Wintermute Ventures: By 2026, Crypto Gradually Becomes the Settlement Layer for the Internet Economy

Author: Wintermute Ventures

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: For decades, the internet has allowed information to flow freely across national borders, platforms, and systems. But value has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial agreements still flow through fragmented infrastructure built on traditional rails, national boundaries, and intermediaries that extract rent at every node. Wintermute Ventures believes this gap is narrowing at an unprecedented rate, with crypto becoming the settlement and clearing layer that the internet economy has always needed.

The report focuses on five major themes: Everything Becomes Tradable (prediction markets, tokenization), Stablecoin Interoperability, Tokenomics Returning to Fundamentals, DeFi and TradFi Convergence, and Privacy as a Regulatory Driver. Infrastructure maturation is the common thread in this transformation.

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

This gap is narrowing at an unprecedented speed. This creates opportunities for infrastructure companies that directly replace traditional clearing, settlement, and custody functions. The infrastructure enabling value to flow as freely as information is no longer theoretical. It is being built, deployed, and used at scale.

For years, crypto existed on-chain but was disconnected from the real economy. This is changing. Crypto is becoming the settlement and clearing layer that the internet economy has always needed; a layer that operates continuously, transparently, and without the permission of centralized gatekeepers.

The following themes represent where we believe digital assets are headed by 2026, and are areas where Wintermute Ventures actively supports founders.

1. Everything Becomes Tradable

A growing number of 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 that historically had no markets at all.

Tokenization and synthetic assets bring liquidity to known assets. Prediction markets go a step further, pricing things that were previously unpricable, transforming raw information into tradable instruments.

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

Insurance is a compelling example: outcome-based markets can provide cheaper, more flexible hedges than traditional insurance or reinsurance by pricing specific risks directly rather than bundling them into broad products. A user could hedge against a specific wind speed, in a specific location, for a specific time window, instead of buying hurricane insurance covering a region. Over longer timeframes, these idiosyncratic risks could be hand-picked by agent workflows and bundled into an individual's unique needs.

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 perceptions, 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 tradable, the infrastructure providing liquidity, enabling price discovery, and ensuring settlement becomes critical.

This structural shift will concentrate value at the infrastructure layer, which directly impacts how we allocate capital. We actively support teams building core market and settlement infrastructure, data layers for verification and attestation, and new data products supporting the financialization of previously non-tradable outcomes. We also focus on novel abstraction models that make these markets programmable and composable, enabling them to be embedded into real-world workflows and replace parts of traditional finance and insurance infrastructure.

2. Stablecoins Become the Trust Layer, While Banks Handle Intermediate Settlement

Digital assets lack robust equivalents to settlement banks and clearing houses, which 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 across different ecosystems with varying collateral models, the need is growing for an interoperability layer that can reliably compose these assets. For this system to scale, crypto needs infrastructure capable of netting, converting, and settling across stablecoins and chains without introducing additional credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational overhead.

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

3. Markets Will Reward Long-Term Revenue Over Short-Term Incentives

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

Valuations will be more closely anchored to sustainable earnings and forward-looking projections, converging towards cash-flow based frameworks. Annualizing short-term, volatile monthly fee peaks is no longer a credible way to price businesses, as earnings quality and incentive alignment become core to valuation. Tokens without a credible path to value capture will struggle to sustain demand beyond the speculative phase.

Consequently, fewer companies will issue tokens at inception. Many will default to an equity-first structure, primarily using blockchain as backend infrastructure largely invisible to users and investors. When tokens are used, issuance will increasingly occur only after product-market fit is clear, revenue, unit economics, and distribution are proven, and stakeholder incentives are aligned.

We view this shift as a healthy and necessary evolution for the entire ecosystem. Founders can focus on building enduring businesses rather than prematurely prioritizing token incentives and demand. Investors can evaluate companies using familiar financial frameworks. Users get products designed for long-term value.

4. The Convergence of DeFi and Fintech

The future of finance is not DeFi *or* TradFi: it's the convergence of both. A dual-track architecture allows fintech applications to dynamically route transactions based on cost, speed, and yield. Breakthrough consumer applications will look like traditional fintech products, with wallets, bridges, and chains completely 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 behind the scenes. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives drive this growth, enabling deeper liquidity and more complex financial products.

Distribution will matter more than owning the interface. Winning teams will build backend-first infrastructure that plugs into existing platforms and channels, rather than competing as standalone apps. Personalization and automation (increasingly AI-augmented) will improve pricing, routing, and yield in the background. Users won't consciously choose DeFi. They will choose the better product.

5. Privacy Becomes a Regulatory Driver

Privacy is becoming foundational for institutional adoption, shifting from a regulatory liability to a regulatory driver. 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 history, employers to verify employment without exposing salaries, and institutions to prove reserves without revealing positions. A tangible realization of this vision scaling is a world where businesses no longer need to store vast amounts of data, thereby freeing themselves from expensive and burdensome data privacy regulations. New primitives like private shared state, zkTLS, and MPC unlock undercollateralized lending, tranching, and new on-chain risk products, moving entire categories of structured finance on-chain that were previously unviable.

6. Regulation Shifts from a Compliance Hurdle to a Distribution Advantage

Regulatory clarity has shifted from an adversarial obstacle to a standardized distribution channel. While the "permissionless" nature of early DeFi remains an important engine for innovation, the arrival of operational frameworks like the GENIUS Act in the US, MiCA in Europe, and Hong Kong's stablecoin regime provides greater clarity for traditional institutions. By 2026, the story is no longer about *if* institutions can use blockchain, but *how* they use these guidelines to replace traditional pipes with high-speed on-chain rails.

These standards will enable a larger wave of compliant on-chain products, regulated on-ramps and off-ramps, and institutional-grade infrastructure without mandating full centralization, thereby increasing institutional participation.

Regions that combine clear rules with rapid approval will increasingly attract capital, talent, and experimentation, accelerating the normalization of on-chain value distribution in both native crypto and hybrid financial products, while slower regimes will fall behind.

The Internet Economy on Crypto

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

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

2026 will mark an inflection point. Crypto infrastructure will increasingly fade into the background for users while becoming foundational to the global financial system. The best infrastructure quietly empowers people without drawing attention to itself.

If you are building in any of these areas, please reach out to our team.

You can also fill out the form on our website:

https://www.wintermute.com/contact/ventures