The venture capital firm a16z has published its annual predictions on cryptocurrencies, noting a major shift in how blockchains, AI agents, and global payments will operate during the year 2026.
The research highlights three main forces: autonomous agents, the disappearance of visible payment networks, and a new era of privacy-focused blockchains. All these developments together indicate a structural redesign of the financial layer of the internet.
AI agents will bring about a significant change in the crypto ecosystem.
The most significant change, according to a16z, is the rise of AI agents as economic participants. For every human in financial services, there are now nearly 100 agents per worker.
However, these autonomous systems still lack identity, permissions, or compliance structures. The firm states that by 2026, the first version of KYA: Know Your Agent, a layer of cryptographic identity connecting agents with their owners, restrictions, and responsibilities will arrive.
Without this, agents will remain 'unbanked ghosts', unable to operate securely or access real markets. With this technology, they become programmable market actors capable of spending, trading, and settling value in real time.
Payments disappear in the Internet infrastructure
This shift drives the second major prediction: payments will disappear within the network itself. As AI agents automatically trigger transactions—buying data, paying for GPU time, or settling API calls—money must move with the same speed and detail as information.
New mechanisms like x402 allow value to be transferred instantly, without permissions and without intermediaries.
In this model, payments cease to be an application layer and become a native behavior of the network. Banks, stablecoins, and settlement systems become invisible infrastructures that operate under the trade between agents.
Privacy blockchains will dominate
Privacy is the third pillar of a16z's vision for 2026. The firm asserts that privacy will be the greatest defense in the crypto sector, surpassing the importance of performance or network capacity.
Specifically, once transactions are private, users face real difficulties when switching blockchains because moving secrets leaks metadata. This creates a 'privacy lock-in', an effect where the blockchain that best manages privacy will capture most users.
Arthur Hayes also mentioned this point, stating that institutional adoption cannot grow on public blockchains by default.
"These large institutions do not want their information to be public or risk becoming public," he explained, noting that privacy solutions could first appear on Layer 2 while Ethereum remains the main security base.
Other a16z predictions about crypto highlight the growth of stablecoin infrastructure, the shift from tokenization to the generation of assets directly on-chain, verifiable cloud computing thanks to faster SNARKs, and the arrival of 'locked media', where commentators prove their credibility with on-chain commitments.
