a16z Outlines 17 Crypto Priorities for 2026, From Stablecoin Rails to Privacy

Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm has put down a marker for what the industry should be building in 2026: seventeen interlocking priorities that move the narrative past speculative trading and toward plumbing, privacy, and new economic models for the internet. The list, published by a16z Crypto as part of its annual “big ideas” series, reads less like a wish list and more like a product roadmap for builders who want crypto to matter to everyday users.

At the center of a16z’s thinking are stablecoins and the rails that surround them. Expect work on smarter, more seamless onramps and offramps for stablecoins, and on tokenizing real-world assets in ways that feel native to crypto rather than shoehorned into legacy financial models. The firm argues stablecoins will do more than replace cash in wallets, they can be the settlement fabric that upgrades the bank ledger and lets apps embed money, yield, and settlement directly into user experiences.

That “internet becomes the bank” line is not marketing hype; it’s a thesis about architecture. If stablecoins and tokenized assets reach sufficient scale and regulatory clarity, everyday apps could offer banking-like primitives, custody, payments, and yield, without every interaction routing through the traditional fintech stack. a16z frames this as an evolution from crypto-as-asset to crypto-as-infrastructure.

Roadmap to Real-World Crypto

The firm also flags identity and compliance as needing a rethink. As software agents and automated services start to transact on behalf of people, the industry will move from Know Your Customer (KYC) rules to what a16z calls Know Your Agent (KYA), vetting the logic, reputation, and constraints of an agent rather than only the human behind it. That shift matters for everything from custody policies to on-chain dispute resolution.

Artificial intelligence shows up throughout the list, but not as a rival to crypto; rather, as a collaborator and a challenge. a16z points to AI being used for deeper, substantive research tasks, while also warning of an “invisible tax” being imposed on the open web: AI agents that surf, summarize, and transact on content can capture value that today’s ad- and subscription-funded creators rely on, eroding the web’s business model. The suggested remedies are technical and economic, micro-attribution, nanopayments, and new sponsored-content models that align incentives between agents, creators, and platforms.

Privacy earns a particularly strong place in the thesis: a16z says privacy will become the most important moat in crypto. That’s a recognition that if networks want to host real economic activity, wages, healthcare, identity-linked financial services, users and institutions will demand privacy guarantees that go beyond today’s public-ledger norms. Expect investment in private computation, better zero-knowledge tooling, and architectures that treat privacy as a first-class design constraint.

Some of the items on the list are refreshingly specific: decentralized, quantum-resistant messaging systems; the rise of “staked media,” where outlets and experts put tokenized skin in the game to signal credibility; and a renewed push to tokenize real-world assets (RWA) in a crypto-native way so markets can price and exchange them without friction. Those points reflect a broader theme in a16z’s paper: technical advances are necessary but not sufficient, legal, economic, and product-layer changes must align for blockchain’s potential to be fully unlocked.

The report closes on a practical note: legal frameworks that recognize and accommodate blockchain architectures will be the last, essential mile. For many of the items on a16z’s list, tokenized banking primitives, regulated stablecoins, institutional custody with privacy guarantees, regulatory clarity and legal alignment are the difference between pilots and mainstream adoption. In other words, the technical future is clear enough to design for; the policy and legal scaffolding now needs to catch up.

Taken together, a16z’s seventeen theses sketch a 2026 where crypto is less about volatility and more about infrastructure: a payments and settlement layer for the internet, new economic models that compensate creators in an AI-heavy world, and privacy-first systems that can support real-world finance on-chain. Whether the industry can execute on that checklist, and whether regulators will let it scale, are the two defining questions heading into the year.