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Crypto faced turbulence in 2025, but six emerging trends—from prediction markets to AI and dynamic DeFi—are shaping a stronger path to 2026.
2025 has been a year of challenge despite having a US president who promised to make the US the Crypto and AI capital of the world, the industry has struggled. Yet these shifts are setting the foundation for the path to 2026 crypto trends now taking shape.
Ever since Trump took office in January, we’ve experienced stressful moments after stressful moments with one in particular that left Crypto paralyzed, the October flash crash.
While the flash crash contagion has yet to be resolved, the macro backdrop and industry tailwinds are now pointing toward a positive quarter and a stronger path to 2026 crypto trends, setting up a more optimistic outlook for the year ahead.
In this article, we’ll delve deeper into 6 trends that are shaping Crypto behind the scenes, giving you a peek into what could happen in 2026
Let’s dig in ↓
Prediction market (PM) as an industry has recently made a new ATH on weekly notional volume, hitting $3B for the first time two weeks ago.
We’re seeing a rapid expansion in market types. Politics, sports, esports, pop culture, macroeconomics, crypto, finance, earnings, and tech are all growing categories.
@Polymarket and @Kalshi act as broad prediction markets covering almost everything. Meanwhile, newer PMs like @trylimitless and @opinionlabsxyz are taking a niche approach. For example, Opinion focuses only on macro, offering US, EU, and JP interest rate markets. Similarly, Limitless targets crypto with a wide range of assets across multiple timeframes.
Crypto options used to be popular during the last bull market in 2021 but went on a huge decline due to several challenges. The top challenges were UI/UX issue and lack of liquidity.
PM offers what options lack, real good UI/UX for anyone to bet on anything (without any finance knowledge) + ability to bootstrap capital by creating exciting markets that anyone can come in and be makers & takers (bet on both Yes & No). Instead of understanding all the Greek letters and alien jargons in options, you just simply buy Yes/No share.
And just like options, people are using PM as a tool to hedge against their core asset exposure.
You get the point.
PM is options repackages into a product that goes mainstream, a product that anyone can participate and benefit from it AND one of those main beneficiaries is machine learning/prediction teams
Teams like @sportstensor, @SynthdataCo, @sire_agent, @AskBillyBets are tripling down on perfecting their signals on prediction markets.
The beauty of PM is that there are multiple Darwinian AI type of competitions that are running (or about to run) and ML teams can join in to prove their strategy in real life environments.
Synth, Sire, Billy can all participate in Sportstensor competition and soon @aion5100‘s @futuredotfun War of Markets on Polymarket & Kalshi.
The coolest part is that Polymarket is teasing Poly token + newer PMs offer token incentives to attract liquidity & volume. ML teams can find mispricings/arb opportunities while farming token incentives at the same time.
Reminds you of early Hyperliquid days doesn’t it?
It’s happening again but this time with Prediction Markets instead of Perps.
We’re seeing a shift, major Web2 startups and corporations are launching L1/L2s and integrating stablecoin rails to serve users directly. At the same time, crypto native projects are pushing into real world financial services.
Teams like @ether_fi, @useTria, @AviciMoney, @UR_global, and many others now offer non custodial crypto spend cards that let users pay IRL straight from their crypto balance.
Within a year, this market jumped from a blue ocean to a crowded battlefield, with 20 to 30+ serious players competing for the same crypto users.
Current Differentiation Vectors
Still, most of these products share the same underlying structure. They rely on partner banks/issuers who hold the Visa/Mastercard licenses, positioning the card as a front end user acquisition layer rather than a true neobank.
Because of this
Right now, that’s acceptable because everyone operates under the same constraints. But as competition intensifies, the ability to become a true bank might just be the real advantage.
Projects that control their compliance and regulatory stack can offer real bank accounts. They can also support multi-currency on/off-ramps and integrate smoothly with both crypto and traditional finance rails.
UR, from the Mantle ecosystem, is already ahead. It operates under FINMA oversight with Swiss banking permissions. It supports seven fiat currencies and offers both real world and crypto financial services. Users can on-ramp, off-ramp, and send funds across seven currencies under traditional banking rails.
We’ve gone from CEX ➙ Spot DEX ➙ Perp DEX with Hyperliquid coming out on top
Hyper-speculation on Launchpads pioneered by Pumpdotfun ➙ kickstarting wave of launchpads for many many narratives
Prediction market reaches escape velocity, hitting mainstream audience for the first time ever (we’ve never had this much virality since the NFT days and back then people were making fun of ugly-ass jpegs). This time people actually like it.
Defi establishes itself as key pillar of Crypto with structured yield products, interest products, stablecoins, RWA/DePIN, and tokenization expanding into Wall Street. People realize they can own a part of the future and earn yield on top of it (or even use it to borrow capital)
All of the key crypto use cases are being amplified with CEXes launching wallet super apps like Base app, Binance, OKX, and other players expanding their wallets capabilities to make it as easy to use as possible by normies. ICOs are coming back Coinbase going live w/ the first Monad ICO while other launch platforms (Legion, Kaito) are growing in adoption.
The initial days of Crypto AI was plagued by AI memecoins and GPT wrappers slapped with tokens, marketed as “AI Agents. Those days are gone.
Now, blockchain rails and stablecoins are powering agent to agent commerce, while cryptographic techniques like TEE and zk proofs, paired with tokenomics mechanisms (incentives and slashing), make AI systems verifiable and deterministic.
The supporting stack i.e. x402, ERC 8004, programmable wallets, metering/billing frameworks, verifiable inference/compute, and other extensions is laying the groundwork for AI human collaboration that’s trustless, continuous, and secure (infra to enable AI & human to seamlessly transact & work together any time any where + guardrails put in place to prevent AI from hallucinating and going haywire)
At the same time, Darwinian AI has emerged as a compelling meta layer gamified competitions that evolve AI/agents, sharpen signal quality, and improve performance through real world incentives. The most successful implementations so far revolve around trading and prediction signals, aligning directly with crypto’s core DNA.
Ecosystems are increasingly adopting this Darwinian model, using token incentives to attract builders, reward contributors, and subsidize R&D toward higher quality AI products. While still early, the Bittensor ecosystem has shown promising traction with its top subnets.
Despite these advancements and signs of product market fit, the token performance of Crypto AI projects hasn’t caught up with most trading 30–90% below their TGE prices, even as they ship strong infrastructure and real utility.
DeFi has long established itself as a core pillar of crypto, with over $130B in total value locked (TVL) across DEXs, lending/borrowing platforms, yield products, and stablecoins.
Built on programmable smart contracts, DeFi is verifiable, auditable, and highly composable the top protocols today are some of the most battle-tested systems in crypto. Yet, despite its success, DeFi’s underlying infrastructure has remained largely static over the past five years. Key mechanics such as concentrated liquidity provisioning or lending/borrowing models haven’t evolved much.
Now imagine a new wave of adaptive DeFi systems protocols that automatically leverage or deleverage, rebalance LP positions, or enter/exit markets based on the predicted price movements of underlying assets.
This marks the beginning of the Dynamic DeFi Era, powered by AI and machine learning.
ML-Enhanced Defi
@AlloraNetwork is the main player working with top DeFi protocols to bring ML-driven intelligence to traditional Defi systems
Predictions and signals are generated by the Allora inference network, where AI/ML engineers contribute models and receive token incentives following a Darwinian AI incentive design that rewards better-performing models.
AI-Managed Defi Strategies
We’re also seeing the rise of AI managed + AI created Defi strategies from @gizatechxyz and @almanak.
Giza acts as an AI capital allocator, managing user funds across a curated set of DeFi protocols and strategies.
Almanak enables AI agents to design and deploy tokenized DeFi vaults within minutes, tailoring them to user specified strategies. This effectively positions Almanak as both a capital allocator (driving TVL into DeFi projects) and a vault creation platform for fund managers.
As TradFi merges with DeFi, ML systems improve value and risk management. AI curators also design more advanced strategies. Together, these shifts make the path to 2026 crypto trends clearer.
The crypto trends shaping the path to 2026 point to smarter and more adaptive financial systems. AI, DeFi, and TradFi innovation now unlock a more intelligent and scalable financial layer for the internet economy. This remains a core theme across the path to 2026 crypto trends.
We’ll likely see more convergence between major narratives in 2026 Crypto, AI, DeFi, RWA, DePIN, and Robotics are merging into one interoperable digital economy run by humans and agents. This fusion is a core part of the path to 2026 crypto trends, highlighting how these sectors are evolving together. As these narratives blend, the crypto trends shaping the path to 2026 will accelerate, creating a unified digital ecosystem with deeper utility and adoption.
Natural selection process runs faster with only a handful number of crypto assets appreciate in price.
Crypto projects likely opt to IPO instead of ICO, tapping into TradFi capital markets for liquidity, legitimacy, and scale.
Next cycle = the cycle where TradFi & Defi blends
@0xJeff
Investor | Author | Researcher | Unfiltered Pieces 🔀 https://t.co/C6xz41Z7AE | Official Link ⏭️ https://t.co/Q5mCFq77sk
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