Original Title: 2026: The Invisible Revolution
Original Author: Paul Veradittakit, Pantera Capital
Original Compilation: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
2026 will be a pivotal year. We will witness the complete transformation of ‘crypto as an industry’ into ‘crypto as a service.’
The past decade has been filled with various gimmicks in the crypto world. The approval of Bitcoin ETFs in 2024 gained mainstream financial recognition. In 2025, everyone focused on building the underlying infrastructure. By 2026, the real value will belong to companies that use blockchain to solve long-standing problems in traditional industries while making users completely unaware of blockchain’s existence.
The future crypto unicorns will not rise through hype. They will be companies that leverage blockchain technology to improve product efficiency by an order of magnitude, thereby tapping into trillion-dollar markets while completely hiding the complex technology.
Crypto Technology Wins the ‘Weekend’
When the Iran conflict erupted, U.S. stock markets were closed for the weekend and unable to react to the sudden global risks. But the crypto market did not stop; Bitcoin once surged to $74,000. Commodities completed price discovery first on the decentralized prediction market Hyperliquid, even before traditional markets opened. This is not an isolated case—the same happened last month when China introduced new policies.
Traditional hedge funds are increasingly entering this space. The ‘7×24 non-stop’ nature of the crypto market is no longer just a slogan but a structural advantage that traditional finance cannot match.
Nevertheless, the current valuation of the crypto market is still far below what its fundamentals should justify. We are undoubtedly in another bear market (my fourth experience), but this time is completely different: regulations are becoming clearer, institutional capital has entered, and infrastructure is increasingly robust.
This feeling was particularly strong at the recent Consensus conference in Hong Kong. The vitality of the Asian market contrasts sharply with the West. There, bipartisan government support, newly entering institutional capital, and a focus on consumer-facing applications are driving strong bullish sentiment.
Highlights for Asia in 2026:
· Cross-border payments via stablecoins, especially in the B2B sector. For Asia’s fragmented economic systems, crypto payments are a natural choice.
· Tokenization of gold, stocks, and real estate. Asian banks and fintech companies are catching up with the pace set by the U.S.
· Perpetual contract trading on DeFi. Driven by retail investors, development speed may surpass that of the West.
· Prediction markets are expected to become an important sector, though their form may differ from that in the West.
Core Trend: ‘Crypto as a Service’
The core theme of 2026 is the shift from ‘crypto as an industry’ to ‘crypto as a service.’ The goal is no longer to make users see blockchain but to make them completely forget its existence.
Over the past decade, we have been passionate about creating ‘crypto spectacles’—gas fee wars, TPS competitions, modular stacks, ZK proofs. The 2024 ETFs were a vote of recognition from mainstream institutions. In 2025, we laid all the underlying infrastructure. In 2026, it’s time to pivot.
Farewell to the ‘Casino’ Era
The new generation of unicorns will not be something like ‘an L3 network built for AI-NFTs.’ They will be companies that leverage blockchain to improve product efficiency tenfold while completely hiding the technology, thereby tapping into trillion-dollar markets.
This perfectly explains our recent investment logic:
Novig: Farewell to the ‘Rake’ Era ($75 Million Series B)
Traditional sports betting is a monopolistic, distorted market. Bookmakers take high commissions from every bet, resulting in a dismal user win rate of only 2%. We led Novig’s $75 million funding round because they treat sports betting as a high-frequency financial product. Through a peer-to-peer trading model, Novig users achieve an average win rate of 23%. Most users don’t care whether a decentralized order book is used in the backend; they only know they get the best odds in the U.S. This is a vivid example of ‘crypto as a service.’
Based: Consumer-Grade Super App ($11.5 Million Series A)
We recently led Based’s Series A funding round. This is a composable Web3 consumer-grade super app built on the Hyperliquid ecosystem. ‘Consumer-grade crypto’ has often been equated with ‘clunky experiences.’ Based is changing that, making on-chain interactions as smooth and seamless as top-tier fintech apps. Complex operations like cross-chain bridging and gas fees are abstracted away, and users are completely unaware. They only need to focus on the social and financial value of their assets.
Doppler: Default Asset Issuance Infrastructure ($9 Million Seed Round)
If Based and Novig are cool new cars, then Doppler is the high-performance fuel system. We led Doppler’s $9 million seed round, aiming to become the default infrastructure for on-chain asset issuance. It allows developers to issue assets with institutional-grade security and compliance standards without building all the underlying layers from scratch. Doppler is like Stripe for on-chain assets—pure utility, all encapsulated behind a clean API.
Why ‘Invisibility’ Is More Important Than ‘Virality’
This trend of ‘invisibility’ also runs through our entire investment portfolio:
· Real-World Assets: Tokenized treasury bonds are no longer crypto experiments; they are becoming the backend liquidity foundation for global trade.
· AI Agents: Blockchain provides a trusted ‘truth layer’ for AI agents through prediction markets and verifiable data, enabling them to autonomously and credibly interact with digital assets.
· Agent payments will accelerate all of this. Payment standards like x402 allow AI agents to directly transact using crypto assets. The gradual clarity of stablecoin regulations makes this payment rail smoother.
Advice for Entrepreneurs
If you are planning to start a business in 2026, my advice is simple: Stop talking about the technology and focus more on what real-world problems you can solve. If the slide about consensus mechanisms in your funding pitch deck comes before the one about customer return rates, your mindset is still stuck in 2022.
We are looking for teams building the next Novig, Based, or Doppler—those who truly understand what ‘mass adoption’ means: When a technology becomes so seamless that people completely ignore its existence, it has truly entered every household.
