2026 Outlook: Trust, Not Tokens

2025 was a transformative year for the digital asset ecosystem in more ways than one, with regulatory clarity being ushered in at a pace never before seen in the industry, coupled with ETF adoption, the rise of Digital Asset Treasury companies, and institutional integration of blockchain rails. Despite this “green light” from traditional financial players, major crypto asset prices ended down on the year. This has left short-term sentiment mixed among key analysts and long-time crypto natives alike. The predictions made in our last annual outlook “2025 Onchain Renaissance” highlighted emerging developments that led to this current disillusionment, informed our strategies to significantly outperform the market, and set the backdrop for this year’s theses.

Reflection on Our 2025 Outlook

Throughout the article, we made a few bold predictions for the year, including one in particular, “The novelty of memes is dead.” The widespread adoption of no-code issuance platforms and token standardization has since evaporated the days of a token having perceived value simply by virtue of existing. This thesis struck a chord in 2025 as the market was flooded with new deployments, swift capital rotations between tokens, and a resounding disgust for dilutive token emissions. 2025 was the year that the “old-school” diversified crypto portfolio was crushed. We started Eon Capital for this very reason. The writing is on the wall. Actively managed digital asset exposure via onchain trading and narrative-targeted positioning will emerge as the most optimal way to maximize future upside performance within the digital asset space.

Last year’s onchain renaissance brought innovative onchain liquidity pool mechanisms which created more capital-efficient vehicles to issue and trade tokens with the rollout of Uniswap v4 hooks and Meteora DLMM pools. DeFi accessibility broadened through the adoption of crypto payment and on/off-ramp providers such as MoonPay and RedotPay, as well as the Base ecosystem which posted record-breaking usage and inflow numbers in 2025. 

Polymarket broke the “glass ceiling” for natively developed crypto projects, quickly becoming the most widely utilized crypto protocol ever created with decentralized markets on election outcomes, asset prices, sporting events, and international affairs. Prediction markets have become the de facto way for traditional financial analysts and speculators alike to gauge sentiment and market interest in probabilistic outcomes, usurping traditional polling and media outlets. Successes like Polymarket set the stage for mass adoption of blockchain-settled platforms going into 2026.

Our final prediction for 2025 was centered around the intersection of artificial intelligence and crypto, which we will discuss in our 2026 predictions below (not wrong, just early… bear with us on this).

2026 Predictions and Market Theses

The digital asset industry will refocus on how trusted blockchain settlement and smart contract technology offer a better alternative to legacy systems and reimagine how permissionless, decentralized ledgers can be used to create entirely new primitives within the digital economy. 

We see this playing out in four different ways:

1. AI Agents Flock to the Blockchain.

   
   

AI speaks the language of the internet and will use the money of the internet. Over the past few years, billions of dollars have poured into building data centers and energy capacity to make models cheaper and more effective. Almost half of new code is now written by LLMs, a trend that will continue as tools such as Cursor and Claude Code democratize access to natural language development platforms. Builders are becoming increasingly comfortable with AI outputs. Users are also becoming more reliant on LLMs for daily life (Don’t believe us? An LLM wrote this section… no we’re serious).

In our 2025 outlook, we argued that plugging AI systems into financial markets via blockchains “opened a Pandora’s box for experimentation onchain.” Since then, using chatbots as assistants for daily tasks such as draft editing, content/idea generation, and personal advice has become increasingly frequent and normalized. These interactions require users to place trust in model outputs, signaling a growing comfort with LLM-mediated decisions. While usage has grown in people’s consumer lives, it will soon enter their financial lives, an area that requires a materially higher trust threshold. As that threshold is crossed, agents will evolve beyond consumer assistive tools into autonomous economic actors, capable of independently making financial decisions onchain.

While traditional money systems are constrained by long settlement times, blockchains offer near-instant access and permissionless settlement, providing agents with direct access to the digital economy. A standardized financial execution layer allows for interoperability between platforms and opens up the possibility for micro- and nano-payments within agent-to-agent commerce. Transparency is also valuable for DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure networks) efforts that crowdsource compute to establish uncensored LLMs which provide a window into the underlying training data sources. The most compelling opportunities will emerge from early experiments that combine agentic execution, onchain settlement, and improved capital access into durable, agent-native financial workflows.

2. Onchain Applications and Capital Formation Go Mainstream.

   
   

Mass Adoption of Onchain Applications

Public blockchains and projects developed on them have the unique ability to take existing, sticky legacy products and reimagine them in a way that is significantly more favorable for individuals to participate in. This dynamic emerged within DeFi. Users gained the ability to lend and borrow assets directly, without banks acting as intermediaries and extracting the majority of the spread, through the peer-to-peer (P2P), permissionless infrastructure. Prediction markets such as Polymarket have ascended well beyond the crypto-native user base, becoming one of the most widely used blockchain applications and fundamentally reshaping how live news, polling, and event-based forecasting such as sports betting are utilized in the marketplace.

Crypto rails are now being adopted by traditional institutions at a speed in which we could only dream of just a few years ago. As more and more individuals use products that rely on blockchains for asset settlement and data integrity, founders and projects are incentivized to build applications that address wider, non-crypto-native audiences. Projects that fail to offer clear improvements over legacy systems will be left by the wayside, while those that do will see an influx of new users utilizing their protocol not just because it’s a “crypto product”, but because it is a better alternative to what currently exists (see Polymarket as an example).

Evolution of Onchain Capital Formation

The step-function increase in idea-to-reality velocity enabled by AI tools has set the stage for a rapid expansion in new startups. For many budding founders, access to early-stage funding remains the primary constraint on pursuing new ideas. Increasingly capital-efficient crypto infrastructure is emerging as a critical piece to this puzzle, lowering the barrier to experimentation and funding. As the coordination layer, blockchains can support a new wave of internet-native experimentation, from bootstrapped research and small ventures to social movements and even crowdfunding for autonomous AI agents.

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” – Benjamin Graham

Crypto-native capital formation mechanisms, including token issuance, bonding curves, volume-based token fees, and early-participation airdrops, all aim to improve alignment between builders and early believers. These mechanisms are emerging attempts at more efficient capital allocation than traditional finance and will see continued iteration and evolution as they seek product-market fit as the “weighing machine” for the incoming wave of internet-native founders.

3. Phigitals and Exotic RWA Marketplaces Disintermediate Ecommerce.

   
   

A recent spike in interest for collectibles and other rare items has made collectibles the fastest-growing category on secondary marketplaces such as eBay. This is a $400B+ annual industry that includes trading cards, fashion, luxury items, among other niche products. As the trusted intermediary providing distribution, delivery guarantees, and dispute resolution, eBay captures roughly a 13% fee on these transactions. A core value proposition of the blockchain is coded trust, where ownership can transfer P2P without reliance on centralized intermediaries. Companies like Circle have leveraged this primitive by issuing stablecoins backed by Deloitte-audited reserves, enabling permissionless P2P payments. This shift has already begun to disintermediate “old guard” payment monopolies such as Western Union. Similar competitive pressure will hit legacy P2P marketplaces as creative decentralized solutions enter the ring.

An early example of this is phygital (physical-digital) marketplaces such as Courtyard, Collector Crypt, and Boxed.gg. These platforms create digital representations of collectibles (primarily Pokémon cards in this case) and rely on a trusted custodian (e.g., PSA, which eBay also uses) to authenticate and vault assets with optional physical redemption of the underlying item at any point. Ownership tokens live in smart contracts, enabling near-instantaneous settlement of both asset and payment with little-to-no marketplace fees.

Beyond lower fees, token programmability unlocks novel mechanics such as digital card-pack “ripping” with verifiable fairness and meaningfully improved expected value per rip. This gacha mechanism has emerged as the clearest early product-market fit for phygital marketplaces, not merely because of speculation, but because it compresses distribution, custody, randomness, and settlement into a single trust-minimized flow that traditional platforms struggle to replicate.

Importantly, these mechanics also point toward a broader shift in how ownership, liquidity, and customer experience converge. As custody, compliance, and redemption infrastructure matures, phygital marketplaces are increasingly positioned less as niche collectibles venues and more as general-purpose rails for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). The same primitives that enable trading cards, authenticated custody, programmable ownership, and optional physical settlement, generalize cleanly to other verticals where provenance, liquidity, and global reach matter.

Blockchains close key supply chain gaps through verifiable ownership and authenticity, composable settlement, and trust-minimized delivery, while also enabling secondary features such as fractionalization, lending, or token-gated access. Beyond trading cards, exotic RWA projects such as Baxus tokenize vintage wines and spirits, while others bring onchain ownership to in-game collectibles like Counter-Strike weapon skins. This list is not exhaustive. Looking forward, the continued tokenization of niche RWAs, especially in categories where custody, authenticity, or fragmentation historically constrained liquidity, should enable lower-fee, more transparent, and more globally accessible marketplaces.

4. Identity and Credit Emerge Within the Digital Realm.

Credit is the most commonly used financial product in the United States. The main difference between widely used traditional financial products and current crypto product offerings revolves around accessibility to consumer credit. Short-term lending has ballooned in recent years, with a majority of consumer purchases being financed via credit and short-term loans (over 90% of Black Friday sales in 2025 were done on credit cards or financed via buy-now-pay-later loans). Fintech platforms now commonly offer paycheck advances to users while expanding the ability to finance literally anything, even a cup of coffee. Projects built on crypto rails have historically attempted to bring credit to the market, but past resistance from chartered banks to get involved with crypto due to regulatory uncertainty, alongside the issue of identity verification onchain killed their prospects. 

Regulatory clarity has emerged for digital assets, as the GENIUS Act paved the way for banks to get involved with stablecoins on crypto rails and issue onchain products for the first time. The US government took a clear stance in favor of US dollar stablecoins, which inherently adds to dollar hegemony as outstanding stablecoins purchase short-term US debt. Identity verification onchain has seen significant developments as well. ZK proofs and offchain state verifiable data, combined with soulbound tokens that permanently link a wallet to its controlling individual, enable the verification of personal and financial information while preserving user privacy and providing counterparties with a clear, trust-minimized view of the user.

We believe that onchain credit will be solved in the coming years and have a massive impact on capital flows within the digital asset ecosystem. Beyond stablecoin-backed credit lines, the inclusion of onchain balances with traditional offchain credit can result in higher creditworthiness for individuals. This opens up a whole new addressable market of credit ratings for onchain protocols (see S&P Global Ratings analysis of MakerDAO “Sky”), assets, and even autonomous agents who operate on the blockchain. 

As agentic finance expands, the creditworthiness of AI agents executing financial transactions will become commonplace. Transparency into transaction history for agents on the blockchain throughout their entire lifespan creates a behavioral track record that can be leveraged for agent credibility and siloing. The majority of social media posts, new code written, and image generation is now done by LLMs and agents. Agents will utilize credit in a way similar to humans currently, for payments, seed funding for ideas, and optimization of financial strategies to improve credit scores and widen access to the suite of financial services and products offered within the marketplace.

Summary

The inherent risks that faced crypto on the regulatory front are being rapidly addressed by the US government. Blockchain usage metrics alongside institutional trust in leading public blockchains are increasing year-over-year. A growing number of assets, both natively digital and traditional, are coming on chain as the blockchain’s unique value propositions move front and center. We remain extremely positive on the long-term outlook for the digital asset market and continue to believe that the optimal exposure to digital assets remains actively managed via onchain trading and capital allocation to specific projects and narratives.