usually what they know. i just had a family friend recently say that she didn’t get into crypto because she heard it was only for speculation. she’s not wrong, but what she is wrong about is that crypto would stay as speculation forever. she wasn’t seeing, she’s not on the “inside” of crypto innovation. it’s a whole new world. like I’ll use the stranger things analogy again (the “upside down” world, that is really like an altnernate reality). - why was crypto’s first mass adopted use case speculation? - When Bitcoin launched in 2009, its intended use case was: - peer-to-peer electronic cash - censorship-resistant payments - non-sovereign money But the first thing people could actually do with it at scale was trade it. Why? 1. Payments need merchants. Speculation only needs buyers. Two people agreeing on price is easier than rebuilding Visa. 2. Volatility created attention. Price movement brought miners, exchanges, liquidity, and infrastructure. 3. Financial primitives bootstrap faster than social ones. Markets form before norms, regulation, or UX.
Pattern was mine → hold → trade → speculate. That pattern repeated—hard—in every cycle.
With Ethereum, the narrative shifted to: • smart contracts • programmable money • world computers
But again, the killer apps were: • ICO speculation • DeFi yield farming • NFTs as speculative assets
Even when utility existed, price discovery dominated behavior. This isn’t because builders are immoral. It’s because markets are the fastest coordination mechanism humans have. Speculation is how new systems: • discover value • attract capital • fund infrastructure • test demand under stress
This is not unique to the crypto industries. - Many foundational industries started with speculation first, utility later. Massive speculative bubbles in railroad stocks and bonds - Many lines were built before demand existed - Repeated boom–bust cycles bankrupted investors
Outcome:
Railroads became the backbone of commerce and logistics.**
Oil and Energy
- Early oil wildcatters speculated on land and drilling rights
- Oil towns formed overnight, then collapsed
- Capital rushed in long before stable industrial demand
Outcome:
Energy became foundational to modern civilization.
Telecom
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Telegraph and telephone companies were heavily speculated on
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Dot-com era massively overbuilt fiber infrastructure
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Most early companies failed
Outcome: The internet rode on surplus fiber capacity.
We wouldn’t have the Googles, Amazons, and Facebooks of today without the experimentation and capital flows of the dot-com era. Speculation paid for the rails of the internet.
Real estate industry cycles are another example..list can go on.
Ok, for my predictions.
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Things are shifting from speculation to “legitimate payment infrastructure”
- This is kind of the boring stuff but where crypto excels really hard right now. Stablecoin regulation is a huge part of it. Paypal and Stripe integrating stablecoins (Circle’s USDC)
- Ecommerce (Shopify, Visa) using crypto for faster, cheaper, global, and programmable payments.
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Crypto as payment rails for agent-to-agent commerce. Agents talking to one another on the Internet to do things for their owners. This will disrupt logistics, supply chains, manufacturing. Imagine a manufacturing manager saying they want X pounds of product to arrive at Y warehouse at Z time. The agent will go online and find the best way to do this at the best rate. No humans needed.
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Crypto for private AI. Using TEE environments to have private spaces stored locally for user data inputted in AI. Because we don’t trust Google or Meta to not use user prompts for training their models. This will lead to disruptions in healthcare, therapy, law, industries that require private interactions between attorney/therapist and client.
- caveat here is that sam altman from openai publicly announced dangers of using AI for therapy
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I use Obsidian for note taking and for my digital garden. I want AI in it.