a16z: Predictions for 17 major crypto trends in 2026

This week, a16z released its annual “Big Ideas” report, once again sparking intense discussions in the crypto community. This report, compiled by partners from various teams specializing in applications, cryptography, infrastructure, AI, and biology, is seen as an important indicator of industry trends for the next two years. This year’s crypto section was particularly noteworthy—from how AI agents will transform blockchain interactions, to the accelerated development of stablecoins and asset tokenization at an institutional level; from breakthroughs in privacy and security technologies, to the resurgence of prediction markets and zero-knowledge SNARKs; to comprehensive innovations in new ways of building decentralized applications. The 17 insights presented provide a more comprehensive and practical view of the crypto landscape as of 2026. With regulatory frameworks becoming clearer and institutional capital continuing to enter the market, the crypto industry is moving from a narrative-driven era to a real-world application-driven era.

I. Regarding stablecoins, RWA tokenization, payments, and finance

1. Better, smarter methods for transferring funds via stablecoins

Last year, stablecoins handled approximately $46 trillion in transactions, setting new record highs. In comparison, this amount is more than 20 times the volume of PayPal’s transactions; nearly three times the volume of one of the world’s largest payment networks, Visa; and is rapidly approaching the volume of ACH, the electronic payment network used in the United States for direct deposits and other financial transactions.

Today, it’s possible to send stablecoins in less than a second, with fees costing less than a cent. However, the problem that remains is how to integrate these digital dollars into the financial systems that people actually use in their daily lives—in other words, how to improve the channels through which stablecoins can be transferred between users.

新一代初创企业正在填补这一空白，将稳定币连接到更熟悉的支付系统和本地货币。一些公司使用密码学证明，让人们可以私密地将本地余额兑换为数字美元。一些公司与区域网络集成，利用二维码、实时支付轨道及其他功能实现银行间支付……而另一些公司则在构建更具真正互操作性的全球钱包层和发卡平台，让用户可以在日常商户处使用稳定币消费。这些方法共同拓宽了谁能参与数字美元经济，并可能加速稳定币更直接地用作主流支付方式。

随着这些出入金通道的成熟，数字美元直接接入本地支付系统和商户工具，新的行为模式将出现。跨境工作者可以实时获得薪酬。商户无需银行账户即可接受全球美元。应用可以与全球任何地方的用户即时结算价值。稳定币将从根本上从一个小众金融工具转变为互联网的基础结算层。

——Jeremy Zhang，a16z crypto工程团队

2、以更具加密原生性的方式思考RWA代币化和稳定币

我们看到银行、金融科技公司和资产管理公司对将美国股票、大宗商品、指数和其他传统资产上链表现出浓厚兴趣。随着更多传统资产上链，其代币化往往是拟物化的——植根于当前现实世界资产的概念，未能利用加密原生特性。

But synthetic forms of products like perpetual contracts allow for greater liquidity, and they’re generally easier to implement. Perpetual contracts also offer a straightforward leverage mechanism, so I believe they represent the most suitable digital derivatives for use in product markets. I also believe that emerging market stocks are one of the most interesting asset classes, and they could be well-suited for perpetualization. (In some cases, the trading liquidity of zero-dated options can even exceed that of the spot market itself. This could be an interesting experiment when it comes to perpetualizing such assets.)

All of this boils down to the question of “perpetualization vs. tokenization”. However, we expect to see more RWA tokens with digital origins over the next year.

Similarly, by 2026, when it comes to stablecoins, we will see more “original creations rather than just tokenization”. Stablecoins have already become mainstream in 2025, and the number of unissued stablecoins continues to grow.

But stablecoins without a robust credit infrastructure still seem like narrow-bore banks—they hold certain liquid assets that are considered particularly safe. While narrow-bore banks are effective products, I don’t think they will become the backbone of the long-term blockchain economy.

We see many new asset management companies, managers, and protocols being developed to facilitate lending transactions based on off-chain collateral. These loans typically originate off-chain, and then are tokenized. I believe that the benefits of tokenization are limited, perhaps except for allowing them to be distributed to users already on the chain. This is why debt assets should be created directly on the chain, rather than being tokenized after being created off-chain. Creating assets directly on the chain can reduce costs associated with lending services and backend development, while also increasing accessibility. The challenges here lie in compliance and standardization, but developers are already working to address these issues.

——Guy Wuollet, co-founder of a16z crypto

3. Stablecoins and upgrades to bank core systems—along with new payment scenarios

The software used by traditional banks is difficult for modern developers to understand. In the 1960s and 1970s, banks were early adopters of large-scale software systems. The second generation of core banking software emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (for example, GLOBUS from Temenos and Finacle from InfoSys). But all of this software is becoming outdated, and its upgrade process is too slow. Therefore, banks—especially those dealing with core systems that track deposits, collateral, and other obligations—still often run on mainframes, using COBOL programming, and relying on batch file interfaces rather than APIs.

Most of the global assets are also stored in those core systems that have been in use for decades. Although these systems have withstood practical testing, are trusted by regulatory authorities, and are integrated into complex banking processes, they also hinder innovation. Adding key features such as real-time payment capabilities may take months or even years, and it’s necessary to deal with various technical challenges and regulatory complexities.

This is where stablecoins come in handy. Not only has stablecoin been a popular choice for finding product-market fit over the past few years, but traditional financial institutions have also embraced them at an unprecedented level this year. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized government bonds, and on-chain bonds enable banks, fintech companies, and financial institutions to create new products and serve new customers. More importantly, this can be done without forcing these organizations to rewrite their outdated systems. So, stablecoins provide a new way for institutions to innovate.

– Sam Broner

4. The Internet Has Become a Banking Tool

As agents become more widespread, many business activities occur automatically in the background, rather than through user interactions. This means that the way money flows—and its value!—also needs to change.

In a world where systems act based on intentions rather than step-by-step instructions—because AI agents recognize needs, fulfill obligations, or trigger certain outcomes, thereby facilitating the transfer of funds—the transmission of value must be as fast and flexible as information transmission today. This is where blockchains, smart contracts, and new protocols come into play.

Smart contracts can now settle dollar payments worldwide in just seconds. But by 2026, emerging technologies like x402 will make such settlements programmable and reactive: agents can pay each other instantly and without any formal approval, using data, GPU time, or API calls—without the need for invoices, reconciliation, or batch processing. Software updates released by developers already include built-in payment rules, limits, and audit tracking capabilities—without the need for fiat integration, merchant registration, or banking services. Prediction markets will also self-settle in real-time as events unfold: odds updates, agent transactions, payments completed worldwide within seconds… without the need for intermediaries or exchanges.

Once value can flow in this way, “payment processes” will no longer be separate operational layers, but rather become part of the network behavior. Banks will become part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and assets will become part of the infrastructure itself. If money becomes data packets that can be routed by the Internet, then the Internet will no longer just support financial systems… it will become a financial system in its own right.

– Christian Crawley and Pyrs Carvolth, a16z Crypto Marketing Team

5. Wealth management for the general public

Traditional personalized wealth management services were usually reserved for high-net-worth clients of banks. Providing customized advice across various asset classes and managing portfolios individually was expensive and complex. However, as more asset classes become tokenized, the crypto sector enables strategies to be implemented and rebalanced in real-time at low costs, through AI recommendations and co-piloting.

This isn’t just about robot-based investment advice anymore; everyone can access active portfolio management, rather than just passive management. By 2025, traditional financial institutions will start incorporating more crypto assets into their portfolios—currently, banks recommend allocating 2-5% of their assets to crypto, either directly or through ETPs. But this is just the beginning. By 2026, we will see platforms built specifically for “wealth accumulation” – not just wealth preservation. Tech companies like Revolut and Robinhood, along with centralized exchanges like Coinbase, will use their technological advantages to dominate this market even more.

At the same time, DeFi tools like Morpho Vaults will automatically allocate assets to lending markets where risk-adjusted returns are optimal, providing a core yield-generating asset allocation for portfolios. Holding the remaining liquidity in stablecoins instead of fiat currencies, and in tokenized money market funds rather than traditional money market funds, opens up new opportunities for higher returns.

Finally, retail investors now have easier access to assets in private markets with limited liquidity, such as private credits, pre-listed companies, and private equity investments. Tokenization helps to unlock these markets while still meeting compliance and reporting requirements. By tokenizing various components of an investment portfolio—ranging from bonds to stocks, and across private and alternative assets—it becomes possible to rebalance the portfolio automatically, without the need for traditional methods like wire transfers.

– Maggie Hsu, a16z Crypto Marketing Team

Second, regarding agents and artificial intelligence

6. From “Know Your Customer” to “Know Your Agent”

The bottleneck in the agent economy is shifting from intelligence to identity verification.

In financial services, “non-human identities” now outnumber human employees by a ratio of 96 to 1—yet these identities remain unreached by banks. The key missing component here is KYA: Know Your Agent.

Just as humans need credit scores to get loans, agents need encrypted credentials to conduct transactions—to link them to their clients, constraints, and responsibilities. Without this, merchants will continue to block agents at the firewall. Industries that took decades to establish KYC infrastructure now have only a few months to figure out KYA.

– Sean Neville, Co-founder of Circle and Architect of USDC; CEO of Catena Labs

7. We will use AI to perform essential research tasks

As a mathematical economist, it was difficult in January this year to make consumer-level AI models understand my workflow. But by November, I could give these models abstract instructions, just like I would do with doctoral students. Sometimes, they would return answers that were both novel and correct. Beyond my experience, we’re starting to see AI being used more widely in research—especially in areas related to reasoning. Models are now helping to discover solutions to complex problems, such as the Putnam problem, which is arguably one of the most challenging university-level math problems in the world.

What fields will benefit most from AI research, and how will it contribute to them? Those questions remain unanswered. But I expect AI research to foster and reward a new type of generalist-style research approach: one that values the ability to infer relationships between ideas and quickly draw conclusions from even more speculative answers. These answers might not be accurate, but they can still point in the right direction (at least under certain conditions). Ironically, this is somewhat like using the power of model “hallucinations”: when models become “smart” enough, giving them the freedom to explore abstract possibilities may lead to meaningless results—but sometimes it can also lead to new discoveries, just like people tend to be most creative when working in non-linear and uncertain situations.

In this way, reasoning requires a new type of AI workflow—not just agents acting on behalf of other agents, but rather agents that work together to evaluate the methods used by previous models and extract the best elements from them. I have been using this approach to write papers, while others use it for patent searching, creating new forms of art, or, unfortunately, finding ways to attack smart contracts.

However, creating a collection of reasoning agents for research purposes requires better interoperability between models, as well as a way to identify and appropriately compensate each model’s contributions. These two issues can be addressed with the help of encryption technology.

– Scott Kominers, a16z crypto research team member and professor at Harvard Business School

8. The “invisible tax” on open networks

The rise of AI agents is imposing an invisible tax on open networks, fundamentally disrupting their underlying infrastructure. This disruption stems from the growing mismatch between the context layer and the execution layer of the internet: currently, AI agents extract data from advertising-supported websites, providing convenience to users, while systematically bypassing the revenue streams that fund content creation, such as advertising and subscriptions.

To prevent the erosion caused by open networks (and to preserve the diverse content that nourishes AI itself), we need to implement large-scale technical and economic solutions. This may involve innovative models such as next-generation sponsored content, micro-ownership systems, or other innovative funding mechanisms. Existing AI licensing agreements have also proven to be financially unsustainable temporary solutions. They typically compensate content providers only for a small portion of the revenue lost due to AI reducing traffic flow.

The network requires a new technological and economic model where value can flow automatically. The key shift in the coming year will be from static licensing to real-time compensation based on usage. This means testing and expanding systems—possibly using blockchain-supported micropayments and complex ownership standards—to automatically reward every entity that contributes information successfully to tasks completed by the system.

– Liz Harkavy, a16z Crypto Investment Team

Thirdly, regarding privacy (and security)

Privacy will become one of the most important advantages in the cryptocurrency industry. It is a feature that is currently lacking in almost every blockchain. For most chains, privacy is often only considered after the fact.

But now, privacy itself is enough to distinguish one chain from all others. Privacy also does something even more important: it creates a “chain lock-in effect”; in other words, a network effect of privacy. This is especially true in an era where performance-based competition is no longer sufficient.

Thanks to cross-chain bridge protocols, as long as everything is transparent, transferring tokens from one chain to another is extremely easy. However, once things become private, things change drastically: transferring tokens across chains becomes easy, but transferring secrets across chains becomes very difficult. When moving between private and public chains, there’s always a risk of being identified by monitors, memory pools, or network traffic. Crossing the boundary between private and public chains—even between two private chains—can lead to the leakage of various metadata, such as transaction times and transaction sizes. This makes it easier to track someone’s activities. Compared to many non-private new chains, where block space has become essentially the same across all networks, private chains can have stronger network effects. In reality, if a “general-purpose” chain doesn’t have a prosperous ecosystem, killer applications, or unfair distribution advantages, then there’s little reason for anyone to use or build on it—let alone be loyal to it. When users are on public chains, they can easily trade with users on other chains—it doesn’t matter which chain they join. But when users are on private chains, choosing which chain they join becomes much more important. Once they join a chain, they’re less likely to switch chains and risk revealing their identities. This creates a situation where only the strongest can survive. And since privacy is crucial for most real-world applications, a few private chains could dominate the encrypted world.

Compared to many non-private new chains, where block space has become essentially the same across all networks, private chains can have stronger network effects. In reality, if a “general-purpose” chain doesn’t have a prosperous ecosystem, killer applications, or unfair distribution advantages, then there’s little reason for anyone to use or build on it—let alone be loyal to it.

When users are on public chains, they can easily trade with users on other chains—it doesn’t matter which chain they join. But when users are on private chains, choosing which chain they join becomes much more important. Once they join a chain, they’re less likely to switch chains and risk revealing their identities. This creates a situation where only the strongest can survive. And since privacy is crucial for most real-world applications, a few private chains could dominate the encrypted world.

– Ali Yahya, co-founder of a16z Crypto

10、(近期)未来的通讯不仅是抗量子的，更是去中心化的

当世界为量子计算做准备时，许多基于加密的通讯应用(苹果、Signal、WhatsApp)已走在前列，都做得很好。问题在于，每一个主流通讯应用都依赖于我们信任由单一组织运营的私人服务器。这些服务器是政府可以轻易关闭、设置后门或强迫交出私人数据的目标。

如果一个国家可以关闭服务器;如果一个公司拥有私人服务器的钥匙;甚至，如果一个公司拥有私人服务器，那么量子加密还有什么用?私人服务器需要“信任我”——但没有私人服务器意味着“你不需要信任我”。通信不需要一个单一的公司作为中间人。即时通讯需要开放的协议，我们不必信任任何人。

我们实现这一目标的途径是去中心化网络：没有私人服务器。没有单一应用。全部开源代码。一流的加密——包括抵御量子威胁。有了开放网络，就不存在任何个人、公司、非营利组织或国家能够剥夺我们通信的能力。即使一个国家或公司关闭了一个应用，第二天就会出现500个新版本。关闭一个节点，由于经济激励(得益于区块链等技术)，会立即有新的节点取而代之。

当人们像拥有自己的金钱一样拥有自己的消息——拥有一把钥匙——一切都会改变。应用可能来来去去，但他们始终能控制自己的消息和身份;终端用户现在可以拥有自己的消息，即使不拥有应用本身。

这比抗量子性和加密更重要;这是所有权和去中心化。没有这两者，我们所做的只是构建可以被关闭的牢不可破的加密。

~——Shane Mac，XMTP Labs联合创始人兼首席执行官

11、“秘密即服务”

在每个模型、代理和自动化背后，都有一个简单的依赖：数据。但当今的大多数数据管道——输入或输出模型的数据——都是不透明、可更改且不可审计的。这对于某些消费应用来说没问题，但许多行业和用户(如金融和医疗保健)要求公司保持敏感数据的私密性。对于目前寻求将现实世界资产代币化的机构来说，这也是一个巨大的障碍。

那么，如何在实现安全、合规、自主且全球互通的创新的同时保护隐私呢?方法有很多，但我会聚焦于数据访问控制：谁控制敏感数据?它如何移动?以及谁(或什么)可以访问它?

Without data access control, anyone who wants to maintain data confidentiality must currently rely on centralized services or implement custom solutions. This approach is not only time-consuming and costly, but it also hinders traditional financial institutions from fully leveraging the advantages of blockchain-based data management. As proxy systems begin to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, users and organizations in various industries will need encryption as a guarantee of security, rather than relying on “best efforts to ensure trust.”

This is why I believe we need “secret as a service” – systems that allow for programmable, native data access rules; client-side encryption; and decentralized key management, ensuring who can decrypt what content under what conditions, and for how long… All of this should be executed on the blockchain. Combined with verifiable data systems, secrets could become part of the basic infrastructure of the internet – not just patches applied at the application level after the fact. This would make privacy an essential component of the core infrastructure.

– Adeniyi Abiodun, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder at Mysten Labs

12. From “code is law” to “spec is law”

Recent DeFi hacks have affected well-established protocols that have strong teams, rigorous audits, and years of operation. These incidents highlight a disturbing reality: today’s standard security practices are still largely heuristic and case-by-case.

To become mature, DeFi security needs to shift from ad hoc approaches to more design-oriented methods, from “do your best” to “follow principles”.

In terms of pre-deployment/static testing (testing, auditing, formal verification), this means systematically proving that certain properties are true across all scenarios, rather than only verifying those properties that were manually selected. AI-assisted proofing tools, currently being developed by several teams, can help in writing specifications, identifying relevant properties, and automating the tedious work that was previously required for such verifications. In terms of post-deployment/dynamic aspects (runtime monitoring, runtime execution, etc.), these properties can be turned into real-time safeguards—the last line of defense. These safeguards will be encoded as runtime assertions, and every transaction must meet these requirements.

Thus, we no longer assume that every vulnerability is detected. Instead, critical security properties are directly incorporated into the code itself, allowing for automatic rollback of any transactions that violate these properties.

This isn’t just theory. In practice, almost every attack has triggered one of these checks during execution, thereby potentially preventing attacks from happening. Therefore, the once-popular concept of “code as law” has evolved into “spec is law”: even new types of attacks must satisfy the same security properties that ensure system integrity. As a result, remaining attacks are either insignificant or extremely difficult to execute.

– Daejun Park, a16z crypto engineering team

Four, regarding other industries and applications

13. Prediction markets are becoming more extensive, intelligent, and effective

Predictive markets have become the mainstream. In the coming year, as they integrate with blockchain technology and AI, they will continue to grow in size, scope, and intelligence. At the same time, they pose new and significant challenges for those who develop these technologies.

First of all, more contracts will be launched. This means that we will be able to obtain real-time odds not only for major elections or geopolitical events, but also for various detailed outcomes and complex, interconnected situations. As these new contracts emerge and more information becomes part of the news ecosystem, they will trigger important social issues: how we can balance the value of this information, and how we can design it in a way that makes it more transparent and auditable. And this is exactly what blockchain technology can achieve.

To handle an enormous number of contracts, we need new ways to reach agreements regarding what constitutes truth in order to settle disputes. Centralized platforms for making decisions (whether a certain event actually occurred, how do we verify this?) are important, but cases like the Zelenskyy suit market or the Venezuelan election market demonstrate their limitations. To address these edge cases and help predictive markets be used in more useful applications, new types of decentralized governance and LLM-based mechanisms can help determine the truth behind disputed outcomes.

In addition to LLM agents, AI also opens up new possibilities for predicting market trends. For example, AI agents used in these platforms can search for signals from around the world, thereby providing advantages in short-term trading decisions. This helps us develop new ways of thinking about the world and predicting its future developments. Projects like Prophet Arena already demonstrate the potential of this technology. In addition to acting as complex political analysts whose insights we can utilize, these agents can also reveal new insights into the underlying factors that drive complex social events.

Will prediction markets replace polls? No; instead, they will improve polls (and poll data can be fed into prediction markets). As a political scientist, I’m most excited about how prediction markets can work together with rich and dynamic poll ecosystems. But we need to rely on new technologies like AI, which can enhance the survey experience. Additionally, encryption technologies can provide new ways of verifying that poll respondents are human beings, rather than robots.

– Andy Hall, research advisor at a16z crypto, and professor of political economy at Stanford University

14. The rise of staked media

The cracks in the traditional media model—and its so-called objectivity—have been apparent for some time. The Internet has given everyone the opportunity to express their opinions. Now, more and more individuals, practitioners, and creators are sharing their views directly with the public. Their opinions reflect the interests they represent in the world. Intuitively, listeners tend to respect them not because they have no interests at all, but precisely because they do have interests of their own.

What’s new here isn’t the rise of social media, but the advent of cryptographic tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments. With AI making it easy to generate unlimited content—regardless of the perspective or identity, whether real or fictional—it becomes insufficient to rely solely on people’s (or robots’) opinions. Tokenized assets, programmable locks, predictive markets, and blockchain-based history provide a stronger foundation for trust: commentators can present their arguments while proving that they are willing to invest money in their views. Podcasters can lock in tokens to demonstrate that they aren’t opportunistic in their actions. Analysts can link predictions to publicly traded markets, creating auditable records.

This is what I consider to be the early form of “pledged media”: a type of media that not only embraces the concept of “stakeholder involvement,” but also provides verifiable evidence for its claims. In this model, credibility doesn’t come from pretending to be impartial, nor from making baseless claims. Instead, it comes from having interests of one’s own, and being able to make transparent and verifiable commitments regarding those interests. Pledged media will not replace other forms of media; rather, it serves as a supplement to our existing media outlets. It offers a new signal: not just “trust me, I’m neutral,” but also “this is the risk I’m willing to take, and how you can verify that I’m telling the truth.”

– Robert Hackett, editorial team member at a16z crypto

For years, SNARKs—cryptographic proofs that allow verification without the need for re-computing—have largely been a subset of blockchain technology. The cost of verifying such proofs is simply too high: verifying a computation might require an amount of work that’s 1 million times greater than just executing the computation itself. This makes it worthwhile to share the costs among thousands of validators, but it’s not practical in other situations.

This situation is about to change. By 2026, the zkVM prover will enable significant savings in memory usage—up to 10,000 times less than required. This level of efficiency would be sufficient for use on mobile devices, and it would be affordable for use anywhere. Here’s why 10,000 times savings could become a reality: High-end GPUs have approximately 10,000 times higher parallel processing capabilities compared to laptop CPUs. By the end of 2026, individual GPUs will be able to generate cryptographic proofs in real time, using CPUs as intermediaries.

This could unlock a vision described in some research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you already run CPU-based workloads in the cloud—either because your computational requirements aren’t yet suitable for GPUs, or due to lack of expertise, or due to legacy reasons—you can obtain cryptographic proofs of correctness at a reasonable cost. The prover has been optimized for use with GPUs; your code doesn’t need to be modified at all.

– Justin Thaler, a16z crypto research team member, and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University

Fifthly, regarding building

16. Transactions are the hub of cryptocurrency businesses, not their end point

Nowadays, almost every well-performing cryptocurrency company seems to be transitioning towards using transactions as a core mechanism for operations. But what happens if “every cryptocurrency company becomes a trading platform”? If too many companies do the same thing, it will erode the market share of those who are more innovative and resilient. This means that those who rush into trading will miss out on opportunities to build more robust and sustainable businesses.

Although I feel deep sympathy for those founders who try to get their companies off the ground, chasing immediate product-market fit comes with its costs. This problem is particularly acute in the crypto industry, where the unique dynamics surrounding tokens and speculation can lead founders toward a path of instant satisfaction during their efforts to find the right product-market fit… It can be described as a kind of “tangled test”.

Trading itself isn’t wrong at all—it’s an important market function. But it certainly isn’t the ultimate goal. Founders who focus solely on the “product” aspect of product-market fit may end up being the winners in the long run.

– Arianna Simpson, co-general partner of a16z crypto

17. To fully unleash the potential of blockchain… when the legal framework finally matches the technical architecture.

One of the biggest obstacles to building blockchain networks in the United States over the past decade has been legal uncertainty. Expensive interpretations of securities laws and selective enforcement have forced founders to operate within a regulatory framework that prioritizes the company over the network. Over the years, dealing with legal risks has become more important than developing product strategies; engineers have had to step back and rely on lawyers.

This dynamic has led to various strange distortions: founders are told to avoid transparency. Token distribution becomes arbitrary from a legal perspective. Governance becomes mere formality. Organizational structures are optimized for legal protection. Tokens are designed without any economic value or business model. Even worse, crypto projects that recklessly handle rules often end up surpassing those who built them with good intentions.

However, legislation governing the structure of the cryptocurrency market – with governments being closer than ever to enacting such laws – could eliminate all these distortions next year. If passed, this legislation will promote transparency, establish clear standards, and replace the current chaotic practices related to fundraising, token issuance, and decentralization with more organized processes. Following the GENIUS Act, the proliferation of stablecoins has grown exponentially. Legislation addressing the structure of the cryptocurrency market would represent a significant shift, but this time it would be aimed at the internet itself.

In other words, such regulations would allow blockchain networks to operate like the internet itself: openly, autonomously, interoperable, trustworthy, neutral, and decentralized.

– Miles Jennings, a16z Crypto Policy Team Lead and Chief Legal Counsel