a16z Shares Three Ways Crypto Will Move Beyond Crypto in 2026

Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto research team published predictions on January 9, 2026, and shared three ways crypto will move beyond blockchain applications.

The venture capital firm stated prediction markets will become bigger and broader, SNARKs will offer new primitives for non-blockchain industries, and staked media will rise as a credibility mechanism.

Prediction Markets Will Expand Contract Volume and Scope

a16z crypto stated prediction markets have already gone mainstream and will become bigger, broader, and smarter in 2026 as they intersect with crypto and AI.

Many more contracts will be listed this year. Users will access real-time odds not just for major elections or geopolitical events but for detailed outcomes and complex intersecting events.

As new contracts emerge, more information becomes part of the news ecosystem, raising societal questions about balancing information value and designing transparent, auditable systems.

Crypto makes this transparency possible. The expansion needs resolving important challenges for builders.

Handling larger contract volumes requires new ways of aligning on truth to resolve contracts. Centralized platform resolution is important, but disputed cases highlight its limitations.

The Zelensky suit market and Venezuelan election market exposed edge cases. AI opens possibilities beyond LLMs for oracles. AI agents help surface new ways of thinking about the world and predicting future events.

AI agents could serve as political analysts that users can query for insight. The agents could reveal new information about root predictors of complex societal events when examining their emergent strategies.

Prediction markets do not replace polling; instead, they enhance it. Polling information can be fed into prediction markets.

A16z crypto political scientist stated that prediction markets can function in concert with a rich polling ecosystem.

New technologies, such as AI, can enhance the survey-taking experience. Crypto can provide new ways to prove that poll respondents are humans, not bots.

zkVM Technology Enables Verifiable Cloud Computing

SNARKs, cryptographic proofs that enable users to verify computations without re-executing them, have been largely a blockchain-only technology for years.

The overhead was too high, as proving a computation required 1,000,000 times more work than running it.

This situation is changing in 2026. zkVM provers will hit roughly 10,000 times overhead with memory footprints in the hundreds of megabytes.

The technology becomes fast enough to run on phones and cheap enough to run everywhere. The 10,000 times threshold could be a magic number.

High-end GPUs have approximately 10,000 times more parallel throughput than a laptop CPU. By the end of 2026, a single GPU will be capable of generating proofs of CPU execution in real-time. This could unlock a vision from old research papers about verifiable cloud computing.

If users run CPU workloads in the cloud because the computation is not heavy enough to be GPU-optimized, or they lack expertise, or for legacy reasons, they will obtain cryptographic proofs of correctness at a reasonable price overhead.

Justin Thaler, a16z crypto research team member and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, stated that this development will unlock crypto applications beyond blockchain.

Staked Media Emerges as New Credibility Mechanism

a16z mentioned that cracks in the traditional media model with supposed objectivity have been showing for a while.

There are now more builders, operators, and practitioners who interact directly with the public. Audiences frequently respect them because of their hobbies rather than in spite of them.

The new development is not the rise of social media but the arrival of cryptographic tools that allow people to make publicly verifiable commitments.

As AI makes it cheap and easy to generate unlimited content claiming anything from any point of view or persona, simply relying on what people or bots say feels insufficient.

A commentator can publish an argument and prove they are putting their money where their mouth is.

A podcaster can lock tokens to show they are not opportunistically flipping or pumping and dumping. The report by a16z explores how cryptocurrency will evolve to enhance everyday life.