Crypto didn’t just have a good year in 2025. It thrived in ways that would have seemed like wishful thinking only a couple of years ago when banks shunned it as a liability, and Gary Gensler’s Securities and Exchange Commission pursued what felt like a scorched-earth campaign.
The industry got virtually everything it had spent years lobbying for: an end to regulation-by-enforcement; the first major federal crypto bill—the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act—signed into law; a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, committing the U.S. government to hold the asset; and openly pro-crypto leadership installed at both the SEC and the CFTC.
In one of the clearest signs of the wind change, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who for years dismissed bitcoin as a “fraud,” “stupid” and “worthless”, changed his tune likening owning it to “the right to smoke.” What’s more, Dimon’s $4.5 trillion global bank might even soon offer crypto trading to its institutional clients.
Above all, crypto found its most sympathetic president yet (who’s also profiting off his newfound interests). No wonder total crypto market capitalization topped $4 trillion for the first time in July. Bitcoin hit a record $126,080 in October before macro pressure, leverage unwinds and early-holder profit-taking dragged prices lower into year-end.
Here are five trends to watch as crypto heads into 2026:
1. Further Institutionalization
The ETF boom that began with the SEC’s approval of spot bitcoin funds in January 2024 was just the beginning. Today global assets in crypto ETFs and ETPs, of which there are over a hundred, are estimated to be in excess of $200 billion.
“You're going to continue to see this gradual institutionalization via the ETF wrapper over the next year: the inclusion of bitcoin ETFs in model portfolios, in 401Ks, in directed mandates as opposed to just self-directed investments, and more scaled adoption by some of these extremely large institutions,” says Ophelia Snyder, cofounder of ETP provider 21Shares (acquired by FalconX in October). “What people often miss is that this is where most of the actual money is, and a few haven't even begun to really actually allocate.”
That shift changes the buyer base, and eventually the behavior, of bitcoin itself. “You’re going to start to see global macro sentiment from a highly diversified body of investors drive bitcoin pricing far more than sort of a crypto-native cohort,” Snyder says, adding that the investor overlap between bitcoin and broad equities is growing.
Echoes Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures, “2026 is going to feel less like hype and more like maturity for the space.”
2. Accelerated Tokenization
Tokenized assets—digital representations of assets like stocks, bonds and real estate on blockchains—still make up roughly 0.01% of global equity and bond markets. But momentum is building. The SEC’s December approval for the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC), which handles over $3.5 quadrillion in securities transactions annually, to provide tokenization services “puts us on the path of actually having traditional finance on crypto rails, which is exactly where the future is,” Snyder says.
The agency will also likely offer exemptive relief—perhaps via a no-action letter or the “innovation exemption” framework floated by SEC Chairman Paul Atkins—for expanding the use of tokenized securities in decentralized finance, predicts Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital. He anticipates the early stages of formal rulemaking to commence in the second half of 2026.
Galaxy’s Thad Pinakiewicz thinks we’re likely to see a major bank or brokerage begin accepting deposits of tokenized equities and treating them as fully equivalent to traditional securities.
3. Stablecoin Infrastructure Development
The stablecoin market grew from $206 billion to over $300 billion in 2025, thanks in large part to the passage of the GENIUS Act, and attracted major new entrants including fintechs like Stripe, Fiserv and Klarna. Today there are more than a dozen entities issuing dollar denominated stablecoins.
“Everybody wants to issue [stablecoins] because everybody wants to manage flow and innovate. And everybody wants to receive because you want to accept what your customers want to pay with—and, more importantly, because you make money that way,” says Juan Lopez, general partner at VanEck Ventures.
The next hurdle is “the orchestration challenge,” he notes—seamlessly routing payments across different platforms and blockchains. “The most important innovation here is removing counterparty risk,” Lopez adds. “There needs to be a common venue where, without counterparty risk, all participants—the distributor, the issuer, the consumer—agree that if you want to redeem your money, or your digital USD for real fiat USD, it’s guaranteed, or close to guaranteed, because there’s no counterparty risk along the way.”
This requires establishing standardized operating rules analogous to existing payment systems, Lopez explains. "Visa has a rulebook. ACH has a rulebook. SWIFT has a rulebook. What that means is: if you want to plug into the network, you have to meet certain criteria that reduce and remove counterparty risk. You have to screen transactions in a certain way. You have to align to particular standards for transaction types.”
4. Markets For Everything
One of crypto’s enduring advantages is its ability to support always-on markets without geographic or time constraints. In 2026, that feature is likely to extend well beyond tokens.
“Whether we're talking prediction markets, perpetual futures, tokenized real world assets, attention, culture…If it can be traded, it's going to be turned into a market on-chain,” says Coinbase Ventures’ Tejwani. “Speculation is inherent in human behavior” after all.
For instance, perpetual futures are now surging in popularity thanks to platforms like Hyperliquid, which traded nearly $3 trillion in 2025. These derivatives, which never expire and track prices via funding rates, now extend to non-crypto assets: oil, interest rates, even Fed rate decisions.
As crypto further intertwines with traditional finance, traders are increasingly using blockchain-based instruments not just to bet on digital assets, but to hedge, speculate and express broader macro views.
5. The Intersection Of Crypto And AI
s software grows more autonomous, it won’t just generate decisions, it will need to move money on its own. Enter the so-called “agentic commerce.”
“You have AI agents now that can spin up smart contracts and generate tokens that you can interact with. That's probably the most simple version,” says Tejwani. The more consequential shift comes when those agents start transacting with one another. “There’s going to be a massive machine to machine economy,” he adds. “Doing a lot of that activity on blockchains is very logical. You can't economically enable a sub-30 cent transaction with traditional rails right now, and these agents are going to be making billions and billions of these.”
Galaxy Digital highlights Coinbase’s Base and Solana blockchains as the potential leaders supporting agentic payments due to their large developer and user bases as well as new payment-focused chains like Tempo (from Stripe and Paradigm) and Circle’s Arc.
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