Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
1. Prediction Markets Will Become Broader and Smarter
Prediction markets have gone mainstream, and in 2026, with deeper integration with blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), they will become larger, more extensive, and smarter, while also presenting new significant challenges for developers.
First, more contracts will be listed in the market this year. This means we can not only obtain real-time probabilities for major elections or geopolitical events but also understand predictions for various minor outcomes and complex cross-events. As these new contracts reveal more information and integrate into the news ecosystem (a trend already emerging), they will also raise important social issues, such as how to balance the value of information and how to better design these markets to make them more transparent, auditable, etc.—improvements that can be achieved through blockchain technology.
To handle the emergence of a massive number of contracts, we need new ways to coordinate facts and resolve contract disputes. Centralized platforms' adjudication mechanisms (e.g., did an event actually happen? How to confirm?) are important, but controversial cases like the Zelensky lawsuit market and the Venezuela election market have exposed their limitations. To address these edge cases and help prediction markets scale to more useful applications, new decentralized governance methods and large language model (LLM)-powered oracles can be used to determine the authenticity of disputed outcomes.
Artificial intelligence also expands the functionality of oracles. For example, AI agents capable of trading on these platforms can search for signals globally, providing an advantage for short-term trading while revealing new ways of thinking and possibilities for predicting future events. (Projects like Prophet Arena have already demonstrated the potential in this area.) Beyond serving as complex political analysts we can query for insights, these AI agents may also reveal fundamental predictive factors for complex social events when we analyze their emergent strategies.
So, will prediction markets replace polls? The answer is no. Prediction markets will not replace polls but will make them better (polling data can also be fed into prediction markets). As a political economist, I am most interested in how prediction markets operate in synergy with a rich and vibrant polling ecosystem—but we need to rely on new technologies like AI to improve the survey experience and on blockchain technology to provide new verification methods, ensuring that those participating in polls or surveys are real humans, not bots.
—Andy Hall (a16z crypto research advisor, Stanford University political economy professor)
2. This Year, Blockchain Technology Will Bring New Foundational Tools to Other Industries
For years, SNARKs (Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge, a cryptographic proof that verifies the correctness of a computation without re-executing it) have been primarily applied in the blockchain space. The reason is that SNARKs are computationally expensive: proving a computation can require 1,000,000 times more work than directly running the computation. This high cost is justified when amortized across thousands of verifiers but is impractical in other scenarios.
This is about to change. This year, the computational overhead of zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) provers will drop to about 10,000 times, with memory usage requiring only hundreds of megabytes—fast enough to run on mobile phones and cheap enough to普及 to various devices.
Why might "10,000 times" be a critical number? One reason is that the parallel throughput of high-end GPUs is roughly 10,000 times that of a laptop CPU. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs for CPU executions in real time.
This may realize a vision from research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you are running CPU workloads in the cloud (perhaps because the computation is not sufficient for GPU optimization, or due to a lack of expertise, or because of traditional architecture constraints), you will be able to obtain cryptographic proofs of computation results at a reasonable cost overhead. Moreover, since provers are optimized for GPUs, your code requires no additional adaptation.
—Justin Thaler (a16z crypto research team member, Georgetown University computer science associate professor)
3. The Rise of Staked Media: A New Paradigm of Trust
The so-called "objectivity" of traditional media models has shown cracks. This change has been brewing—the internet gave everyone a voice, and now more practitioners, practitioners, and builders are speaking directly to the public. Their views reflect their real-world interests, and paradoxically, audiences often respect them more for their stance rather than their neutrality.
The new development here is not the rise of social media but the arrival of cryptographic tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments. As AI makes generating infinite content cheap and easy—whether based on real or fake identities, claiming anything from any stance—relying solely on what people (or bots) say is no longer sufficient. Tokenized assets, programmable locks, prediction markets, and on-chain history provide a stronger foundation for trust: commentators can prove they practice what they preach while expressing views; podcast hosts can lock tokens to show they are not opportunists or engaged in "pump and dump" schemes; analysts can tie predictions to publicly settled markets, thereby building auditable records.
This is what I see as the early form of "Staked Media": a new type of media that not only embraces the idea of "having skin in the game" but also provides the means to prove it. In this model, credibility comes not from pretended detachment or baseless claims but from publicly transparent and verifiable commitments of interest. Staked media will not replace other forms of media but will complement them. It offers a new signal: not just "trust me, I'm neutral," but "look at the risks I'm willing to take and how you can verify the truth of what I say."
—Robert Hackett (a16z crypto editorial team)
