Messari released the “2026 Crypto Trends Report,” predicting the future of public chains, Decentralized Finance, AI, DePIN, and TradFi. The year 2026 will be a key year for Crypto Assets to shift from “speculation” to “system-level integration.” This article highlights core viewpoints to help you quickly grasp the next trend. This article is sourced from a piece by ODIG Invest, organized, translated, and written by PANEWs. (Previous Summary: Messari 10,000-word research report: Insights into the trends of the seven major sectors of Crypto Assets in 2026) (Background Supplement: Messari: What is still missing for the prediction market to reach its true explosion?)

Table of Contents

• Crypto Assets (Cryptomoney) are the foundation of the entire industry.
• The Convergence of TradFi x encryption
• Decentralized Internet Finance
• Decentralized AI
• DePIN is the Frontier
• The Time for Consumer Crypto is Now
• Disruption Factor (DF): Evaluating the concept verification framework of Layer 2 protocols.

Messari released the “Crypto Theses 2026” report, which predicts future trends in public chains, DeFi, AI, DePIN, and TradFi. From Messari's perspective, 2026 will be a pivotal year for Crypto Assets to shift from “speculation” to “system-level integration.”

To facilitate reading, we have streamlined the original text, extracting the most core conclusions and viewpoints for a quick insight into the next trend.

Crypto Assets are the foundation of the entire industry.

• Bitcoin has clearly distinguished itself from all other crypto assets and is undoubtedly the most representative and mature “crypto asset” currently.

• The relative underperformance of BTC in the second half of this year is partly due to increased selling pressure from early, large holders. We do not believe that this underperformance will evolve into a long-term structural problem; the “monetary narrative” of Bitcoin is expected to remain solid in the foreseeable future.

• The valuation of L1 is gradually decoupling from its fundamentals. L1's revenue has significantly declined year-on-year, and its valuation increasingly relies on the assumption of a “currency premium.” With few exceptions, we expect most L1s to underperform BTC.

• ETH remains the most controversial asset. Concerns about its value capture ability have not been completely eliminated, but the market performance in the second half of 2025 indicates that the market is willing to see ETH as a crypto asset similar to BTC to some extent. If the crypto bull market returns in 2026, Ethereum's Data Availability Tokens (DATs) may welcome a “second life.”

• ZEC is increasingly being priced as a “privacy-focused crypto asset” rather than just a niche privacy coin. This makes it a complementary hedge asset to BTC in an era of enhanced surveillance, deepening institutionalization, and heightened financial repression.

• Application layers may begin to choose to establish their own currency systems, rather than relying on the native assets of the network on which they operate. Applications with social attributes and strong network effects are particularly likely to move in this direction.

The Convergence of TradFi x encryption

• The “GENIUS Act” reshapes the positioning of stablecoins: stablecoins transition from being encryption-native trading tools to components of the U.S. monetary policy system, thereby igniting competition among banks, fintech companies, and tech giants for control over the infrastructure (payment and settlement rails) of the “digital dollar”.

• Tether's valuation of approximately 500 billion USD reflects its strong profitability, but the “GENIUS Act” also brings heavyweight players like JPMorgan and Google into the same arena. We expect Tether to maintain its dominant position in economies characterized by relatively loose compliance requirements and “dollarization,” while traditional institutions with brand, compliance, and distribution advantages will occupy a major share in developed markets.

• Banks are “marrying” stablecoins into existing payment systems, while Cloudflare and Google are building the underlying infrastructure for the nearly non-existent “agentic commerce”. As AI Agent-driven transactions scale on these tracks, the convergence of technology, finance, and AI is expected to become the dominant narrative by 2026.

• The decline in interest rates will drive capital towards crypto-native yield opportunities, including funding differentials, token arbitrage, and lending collateralized by GPUs. This round of yield cycles will rely more on actual cash flows rather than token inflation, thereby building a more robust and sustainable yield structure.

• By 2025, the tokenization scale of RWA (Real World Assets) has reached $18 billion, mainly concentrated in the fields of U.S. government bonds and credit assets—these are the directions that first achieved product-market fit (PMF). As DTCC receives authorization from the SEC to tokenize U.S. securities, this scale will further expand, with the potential to bring trillions of dollars worth of assets onto crypto infrastructure.

Decentralized Internet Finance

• Active Market Making AMMs (Prop AMMs) and CLOBs (Centralized Limit Order Books) will replace passive AMMs and become the mainstream architecture of DEXs. With the expansion of on-chain infrastructure, these architectures can provide better execution quality and narrower spreads.

• Modular lending protocols (e.g., Morpho) will surpass integrated (monolithic) lending platforms. By providing flexible, isolated vaults, they better align with the risk and compliance preferences of institutions and neobanks.

• Equity Perpetual Contracts (Equity Perps) are expected to break through in 2026, providing global users with high leverage and borderless equity exposure, while avoiding the friction caused by off-chain regulations.

• Yield-bearing stablecoins will replace “passive” stablecoins and become the core collateral asset in Decentralized Finance, narrowing the gap between reserve yields and actual returns for users.

• DeFi Banks will emerge as a response to the new type of banking in the crypto world, packaging savings, payment, and lending functions into high-profit, fully self-custodied applications.

Decentralized AI

• The continuous explosion of computing power demand + the enhancement of open-source model capabilities are opening up new sources of income for decentralized computing power networks.

• If decentralized data foundries can establish an absolute advantage in a key application scenario at a certain frontier point, they will become the most profitable participants in the entire deAI technology stack.

• The DeAI Laboratory will form a “faith-like” community following around medium-sized open-source models with significant differentiation. This range of model sizes continues to demonstrate a strong model–market fit.

• Darwinian Networks, which refers to the mechanisms of “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection,” will promote the de-stigmatization of the Crypto Assets industry through a positive feedback loop: attracting top talent while also bringing in institutional-level demand, thereby continuously strengthening itself.

• AI Agent Co-pilots will package the DeFAI technology stack into a unified “terminal entry,” relying on a powerful data flywheel to directly challenge the existing mainstream consumer-grade front-end entries.

• With the scaling of prediction markets, AI Agents provide a path for continuous information aggregation, more stable liquidity, and higher quality pricing calibration—significantly reducing systematic bias without altering the fundamental structure of the market.

DePIN is the Frontier

• The vertically integrated DePIN network (from underlying resources to end products for businesses/consumers) is most capable of achieving sustainable income and higher profit margins, fundamentally addressing demand-side issues.

• With the accelerating demand for scarce Real-World Data, the DePAI data collection protocol is expected to achieve breakthroughs by 2026. With the help of DePIN-style incentive mechanisms, its data collection speed and scale will significantly outperform centralized solutions.

• InfraFi will become an explosive DePIN adjacent track: by bringing on-chain capital into new infrastructure areas (such as debt financing) that are difficult for traditional private credit to cover, it opens up the channels between funds and real infrastructure.

• Clear regulations will significantly expand the builder community of DePIN and accelerate enterprise-level participation—on one hand, reducing the uncertainty of token design, and on the other, making the deeply integrated DePIN business model viable for enterprises.

• By 2026, DePIN is expected to achieve over 100 million USD in on-chain verifiable revenue: on one hand, the annualized revenue of mature protocols will leap from the tens of millions USD level to the hundreds of millions USD level; on the other hand, a new batch of blue-chip DePIN projects will complete their TGE (Token Generation Event).

The Time for Consumer Crypto is Now

• The value of transaction fees has shifted from “chain” to “application.” As block space is no longer a bottleneck, consumer-grade encryption is evolving into an application-centric economy: applications capture the majority of revenue and can finally be truly optimized around user experience.

• The PMF at the consumer level is most clearly seen in the “market as product” scenario. Memecoins / NFTs and prediction markets exist because they embed ownership and pricing mechanisms directly into cultural behaviors and information acquisition processes, rather than “forcefully integrating” encryption capabilities into existing applications.

• The market prediction has completed the transition from the election scenario to continuous use. The year 2025 validates the non-political demand (sports / encryption / culture), while distribution-level partners (such as Robinhood) become key accelerators for the demand explosion.

• Financialized social interaction is still in its early stages, but there is real design space. The opportunity lies not in “decentralized social” itself, but in making content, creators, and interactions tradable, thereby creating a brand new user experience.

• “Atypical RWA” is becoming the new consumer-grade entry point. Tokenization is beginning to improve the non-financial goods market (such as collectible cards and gacha), and is showing a clear path to on-chain liquidity, verifiable provenance, and composable financial layers, reshaping the collectibles track.

Disruption Factor (DF): Assessment of the Proof of Concept Framework for Layer 2 Protocols (L2)

The crypto world has never lacked activity. New chains, new tokens, new narratives—each cycle brings explosive growth in innovation and noise. However, there is one question that remains difficult to answer: which projects truly have the opportunity to create a lasting impact?

In the development process of Messari, we have attempted various best available frameworks, from traditional valuation methods to network and market structure models, striving to find a reliable and concise project evaluation method. The same flaw appears in every practice: the way protocols succeed differs from traditional companies, and there is no single traditional analytical perspective that can reliably measure whether a project is accumulating lasting advantages in the long term.

Messari introduces the concept framework of the Disruption Factor (DF) to address this issue. The construction of the Disruption Factor follows these four guiding principles: transparency; customizability; long-termism; open source and evolution.

The disruption factor measures the depth of a crypto project's integration into the real world and mainstream user behavior. It not only evaluates on-chain activities but also assesses whether these activities effectively replace traditional systems, attract non-crypto-native users, and translate into sticky long-term adoption.

This proof of concept evaluated 13 L2s. The results showed a clear “barbell” pattern: Arbitrum One (70) and Base (67) stood out as the frontrunners; OP Mainnet (58) is in the second tier; the remaining projects scored below 49, indicating that many L2s are still in the early stages, in vertical niches, or yet to prove their durability.