a16z Crypto Predictions Name 3 Bullish Narratives For 2026

Without this, agents will remain “unbanked ghosts,” unable to transact safely or access real markets. With it, they become programmable market actors capable of spending, trading, and settling value in real time.

Payments Vanish into the Internets Plumbing

This shift drives the second major prediction: payments will vanish into the network itself. As AI agents trigger transactions automatically — buying data, paying for GPU time, or settling API calls — money must move with the same speed and granularity as information.

Emerging primitives like x402 enable value transfer to occur instantly, permissionlessly, and without intermediaries.

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In this model, payments stop being an application layer and become a native network behavior. Banks, stablecoins, and settlement systems become invisible infrastructure running under agent-to-agent commerce.

Privacy Chains Will Dominate

Privacy forms the third pillar of a16zs 2026 outlook. The firm argues that privacy will become the strongest moat in crypto, far outweighing performance or throughput.

More specifically, once transactions become private, users face real friction when switching chains because moving secrets leaks metadata. This creates “privacy lock-in,” a winner-take-most effect for the chains that get privacy right.

Privacy will be the most important moat in crypto.

Why？ Because secrets are hard to migrate.

Everyone is launching a new “high performance” blockchain lately. But these chains are hardly different from one another. Blockspace is functionally the same everywhere. And with…