Wintermute Ventures: Our 6 Predictions for Digital Assets in 2026

Original author: Wintertermute Ventures

For decades, the internet has enabled information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. But the flow of "value" has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial contracts still rely on fragmented infrastructure, circulating along outdated tracks, across national borders, and through layers of intermediaries, each link extracting costs.

And this gap is being filled at an unprecedented speed.

This creates an opportunity for a class of infrastructure companies that directly replace traditional clearing, settlement, and custody functions.

The infrastructure that allows value to flow as freely as information is no longer just a theoretical concept, but is being built, deployed, and used on a large scale.

For years, crypto assets, while existing on-chain, have been disconnected from the real economy. Now, this is changing.

Encryption is becoming the clearing and settlement layer that the internet economy has been missing: a transparent system that can operate 24/7 and does not require the permission of a centralized gatekeeper.

The following themes represent our assessment of the future direction of digital assets in 2026, and are also areas where Wintermute Ventures is actively supporting entrepreneurs.

Everything will become tradable

More and more assets and real-world outcomes are becoming tradable through new financial primitives, including prediction markets, tokenization, and derivatives.

This shift provides a liquidity layer for areas where markets previously did not exist.

Tokenization and synthetic assets bring liquidity to known assets; prediction markets go a step further, pricing things that were previously “unpriceable,” transforming raw information into tradable financial instruments.

Prediction markets are expanding both as consumer-facing products and as entirely new financial instruments, supporting hedging, outcome-linked trading, and the representation of highly segmented events. They are also beginning to replace some of the functions of traditional financial infrastructure.

Insurance is a prime example: an outcome-based market that can offer a cheaper and more flexible hedging option than traditional insurance or reinsurance by directly pricing specific risks.

Users no longer need to purchase hurricane insurance covering the entire area; instead, they can hedge against specific times, locations, and wind speeds.

On a longer timescale, these highly personalized risks can also be finely combined according to individual needs through workflows with proxy capabilities.

As prediction market infrastructure expands, entirely new data products will emerge around topics that have never been priced before.

We anticipate the emergence of markets for trading and quantifying objective metrics such as "perception, sentiment, and collective opinion." These emerging markets are a natural extension of decentralized finance, opening up new ways to price and exchange "information itself."

When everything becomes tradable, the infrastructure that provides liquidity, enables price discovery, and ensures settlement will become crucial.

This structural change will cause value to concentrate in the infrastructure layer and directly affect how capital is allocated.

We are actively supporting teams that build core market and settlement infrastructure, data layers for verification and proof, and new data products that support previously non-tradable results.

At the same time, we are also looking at new abstract models that make these markets programmable and composable, enabling them to be embedded in real-world workflows and gradually replace parts of the traditional financial and insurance systems.

Stablecoins serve as the trust layer, while banks handle settlements during the transition period.

Digital assets currently lack a robust system similar to the settlement banks and clearing institutions in traditional finance.

Stablecoins offer an open and programmable form of value, but in the absence of settlement infrastructure, fragmentation between different systems still creates friction and limits their large-scale application.

As stablecoin issuers with different collateral models continue to emerge across various ecosystems, the market demand for a reliable interoperability layer to combine and coordinate these assets is rising.

For this system to truly scale, the crypto industry needs an infrastructure that enables net settlement, exchange, and clearing between different stablecoins and different chains without introducing additional credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational complexity.

The missing key abstraction is to transfer exchange and credit risk to the balance sheet of the stablecoin issuer through "balance sheet-based interoperability," rather than making end users bear the exchange rate, path selection, or counterparty risk themselves when trading across stablecoins.

We view this as an "on-chain correspondent banking system": settlements take only seconds and are completely open to application developers. We anticipate that more companies will position themselves as coordination layers between publishers and applications.

The market will reward sustainable income, not short-term incentives.

The approach of relying solely on token incentives to drive growth, lacking a sustainable business model, is gradually becoming ineffective.

Companies that subsidize users or liquidity providers but lack a structurally sound revenue model will find it increasingly difficult to compete.

Valuations will be more closely anchored to sustainable returns and forward-looking earnings expectations, and will gradually return to a cash flow-based assessment framework.

Simply annualizing short-term, highly volatile monthly transaction fees is no longer a reasonable pricing method. Return quality and incentive consistency will become the core of valuation.

Tokens that lack a clear path to value capture will also struggle to maintain demand outside of speculative cycles.

Therefore, fewer and fewer companies are issuing tokens at the outset. Many projects will prioritize equity structures, treating blockchain primarily as underlying infrastructure, making it virtually "invisible" to users and investors.

When tokens are adopted, issuance often occurs after product-market fit has been clear, and revenue, unit economics, and distribution channels have been validated.

We believe this is a healthy and necessary evolution.

It allows founders to focus on building a long-term sustainable business rather than chasing token incentives prematurely; it allows investors to evaluate using a familiar financial framework; and it gives users access to products truly designed for long-term value.

DeFi will merge with financial technology

The future of finance is neither DeFi nor traditional finance, but a fusion of the two. A dual-track architecture allows fintech applications to dynamically route transactions between different systems based on cost, speed, and returns.

Breakthrough consumer products will superficially resemble traditional fintech products, with wallets, bridges, and blockchain completely abstracted and hidden. Capital efficiency, yield levels, settlement speed, and transparent execution will define the next generation of financial products.

While user experience is converging with fintech, the industry will continue to expand rapidly at its core. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives are driving this growth, enabling deeper liquidity and more complex financial products.

Distribution capabilities will be more important than "having an interface." The winning team will build backend-centric infrastructure that is embedded in existing platforms and channels, rather than competing as a standalone application.

Personalization and automation (increasingly driven by AI) will optimize pricing, routing, and revenue in the background.

Users will not actively choose DeFi.

They will only choose the product that works better.

Privacy has become a "basic threshold".

Privacy is becoming a fundamental condition for institutions to adopt digital assets, and its role is shifting from a "regulatory burden" to a "regulatory enabler".

Selective disclosure, enabled by zero-knowledge proofs and secure multi-party computation, allows participants to demonstrate their compliance without exposing raw data.

In practical applications, this means:

Banks can assess creditworthiness without reviewing the complete transaction history;

Employers can verify employment relationships without disclosing specific salaries;

Financial institutions can demonstrate that their reserves are sufficient, but they are not required to disclose their holdings structure.

The direct real-world extension of this vision is that enterprises no longer need to store large amounts of sensitive data for extended periods, thus freeing themselves from costly and burdensome data privacy compliance requirements.

New technological primitives such as private shared state, zkTLS, and MPC are unlocking previously infeasible financial models, including under-collateralized loans, tranching, and new on-chain risk products.

This will migrate the entire category of structured finance, which was previously difficult to put on the blockchain, to the blockchain.

Regulation has evolved from a compliance hurdle to a distribution advantage.

Regulatory clarity has shifted from an adversarial barrier to a standardized distribution channel.

While the permissionless nature of early DeFi remains a key engine of innovation, regulatory frameworks for stablecoins, such as the GENIUS Act in the United States, MiCA in Europe, and stablecoin regulations in Hong Kong, are providing clearer operational boundaries for traditional institutions.

By 2026, the core issue will no longer be "whether institutions can use blockchain," but rather how they can replace the outdated and inefficient underlying pipelines of the traditional financial system with high-speed on-chain channels under these regulatory guidelines.

These standards will drive the adoption of larger-scale compliant on-chain products, regulated deposit and withdrawal channels, and institutional-grade infrastructure without sacrificing decentralization or moving towards full centralization, thereby significantly increasing institutional participation.

Regions with clear rules and efficient approval mechanisms will continue to attract capital, talent, and experimental innovation, accelerating the normalization of on-chain value distribution in native crypto and hybrid financial products; while regions with slow regulatory progress will gradually fall behind.

The internet economy operates on encryption.

The common thread running through all these changes is the maturation of infrastructure. Encryption is becoming the clearing and settlement layer of the internet economy, allowing value to flow as freely as information.

The protocols, primitives, and applications currently being built are unleashing entirely new forms of real-world economic activity and continuously expanding the boundaries of the internet's capabilities.

At Wintertermute Ventures, we support entrepreneurs who are focused on building this infrastructure.

We are looking for teams with a deep understanding of technology and a strong product mindset—to deliver products that users truly want to use; to operate within a regulatory framework while advancing the core principles of decentralized systems; and to design business models with a long-term impact in mind.

2026 will be a major turning point.

For users, cryptographic infrastructure will gradually fade into the background;

But it will become indispensable to the global financial system.

The best infrastructure quietly empowers the world without needing to be noticed.