For decades, the internet has enabled information to move freely across borders, platforms, and systems. But value has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial agreements still move through fragmented infrastructure built on legacy rails, national boundaries, and intermediaries that extract rents at every junction.

That gap is closing faster than ever before. This creates an opportunity for infrastructure companies that directly replace legacy clearing, settlement, and custody functions. The infrastructure that enables value to move as freely as information is no longer theoretical. It's being built, deployed, and used at scale.

For years, crypto existed onchain, but remained disconnected from the real economy. That's changing. Crypto is becoming the clearing and settlement layer that the internet economy has always needed; one that operates continuously, transparently, and without requiring permission from centralized gatekeepers.

The themes below represent where we believe digital assets are heading in 2026 and where Wintermute Ventures is actively backing founders.

Everything becomes tradeable

An increasing range of assets and real-world outcomes become tradeable through new financial primitives, including prediction markets, tokenization, and derivatives. This shift provides a liquidity layer for areas that historically had no markets at all.

Tokenization and synthetics bring liquidity to known assets. Prediction markets go further by pricing what was previously unpriceable, converting raw information into tradeable instruments.

Prediction markets continue to expand as both consumer products and novel financial instruments, enabling hedging, outcome-linked trades, and views on granular events. They are also beginning to replace parts of legacy financial infrastructure.

Insurance is a compelling example: outcome-based markets can offer cheaper, more flexible hedging than traditional insurance or reinsurance by directly pricing specific risks rather than bundling them into broad products. Instead of buying hurricane insurance that covers a region, users can hedge against specific wind speeds in specific locations during specific timeframes. Over longer time horizons, these idiosyncratic risks could be hand-picked and bundled to an individual's unique need by agentic workflows.

As prediction market infrastructure scales, entirely new categories of data products emerge around topics that were never priced before. We expect markets designed to trade and quantify objective measures of perception, sentiment, and collective opinion. These emerging markets are a natural extension of decentralized finance, unlocking new ways to price and exchange information itself. When everything becomes tradeable, the infrastructure that provides liquidity, enables price discovery, and ensures settlement becomes critical.

This structural shift will concentrate value in the infrastructure layer, which directly shapes how we allocate capital. We are actively backing teams building core market and settlement infrastructure, data layers for verification and attestation, and new data products that emerge to support the financialization of previously untradeable outcomes. We are also focused on novel abstraction models that make these markets programmable and composable, enabling them to be embedded into real-world workflows and replace parts of legacy financial and insurance infrastructure.

Stablecoins become the trust layer while banks handle the interim settlement

Digital assets lack a robust equivalent to settlement banks and the clearing houses that grease the wheels of traditional finance. Stablecoins enable open access and programmable value, but without settlement infrastructure, fragmentation creates friction that limits adoption.

As stablecoin issuers proliferate with different collateral models across ecosystems, demand is growing for an interoperability layer that can reliably compose these assets. For this system to scale, crypto needs infrastructure that enables netting, conversion, and settlement across stablecoins and chains without introducing additional credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational overhead.

The missing abstraction is moving conversion and credit risk to stablecoin issuers via balance-sheet-based interoperability, rather than forcing end users to manage FX, routing, or counterparty exposure when transacting across stablecoins. We think of it as an onchain equivalent of correspondent banking, with settlement in seconds and open access for application builders, and expect to see more companies positioning themselves as the coordination layer between issuers and applications.

Markets will reward durable revenue over temporary incentives

Token-driven growth without sustainable business models is losing effectiveness. Companies that rely on subsidizing users or liquidity providers while operating structurally fragile revenue models will find it harder to compete.

Valuations will anchor more tightly to sustainable earnings and forward projections, converging toward cash-flow-based frameworks. Annualizing short-term, volatile monthly fee spikes will no longer be a credible way to price businesses, as earnings quality and incentive alignment become central to valuation. Tokens without a credible path to value capture will struggle to sustain demand beyond speculative phases.

Consequently, fewer companies will launch tokens at inception. Many will default to equity-first structures, using blockchains primarily as backend infrastructure that remains largely invisible to users and investors. When tokens are used, launches will increasingly happen only after product-market fit is clear, with revenues, unit economics, and distribution already proven and stakeholder incentives aligned.

We see this transition as a healthy and necessary evolution that benefits the entire ecosystem. Founders can focus on building durable businesses instead of prioritizing token incentives and demand too early. Investors can evaluate companies using familiar financial frameworks. Users receive products designed for long-term value.

DeFi will converge with Fintech

The future of finance isn’t DeFi or TradFi: it’s the convergence of both. Dual-rail architectures allow fintech applications to route transactions dynamically based on cost, speed, and yield. Breakout consumer applications will look like conventional fintech products, with wallets, bridges, and chains fully abstracted away. Capital efficiency, yield, settlement speed, and transparent execution define the next generation of financial products.

While the user experience converges with fintech, the industry continues to expand rapidly under the hood. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives drive this growth, enabling deeper liquidity and more sophisticated financial products.

Distribution will matter more than owning the interface. Winning teams will build backend-first infrastructure that plugs into existing platforms and channels instead of competing as standalone apps. Personalization and automation, increasingly augmented by AI, will improve pricing, routing, and yield in the background. Users will not consciously choose DeFi. They will choose products that work better.

Privacy becomes table stakes

Privacy is becoming foundational to institutional adoption, shifting from a regulatory liability to a regulatory enabler. Selective disclosure using zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation allows participants to prove compliance without exposing raw data.

In practice, this enables banks to assess creditworthiness without accessing transaction histories, employers to verify employment without exposing salaries, and institutions to prove reserves without revealing positions. A tangible real-life extension of this vision is a world where corporations no longer have to store swaths of data, thereby freeing themselves of costly and burdensome data privacy regulations. New primitives such as private shared state, zkTLS, and MPC unlock undercollateralized lending, tranching, and new onchain risk products, shifting entire categories of structured finance onchain that were previously not viable.

Regulation matures from a compliance hurdle into a distribution edge

Regulatory clarity has transitioned from an adversarial hurdle into a standardized distribution channel. While the "permissionless" nature of early DeFi remains a vital engine for innovation, the arrival of operational frameworks like the GENIUS Act in the US, MiCA in Europe, and Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime are providing greater clarity for legacy institutions. In 2026, the story is no longer about whether institutions can use blockchains, but about how they are using these guidelines to replace legacy plumbing for high-velocity onchain rails.

These standards will enable a greater wave of compliant onchain products, regulated on- and off-ramps, and institutional-grade infrastructure without forcing full centralization, increasing the institutional participation.

Regions that combine clear rules with fast approvals will increasingly attract capital, talent, and experimentation, accelerating the normalization of onchain value distribution across both native crypto and hybrid financial products, while slower regimes will fall behind.

The internet economy lives on crypto

Infrastructure maturation is the common thread across this shift. Crypto is becoming the clearing and settlement layer for the internet economy, enabling value to move as freely as information. The protocols, primitives, and applications being built today are unlocking new forms of real economic activity and expanding what is possible on the internet.

At Wintermute Ventures, we support founders building this infrastructure. We look for teams who combine deep technical understanding with a strong product mindset. Teams who ship solutions people genuinely want to use. Teams who can operate within regulatory frameworks while advancing the core principles of decentralized systems. Teams who design businesses built for long-term impact.

2026 will mark a turning point. Crypto infrastructure will increasingly fade into the background for users while becoming foundational to the global financial system. The best infrastructure empowers people quietly, without demanding attention.

If you are building in any of these areas, we would love to hear from you!

Contact our team: https://www.wintermute.com/contact/ventures