Yes, I know—you’re probably sick and tired of seeing everyone’s 2026 predictions. Or maybe you enjoy them, idk. People really do love making predictions. It’s kind of part of our nature.
I don’t usually like to make them. But this year feels different.
AI is here. ChatGPT is used by virtually everyone. Claude is too, and the updates keep coming. We even have robots now—Waymo self-driving cars are already on the road.
If you’ve watched Stranger Things, you might remember an early scene where the Demogorgon is first discovered by residents of Hawkins, Indiana—wreaking havoc and threatening to destroy everything. Once the resident heros realizes what’s happening, they know they can’t just tell people the truth. No one would believe them. They’d sound insane. So instead, they make it palatable: there’s a chemical leak in the water. That explanation fits into an existing mental model. People have seen that before.
I think about that analogy a lot when it comes to AI predictions.
If I said outright that AI will aggressively eat jobs across industries—from legal to healthcare to ecommerce—that software developers will be replaced, that Uber drivers may disappear in a few years, that robots will become commonplace… I’d sound crazy. Even if it’s already happening.
So instead, I try to make this shift palatable.
What excites me about AI isn’t the moonshot, science-fiction version of the future (though that’s coming too). It’s the incremental change—the way AI quietly reshapes the products and tools I already use every day.
In crypto, that looks like natural language interfaces that abstract away the technical complexity of using crypto for payments. Beautiful, intuitive UI/UX is no longer optional—it’s a requirement. We’re already seeing this with products coming out of ecosystems like NEAR and Optimism. NEAR Intents, for example, and Optimism’s upcoming Actions product, which abstracts common DeFi behaviors like lending, borrowing, swapping, and payments.
For crypto natives, these workflows have become habitual. But for the rest of the world—people who aren’t “red-pilled” on crypto yet—the paradigm is still hard to understand.
I’ve also been thinking about a tweet I saw recently on crypto marketing—the idea that once crypto advertising becomes broadly allowed, it will disrupt traditional marketing channels. Imagine streaming your favorite show on Peacock and suddenly seeing ads for crypto apps.
That worries me.
Many consumer crypto apps today are effectively trading or gambling products—prediction markets for sports and politics, leveraged trading, speculative assets. This feels dangerous. It reminds me of tobacco companies being allowed to advertise again. Morally, I’m against this, and I’m not excited about that future.
What does excite me are crypto products that operate quietly in the background—seamless infrastructure that enables genuinely useful things. Tools that make day-to-day life easier without constantly demanding attention.
Think AI assistants that actually help—without needing to pull out your phone, type, or awkwardly voice-command something. Something like Alexa or Google Home, but meaningfully better. This is probably more CES-adjacent, but still—it’s the direction I care about.
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The phases of crypto adoption
Crypto today is still most commonly associated with speculation and gambling: sports betting, prediction markets, trading on Coinbase or Robinhood (where crypto is framed as just another “asset class”).
When family and friends talk to me about crypto, this is usually what they know. I recently had a family friend tell me she never got into crypto because she heard it was only for speculation. She’s not wrong—but what she is wrong about is assuming crypto will stay that way forever.
She’s not on the inside of crypto innovation. She’s not seeing what’s being built. It really does feel like an alternate reality—almost like the Upside Down in Stranger Things. A parallel world that exists, but isn’t visible unless you’re already in it.
So why was crypto’s first mass-adopted use case speculation?
When Bitcoin launched in 2009, its intended purpose 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.
The pattern became: mine → hold → trade → speculate. And that pattern repeated—hard—every cycle.
With Ethereum, the narrative shifted to smart contracts, programmable money, and world computers. But again, the killer apps were ICO speculation, DeFi yield farming, and NFTs as speculative assets.
Even when real 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
And this is not unique to crypto.
Many foundational industries followed the same path. Railroads experienced massive speculative bubbles long before demand stabilized—yet they became the backbone of commerce and logistics. Oil saw wildcat speculation and boomtowns before becoming foundational to modern civilization. Telecom massively overbuilt fiber during the dot-com era, and most companies failed—but the internet rode on that surplus capacity.
We wouldn’t have Google, Amazon, or Facebook without the experimentation and capital flows of the dot-com era. Speculation paid for the rails.
Real estate cycles tell the same story. The list goes on.
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So, my predictions.
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A shift from speculation to legitimate payment infrastructure This is the “boring” part—but it’s where crypto is quietly winning. • Stablecoin regulation will be key • PayPal and Stripe integrating stablecoins like USDC • Ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Visa using crypto for faster, cheaper, global, programmable payments
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Crypto as payment rails for agent-to-agent commerce AI agents will transact with other agents on behalf of humans. This will disrupt logistics, supply chains, and manufacturing. Imagine a manager stating a goal—X pounds of product delivered to Y warehouse at Z time—and an agent handling sourcing, pricing, and coordination automatically. No humans in the loop.
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Crypto for private AI Using trusted execution environments (TEEs) and similar tech, we’ll see private AI contexts where user data is stored locally and not harvested for model training. This matters because people don’t trust Google or Meta with sensitive prompts. This could reshape healthcare, therapy, and law—industries that rely on private, confidential interactions. A caveat here: Sam Altman has publicly warned about the dangers of using AI for therapy. That concern is real and shouldn’t be ignored.
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Personal tools, quietly augmented I use Obsidian for note-taking and my digital garden. I want AI there—not as a gimmick, but as a quiet collaborator that helps me think, synthesize, and connect ideas without extracting value from my data.
That’s the future I’m actually betting on.