Author: a16z crypto
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
1. Prediction Markets Will Become Larger, Broader, and Smarter
——Andy Hall, a16z Crypto Research Advisor, Professor of Political Economy at Stanford University
Prediction markets have gone mainstream, and by 2026, their scale, breadth, and intelligence will only increase as they integrate with cryptocurrency and AI, while also presenting builders with new and significant challenges.
First, more contracts will be listed this year. This means not only obtaining real-time odds for major elections or geopolitical events but also for detailed outcomes and complex intertwined events. As these new contracts disclose more information and integrate into news (which is already happening), they will raise important social questions, such as how to balance the value of this information and how to better design them to be more transparent, auditable, etc.—something cryptocurrency can achieve.
To handle the vast number of contracts, new methods for reaching agreement on contract outcomes are needed. While centralized platforms are important for determining whether an event actually occurred (and how to confirm it), controversial cases like the Zelensky "suit incident" and the Venezuelan election market highlight their limitations. To address these edge cases and help prediction markets expand into more practical applications, new decentralized governance and LLM oracles can help determine the truth of disputed outcomes.
AI opens up more possibilities for oracles beyond LLMs. For example, AI agents trading on these platforms can search for global signals, helping to achieve short-term trading advantages and revealing new worldviews and ways to predict future events. Beyond serving as complex political analysts that can be queried for insights, when studying the emerging strategies of these agents, they can also uncover new information about the fundamental predictors of complex social events.
Will prediction markets replace polls? No; they will make polls better (and poll information can be fed into prediction markets). As a political scientist, what is most exciting is how prediction markets can operate in tandem with a rich and vibrant polling system—but this will also rely on new technologies like AI, which can improve the polling experience, and crypto, which can provide new ways to verify that poll/survey respondents are not bots but real people, etc.
2. This Year, Crypto Will Provide a New Foundational Tool for Industries Beyond Blockchain
——Justin Thaler, Member of a16z Crypto Research Team, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University
SNARKs (a type of cryptographic proof that verifies computations without re-executing them) have been used primarily in the blockchain space for years. The overhead was simply too high: proving a computation could require a million times more work than running it directly. This might be worthwhile when thousands of verifiers share the cost, but it was impractical in other scenarios.
But this is about to change. This year, the overhead of zkVM provers will drop to about 10,000 times, with memory footprints of just a few hundred megabytes—fast enough to run on mobile phones and cheap enough to run anywhere.
10,000 times might be a magic number for one reason: high-end GPUs have about 10,000 times the parallel throughput of laptop CPUs. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be able to generate proofs for CPU executions in real time.
This promises to realize a vision from early research papers: verifiable cloud computing. If you are running CPU workloads in the cloud—because your computation isn't large enough to justify using a GPU, you lack the expertise, or for historical reasons—you will be able to obtain cryptographic proofs of correctness at a reasonable cost. The prover is optimized for GPUs; your code does not need to be optimized.
3. Witness the Rise of "Staked Media"
——Robert Hackett, a16z Crypto Editorial Team
The traditional media model (and its so-called objectivity) has long shown cracks. The internet has given everyone a voice, and increasingly, operators, practitioners, and builders are speaking directly to the public. Their views reflect their real-world interests, and surprisingly, audiences often do not dismiss them because of these interests but respect them for it.
What's new here is not the rise of social media but the emergence of crypto tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments. As AI makes generating infinite content cheap and easy (with any opinion or identity, real or fictional, able to claim anything), relying solely on what the masses (or bots) say is no longer sufficient. Tokenized assets, programmable lock-ups, prediction markets, and on-chain history provide a firmer foundation for trust: commentators can express views and prove they practice what they preach. Podcast hosts can lock up tokens to show they are not hyping or "pump-and-dumping" speculatively. Analysts can tie predictions to publicly settled markets, building auditable track records.
This is the embryo of what I call "staked media": media that not only embraces the idea of being stake-aware but also provides proof. In this model, credibility comes not from "word of mouth" or unsubstantiated assertions; instead, it comes from having skin in the game through transparent and verifiable commitments. "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 "here is the risk I'm willing to take, and here is how you can verify if what I say is true."
Related reading: a16z's 8 Major Crypto Trends Predictions for 2026: Rise of Privacy Chains, Transformation of Trading Platforms, etc.
