An interview series spotlighting global tech influencers, disruptors, visionaries, and of course, innovators.
Season’s Greetings, Readers. Best wishes for a prosperous, peaceful and healthy 2026 to you and your loved ones. As I write my heart goes out to gun violence victims and their families, including those from my alma mater, Brown University. First we grieve, than we must do better than thoughts and prayers. We are ever true, Brunionians.
Over the weekend Brown tolled its campus bells to pause and remember students Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, “two bright lights extinguished far too soon,” eulogized President Christina H. Paxson. Every university, every college, every school, everytown.
On a much lighter note, this year marks the 10th Annual Innovators’ Predictions. Many thanks to the global experts who shared their insights and visions (again). Each December I look forward to (re)connecting with global tech leaders and their teams to gain insight into what to expect in the upcoming year. As an editor and writer, I particularly enjoy each person’s voice, experience and perspective, trademark individualities that may be erased with AI’s increasing over/use and inaccuracies.
As expected, AI concern and enthusiasm touches most of this year’s futurescoping predictions. Leaders hypothesize what several intersections of Fintech, Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Crypto, Tokenization, InsurTech and Future of Work may look like in 2026, while others address how AI will affect the workplace, particularly regarding transparency, regulation, fraud, data breaches and efficacy. C-suite experts and founders often mention “visibility,” “specialized, decentralized AI models,” “AI bubble,” “humans-in-the-loop / hybrid models,” “inflation,” “adversarial innovation,” “global participation” “data crises,” “tricksters” and “fabricated AI memory” in this year’s predictions, focusing less on disruptive innovation and more on improvement, streamlining, regulation and verification. Balancing AI’s opportunities with an ethical and regulatory framework that benefits society as a whole will continue to challenge global societies in the new year.
The past is prologue: click and read past predictions from 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 crypto, 2018 blockchain, 2018 fintech and 2017 marketplace lending.
2026 Predictions
*AI & Fintech
Geeq Founder & CEO Stephanie So:
Organizations are recognizing that reacting faster is not the same as seeing clearly. As more decisions are automated and systems operate at greater speed, gaps in visibility carry greater risk. Many failures still come down to not knowing what code is operating, where it came from, or what authority it carries at the moment decisions are made. In 2026, more effort will move toward making those facts explicit, verifiable, and reusable before action occurs. Stablecoins and real-world digital assets will be a forcing function for transparency. I believe the same visibility gap will draw renewed attention in digital asset markets. Asset-backed systems depend on facts about ownership, authority, collateral, and status that must hold across platforms, jurisdictions, and time. Today, those facts are scattered and difficult to check. While much of the excitement remains focused on launching new stablecoins and real-world assets, a more consequential phase of infrastructure development is emerging. Across issuers and regulatory regimes, the challenge is consistent: underlying facts must be verifiable by participants and regulators before assets are traded. Mitigating risk will become a top priority as organizations adapt to a faster, more automated, and less forgiving digital environment.
Fintech Sandbox Founder Sarah Biller:
I think we can argue that 2026 is the tipping point of digitization over aging, analog financial services infrastructure. In prior years, brute force (at a high cost of capital) has bridged the fine line between operating and operational excellence in financial services and enabled incumbents to hold onto protective product or regulatory moats without making the needed investment in internal systems. AI will now separate the firms that have invested not just front-end systems, but core infrastructure that enables them to mine data for insights on customer expectations, new distribution channels, products or, importantly, rising risks and/or seamlessly integrate best-in-class external capabilities like fraud protection software, payment processes, etc. to compensate for a lack of investment.
The ability of Fintech founders as much as incumbent organizations to continuously collect and mine data will separate the winners from the losers in this cycle of innovation in the Financial Services sector. In other words, the ability for Financial Services to meet the demands of a rapidly changing operating environment fueled by AI necessitates a shift of perception to apperception (or incorporate new capabilities based on past experiences).
AI models depend on vastly increasing data requirements, including the volume, variety, velocity, as well as the infrastructure that supports the use of this data (e.g., the ability of organizations to me the quality, diversity and governance requirements). FinTech Sandbox is reexamining our learnings on the role of data in driving forward innovative FinTech solutions, considering these new opportunities and the incredible technical capabilities AI enables currently and those to come. We will have a tremendous amount to say on this topic across the first quarter of 2026 from our decade of working hand in hand with innovators.
We see from our perch at Fintech Sandbox the rise of Fintech companies whose revenue comes from sources traditionally owned by incumbents or entities outside of core Financial Services. We predict 2026 will see more Fintech founders build companies more on the basis of diverse revenue streams like interest from lending, interchange fees, or referral fees for promoting third-party partners. Each of these revenue models creates dependencies on data not previously exploited at scale.
Open Banking Excellence (OBE) CEO & Founder Helen Child:
The UK’s Smart Data ecosystem is at a pivotal moment. With the passage of the Data Use and Access Act (2025), the government has laid the groundwork for a truly data-driven economy, evolving from Open Banking to Open Finance and beyond. Yet as opportunity accelerates, our defenses lag our ambitions. Smart Data can only thrive if consumers trust it. This means building security, resilience, and accountability into the ecosystem from day one. We must protect customers, not retrospectively but preemptively by closing the stable door before the horse bolts. The next phase of Open Finance will only scale if it is safe. That’s why we believe in 2026 we will see more focus on third-party risk protections and more work to expand ecosystem security through greater cross-industry collaboration. Let’s enter this new era prepared, protected, and with our eyes wide open.
Artificial Intelligence will become the engine driving the next chapter of Open Finance. 2026 will see AI move beyond analytics to autonomous financial intelligence, interpreting real-time financial data to predict, prevent, and personalise. I predict that AI will detect and deter fraud faster than humans ever could. As a result, we expect to see enhanced transaction monitoring tools, increased detection accuracy and reduced false-positive incidents. AI will also anticipate consumer needs and offer hyper-personalised financial guidance. Banks at the forefront of this trend will be able to offer personalisation at scale, giving retail customers the same level of service as private banking clients. Lastly, AI will empower regulators and policymakers with real-time market insight. This will help regulators stay ahead of market trends and enable policymakers to better balance customer protections with innovation. As AI deepens its reach, ethical data use and governance must keep pace. Financial services organisations must take steps now to create adequate risk frameworks to safeguard customers and ensure AI is being deployed appropriately. The winners will be those who combine innovation with integrity, using AI not just to make finance smarter, but safer for all.
Lendflow Founder & CEO Jon Fry:
Advanced agentic capabilities will shape the fintech and AI industries in 2026, as AI agents are becoming more sophisticated as they gain access to better and more specialized models. We’re seeing the emergence of a true memory layer that stores application data, third-party data and deal statuses. As these agents begin to leverage all of this system data, we’re seeing clear results: improvements in conversion rates, completion speed and customer satisfaction.
FLock.io CEO Jiahao Sun:
The industry is finally waking up to the reality that centralized AI is a single point of failure, a “black box” that is fundamentally incompatible with the future of data ownership. The real revolution in AI is far from bigger proprietary models, but more aligned with building transparent, auditable, and community owned models. This shift is as inevitable as the move from Web2 to Web3 was. In 2026, the focus will shift from massive, general purpose models to specialized, verifiable intelligence. It could well be the year of Auditable Intelligence, where the market demands proof of privacy and provenance. Many highly specialized, decentralized AI models are already deployed in high stakes sectors like healthcare and finance with blockchain governance. These vertical solutions will succeed where centralized general purpose models fail, because they solve the critical issues of data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and domain specific accuracy. The market will reward the protocols that can deliver real world impact and verifiable results, making industry specific DeAI the most valuable sector in the coming year.
Sydecar CEO & Co-Founder Nik Talreja:
I believe that secondary SPV volume will continue into 2026 and will remain the conduit for access and liquidity in pre-IPO businesses. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in retail investor access to private market assets. The first wave introduced slices of institutional funds to retail investors through RIAs. We are now seeing another wave, where those same RIAs are now able to offer a more diverse set of private funds and specific private companies to their clientele, largely mediated by SPVs.
Noda Co-Founder Lasma Kuhtarska:
I believe fintech in 2026 will be shaped less by new products and more by the maturation of three key forces: AI, real-time payments and alternative payment methods. AI is moving from experimental to essential, proving its value in practical, everyday processes by detecting and preventing fraud in real time, speeding up onboarding and identity checks, and helping payment systems make smarter routing decisions. According to Bank of England, over 75% of firms in UK financial-services now use AI. Adoption is outpacing regulation. The absence of clear standards on liability, explainability, and data governance risks creates compliance uncertainty that could constrain innovation.
The year we will also see real-time payments take a major leap forward. As the EU Instant Payment Regulation and its 2025 deadlines push industry-wide adoption, real-time settlement is becoming the expected standard from both consumers and businesses. In 2026, this will put increasing pressure not only on banks but also on third-party payment providers to accelerate money movement. Finally, alternative payment methods will continue to grow globally, taking share from traditional card payments. Solutions such as digital wallets, pay-by-bank options and Buy Now, Pay Later are expanding fast because they reflect what customers and merchants want: flexibility, speed and convenience.
Uplinq Co-Founder Patrick Reily:
Commercialization of end-user driven solutions that act in advisory, clerical, concierge and administrative roles will continue to grow quickly. For banks and lenders, this means setting aside how we traditionally associate risk with given industries, sectors or business function. It is a new day, and credit models need to adapt to these new realities. The Fed Reserve will reduce interest rates by 1.75% by the end of 2026. Powell is likely to reduce rates by another 50 basis points before the end of his term, with his successor returning rates to the historical norm. The net result will be lower borrowing costs, higher employment, and greater economic growth. In addition, the Fed Funds rate and what businesses pay for credit are highly coupled. Getting Fed Funds back in line will be a stimulus for greater business lending.
Tillo Co-Founder / CEO Alex Preece:
In 2026, fintech innovation will accelerate around three themes: embedded value, embedded finance, and embedded choice. People increasingly expect financial experiences to happen instantly, invisibly, and exactly where they’re already spending time. That means rewards, payouts, and benefits will continue moving inside apps, marketplaces, banking platforms, and digital wallets.
Butter Payments CCO Charles Rosenblatt:
In 2026 AI becomes a must-have, not a nice-to-have, as manual account recovery strategies for failed payments are increasingly ineffective and AI-powered retries define industry performance. Credit cards will dominate subscription payments, with consumers favoring rewards, fraud protection, and spending flexibility, pushing brands to make credit card payments seamless and rewarding. Bundling will outpace pure subscriber growth, with customers increasingly preferring deep relationships with a few brands rather than shallow ones with many. Brands that promote bundled subscriptions will drive both higher average order value and better retention. To stay competitive in 2026, brands must combine AI-powered recovery, preferred payment methods, and smart bundling or risk falling behind.
Tillo CRO Bill Warshauer:
In the year ahead, branded currency adoption will accelerate, and by 2028, every brand will operate a form of branded currency. Just as companies once needed a website, then an app; soon, having your own branded currency will be table stakes. It will sit at the heart of customer engagement and loyalty, powering insights, driving direct-to-consumer growth and reshaping how brands build last connections.
BankTech Ventures Principal Brandon Oliver:
With so many options, many fintech subsectors are wildly fragmented. There will be a rollup in 2026. Incumbents will continue to acquire interesting solutions. VCs need to be hyper vigilant in their due diligence of these companies. Why is this one going to survive over that one? We see it being discussed now in the AI space generally. “Are we in a bubble?” From a valuation expectations standpoint, I’d agree that we are.
Grasshopper Chief Compliance Officer Jason Boova:
In 2026, the two most significant trends in the banking industry will be the rise of agentic AI and the mainstream adoption of real-time payments (RTP) infrastructure. Agentic AI will move beyond chatbots and basic prompts to autonomous systems that perform complex tasks, such as preemptively rebalancing a client's portfolio or executing tailored, real-time fraud defense. The shift toward tokenization and programmable money will have the most lasting impact. As we move closer to a financial system where payments, compliance, and even treasury functions can be executed instantly and programmatically via blockchain or stablecoin rails, the value chain of banking will be fundamentally rewritten for decades to come.
Gregory SVP / Head of Fintech Kyle W. Kempf:
Instant payments will become not just a competitive differentiator but the baseline expectation for financial services in 2026. With the adoption of FedNow and RTP accelerating, businesses and consumers will increasingly expect funds to move in real-time, 24/7, 365 days a year. This shift will ripple across payroll, consumer bill pay, insurance claims, merchant settlement, and corporate treasury, forcing legacy institutions to rethink their underlying payment architectures. Companies not prepared to operate in a constantly on environment will face pressure from faster, more agile fintechs and global systems. The era of waiting days for payments to clear is ending; the industry must adapt to meet this new standard of immediacy.
Advisors won’t be replaced by AI in 2026, but they will be fundamentally augmented by it. The next wave of wealthtech will focus on hybrid models that combine a human advisor’s emotional intelligence with AI platforms such as Zocks. Routine workflows, including meeting prep, note-taking, ongoing communication, compliance documentation, and portfolio monitoring, will increasingly be automated. This frees advisors to spend more time conversing with clients, strengthening relationships, and constructing and managing Unified Managed Household (UMH) portfolios. AI will also play a pivotal role in personalizing financial guidance, parsing vast data sets to surface insights that would be impossible for humans to identify alone. The result is not automation replacing advisors, but automation empowering them to operate at their highest potential.
As financial services digitize further, fraud schemes are evolving just as quickly. Deepfake-enabled identity fraud, synthetic accounts, and AI-driven social engineering will push financial institutions into an arms race for more adaptive fraud prevention systems. In this environment, 2026 will become a breakout year for compliance-as-a-service platforms that can provide real-time monitoring, automated regulatory reporting, biometric identity verification, and ongoing model governance. With regulators raising expectations around AI explainability, AML controls, and customer authentication, fintechs and banks alike will increasingly rely on outsourced compliance infrastructure that is faster, more flexible, and more cost-effective than building it in-house.
Green Check VP of Banking Programs Stacy Litke:
Lending is the key to unlocking growth in the cannabis industry in 2026. Many operators have high priced debt coming due and the ability to refinance that debt at lower rates will be available to those who are in a good financial position. New entrants to the lending space, and lower overall rates have driven down the cost of credit while at the same time making it more available. This will be great for the industry as it lowers its cost of debt, and an opportunity for financial institutions who are interested in increasing the profitability of their programs. GC is positioned to support this evolution in a number of ways, with data, compliance tools, our ecosystem of providers and the creation of our Lending Alliance program.
Grasshopper Head of SBA Lending Brennan Quenneville:
Three factors seem set to have a big impact on 2026: decreasing interest rates, tariff volatility, and broader economic uncertainty. There’s a chance that rates and tariffs find some kind of stability in 2026, but it seems likely that economic uncertainty will carry beyond the next twelve months.
Grasshopper SVP/ Head of Small Business Banking Danielle Kane:
Traditional banks will push bundled value to try to protect their core operational deposits, digital banks will lean into AI and integrations to expand their product set from their standard high-interest, low fee checking and savings, and fintechs will double down on embedding services where customers already transact.
Aubrey Capital Management CEO Andrew Ward:
Looking ahead to 2026, Aubrey’s investment team believes market leadership could begin to broaden as inflation continues to ease and interest rate cuts become more visible. Periods of narrow, index-driven performance tend not to persist indefinitely, and historically, a more supportive monetary backdrop has coincided with a wider range of companies contributing to returns. In that environment, fundamentals such as earnings growth, cash generation and balance sheet strength typically play a greater role in shaping outcomes. AI is likely to remain an important theme, with demand for infrastructure and related investment still strong. However, the team notes that advanced semiconductor manufacturing is highly concentrated, and capacity constraints are a real consideration over time. Semiconductors also remain cyclical, meaning the pace of investment is unlikely to be constant. As a result, selectivity and valuation discipline will become increasingly important as the cycle matures. In emerging markets, the outlook for 2026 appears more constructive than it has in recent years. Inflation has been falling across many countries, interest rates have already begun to come down in parts of the emerging world, and a softer U.S. dollar and lower oil prices are providing a more supportive macro backdrop. India, in particular, is seen as having consolidated after a strong run, with robust growth, favourable demographics and improving valuations creating potential for renewed momentum. While the UK continues to face structural growth challenges, our team sees selective opportunity emerging in areas that have been heavily sold. Persistent outflows from UK equities have created valuation gaps, particularly among investment trusts trading at wide discounts to net asset value. For investors with flexibility, these areas may offer access to high-quality global or specialist assets at prices that appear disconnected from underlying fundamentals.
Cisco SVP GM of Collaboration Snorre Kjesbu:
By 2026, the workplace is going to look and feel very different from what we’re used to. The workplace will be about people working side by side with technology. That means you’ll see more “agents” (think AI helpers and robots) assisting with tasks, not necessarily looking like something out of science fiction, but integrated into our day-to-day routines. The line between human and digital collaboration will blur, and the companies that do this well will be the ones that figure out how to bring people and technology together in smart, meaningful ways. We’re used to talking about closing the distance between people, but by 2026, we’ll also be closing the gap between people and AI, and even between different AIs. We’ll start to rely more on AI coworkers, or specialists that can handle everything from summarizing meetings to translating languages and even offering expert recommendations. On top of that, different AI agents will be working together behind the scenes, monitoring each other and collaborating to solve problems faster. The future of work is about “connected intelligence,” where humans and AIs all contribute as part of the same team. With all this new technology in the workplace, security challenges are only going to get more complex. The old model of just protecting the edges of your network isn’t enough. By 2026, companies will need to take a more “fused” approach to security, where protections are built-in at every layer, from the edge to the cloud to the core. As AI is woven into everything, we’ll need smarter, more adaptive security that can keep up with new threats, and we’ll have to think about how security and network management work together, not in silos. A lot of organizations still treat AI like one big, complicated stew where everything is mixed together, hard to manage, and even harder to get value from. By 2026, the best companies will take a different approach: they’ll “disaggregate” their AI, breaking it up into clear, manageable pieces that can be tailored for their specific needs (like collaboration, security, or customer experience). This isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing; every industry, whether it’s healthcare, finance, or manufacturing, will need its own recipe. That’s how companies will unlock real value and stay agile as AI evolves.
*Future of Work
Tillo CPO Hanna Smith:
We’re focusing on a culture of leadership with no titles. So as we move into 2026, I expect leadership and talent strategy to shift toward faster, flatter decision-making, with empowered micro-teams and leaders who act more like coaches than gatekeepers. Skills, not titles, will become the core currency of progression, pay, and workforce planning, with internal mobility treated as a strategic differentiator.
*Retail
LiquiDonate Founder & CEO Disney Petit:
Since Covid, the number of online retail returns has grown exponentially and consumers who love the convenience don’t seem to be stopping any time soon. The costs and complications that come with online returns require new technologies to handle all of the detailed logistics and routing, so this sector will just continue to grow. Reverse logistics departments and titles will become a standard part of any retail organization. It’s going to be just as important to have someone dedicated to your retail returns strategy as it is to your marketing, sales, and operations. In some categories, returns can make up to 30% of all purchases. It is business critical to have someone responsible for the management of returns and reverse logistics. “Free Returns” will see its final days: making returns free was introduced by gigantic retailers like Amazon and Walmart who could take on those losses with ease. Meanwhile, it’s hurt the environment with increased landfill waste and it’s hurt smaller businesses who can’t afford to pay $15 to return a $10 item that already had free shipping. Companies like Nordstrom Rack are now charging for non in-store returns and setting a new precedent that discourages wasteful consumer behavior of overbuying in mass. Donation-as-a-disposition will become more mainstream: transparency in operations is no longer optional. Younger generations are demanding that retailers consider their impact on the environment or they’ll take their dollars elsewhere. Companies that are used to quietly shoving product into the landfill or an incinerator or going to have a reckoning and be forced to find a way to make donation a regular part of their disposal flows. Lastly, being sustainable will go from more expensive to more cost effective. Many retailers have delayed making more sustainable operations and continued landfilling because of the costs. However, with the introduction of new EPR and DPP initiatives, being overtly wasteful or using environmentally un-friendly materials will end up costing fines, some upwards of $50,000 per day. Some of these requirements begin as early as 2027, forcing operational shifts in 2026.
*AI & Cybersecurity
Prove VP Evangelist & Fraud Executive Adviser Mary Ann Miller:
By the end of 2026, the financial and commercial liability shift caused by anonymous, autonomous agent fraud will force the industry to establish cryptographically mandated Know Your Agent (KYA) protocols for high-value transactions. Specifically, most top-tier global payment processors and wealth management platforms will require an evidence-grade, identity-bound payment token that is supported by an immutable consent audit trail. That will become the necessary step for any agent-delegated transaction exceeding a set risk threshold. This mandate will enforce least-privilege access via a token vault and demand verifiable human consent for agent actions, effectively transferring dispute liability to any party unable to produce cryptographic proof of authorization.
EverC Senior Risk Strategist Anna Pogreb:
The core problem of 2025, and almost certainly 2026, is that everything is happening at once. Regulation is fragmented, markets are volatile, and AI is amplifying every fraud pattern we already know. Fraudsters don’t need new ideas; they just use AI to make old ones bigger, faster, and far more realistic: fake documents, fake identities, tax-evasion schemes, scams targeting elders and parents, hyper-personalized phishing, and industrialized bot operations. The hope is, by 2027, detection will shift from reactive to predictive. AI will continuously stress-test systems, simulate fraud campaigns, evaluate documents and transactions in real time, and connect signals across identity, behavior, and networks.
BOK Financial Chief Information Security & Privacy Officer Paul Tucker:
2026’s cybersecurity threat landscape is high-tech, high-stakes, and fast-changing. From AI-driven hacks to deepfake scams eroding trust in communications, attackers and defenders are locked in an escalating technological arms race. Even familiar menaces like ransomware are upping the ante (ransomware attacks alone could inflict over $57 billion in damages next year.
Symphony CISO Mitch Hibbs:
AI-powered autonomous agents will emerge as the dominant attack vector in cybersecurity. While defenders will pursue AI-driven countermeasures, their efforts will lag behind the accelerating pace of adversarial innovation.
Green Check Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer Mike Kennedy:
AI will fundamentally reshape compliance workflows. We’re already seeing models that can summarize risk narratives, extract insights from adverse media, and assist in conducting ongoing monitoring reviews with high accuracy. The real breakthrough will be when AI acts as a co-pilot helping compliance officers focus on judgment and oversight rather than repetitive review tasks.
DM Communications Global Public Relations Head Adir Alon:
In 2026, AI will transform PR from a labor-intensive service into a technology-driven operation. At DM Communications, we have already reduced the cost of international PR campaigns from $5,000-$10,000 to $1,800 using proprietary AI systems, delivered in half the time with higher quality output. By 2026, this model will become the industry standard. AI will handle media monitoring, content drafting, and journalist targeting with precision that was previously impossible at scale, analyzing each reporter's coverage patterns and optimal contact timing. The result: lower retainers for clients, greater capacity for agencies, and more accurate outreach. The PR professionals who thrive will not be those who use AI as an occasional tool, but those who rebuild their entire workflow around it, applying human expertise only where it truly matters: strategic counsel, relationship building, and creative storytelling.
*Auto Insurtech
The Zebra COO David Seider:
Competition will be fierce, carriers will continue to take targeted rate reductions in certain markets, and consumers will have big incentives to shop and save. Targeted rate reductions will help but most renewals will see rates staying high. If the broader economy begins to degrade, these insurance costs could be troublesome for the average consumer as the % of take-home pay spent on insurance continues to rise. This could mean more people foregoing insurance and lots of people shopping to find deals (probably more frequently - maybe at every renewal).
Crypto, Blockchain & Web3
Blockchain Researcher Sean Brizendine:
In my opinion 2026 is going to bring a lot of changes. People will begin to clearly see that Bitcoin is hands down the clear leader in the game and nothing else compares or ever will. I also believe that stablecoins USDT and USDC will begin to show that their ability to provide a stable parachute for the frequent market volatility that plagues Bitcoin and allows those who utilize this crucial feature that stablecoins provide to save a lot of people’s financial bottom line when Bitcoin enters its often predictable and unpredictable freefall acceleration periods.
Milo CEO Josip Rupena:
In short, 2026 is the year when crypto becomes normal finance, lending becomes real time, and mortgages finally start feeling tech powered instead of paper based. By 2026 crypto stops being “early adopter finance” and starts becoming infrastructure.Large institutions will hold more BTC and ETH directly on balance sheets, not through synthetic wrappers. Real world assets and lending products using on chain rails will move from pilot to production scale. Homebuyers will start expecting lenders to recognize digital assets as part of their real balance sheet, just like cash or securities.The idea of selling your crypto to buy a home will feel outdated, the same way mailing a paper application feels outdated today. Bottom line: digital assets will be part of everyday financial decisions, not the exception.
Underwriting in 2026 looks very different from 2016 or even 2020. Lenders will rely more on real time asset verification, including crypto, equities, and tokenized assets. Clients will expect approvals in minutes, not days. Modern lending will move from “prove who you are once a year” to a live financial profile, where the lender can understand risk dynamically without making the borrower jump through hoops. Collateral flexibility will matter more than the rate itself: borrowers will want the ability to adjust, rebalance, or add assets instantly. In 2026, we will move from static underwriting to intelligent, active lending.
The housing conversation will shift away from rate headlines to what actually matters: monthly payments and supply. Even if rates improve, affordability will still be constrained. A 50-year mortgage will get attention, but the impact will be limited. Because the monthly payment does not move enough, most buyers will soon realize that price and supply matter far more. What will matter is how technology removes friction from the process: faster approvals, dynamic collateral, better use of digital assets and transparent servicing. In sum, tech does more to change outcomes than stretching a mortgage term. By 2026, crypto backed mortgages will not be viewed as niche. More primary residence buyers will use them, not just investors. People will use crypto as collateral in the same way previous generations used stock portfolios. Borrowers will value the ability to keep their long term crypto upside while unlocking real estate. Volatility will matter less because collateral frameworks and client behaviour will keep improving.
Solflare Co-Founder & Co-CEO Filip Dragoslavic:
Looking ahead to 2026, three things sit at the center of where crypto is heading: prediction markets, stablecoins, and AI. I expect prediction markets to be one of the biggest topics we talk about because they’ve found a way to make participation broadly accessible in an area that’s usually tightly regulated. It’s debatable how long the current pace will last, but I do expect prediction markets to be a major focus in the near term. As prediction markets gain momentum, I also expect regulation to follow, especially in the EU, even if it’s not yet clear what form that takes. Stablecoins will continue to matter because they’ve found real utility. I see the strongest growth potential in emerging markets where holding USD- or EUR-denominated stablecoins can help combat inflation and make moving capital easier, while in wealthier markets, demand for prediction-style products is supported by available capital. AI is the third big driver: on the business side, AI is increasingly becoming a credits and funding game. If AI-led user experiences consume a lot of credits, companies either need to raise large rounds or be extremely capital-efficient, which can widen the gap between teams with capital and those without. At the product level, I expect plain-language input to become mandatory: people will want to express intent naturally rather than having to follow multiple manual steps. If you’re not building toward that by 2026, you’re going to have a very rough 2027. On whether Web3 will look fundamentally different next year because of AI, I think the near-term impact is mainly about reducing manual work rather than taking control away from users, because people still want high control when financial assets are involved. However, as these systems mature, I do think AI can take on more rule-based automation, including portfolio management within clear constraints.
Diode Co-Founder Hans Rempel:
2026 will be the year that enterprises embrace decentralized infrastructure. After a year of outages across every major cloud provider, enterprises are beginning to recognize the fragility of centrally managed infrastructure. In contrast, mature blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum never go down because they’re anti-fragile by design and supported by thousands of independent participants rather than a single failure-prone operator. In 2026, this reliability gap becomes impossible for CIOs to ignore. As AI-augmented attacks increase and uptime becomes a strategic risk, major industries will begin shifting toward decentralized infrastructure and the applications built on top of it. Privacy will become a first-class business priority in 2026. Digital privacy is under unprecedented pressure, from government surveillance proposals to the new risks created by AI systems that can infer or reconstruct personal data. Instead of relying on vendor promises, organizations are turning to cryptographic privacy by default. Across the industry, we’re seeing rapid adoption of mathematically enforced privacy: Ethereum’s new Kohaku tooling, emerging private Arbitrum chains, Dfinity’s vetKeys, and fully private peer-to-peer collaboration tools like Diode Collab. These advances reflect a broader societal ‘immune response’ to privacy erosion. In 2026, privacy becomes a top enterprise trend. Businesses will integrate privacy-preserving technologies not because it’s optional, but because regulatory uncertainty and escalating AI-driven threats make traditional trust-based models untenable.
DecideAI Founder / CEO Raheel Govindji:
2026 is the year the industry finally shifts from ‘bigger models’ hype to genuine, data-centric transformation. The real bottleneck isn’t GPUs; it’s the quality and provenance of the data models that are trained on. Companies will start demanding transparency about where data comes from and whether it’s ethically sourced. The AI leaders of 2026 will be defined by accountability, not scale. Decentralized data and proof-of-humanity will become the foundation of trustworthy AI as they provide the missing layer of authenticity. Decentralized data networks make it possible to trace training data back to verified human contributors, while proof-of-humanity systems block bots and synthetic manipulation. The result is AI that’s auditable, bias-resistant, and built on verifiable human inputs, not opaque datasets. Lastly, Blockchain incentives will evolve to reward ethical, human-verified training data. Data will become the next major asset class. In 2026, incentives will shift toward rewarding high-quality, human-verified data instead of raw volume. Blockchain enables transparent payouts and global participation, giving contributors real ownership in the AI supply chain. Models trained this way will be more ethical, more resilient, and far more representative.
Kinic Co-Founder Houman Shadab:
By mid-2026, we’ll see multiple competing protocols for portable AI memory, kicking off a full-scale memory portability war. The real battle will be between centralized cloud platforms that offer export APIs and decentralized systems that give users cryptographic ownership of their memories. As pressure builds, major AI platforms will be forced to support memory imports, shifting their competitive edge from ‘you trained your AI here’ to ‘we reason better over the memory you own.’ Interoperability will become the new moat, just as it was in the early days of email.
In 2026 users will stop accepting that their AI memory must live inside a single provider. Decentralized memory layers, where users control their context on neutral infrastructure, will attract a significant share of power users who want to switch AI providers without losing their trained history. This flips the economics: instead of paying per conversation, users pay for persistent memory storage and choose whichever reasoning engine serves them best. It creates a new class of ‘memory-first’ platforms that own the context layer while remaining model-agnostic, similar to how Plaid unbundled financial data from banks.
By late 2026, we’ll see the first major crisis around poisoned or fabricated AI memory, attackers injecting false memories to manipulate model behavior or forge digital identities. That will trigger demand for verifiable memory provenance using zero-knowledge proofs, allowing users to prove their AI interactions are authentic without exposing content. A new category of ‘memory notaries’ will emerge to timestamp and cryptographically verify interactions, becoming as essential to AI trust as SSL certificates were to the early web.
Mercuryo Co-Founder / CEO Petr Kozyakov:
Stablecoins and real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation will continue to grow in significance in 2026 as pivotal parts of the digital token ecosystem. Stablecoins are already one of the simplest ways to send payments, and their use will continue to expand for a variety of use cases, including DeFi, trading, remittances and transferring value across borders at low cost and high speed. Here we see the use cases blossoming from a product that was initially invented as a safe harbour for traders, given the high levels of volatility in cryptocurrency markets. According to DeFiLlama data, the stablecoin market capitalisation rose from about $205 billion at the start of 2025 to over $300 billion in December 2025, a gain of about 47%.
Tokenisation is moving in the same direction, bringing traditional assets into digital systems in ways that improve access and efficiency without changing how people interact with finance. This momentum is reflected in real-world asset tokenisation, where industry analysis compiled by RedStone shows the tokenised RWA market growing from $15.2 billion in December 2024 to over $24 billion by mid-2025. Taken together, the accelerating growth of stablecoins and real-world asset tokenisation reflects a broader shift toward practical, low-cost and efficient digital financial infrastructure that builds on existing systems while expanding how value moves globally.
Web3 Foundation Ecosystem VP Bill Laboon:
Privacy is becoming increasingly important as more people realize that everything they do is visible on-chain. We’re already seeing this concern drive major initiatives—such as the Kusama Vision proposal, which includes a 10M DOT program to accelerate zero-knowledge innovation. This push signals a clear return to blockchain’s original digital-sovereignty ethos. Blockchain infrastructure is becoming mostly commoditized. The real challenge, and opportunity, now lies in developing secure, user-focused on-chain products. That’s exactly where our ecosystem is concentrating its efforts. Even as blockspace becomes commoditized, not all blockspace is equal. There is a meaningful difference between low-quality, insecure networks with a low Nakamoto coefficient, and the decentralized, secure blockspace that Polkadot provides. As the industry matures, that gap will only become more important.
See you in 2026!
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*Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this series are those of the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.
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