A16Z Crypto Trend Watch: In 2026, will you take these three paths to the sky?

Author: a16z crypto

Translation: Deep潮 TechFlow

This week, we will continue to publish trend observations for 2026. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, welcome to subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more trend updates, industry reports, building guides, news analysis, and other resources.

1. The prediction market will become broader and more intelligent

Prediction markets have become mainstream, and by 2026, with deep integration with blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), they will become larger-scale, more widespread, and smarter, while also presenting new significant challenges for developers.

First, more contracts will be listed on the market this year. This means we can not only access real-time probabilities for major elections or geopolitical events but also understand the outcomes of various detailed scenarios and predictions of complex cross-events. As these new contracts reveal more information and integrate into the news ecosystem (a trend already emerging), they will also raise important social issues, such as how to balance information value and how to better design these markets to be more transparent and auditable, all of which can be achieved through blockchain technology.

To cope with the emergence of massive contracts, we need new ways to coordinate facts and resolve contract disputes. Centralized platform adjudication mechanisms (e.g., whether an event truly occurred, how to verify it) are important, but controversy cases like Zelensky lawsuit markets and Venezuela election markets also expose their limitations. To resolve these edge cases and help prediction markets expand into more useful applications, new decentralized governance methods and LLM-driven oracles can be used to determine the authenticity of dispute outcomes.

AI also expands the possibilities for oracles. For example, AI agents capable of trading on these platforms can search for signals worldwide, providing advantages for short-term trading, while revealing new ways of thinking and predicting future events. (Projects similar to Prophet Arena have already demonstrated the potential in this field.) Besides serving as complex political analysts from whom we can query insights, these AI agents may also reveal fundamental predictive factors of complex social events when analyzing their emerging strategies.

So, will prediction markets replace polls? The answer is no. Prediction markets will not replace polls but will improve them (poll data can also be input into prediction markets). As a political economy scholar, I am most interested in how prediction markets can work in tandem with a rich and vibrant polling ecosystem — but we need to rely on new technologies like AI to improve survey experiences; at the same time, blockchain technology can provide new verification methods to ensure that participants in polls or surveys are real humans, not bots.

— Andy Hall (a16z crypto research advisor, Stanford University political economy professor)

2. Blockchain technology will bring new foundational tools to other industries this year

For years, SNARKs (Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge, a cryptographic proof that can verify correctness without re-executing the computation) have mainly been applied in the blockchain space. The reason is that SNARKs are computationally expensive: proving a computation may require over 1,000,000 times the work of directly running the computation. This high cost is worthwhile when distributed among thousands of verifiers, but impractical in other scenarios.

This situation is about to change. This year, zkVM (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine) proofers will reduce the computational overhead to about 10,000 times, with memory usage only a few hundred megabytes — fast enough to run on mobile phones and cheap enough to be widely adopted across various devices.

Why might “10,000 times” be a critical number? One reason is that high-end GPUs have a parallel throughput roughly 10,000 times that of a laptop CPU. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs in real-time for CPU computations.

This could realize a long-studied vision: verifiable cloud computing. If you are already running CPU workloads in the cloud (perhaps because the workload is not large enough to benefit from GPU optimization, or due to lack of expertise, or architectural limitations), you will be able to obtain cryptographic proofs of your computations at a reasonable cost. Moreover, the proofers are already optimized for GPUs, so your code doesn’t need additional adaptation.

— Justin Thaler (a16z crypto research team member, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University)

3. The rise of staked media: a new paradigm of trust

The so-called “objectivity” in traditional media models has shown cracks. This change has been brewing — the internet has empowered everyone to speak out, and now more practitioners, practitioners, and builders are directly addressing the public. Their views reflect their interests in the real world, and paradoxically, audiences tend to respect them more for their stance than for their neutrality.

This new shift is not just about the rise of social media, but the arrival of cryptographic tools that enable people to make publicly verifiable commitments. As AI makes generating infinite content cheap and easy — whether based on real identities or false ones, claiming anything from any stance — relying solely on what people (or bots) say is no longer enough. Tokenized assets, programmable locks, prediction markets, and on-chain history provide a stronger foundation for trust: commentators can prove their consistency when expressing opinions; podcasters can lock tokens to show they are not engaging in speculation or “pump and dump”; analysts can link predictions to publicly settled markets, creating auditable records.

This is what I see as the early form of “staked media”: a new type of media that not only accepts the idea of “interests” but also provides proof mechanisms. In this model, credibility does not come from feigned neutrality or baseless claims; it comes from open, transparent, and verifiable interest commitments. Staked media will not replace other forms of media but will complement existing media. It offers a new signal: not just “trust me, I am neutral,” but “see the risks I am willing to bear and how you can verify the truth of what I say.”

— Robert Hackett (a16z crypto editorial team)