Investment firm a16z has published its annual crypto expectations, outlining a significant shift in how blockchains, AI agents, and global payments will operate in 2026.
The research highlights three key forces — autonomous agents, disappearing payment systems, and a new era of privacy-focused blockchains. All these developments together indicate that the financial layer of the internet is being redesigned.
AI agents are driving a major shift
The biggest change, according to a16z, is the rise of AI agents as economic participants. For every human in the financial sector, there are now almost 100 active agents.
Yet these autonomous systems still lack identity, rights, and compliance structures. According to the company, the first version of KYA: Know Your Agent will come in 2026, a cryptographic identity layer that links agents to their owners, limitations, and responsibilities.
Without this layer, agents remain “unbankable spirits,” who cannot trade securely or access real markets. With this layer, they become programmable market participants who can directly spend, trade, and settle value.
Payments disappear into the infrastructure of the internet
This development leads to the second major expectation: payments will disappear within the network itself. While AI agents automatically execute transactions — for example, buying data, paying for GPU time, or settling API calls — money must move as quickly and precisely as information.
New technologies such as x402 enable value transfer directly, without permission and without intermediaries.
In this model, payments are no longer a separate application, but become a standard function of the network. Banks, stablecoins, and settlement systems transform into invisible infrastructure underneath agent-to-agent trading.
Privacy chains will dominate
Privacy forms the third pillar of a16z's expectation for 2026. According to the company, privacy will become the strongest competitive advantage in crypto, more important than performance or speed.
More specifically: when transactions become private, users experience real friction when switching chains, as moving secrets causes metadata to leak. This creates “privacy lock-in,” where the chains with the best privacy attract the most users.
Arthur Hayes said the same earlier: institutions cannot become large on blockchains that make everything public by default.
“These large institutions do not want to make their information public or risk it becoming public,” he said, noting that privacy solutions on Layer-2 are likely to emerge first, while Ethereum remains the underlying security level.
Other crypto expectations from a16z include more infrastructure for stablecoins, the shift from tokenization to on-chain emergence, reliable cloud computing through faster SNARKs, and the emergence of “staked media,” where commentators prove their reliability through on-chain engagement.