#2026CryptoOutlook

When I think about the 2026 cycle, I don’t frame it as a simple question of “are we early or late.” That binary worked when crypto was smaller, more reflexive, and entirely retail-driven. It doesn’t work anymore. What we’re actually watching is a transition from a market that was powered almost entirely by liquidity and narrative into one that increasingly has to justify itself through structure, throughput, and economic usefulness. 2026, in my view, sits in that uncomfortable but fertile middle ground. It’s not the euphoric top where everything melts up, but it’s also not a dead zone. It’s a period where capital becomes more selective, where narratives start competing on fundamentals rather than vibes, and where the gap between assets that merely exist and assets that matter begins to widen sharply.
This is why I don’t see 2026 as a classic late bull. Late bulls are noisy, reckless, and indiscriminate. They pull future demand forward and leave nothing but wreckage behind. What we’re seeing instead is something closer to a compression phase, where volatility exists but direction is earned rather than gifted. Liquidity isn’t gone, but it’s cautious. Institutions aren’t chasing, but they are positioning. Retail isn’t euphoric, but it’s still present, rotating between narratives in search of meaning. That combination usually doesn’t mark the end of a cycle; it marks the point where the next leg has to be built on something more durable than speculation alone.
When you look at which narratives can actually survive across cycles, the biggest filter is simple: does this narrative reduce friction in the real world, or does it only exist to create price action inside crypto? AI is a good example of this distinction. As a narrative, “AI + crypto” has already gone through its hype phase. Most tokens branded as AI will not survive, and they shouldn’t. But AI as an enabling layer — automating execution, optimizing liquidity, managing risk, coordinating agents — is too powerful to disappear. Over time, AI stops being a sector and starts being invisible infrastructure. The survivors won’t be the loudest projects; they’ll be the ones quietly embedded into DeFi, trading, governance, and data pipelines, where removing them would make systems objectively worse.
Layer 2s and modular scaling feel even more inevitable. Scaling isn’t a bet on taste or culture; it’s a bet on physics. If blockspace demand continues to grow, execution has to become cheaper, faster, and more specialized. What changes across cycles isn’t whether scaling matters, but which approaches prove economically viable. Subsidized growth without a path to fees doesn’t survive tightening conditions. Ecosystems without developers don’t survive competition. But the broader idea — that settlement, execution, and data availability can be separated and optimized — isn’t going anywhere. In that sense, L2s aren’t a narrative you trade; they’re infrastructure you accumulate when it’s misunderstood and hold when it becomes boring.
RWA is the opposite kind of narrative. It’s slow, regulatory-heavy, and deeply unsexy — which is precisely why it’s likely to survive. Tokenized treasuries, on-chain credit, and real yield don’t need mass retail excitement to work. They need trust, legal clarity, and steady demand. Over multiple cycles, narratives that anchor crypto to external cash flows tend to outlast those that depend on internal speculation. RWA won’t dominate headlines, but it will quietly change who uses blockchains and why. That shift matters more than price multiples in any single year.
DePIN sits somewhere in between vision and execution risk. It’s one of the few areas where crypto tries to directly compete with legacy infrastructure in the physical world, which is incredibly hard and slow. Many projects will fail simply because coordinating real-world hardware, operators, and demand is not something tokens magically solve. But if even a small number of these networks reach escape velocity, they create something crypto has historically lacked: defensible utility tied to production. That’s why DePIN is not a core allocation for me, but it’s a necessary one. The upside isn’t linear; it’s asymmetric.
Memes, by contrast, are structurally incapable of surviving across cycles in a leadership role, even though they will always exist. Memes are expressions of liquidity and culture, not stores of value or engines of growth. They thrive when attention is abundant and capital is bored. They fade when markets demand justification. Treating them as long-term bets is a category error. Treating them as tactical instruments is honest.
All of this feeds into how I think about allocation. I don’t allocate based on what feels exciting today; I allocate based on what I believe will still command attention, liquidity, and relevance after the next drawdown. That’s why the largest portion of capital belongs in assets that function as monetary or settlement anchors. They absorb volatility, attract institutional flows, and act as the gravity wells of the ecosystem. Around that core, I want exposure to narratives that are structurally necessary — scaling, automation, real-world integration — because those are the areas where progress compounds rather than resets each cycle.
What I try to avoid is overexposure to narratives that depend entirely on favorable market conditions to justify their existence. Those can perform extremely well in short bursts, but they don’t build on themselves. When conditions change, they have nothing to fall back on. The longer I stay in this market, the more I care about survivorship. Not what can pump, but what can endure neglect, skepticism, and boredom because those are the environments where real value is created.
So when I look at 2026, I don’t see an ending. I see a sorting process. A market that’s learning, slowly and painfully, that not all tokens are equal, not all narratives deserve capital, and not all growth is real. For investors, that’s uncomfortable. For builders and patient capital, it’s exactly what you want.