Having enjoyed a blockbuster year of venture capital investors ploughing over $25 billion into crypto companies, a 73% uptick from 2025, according to DefiLlama data, crypto startups are banking on an exciting 2026.

The only question now is where exactly will the next big businesses crop up?

From artificial intelligence to geopolitics — that question is hard to answer.

DL News asked five investors about what they’re keeping an eye out for in 2026.

Hoolie Tejwani, Head of Coinbase Ventures

Perpetuals are already the most used financial product in crypto. They’ve been around for years, handle vast amounts of trading, and work even when markets get chaotic.

What’s new is how they’re being used. Instead of just speculating on crypto prices, people are using perps to create synthetic markets tied to real-world assets. That could be inflation data, oil prices, private companies, or other signals people care about but can’t easily trade today.

The key point is you don’t need to actually own the thing you’re trading. You don’t have to move oil barrels or custody shares. That makes it much faster to launch new markets and lets them scale globally from day one.

‘Taken together, 2026 feels less like hype and more like maturity.'

—  Hoolie Tejwani, Head, Coinbase Ventures

A few other shifts are happening alongside this. Crypto’s superpower is enabling 24/7 global markets for anything. Anything that can be tokenised and traded will be, and the lines between trading platforms will blur.

Decentralised finance products are also starting to work together better, with a more intuitive user experience, so we expect new cohorts of users and capital to onboard to DeFi. And as AI systems become more capable, crypto is quietly becoming the way those systems move money and coordinate actions.

Regulation also plays a role. This year was when legislation like the Genius Act helped move crypto out of a legal grey zone. Market clarity is the next big unlock, which we expect to see in 2026.

When clear rules are set, capital gets more patient, and builders can play beyond the next quarter.

Taken together, 2026 feels less like hype and more like maturity.

Founders are thinking long-term, building real infrastructure, and focusing on what actually gets used. That’s usually when things start to stick, and we’re investing in the teams that show up to build with five- to 10-year visions.

Mike Giampapa, General Partner, Galaxy Ventures

Despite lacklustre price performance in 2025, with total crypto market capitalisation down roughly 13% year-to-date, we’ve seen unprecedented improvements in underlying fundamentals.

We expect adoption of stablecoins and other tokenised assets to continue accelerating in 2026 and to represent a secular growth trend over the next one to two decades.

The US government is likely to continue supporting the global export of dollar-backed stablecoins, underpinning a new wave of fintechs and neobanks that deliver better, faster, cheaper financial services.

In parallel, incumbents are beginning to fight back by launching blockchain-enabled products across digital asset custody, cross-border payments, stablecoin issuance, cards, and treasury management, making 2026 a true inflexion point for institutional adoption.

Large banks, asset managers, and broker-dealers increasingly view these efforts as opportunities for growth and margin expansion, replacing legacy rails with modern blockchain infrastructure without requiring end users to materially change existing behaviour.

As more assets move onchain, institutional capital formation should accelerate, creating a supportive backdrop for DeFi, with crypto primitives such as prediction markets, perpetuals, and vaults continuing to gain relevance.

Following a landmark year for crypto mergers and acquisitions in 2025, we expect continued consolidation as incumbents execute on strategic roadmaps.

Venture funding activity is ultimately downstream of new fund formation, which is likely to remain challenging as many institutional allocators remain over-allocated to venture and private equity more broadly.

Finally, after what was the most important year in history for crypto regulation, with the signing of the Genius Act into law in July, attention now turns to advancing a market structure bill in 2026, which will further reinforce institutional adoption."

Francesca Conti, Head of Acceleration and Incubation, CV Labs

Next year is poised to be the year of further institutional adoption in the blockchain arena.

With players like Binance awarded three Abu Dhabi Global Market licenses in the United Arab Emirates, we are confident that the new regulatory clarity emerging across other jurisdictions is a positive indication of what is to come in the new year.

In our experience, good regulation enables innovation and, in turn, allows institutions to participate in the global rise of digital asset markets and correlated industries.

Similarly, crypto exchange Bullish raising $1 billion for its public offering signalled a green light for digital asset companies on Wall Street, which can only stimulate stronger institutional interest that meets their clients’ demand.

We anticipate that growth will continue in other jurisdictions at an even more rapid pace, particularly in regions where the impact of blockchain and frontier technology extends beyond financial market expansions to deeply enable critical industries such as agriculture and health to operate with significant efficiencies.

On the heels of our recently closed African Blockchain fund, backed by well-known leaders such as Circle Ventures, the investment arm of the US-based issuer of the USDC stablecoin, the appetite in emerging markets is more evident than ever.

Our internal research shows that investment in Africa’s blockchain ecosystem is on the rise — with blockchain accounting for over 7% of total venture capital funding and 12.7% of all deals on the continent.

Whilst payments, infrastructure and fintech rails continue to dominate verticals for us at CV VC, we remain deeply committed to the emergence of blockchain technology as the bedrock rail on which better, transparent and verifiable actions can be managed across web3.

Jeff Ren, Founder, OKX Ventures

In 2026, the smarter money in crypto will follow the places where the technology is interoperable with the rest of finance. There’ll still be plenty of chatter about a possible Bitcoin Act or new waves of spot exchange-traded funds, but the more durable story lies in the plumbing underneath.

In 2026, we’ll see more projects explore product-market fit around risks people already care about. That means more niche assets coming onchain: stocks, gold, intellectual property, even trading cards and GPUs, with global, 24/7 access and the ability to plug straight into DeFi.

The goal isn’t to invent new things to speculate on, but to package familiar risks — rates, oil prices, elections, credit spreads — in intuitive formats that the everyday user can actually navigate to get exposure or hedge.

Stablecoins already move more value than big card networks, and with rulebooks like the Genius Act in the US and sweeping crypto regulations in Europe, called Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, banks and brokerages are finally comfortable launching their own stablecoins and tokenised products.

That’s how stablecoins move from trading chips into the default rail for salaries, business-to-business payments and cross‑border trade in a more technology‑driven, compliance‑first environment.

Perpetuals still dominate crypto, but they come with funding fees and a learning curve that favours professional traders. Options can offer cleaner upside or protection without that ongoing drag, especially in simpler, more user‑friendly formats.

Expect to see more click‑once structures, including binary yes-no contracts on events that look and feel closer to prediction markets than traditional options.

Underpinning it all, more of the flow will be machines talking to machines: bots and agents holding balances, paying for services and rebalancing on autopilot. From a VC angle, that means fewer spray‑and‑pray bets on narratives, and more focus on whether a product can work with regulators, institutions, and this emerging machine economy at the same time.

Petr Martynov, Head of Growth, Morningstar Ventures

For most of crypto’s history, investors chased infrastructure. That meant faster blockchains, more decentralisation, and cheaper fees.

That phase is largely done.

By 2026, the most interesting investment opportunities will come from what gets built on top of that foundation.

First, I expect a real wave of consumer crypto apps — especially in DeFi — that don’t feel like crypto at all. The tech is finally invisible. Users won’t think about wallets, seed phrases, or gas fees.

They’ll just use products that feel as smooth as Revolut or Robinhood, but happen to run on blockchains underneath. That’s when adoption stops being theoretical.

Second, the line between traditional finance and DeFi will blur fast.

As regulation becomes clearer, particularly in the US, we’ll see more familiar financial products move on-chain: equities, payments, settlement rails.

This isn’t crypto replacing traditional finance. It’s TradFi quietly using blockchain because it’s cheaper, faster, and global by default.

Finally, I’m watching how blockchains become verification layers for AI and robotics.

As machines generate more data and make more decisions, we’ll need neutral systems to prove what happened, when, and by whom.