Wintermute Ventures: By 2026, crypto will gradually become the clearing layer of the internet economy

Author: Wintermute Ventures

Translation: Deep潮 TechFlow

Deep潮 Guide: For decades, the internet has enabled information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. But value has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial protocols still move through fragmented infrastructure built on traditional rails, national borders, and intermediary institutions that extract rent at every node. Wintermute Ventures believes this gap is narrowing at an unprecedented pace, with crypto becoming the settlement and clearing layer that the internet economy has long needed.

The report focuses on five major themes: Everything is tradable (prediction markets, tokenization), stablecoin interoperability, tokenomics returning to fundamentals, the fusion of DeFi and TradFi, and privacy as a regulatory driver. The maturation of infrastructure is the common thread in this transformation.

The full text is as follows:

For decades, the internet has allowed information to flow freely across borders, platforms, and systems. But value has lagged behind. Money, assets, and financial protocols still move through fragmented infrastructure built on traditional rails, national borders, and intermediary institutions that extract rent at every node.

This gap is closing at an unprecedented speed. It creates opportunities for infrastructure companies that can directly replace traditional clearing, settlement, and custody functions. Infrastructure that enables value to flow as freely as information is no longer theoretical. It is being built, deployed, and adopted at scale.

For years, crypto existed on-chain but was disconnected from the real economy. This is changing. Crypto is becoming the settlement and clearing layer that the internet economy has long needed—a continuously operating, transparent layer that requires no centralized gatekeepers.

The following themes represent our view of the development trajectory of digital assets by 2026, and are areas where Wintermute Ventures actively supports founders.

1. Everything is Tradable

An increasing number of assets and real-world outcomes are becoming tradable through new financial primitives, including prediction markets, tokenization, and derivatives. This shift provides liquidity layers for fields that historically had no markets.

Tokenization and synthetic assets bring liquidity to known assets. Prediction markets go further, pricing previously unquantifiable things, transforming raw information into tradable instruments.

Prediction markets continue to expand, serving as consumer products and new financial tools for hedging, outcome-based trading, and opinions on granular events. They are also beginning to replace parts of traditional financial infrastructure.

Insurance is a notable example: outcome-based markets can offer cheaper, more flexible hedges by directly pricing specific risks rather than bundling them into broad products. Users can hedge against specific wind speeds at particular locations and times, rather than buying hurricane insurance for a region. Over longer time horizons, these specialized risks can be manually selected and bundled into individual needs through agent workflows.

As prediction market infrastructure scales, entirely new categories of data products emerge around previously unpriced topics. We expect markets designed to trade and quantify objective perceptions, emotions, and collective opinions. These emerging markets are a natural extension of decentralized finance, unlocking new ways to price and exchange information itself. When everything becomes tradable, infrastructure that provides liquidity, price discovery, and settlement becomes critical.

This structural shift will concentrate value at the infrastructure layer, directly impacting how we allocate capital. We actively support teams building core markets and settlement infrastructure, data layers for verification and proof, and new data products that finance previously untradeable outcomes. We also focus on novel abstraction models to make these markets programmable and composable, enabling integration into real-world workflows and replacing parts of traditional finance and insurance infrastructure.

2. Stablecoins as Trust Layer, with Banks Handling Intermediary Settlement

Digital assets lack robust equivalents of settlement banks and clearinghouses, which are essential for traditional finance. Stablecoins enable open access and programmable value, but without settlement infrastructure, fragmentation causes friction that limits adoption.

As stablecoin issuers proliferate across ecosystems with different collateral models, demand grows for an interoperability layer capable of reliably combining these assets. To scale this system, crypto needs infrastructure that can perform net settlement, conversion, and clearing across stablecoins and chains without adding extra credit risk, liquidity risk, or operational overhead.

The missing abstraction is asset-liability-based interoperability that transfers conversion and credit risk to stablecoin issuers, rather than forcing end users to manage FX, routing, or counterparty risk during cross-stablecoin transactions. We see this as the on-chain equivalent of a bank, with settlement in seconds, open to application builders, and expected to see more companies positioning themselves as coordinators between issuers and applications.

3. Markets Will Reward Long-Term Revenue Over Short-Term Incentives

Token-driven growth without sustainable business models is losing effectiveness. Companies relying on subsidies to users or liquidity providers, while operating fragile revenue models, will find it harder to compete.

Valuations will more closely anchor to sustainable earnings and forward-looking forecasts, converging toward cash flow-based frameworks. Short-term, volatile monthly fee peaks are no longer credible for enterprise valuation, as revenue quality and incentive alignment become central. Tokens without credible value capture pathways will struggle to sustain demand beyond speculative phases.

Therefore, fewer companies will issue tokens at inception. Many will default to equity-first structures, primarily using blockchain as a back-end infrastructure that is largely invisible to users and investors. When tokens are issued, it will increasingly occur only after product-market fit, revenue, unit economics, and distribution are proven, and stakeholder incentives are aligned.

We see this shift as beneficial and necessary for the health of the ecosystem. Founders can focus on building durable businesses rather than prematurely prioritizing token incentives and demand. Investors can evaluate companies using familiar financial frameworks. Users will access products designed for long-term value.

4. Fusion of DeFi and Fintech

The future of finance is not DeFi or TradFi—it’s their integration. A dual-track architecture allows fintech applications to route transactions dynamically based on cost, speed, and yield. Breakthrough consumer applications will resemble traditional fintech products, with wallets, bridges, and chains abstracted away. Capital efficiency, yields, settlement speed, and transparent execution will define next-generation financial products.

While user experience merges with fintech, the industry continues to expand rapidly behind the scenes. Tokenization and highly composable financial primitives drive this growth, enabling deeper liquidity and more complex financial products.

Distribution will become more important than having a user interface. Winning teams will build backend-first infrastructure that integrates into existing platforms and channels, rather than competing as standalone apps. Personalization and automation (increasingly AI-enhanced) will improve pricing, routing, and yield in the background. Users won’t consciously choose DeFi; they will choose better, more seamless products.

5. Privacy as a Regulatory Driver

Privacy is becoming a foundational element for institutional adoption, shifting from a regulatory obligation to a regulatory driver. Selective disclosure using zero-knowledge proofs and multiparty computation allows participants to prove compliance without exposing raw data.

Practically, this enables banks to assess creditworthiness without accessing transaction histories, employers to verify employment without revealing wages, and institutions to demonstrate reserves without disclosing positions. The realization of this vision involves a world where companies no longer need to store large amounts of data, freeing themselves from costly and burdensome data privacy regulations. New primitives like private shared state, zkTLS, and MPC unlock undercollateralized loans, layered products, and new on-chain risk products—making previously impossible classes of structured finance feasible on-chain.

6. Regulation Shifting from Compliance Barriers to Distribution Advantages

Regulatory clarity has transitioned from an adversarial obstacle to a standardized distribution channel. While early DeFi’s permissionless nature remains a key driver of innovation, frameworks like the US GENIUS Act, Europe’s MiCA, and Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime provide greater clarity for traditional institutions. By 2026, the story will no longer be about whether institutions can use blockchain, but how they will leverage these guidelines to replace traditional pipelines and achieve high-speed on-chain operations.

These standards will facilitate a new wave of compliant on-chain products, regulated deposit and withdrawal channels, and institutional-grade infrastructure—without forcing full centralization—thus increasing institutional participation.

Regions that combine clear rules with rapid approval will increasingly attract capital, talent, and experimentation, accelerating the normalization of on-chain value distribution in native crypto and hybrid financial products, leaving slower jurisdictions behind.

The Internet Economy on Crypto Infrastructure

Maturation of infrastructure is the common thread in this transformation. Crypto is becoming the settlement and clearing layer of the internet economy, enabling value to flow as freely as information. Protocols, primitives, and applications being built today are unlocking new forms of real economic activity and expanding the scope of what’s possible online.

At Wintermute Ventures, we support founders building this infrastructure. We seek teams with deep technical understanding combined with strong product thinking. Teams that release solutions people truly want to use. Teams capable of operating within regulatory frameworks while advancing core principles of decentralization. Teams designing long-term impactful businesses.

2026 will mark a turning point. Crypto infrastructure will increasingly fade into the background for users while serving as the backbone of the global financial system. The best infrastructure quietly empowers people without attracting attention.

If you are building in any of these areas, contact our team.

You can also fill out the form on our website: