2026 Crypto Predictions with Haseeb Qureshi

On the whole, I think the easiest out of the box solutions are all for EVM chains because they've just existed the longest. They just have the most tooling and the most kind of robust ecosystem. Minute differences in technical architecture have seemingly gone to the wayside in exchange of like, okay, who's actually making money or like who's using this or like

I did. I did. It was very lovely. But yeah, I can see you guys are very in the Christmas cheer. I respect that.

Yeah. Well, if you zoom out on 2025, I technically still 2025, so we can still get our asses kicked in the last couple days, but I'd say overall it's been a very mixed year. You know, we went into the year with enormous amounts of optimism. We had the presidential election. We kind of got everything that we wanted in the wish list of regulation. And yet prices, Bitcoin is down slightly on the year. Alt really got kicked pretty hard. Everything besides, if you look at ETH, you look at XRP, they had pretty good years. BNB had a pretty good year, but almost everything else in the alt complex really just got kicked in the teeth. So it's a mixed year. It depends on really what you owned. The more that you own the majors, the less you have to complain about. But of course this year has been the year of everything else rallying. NASDAQ is up something like 25-30%. AI stocks have done incredible. Gold has rallied like crazy. And yet crypto kind of seems to have been left behind. So that makes it a tough year from what everybody was expecting going into the year.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. So at the end of 25 or sorry at the beginning of 25 I wrote a set of predictions last year that got a lot of attention and at the end of every year I try to do both going back and seeing what did I get right what did I get wrong about my previous year's predictions and then making predictions for the next year to try to keep myself honest and try to improve as an investor. Because so much of investing is actually being able to separate out what's the narrative that everyone's telling, what's the hype that everyone's excited about and what part of it is real and what part of it is going to end up being transient. So if you remember like beginning of this year, everybody was excited about AI agents. That was the meta, right? It was like virtual taking off, there was AI XPTt, there was all like that was what everybody was talking about. And we were still in the era of like Zerro and what was the word? Goat. And all that stuff was going crazy. And so actually most of my post and most of the stuff that I got engagement about was talking about how I think this stuff is going to flame out pretty quickly. Now some of the specific predictions that I made turned out to be a little bit actually too generous to the AI meme coins. So, I claimed that I thought the memecoins were going to lose market share to the AI Asian coins. That really didn't happen. AI agent coins kind of collapsed like I think like end of Q1. Basically, they just totally got destroyed. I thought that it was going to continue through most of 2025. That was wrong. But I did say that they were going to die off by the end of the year. That was true. I also said that these chat bots, these agents would become so ubiquitous that people would get annoyed by them.

Twitter became true extremely quickly. Like it went from cute to I remember I had this analogy of it's like seeing an elephant paint that like the first time you see an elephant paint you're like oh my god that's amazing. You see that elephant just made that painting and then the thousandth painting you see by elephant you're like these paintings suck. Like I hate I don't want to see any more elephant art. And that's kind of where we're at now is that nobody is amazed anymore at what LLM can do. We all just hate them. Everybody hates them and they're all like people are now looking for signs that this was painted by an elephant when they see anything posted that has an em dash in it. So, a few other claims that I made. I thought that this idea that everyone's going to have their own trading agent or miniature hedge fund from AI, that's not going to happen. That was correct. There's going to be a ton of scams that are going to be automated by all these chatbots. That was correct. And I claimed that software engineering agents were going to be the most impactful of anything. And so far that seems to be true is that the software automation you see how much money Anthropic's making and Claude Code and all of this stuff that's where the most product market fit is for everything in AI. And I said the memecoin stuff is going to be superseded by more serious decentralized AI players like Near, Jensen, Prime Intellect, News Research that seems to be happening. I don't know that it's huge but that seems to be the case that most of the mind share and what people are talking about these days is there.

So other predictions I've made. Oh sorry go ahead. No, I was gonna say I think the only positive development that we saw from any of the kind of agent meta was just a realization that that wasn't actual agents and that whatever is going to come next to get people interested has to be way better than whatever that was. So, maybe that'll be a 2027 or late 2026. Well, so what I suspect will happen is that any time that people see a new phase transition in abilities, right? So like that was really the first moment that you could have a fully autonomous agent interacting with people online. And that was so exciting the first time that you saw that that crypto has a way that when it sees something that's genuinely new to just go all in and be like great, let's make tokens around it and let's sell it to retail and let's find a way to play a game around this thing. So it's been a while since we've seen another phase transition, right? There's no, you know, people have talked about, oh, what about agents paying each other? What about some kind of agents becoming economic actors? That hasn't really happened yet. I suspect that once that does happen that we'll see another speculative mania. It might be smaller because people have already gotten burned by the chatbot stuff and they kind of know, okay, maybe that wasn't where it's going. But when they see agents actually being economic actors, that's when I think we'll see another little mini mania. Doesn't necessarily mean that's where the long-term value is going to be. But we're not there yet. We're probably more than a year away from getting to agents actually being economic actors.

And I mean,

Yeah. So, I mean, I think the reasons why I was right were not the reasons that I originally anticipated. So, I thought it's going to be this new generation of EVM chains, the Monads, the Megaes, the Berachain of course also launched this year. And I thought, okay, all these new EVM chains and Hyper EVM, all these new chains are going to increase the adoption for the EVM at large. That was not really the story. The story was more that we were at in December of last year, that was the local top for Solana dominance, right? If you remember, it was right when the Trump memecoin launched that Solana hit all time highs

And where the Solana transaction volume was all time high. I think that was the day that Trump launched his meme was that we saw record-breaking volumes on Solana. And people thought like, okay, it's over. Solana is just going to eat everything. Solana is just gonna be absolutely dominant and it's only a one-way ratchet from here and actually that was the top for SVM dominance. So if you look over time the market share of transaction volume, market share of TVL, market share of fees, everything has declined from that point not linearly but it's almost like mean reversion. That was kind of a Solana had a hot hand. Solana is still good, it's still very big, it's still very important but it's no longer really seeming like Solana is going to eat everything. So maybe we see another resurgence but at least right now it's pretty EVM remains the dominant architecture for blockchains. And so I think that was why that one ended up being wrong. I also thought that maybe LLMs are going to have something to do with it is that LLMs just know so much more about the EVM that maybe they're just going to make it so much easier to write programs and contracts than EVM. That turned out to not really be part of the story, but I think it may end up mattering more going forward. So, I think one of the claims I made was that L1s and L2s are overcrowded. They're due for a shakeout and that people are going to stop caring about the distinction between L1s and L2s. And this felt like the year of that, you know, it felt like the year of there's too many of these. Market is no longer giving credit for just having an L1 or an L2 that's lying in wait and doesn't have traction. And this whole idea that users don't really care. Like Robinhood was an L2, Tempo was an L1, and maybe some CT people argued about it or some Ethereum maxis care about it, but most people don't care. Most people are like, "Oh, okay, fine. Corpo Chain is this, Corpo Chain is that, who really cares?" And so I think that does feel like the year of these tribal fights just mattering less and less as corporate interests start to matter a lot more than our kind of regional crypto battles. What Freud called this the narcissism of small differences is the closer you are to each other, Ethereum has more in common with Solana than we have with the rest of finance. And so, but the fights between Ethereum and Solana are the most fierce fights when really it should be us against them. But that's the narcissism of small differences.

Yes and no. I think it does matter in terms of a choice. Like the choice between L1 and L2, I think if you're a corporate, I don't think you need to be explained why you should care about this, right? If I explain to you like, well, if you're an L2 as opposed to an L1, well, there's going to take longer for you to become progressively decentralized and you're using Ethereum security as you're not using it here. You don't have your own validator. It's like okay well I just wanted to put stable coins and get my C you know I don't know about any of that I don't why are you talking to me? Whereas if you tell them like okay if you use SVM you need to hire Rust engineers and you can't use these contracts you need to write your own. They'll say oh okay well I'll use the other one. That is actually a business decision that I think a lot of these enterprises do care about. And that's part of the reason why almost all the corporate chains are EVM. Like EVM is less performant than SVM, right? So these are not performance decisions that they're making. It's interoperability and ease of adoption questions that they're answering.

I don't think these corporations really care. Unless they're being yelled at really loudly. And the thing is we're not as loud as we think we are.

Yeah. No I agree with that and the other thing I didn't touch on it in my predictions but this was also the year of the Ethereum revival right I mean at the time you remember Ethereum was just down in the dumps. people were talking about L2s being parasitic to Ethereum. And I think that in a way that is part of the revenue meta is this idea that L2s are pulling the life force away from Ethereum and Ethereum needs to pull these barnacles off of itself and emerge from the depths and it kind of did that right with the whole Ethereum pivot which now we can talk about it without it being so politicized but at the time it was like very contentious to say is it a pivot is it not a pivot blah blah blah. In retrospect it was totally a pivot and it was good. It was successful. They did the right thing by refocusing their marketing, their storytelling as well as the focus on scaling the L1 and supporting developers directly on top of the base chain. So that was probably one of the big stories of this year.

I think the things that they care about are pretty straightforward, which is one, I want access to customers, right? Where are the people who hold stable coins? I want to get my stable coin into their hands. Second, I want it to be easy to launch, build, interop, everything. I want everything to be easy. I don't want have to build a bunch of stuff myself because that's not my expertise. That's you, you guys are good at that. I'm not good at that. And then third, they want it to be really easy to keep track of. So, they want easy indexing. They want easy accounting. they want to be able to just have some ETL pipeline that they know exactly what's happening on the chain at any given time. So, Solana for quite a while had a lot of indexing issues. Now, those have improved significantly this year. And so it makes it a lot more viable place for people to be launching stable coins. But on the whole, I think the easiest out of the box solutions are all for EVM chains because they've just existed the longest. They just have the most tooling and the most kind of robust ecosystem. And that's why most of these people are choosing EVM. It's not because they love Ethereum or because they want to be Ealigned or whatever. It's purely a pragmatic business decisions that they see. That's where all the stable coins are. So, I should probably go there if I want to be the next big stable coin.

Yeah yeah no it's a good point and I think part of that is the reality that a lot of this infrastructure has scaled. So, you know, if you're on Solana and you're Pump, maybe if you're looking at January when Trump memecoin launched and Solana basically fell over, you're like, we got to get off of here because I can't have the single biggest day of crypto trading on this chain in history have my users be unable to use my platform, right? But, after January, a bunch of people fixed a bunch of stuff. RPCs became more robust. There's just a lot of improvements that happen when people see these scaling bottlenecks. And then it's like, okay, look, is this the biggest priority? Is the biggest priority for us to create a whole new infra, create whole new indexing, create bridges, create all this stuff, like launching a new chain is hard. It's really difficult, especially if you're not doing it from day one. If you're migrating an existing application to a new chain that is brutally hard, right? And if you look at the examples of people who tried to migrate almost entirely failures, right? So if you look at Unichain, if you remember Uniswap launching Unichain, people were so excited. This is one of the things that I predicted on our own podcast that Unichain was going to underperform. Here we are Unichain is basically a nothing burger. There's absolutely nothing going on on Unichain. Uniswap is still dominant on the primary chains where it trades, but yeah, trying to move the liquidity and move the demand and move everything over into a new platform, it's just too hard and it's kind of not worth doing when the core business is working. So, I suspect for a lot of these, if you're Pump.fun, maybe even if you're Polymarket, like launching your own chain, it's like, yeah, maybe I'll get around to it when I get around to it. But I have so many other things that are more important to just improve the product experience, get more users in the door, regulation, like all this other stuff that is existential and moving chains is just very seldom existential.

And crowd sales I mean MegaETH one of the largest ICO raises this year and the list just goes on and on. I mean, Yield Basis, the Curve Michaels project had 200 million subscribed for $5 million raise on Legion with Kraken. And so you just had a lot of these big launches.

That's true.

All the big fintech companies and a bunch of banks now offering stable coins, Vanguard, all these things.

Yeah, it depends on how you count the washes. So if you count the washes, 15 out of 24 is slightly below 70%. Which I think is pretty good. I think it's pretty good. If you don't count the washes, then it's 15 out of 18, which is even better.

It's like 80 something. So I think I did pretty well. I think the ones I got wrong were giving a little bit too much credit to the AI agent stuff. Those are my main misses. But most everything else I was able to get right. So I think it was a good year for a lot of tech. It was a bad year for prices.

And so I think at the end of the day it's one of these years where the industry is forced to grow up. people are forced to look in the eye of what they're doing with respect to meme coins, respect to these agent slop coins and all this other stuff and be like, "Hey, what really has staying power here and what's just a game of musical chairs that we're playing?" The music stopped this year. There's no more music playing for the game of musical chairs. And so you got to actually do something productive. And I think that's the theme going into 2026 is let's build some real stuff.

Yep.