Leading builders and researchers say the next year in crypto will be defined less by narrative cycles and more by structural reform, across risk management, governance, developer experience, and the convergence of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
Their forecasts point toward an industry moving past growth-at-all-costs and confronting issues that have long sat in the background.
DeFi Shifts From Yield Marketing To Real Risk Discipline
Sam MacPherson of Spark told Yellow.com that the events of 2025 exposed how shallow metrics like APY and TVL fail under stress.
Each major leverage unwind, he said, made the divide clear between protocols engineered for durability and those optimized for attention.
He emphasized that independent collateral assessments, such as those from S&P and Credora, are becoming essential guardrails.
These frameworks, he noted, give users “measurable standards for collateral quality” rather than relying on branding or token incentives.
MacPherson expects 2026 to favor protocols with conservative collateral onboarding, more transparent liquidation environments, and real revenue tied to product-market fit. “Resilience will matter more than narrative,” he said.
Builders, Not Just Users, Become The Competitive Edge
Syndicate’s Will Papper says 2026 will be shaped by three constraints, including developer experience, user experience, and monetization.
The industry’s fixation on onboarding new users, he argues, misses the fact that ecosystems that retain the best builders ultimately accumulate the most durable value.
Papper said networks that reduce development friction and make onchain tooling faster will gain a structural advantage.
“2026 won’t be about who launches the most,” he said. “It will be about who fixes the fundamentals that help builders ship faster and founders earn revenue sustainably.”
Privacy, AI Breaches, And The Race for Verifiably Private Systems
Aurora Labs CEO Alex Shevchenko expects privacy to re-emerge as a defining theme after a surge of activity around shielded assets in 2025.
With AI models increasingly consuming personal data, he warned that coming breach events next year will accelerate demand for “verifiably private AI.”
He added that token holders are now scrutinizing revenue with far more rigor, pushing protocols to experiment with business models that are difficult to fork and have real distribution advantages.
Also Read: Why Google Is Backing Hut 8’s 245MW And Potential 2GW AI Data Center Ambition Cross-chain expansion is already reflecting this trend, with Shevchenko pointing to the adoption of NEAR Intents for projects seeking broader user reach.
Governance Becomes The Hardest Problem To Solve
NEAR Foundation’s (NEAR) Lane Rettig said 2025 demonstrated that the biggest challenges facing major blockchains are no longer technical but social.
Coordination failures, legitimacy questions, and unclear incentive structures have become bottlenecks for even the most advanced ecosystems.
He pointed to Solana’s (SOL) economic model debate and quantum-resistance pressures facing Bitcoin and Ethereum as examples where governance, not engineering, is the limiting factor.
“The true differentiator will be governance,” Rettig said, predicting that AI-assisted governance tools and economic design will move to the center of crypto’s competitive landscape in 2026.
Regulation, AI And Agentic Finance Shape Institutional Outlook
Moonwell founder Luke Youngblood says 2025 marked a turning point as institutional capital expanded following the GENIUS Act and Bitcoin (BTC) surged above $126,000.
That optimism, however, faded into year-end as market structure legislation stalled amid political gridlock.
He expects 2026 to be shaped by increasing convergence between AI and crypto.
Agentic finance, as AI systems that autonomously manage user portfolios will continue growing, he said, citing products already optimizing yield and borrowing decisions.
Youngblood also expects further adoption of trustless payment rails like x402, which major firms have begun integrating to enable AI-driven transaction execution.
Ethereum’s Challenge: Unifying Fragmented Rollups
SSV Labs CEO Alon Muroch believes the biggest structural question for Ethereum (ETH) in 2026 is how to scale without fracturing liquidity or user experience further.
Despite performance gains from the rollup-centric roadmap, Muroch noted that liquidity has scattered and users are forced to navigate a maze of chains and wrapped assets.
He expects synchronous composability, executing cross-rollup actions atomically with Ethereum security, to become a core pillar next year. “Every rollup will be a ZK rollup,” he said, predicting that the benefits of instant, trustless settlement will make ZK proofs the default architecture.
The final frontier, he added, is making rollup boundaries invisible to users.
Wallets and apps will need to route activity automatically across environments, creating a unified UX if Ethereum is to realize the “world computer” vision.
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