The venture company a16z has published its annual crypto forecasts, in which they describe a significant change in how blockchains, AI agents, and global payments will function in 2026.
The research highlights three main forces — autonomous agents, disappearing payment pathways, and a new era with blockchains where privacy is prioritized. These events indicate a structural redesign of the financial layers of the internet.
AI agents will create a significant change
The most significant change, according to a16z, is that AI agents are taking on increasingly important economic roles. For every human in financial services, there are now almost 100 agents.
But these autonomous systems still lack identity, rights, or compliance structures. The company claims that 2026 will be the year when the first version of KYA: Know Your Agent is launched, a cryptographic identity layer that links agents to their owners, limitations, and responsibilities.
Without this, agents remain 'invisible ghost actors' who cannot conduct secure transactions or access real markets. With the identity layer, they can become programmable market actors who can spend, trade, and regulate value in real time.
Payments disappear into the infrastructure of the internet.
This change leads to the next big prediction: payments disappear into the network. When AI agents automatically perform transactions — buying data, paying for GPU time, and managing API calls — money must be able to move as quickly and in as much detail as information.
New technologies like x402 enable value to be transferred directly, without permission and without intermediaries.
In this model, payments cease to be an application layer and instead become a network behavior. Banks, stablecoins, and settlement systems function as invisible infrastructure beneath agent-to-agent trading.
Privacy chains will dominate.
Privacy is the third pillar in a16z's view of 2026. The company asserts that privacy will be crypto's strongest protection, much more important than performance or capacity.
When transactions become private, users face problems when they want to switch chains, as moving secrets leaks metadata. This creates 'privacy locking', where the chains that protect privacy win the most.
Arthur Hayes brought up the same point earlier and says that institutions cannot grow in blockchains that are always public.
'These large institutions do not want their information to become public or risk becoming so,' he says, suggesting that layer-2 privacy solutions may come first while Ethereum continues to be the underlying security layer.
Other crypto forecasts from a16z concern stronger stablecoin infrastructure, a shift from tokenization to origin directly on-chain, verifiable cloud computing through faster SNARKs, and that 'staked media' emerges, where commentators demonstrate credibility through blockchain-based commitments.
