A16z: AI Agents and On-Chain Finance Are About to Reshape Everything

A16z crypto, a venture capital fund of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), said it expects several crypto-related themes to gain prominence in 2026, while citing developments across stablecoins, real-world-asset tokenization, banking infrastructure, AI agent authentication, privacy technologies, and prediction markets.

In its latest post, the firm said stablecoins processed an estimated $46 trillion in transaction volume last year, and even surpassing major payment networks. But connecting digital dollars to existing financial rails remains an unresolved issue.

Major Crypto Themes For 2026

According to the report, new startups are building on- and off-ramps that link stablecoins with local payment systems, QR-based regional networks, real-time settlement rails, and merchant tools, enabling digital dollars to circulate more easily in everyday payments. A16z said these integrations could support new use cases such as instant cross-border payroll and direct merchant acceptance without bank accounts.

The report also pointed to growing interest among banks, fintech firms, and asset managers in bringing traditional assets on-chain, but said many tokenization efforts still replicate existing financial structures. It spoke about synthetic instruments such as perpetual futures as easier to implement and capable of deeper liquidity, adding that “perpification versus tokenization” will remain an important question as more assets come on-chain.

Stablecoin issuance also grew in 2025, and A16z predicted that 2026 would see more on-chain origination of credit products rather than off-chain issuance later converted into tokens. The firm said banks continue to rely on legacy core systems built decades ago and argued that stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized treasuries, and on-chain bonds allow institutions to launch new products without replacing aging infrastructure.

In its outlook on automation, the report said a shift toward intent-based systems and AI agents will require payments that move at internet speed, supported by programmable settlement tools such as x402. This could turn value transfer into a native network function rather than a separate operational layer.

Prediction Markets, DeFi, and LLM Oracles

The report also predicted broader access to wealth-management tools as tokenized assets, stablecoins, and DeFi allocation mechanisms enable faster portfolio adjustments, including access to private market assets traditionally limited to institutional investors.

On identity, A16z said non-human agents now outnumber human employees in financial services and argued that cryptographically signed credentials, described as “Know Your Agent,” will be required for agents to transact. The report said AI systems are increasingly used for research tasks and predicted that multi-agent workflows will need attribution and compensation mechanisms that blockchain systems could support.

A16z believes that the rise of AI agents has disrupted the economic model of the open web by extracting information without supporting ad-based revenue, and added that real-time usage-based compensation systems, potentially using crypto micropayments, may be needed.

On privacy, the venture fund said chains with built-in confidentiality could gain stronger network effects because moving between private and public environments risks metadata exposure. The report also predicted increased focus on decentralized, quantum-resistant messaging networks and described “secrets-as-a-service” as a needed framework for enforcing data-access rules on-chain.

The report said recent DeFi exploits show that current security practices remain largely case-by-case, and that the sector will need to shift toward proving system-wide properties and enforcing them at runtime. It also noted that prediction markets are expected to list many more contracts, which could raise questions about how to determine outcomes, and new decentralized governance mechanisms and LLM-based oracles will be proposed to help resolve contested events.

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