Predictions for 2026

Bullish:

• $ETH - Ethereum will have a renaissance year in 2026 with RWA adoption, on-chain finance growth, and potential for higher monetary premium as chains like Stripe's Tempo go live.

  • “I think they are going to continue, like, winning RWA adoption.”

    Myles·18:59

  • “I do actually think for the first time this could translate to price. And I might take the sort of contrarian angle here where I do think that Ethereum could start having a higher monetary premium in 2026 as chains like Stripe goes live.”

    Xavier·20:58

  • “I think Ethereum rather has pretty convincingly won this RWA issuance on chain finance use case.”

    Mike·30:57
• $SOL - Solana will continue to increase its lead in retail app adoption and drive significant fees from trading and financial applications, with both consumer apps and potential AI development.

  • “I think they will continue to increase their lead in, retail app adoption. So, like, if you're building anything with, a, you know, a a financial component, whether it's prediction markets or trading or, like, some new type of, like, SocialFi play. Like, I think your your default choice is Solana today, and I think that will just only continue.”

    Myles·17:57

  • “I'm very bullish on very bullish on Solana.”

    Mike·29:18

  • “I do think that they have a real niche right now in the market with attracting consumer app developers. And it's really the era we're in right now in crypto for consumer apps, and I think Solana is perfectly set up for this.”

    Xavier·20:07
• $DEFI - DeFi protocols like Morpho and Pendle will have a big year as RWA looping, vault management, and fixed-rate products gain traction with institutional adoption.

  • “I think Pendle and Morpho are gonna be the two big five, DeFi winners of this year. Morpho because they've got the right construction. They've got a great team.”

    Mike·33:30

  • “I think one of the part of the reason too, think there's a road towards fees here for Ethereum where you have activities like one thing that I think is gonna take off in 2026 is RWA looping, and vault management.”

    Mike·31:04

  • “I think credit funds are going to be a much bigger thing.”

    Mike·32:52
• $HOOD - Robinhood has unbelievable product discipline and momentum in crypto with successful expansion into prediction markets and focus on becoming an everything exchange.

  • “The I feel like wild card in all of this for me is Robinhood. That was if I have to give myself one piece of credit, I think pretty right on that going into 2025. They have unbelievable product discipline. You rarely see Robinhood launch a flop.”

    Mike·54:19

  • “I don't know where the momentum is gonna stop for them. You know, they've they've successfully made inroads into prediction markets. They are and they're much more singularly focused on the everything exchange.”

    Mike·54:42

Bearish:

• $VC - Venture capital in crypto will face real pain in 2026 with declining investment levels, fund closures, and competition from traditional VCs entering the space.

  • “I think there's gonna be real pain in VC this last this coming year. I think there has been pain already, but I think it's going to start to get reported on and covered more deeply.”

    Mike·26:41

  • “I think VC in general is gonna be anemic. Like, we had there's about 30,000,000,000 of VC investment in 2021. We are down even this year in this bull market to around 25. I think we're gonna continue to see that downward trajectory into 2026.”

    Mike·1:00:52

  • “probably there'll be many that officially die out, I think, in 2026. If they're if they're not dead yet, they might be dying out in '26.”

    Xavier·1:04:51
• $LAYERTWO - L2 infrastructure providers face continued challenges with overbuilding, broken mental models, and consolidation down to 2-3 vertically integrated winners.

  • “It's already been pretty tough, but I think it's only going to continue to get tougher for that for that group.”

    Mike·42:51

  • “I think we had a little bit of a broken mental model too around what l twos were. And I think we talked about this before, but everyone wants to position themselves as a platform and an ecosystem. I just don't see it that much for l two.”

    Mike·44:16

  • “we've just way overbuilt and way overestimated demand and how many solutions the market really needs.”

    Mike·45:08
• $CRYPTOAI - Crypto AI and agentic commerce face significant technical challenges with LLMs unable to properly reference on-chain data, making 2026 adoption unlikely.

  • “I think around anything around agentic commerce on crypto, I'm just not bullish on, yet because the infrastructure that you need in order to actually make that work and the security and the trust feels really far off to me.”

    Mike·24:53

  • “Ask an LLM a really basic fact like how much how many fees has Uniswap generated and what it doesn't do is hit anything on chain. What it will do is pull from news articles. And so we're like a little ways away from LLMs directly referencing crypto aggregate data.”

    Mike·1:18:01

  • “I do not think this will take off in 2026.”

    Mike·1:20:00