Wintermute Ventures, the VC arm of a $2 billion crypto market maker, says 2026 is an inflection point when the $3 trillion industry shifts from sidecar to the internet’s transaction layer. The big idea is that value can finally move as freely as information, because the plumbing is being built, deployed, and used at scale. The firm contrasts today’s cross-border payments, still boxed in by borders, intermediaries, enforcement, and gatekeepers, with the near-frictionless movement of online data. In that framing, crypto becomes a clearing and settlement layer that runs continuously and transparently without permission.
First, Wintermute expects markets to widen beyond assets into outcomes, events, and information itself. If everything becomes tradable, a new liquidity layer can emerge for areas that historically had no market at all. Prediction markets are positioned to grow by turning previously unpriceable outcomes into instruments people can price, hedge, and trade. Insurance is another candidate for disruption: rather than buying broad regional coverage, users could hedge specific exposures, such as wind speed at a location over a timeframe. That shift could spawn new data products around topics that were never priced before.
Second, stablecoins are moving toward becoming the default settlement asset of the internet economy, but fragmentation is the bottleneck. The commercial opportunity is an interoperability layer that can reliably aggregate stablecoin settlements across asset types. Wintermute says demand is rising for infrastructure that composes multiple stablecoins without forcing users to manage routing complexity. It frames the winning model as onchain correspondent banking, where conversion and credit risk sit with issuers and settlement finality arrives in seconds. The objective is simple: compress time-to-settle and lower operational friction at scale for everyday internet commerce flows.
The remaining shifts focus on maturity: hype fades, DeFi converges with fintech, and regulation eases. Wintermute expects valuations to anchor to sustainable earnings, leaving tokens without clear value capture struggling beyond speculative phases. It anticipates fewer token launches, with more equity-first structures until product-market fit and incentives are aligned. Consumer products may use dual-rail architectures that route by cost, speed, and yield while abstracting wallets and chains away. With Europe’s MiCA and stablecoin regimes in the US and Asia, institutions could replace legacy plumbing at scale, with Bitcoin near $88,240 and Ether near $2,954.
