Haseeb Qureshi: Why 2026 Will Be a Great Year for Altcoins

I suspect this is going to be a good year for alts. Alts have good years, they have bad years. 2025 was one of the bad years.

So that's one thing that the market got wrong and I think I got that wrong as well, is that that was not the outcome that I was expecting. If we look back at 2026 in hindsight, what is it that most crypto investors will realize that they were wrong about? I predict that if you look at the alt market, about 87% of the people that are watching aren't subscribed. If you choose to subscribe, we are able to be getting better guests and to do more in-person conversations. It doesn't cost you anything. It helps us enormously. Become part of the new era of Finance podcast community. Thank you very much.

I mean, one of the things is that I think people today are trying to diagnose a bunch of potential ills in the altcoin market. I think people think that the fact that altcoins went down in 2025 must mean that there's some deep systemic problem with alts. Maybe there's too much conflict between the devs and the tokens, or maybe there's too much oversupply, maybe the market structure is broken, maybe something fundamental changed after 1010. And I think people will look back and they'll forget they even had these conversations. I feel like every cycle we get all sorts of armchair doctors coming out explaining to you, 'Oh, it's because the moon was in this shape and this thing happened, that's why all the markets did what they did this year.' And the next year people totally forget about it. When prices are going down, everybody demands an explanation. When prices go up, nobody asks anything. They're like, 'Oh, yeah, of course they go up. They're supposed to go up. That's how crypto works.' I suspect this is going to be a good year for alts and that it's going to erode a lot of the soul-searching that we're seeing from the market right now.

What did people get wrong? I think there were a few things. One, obviously, going into last year, Trump had just been elected, not yet inaugurated. And people assumed that this was obviously going to be a good year for everything in crypto. What we saw was that Bitcoin was flat to down on the year, pretty close to flat. Everything else was down. A few things did well, like XRP and ETH staged reasonable returns, but it was a much more mixed year than people were expecting. The lesson there is that regulation had already been priced in by the time Trump got elected, and the expectations seemed to be somewhat out of line with reality. Trump, as much as he is the most powerful person in the world today, is surprisingly ineffective at actually championing the broader universe of assets within crypto. The amount of incremental demand we got from Trump, as opposed to the anticipation about Trump, was a lot less than people were expecting. So that's one thing the market got wrong, and I think I got that wrong as well. That was not the outcome I was expecting, especially after seeing what happened with Trump's memecoin in January. The second thing I think we got wrong is that there was a zeitgeist in crypto at that time of financial nihilism. This view is that the only thing that matters is that nothing matters. Nobody believes any of this stuff. They believe it's all shit. No one really cares about the technology. This is all just us playing a shell game on a sinking Titanic. As a result, what you should expect is that most of the demand and product-market fit for crypto is going to be in the casinos, in meme coins, in AI agent coins, in all the stuff we were talking about at the beginning of 2025. What you've seen over the course of 2025 is that the center of gravity of crypto has moved away from speculation, away from pump.fun, away from the memecoin casino, more towards stablecoins, RWAs, traditional businesses coming on chain. That's where the center of gravity has moved. I think that was a big miscalculation by the median crypto investor, thinking that this was what crypto was about. I was in the minority on that point, and being a VC, maybe it's easy for me to be in the minority, but I think that was one of the things the market generally got wrong.

Yeah. Which narrative do you believe is currently classified as obviously the one that's going to do it, but in hindsight won't be it?

That's right.

I think tokenization is probably the narrative that will be most highly anticipated but will underperform the most. The other one I would say is these fintech chains: Tempo, Robinhood chain, Arc. I think the idea that these big companies are coming on chain and launching their own distribution channels or platforms, and that's going to usurp a lot of the demand or block space from the big traditional neutral incumbents like Ethereum and Solana, that narrative is also going to underperform. For RWAs or tokenization, I actually think RWAs will do well, but RWA more inclusively thinking of things like equity perps, which are cash-settled instruments, derivatives. I think the derivatives will do very well, and the tokenized assets will do relatively poorly. Right now, the biggest tokenized assets are tokenized treasuries, but as yields start to come down and the Fed starts to cut more aggressively, you'll see less growth in tokenized treasuries. If there's more demand in crypto, things like the basis trade yield or private credit will become relatively more attractive than tokenized treasuries. So what that looks like is on-chain yields grow more than off-chain tokenized yields. When it comes to tokenized stocks, I think they're probably not going to see a big growth curve in 2026. Instead, equity perps will grow like crazy. At the end of the day, a lot of the demand, if you look at something like Trade XYZ, the perp RWA product on Hyperliquid, that's been growing very impressively. This universe of people outside the US wanting exposure to US assets, stock indices, even commodities, doing this in a capital-efficient, scalable way, the easiest way is not through tokenization but through derivatives. I think that will take off much more than tokenization itself.

It's not that it's going to go down, but I think it's going to grow a lot less than it has grown so far. Last year, tokenized treasuries grew over 100%. I suspect they probably grow less than or equal to 100% in 2026. You have to remember this is on a relatively small base. A few billion dollars of tokenized treasuries relative to the treasury market is tiny. These businesses, in terms of the amount of bips they're taking off treasuries, is minuscule. Managing a few billion dollars of AUM of treasuries, you're scraping a few bips off that. You're not making a lot of money in a business that has a few billion dollars of treasuries on chain. I don't think this is where the lion's share of the economic growth on chain is going to come from.

We own some Zcash. I think the Zcash team has proven a lot about itself, its resilience, and its mission-driven focus toward enabling the cypherpunk vision of privacy. That being said, I think the enthusiasm and the reality are a little bit uncoupled right now. People want something to believe in. If you look at other privacy platforms that are not Zcash, you can see the shielded pool has been growing quite a bit. A lot of this growth has been accelerated by NEAR and NEAR Intents, which allows anybody on any platform to buy and custody Zcash using the same crypto wallets they have for any other on-chain activity. That's been a big entrance way for a lot of people to get access to Zcash. But if you look at non-Zcash privacy platforms, beyond the shielded pool growing and people investing in the asset, you're really not seeing much activity. I suspect that in 2026, it's a little bit too early for the UX of privacy to be that good. What you may see is on some of these stablecoin chains, like Tempo, ARC, or Codex, they have the ability to do privacy-preserving stablecoin transactions. These are not fully private in the way Zcash is fully private. In these transactions, the operator of the L2 can see your flows, but nobody else can. There's asymmetric cryptography, meaning it's not obfuscated to everyone but you, only to a certain compliance function. Zcash is a different model, pure old-school cypherpunk. Only you can see your tokens. It's like encrypted Bitcoin. Outside of Zcash, you're probably going to see very little growth in privacy, except for these private transactions on stablecoin chains, which are kind of pseudo-private.

But as I know that you like to do predictions every year, you're writing down a long thesis onto predictions.

We're going to do it into the next level. I've got some cards over here.

And I don't know if you can see it. No, I can't believe you can see it.

First thing I'll say is that anything I say here is going to be with low confidence because I was around four years ago hearing what people thought was going to happen in 2025. I was also around in 2017, people thought what was going to happen in 2021. Every single time, no matter how smart, successful, connected, or prescient you are, everybody got it wrong. Trying to forecast out more than a year or maybe two years in advance is kind of a fool's errand in an industry like this. That being said, although I object to having any confidence in such a prediction, I'll go ahead and try to make one.

Okay. By 2030, I think we're going to have over two trillion of stablecoins. I think you're going to see stablecoins be over 15% of M2. I think stablecoins will still be majority US dollar, overwhelming majority, like 98% plus will be US dollar denominated. I think Bitcoin will likely be, by 2030, maybe between 400 and 500K. I think the alts market, I suspect that the top five is going to look different. I think Binance's market share will decline by quite a lot. I think they will sort of be entering the twilight years where they're no longer as efficient, no longer as fast-moving. They start getting dismantled in different countries one by one. It ends up not that they go away, but that they're just not the juggernaut they are today. If you look at the alt market, it's hard to say. I think the alt market is going to be a lot bigger than it is today. I think only some assets will be worth more then than they are now. I'd say less than half of altcoins will be worth more in 2030 than they are today, but the alt market on the whole is going to be a lot bigger.

If you look in absolute terms, the tokens are still much bigger than the equity. The biggest company that's public today is Coinbase, worth about 70 billion or so. That's worth less than Solana, and Solana is top five. The reality is the token complex is much, much bigger than the equity complex. The reason why there's so much energy and momentum around equity right now is because the equity market has recently been unleashed. It was pent up for the last six or seven years because of Gary Gensler and before that even Jay Clayton. It was impossible for a crypto company to go public, to have clear accounting rules, to have clear ability to work with auditors. Even just banking was an ordeal 10 minutes ago that was resolved. Because of that, we've seen this deluge of companies that ought to be public, that are at the scale and maturity that they should be public companies, finally go public. This is being perceived by many people as saying the equity markets are better than the token markets. I think this is a little bit short-sighted. We basically have 10 minutes of history on the equity markets of crypto outside of Coinbase, and we're comparing that to the 10 minutes of history of altcoins being 2025, which was a rough year for alts. Alts also have bad years. 2025 was one of the bad years. 2024 was actually a very good year for alts. We started 2024 with everything going into the Bitcoin ETFs. Although ETH had a false start, alts on the whole did amazing over the course of 2024, even before Trump got elected. It was a very strong year for alts even before the election took place. All of that is to say it's unwise, if you've been in the space for a long time, to try to key too much off of one year of data. You do not want to do that. Second, a lot of the enthusiasm about the equity markets was driven by retail engagement. A lot of the DAt buying was happening from retail. If you look at Circle, in the first six months it had a meteoric rise, now it's come back down to earth, close to its IPO price at like 16 or 17 billion, which is still very respectable for a company given its financials and the state of the business. Gemini has come back down to earth. Bullish has come back down to earth. I think the equity markets look pretty reasonable. They don't look crazy, but they don't look terrible. The token markets, you might say they look kind of terrible, but again, these things are very cyclical. I would not read too much into 2025 telling us how it's going to be going forward. Right now, overwhelmingly, the crypto flows at the margin are coming not from retail but from institutions, and institutions buy stocks, they buy IPOs. When that shifts back and you see more retail engagement relative to institutions, that's likely to result in tokens doing well and things like DATs and other retail-driven assets. That's my high-level view.

Hard to say again. Obviously AI has been very unpredictable in terms of how capabilities evolve year-over-year. I was somebody who was much more worried about AI risk in 2020 than I am today. I think what we've seen from these models is that they are getting to human-level intelligence and superhuman speeds, but they don't really seem to be surpassing humans in any meaningful way. It's difficult to imagine them doing so given the failure modes we already see. The paradigm we have right now is working, making progress, but in a very uneven way. Coding is getting very, very powerful. Mathematics is getting amazing. Writing business emails is already as good as it's going to get. When it comes to solving more open-ended tasks, like being an economic agent or running a business, it seems totally worthless. It's hard to even imagine how we generate the data to train at scale to make it participate in the economy and be a useful, rational economic actor. Not to say we won't, but it's a lot farther away compared to something like coding or mathematics, where we already know how to generate the data to train these models at scale. By 2030, we are going to have basically completely automated software engineering. Software will become very, very cheap, too cheap to meter. It will become so easy to create that we'll think of software engineers the way we think today about sewing. It's just not an important job. It's something you do for fun, but if you want to mass-produce some shirts, there are no humans involved. It's all mechanical. For crypto, crypto is entirely mediated by software. There's no hardware or atoms anywhere in crypto that matters. It's all bits. Because it's all bits, the cost of creating crypto startups and products is going to plummet because the main cost everybody pays is software costs, building the code and shipping the products. You're going to see an explosion of activity on chain, an enormous amount of creativity and innovation. It's also going to improve security by quite a lot because the security of a blockchain is ultimately predicated on putting the work into securing the contracts. The bottleneck is having good security people. If security people are extremely cheap, too cheap to meter, because you point an LLM at the problem and get them to resolve it, we're going to see a change of perception about going on chain. Instead of being dangerous, weird, or having only a few not-very-good products, you're going to see amazing products shipped all the time because anybody can create them for almost nothing, launch them on chain, and see what they do. They're going to be highly secure and very trustworthy.

Two responses I'd give to that. First, when it comes to the commoditization of intelligence, which is effectively what we're seeing with AI, when intelligence is commodified, that doesn't just mean intelligence as an input into building things. It also means intelligence as the way in which the things that get built get used. When somebody says they're going to build a new launchpad or a new whatever, the people interacting with those products, their customers, will also have an enormous degree of intelligence gating them from using products that are poorly designed, poorly made, insecure, or simply economically stupid. If it's a bad idea for you to use this lending protocol because of the parameters and underwriting, right now if you look at private credit platforms like Goldfinch or Maple, as an investor putting your money there, you might have the resources and analysts to underwrite how they're doing their underwriting, what their underlying loan book looks like, the resilience of the company. A retail investor can't do that. They don't have the time, resources, or sophistication. But their AI will be better than your best analyst is today. That AI is going to be so democratized that it will be an enormous forcing function on every startup: you'd better be really good or you will get zero customers. Your AI knows that other AIs will be looking at it this way, and it will design the products so they're actually very good. When you look at cloud code and some of these agentic coding systems, it's not that they're really good at identifying when they write bad code. They just don't write bad code anymore. They used to write terrible code all the time. Now they just don't. That will bring the floor up on everything. Today compared to 50 years ago, there's no market for Cracker Jacks, some old-timey snack that kind of sucked. There's only Cheetos and Lays, and everything's great. That's what it's going to look like on chain. Everyone's taste will change because they will have this democratized intelligence that allows them to make better, safer, smarter decisions. Now, what are governments going to do in response? The first thing to understand is why governments care about crypto. The US government cares about crypto for the age-old reason of investor protection. The theory of investor protection is that retail investors are stupid, not sophisticated, and will get swindled and defrauded by more sophisticated people. That is the premise of the investor protection regime and why we've been regulating crypto. The assault from the SEC is under this premise that this stuff is fraudulent and needs disclosures under the securities regime, not because it can't exist or is per se dangerous, but to protect investors. What I am describing is intrinsically empowering retail investors to have the same protections and intelligence that currently exist for institutional investors, who the SEC has decided don't need protections because they're sophisticated enough. The whole paradigm around this is going to change. If you're regulating crypto for a different reason, like China banning crypto for capital flight, that's capital controls. If that's the reason, then none of this necessarily applies to the realpolitik of protecting financial flows. At the end of the day, giving people access to AI is going to result in a shift of power. Individuals become more powerful and intelligent. The government already has great analysts and people who can write laws and engineer tax codes in ways inscrutable to the average person. When the average person becomes more intelligent, with an agent that can process everything and explain which candidate is actually acting in their interest, what a law actually means for them, whether a politician's claim about tax cuts is true, the AI will no longer need the government to tell you what's going to happen. It will read it for itself and explain to you veridically what's actually going on. That is going to result in a massive change. Every technology big enough results in a massive change of power between governments and individuals. The printing press shifted power from the church to the individual. Television used to be all information dissemination at scale through mass media, and every country controlled the airwaves. After the rise of the internet and streaming, that went away. The government doesn't control the airwaves anymore, and it did just 20 years ago. I think both crypto and AI will have the same impact. Crypto removes the ability of governments to control the financial freedom and decision-making of their populations. It doesn't remove it completely; there are still choke points, banks, fiat payments. But it is another lever by which individuals can reassert that control in every country in the world, not just in the US or Western Europe. The same thing will be true of AI. That's my view.