Author: Benedic, Founder of Meridian
Original Title: Predictions for 2026
Preface
This is my first attempt at writing 24 predictions for 2026, aiming to hold myself accountable through public commitment. If the accuracy rate falls below 18 items (i.e., more than 6 errors) upon verification next year, I will delete this article. At that time, I will evaluate each item one by one and publish the results.
I hold positions in some of the assets and companies mentioned in this article. If you are building in these directions, I look forward to discussing the possibility of angel investment with you.
Mainstream Assets
- The quantum computing narrative will become a serious challenge for Bitcoin in 2026, as its community is too decentralized to propose credible solutions.
- Ethereum's market attention will continue its multi-year decline and begin to show substantial price weakness.
- Solana will shed its meme coin chain label and become the leading platform for real-world synthetic asset trading, while maintaining the largest retail user base.
- Monad will establish itself as an influential Layer 1, with its year-end price significantly higher than the Coinbase ICO price. Apart from Tempo, other execution layers launched in 2025 or early 2026 will fail to gain lasting market appeal or attention.
- The strategy of buying a basket of new Binance coins will significantly underperform the strategy of buying stocks.
Application Layer
- Hyperliquid will capture market share from centralized perpetual contract platforms, but the overall growth rate of the BTC/ETH/altcoin perpetual contract market will be relatively slow.
- Prediction markets will fail to expand significantly beyond sports and major political events, gradually fading from the mainstream view.
- Some form of on-chain tokenized crypto options product will reach a trading volume of $10 billion.
- Base will abandon SocialFi and revert to being an ordinary wallet.
Infrastructure
- Robinhood's Layer 2 will make little progress due to reduced demand for regulatory arbitrage in the current political environment.
- Base will abandon its Layer 2 positioning.
- Some privacy middleware located below the application layer and vertically integrated with embedded wallets will become quite popular.
- Coinbase or Stripe will completely solve the fiat on-ramp issue for stablecoins in third-party applications.
Solana Ecosystem
- Block building will take a significant step toward protocol integration. Jito and Harmonic will adjust their strategies and both successfully launch new business lines beyond block building.
- We will see vertical integration between routing aggregators and decentralized exchanges/professional market makers.
- Tokenized stocks will gain a foothold and achieve significant scale in markets outside the U.S.
AI (Crypto Field)
- AI assistants will significantly improve and become the default configuration in most mainstream consumer applications. By the end of the year, a key differentiator among applications will be the quality of their AI assistants.
- Multiple smart contracts almost entirely written and tested by Claude will gain massive attention. Twelve months from now, the barrier to writing smart contracts will feel 10 times lower than it does now, sparking a renaissance in mechanism design.
- ChatGPT will become more modular and agentic (via plugins), and one crypto use case within it will rapidly gain popularity.
AI (Non-Crypto Field)
- Anthropic will surpass OpenAI in revenue and become the highest-valued AI lab.
- Google will solve the post-training problem, and Gemini Flash will become the most popular model for global non-coding agent tasks.
- Nearly all AI companies selling to enterprises will realize they are competing with each other. This collapse of the imagination space will make competition exceptionally fierce.
- Meta will launch a new consumer AI product that tops the App Store download charts.
- (Low probability but I believe its value is relatively underestimated compared to consensus) A new paradigm beyond "giving LLMs detailed prompts and a series of specialized tools" will emerge and greatly shake up which startups in the field have value.
