CT Vibe Check: 2026 Predictions
Welcome to a special edition of our newsletter, our 152nd!
To celebrate the year-end, we have collected a series of quotes and predictions from the Castle Labs team, the Castle Cap community (full of chads) and some of our friends!
Since we already released an extensive end-of-year report, we chose to present this in a different format: direct quotes from builders, chads, researchers, and pro-traders on their 2025 reflections and predictions for 2026.
Enjoy!
1. Castle Labs Predictions
Francesco
Nothing I hate more than giving predictions! Being in the business of research, I like to base my “predictions” on data. For this reason, I only feel strongly about a couple of narratives. The first one is robotics. Not on its own, but because I believe it has potential for regulatory support. Trump already announced a possible 2026 robotics strategy with an executive order coming up. The other prediction is that everyone needs to shift their investment frameworks closer to TradFi. I think 2026 will be the year when protocols operating like businesses will reinvent their moat and continue to be deeply integrated into the global financial architecture. I also expect Prediction Markets crime to continue, with more and more insider trading. The very fact that Trump is getting into prediction markets with their family company is a telling sign of what we can expect. Last but not least, I expect AI to continue its growth, both as increasingly substituting flows, as well as highlighting threats to privacy, identity and more. For this reason, it will become an increasing problem. Solutions like Worldcoin’s proof of identity will become increasingly relevant and able to spur innovation such as uncollateralised lending based on your onchain reputation (tied to your real-world ID). For this reason, I expect 2026 to continue being a year of maturity and assessment. However, none of this will work on its own as the sector is increasingly reliant on macroeconomic and geopolitical news. For this reason, it becomes impossible to chart tokens without keeping an eye on whether Venezuela is getting bombed, etc. Something to keep in mind for our CT political analysts!
Atomist
Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs will become central to the world’s digital infrastructure, but in a way that doesn’t necessarily require “crypto” or blockchain. It will move into the traditional Web2 world to solve the massive data liability crisis—powering privacy-preserving identity, secure logins, and verifiable AI.
Whoever develops a “legitimate” and accepted way to obscure transactions onchain will be wildly successful, as this is the prerequisite for onboarding the first real cohorts of businesses and institutional enterprise flows onchain.
The market will become aware that crypto is the missing rail for robotics. The humanoid robot market is projected to reach $5 trillion by 2050, but it faces a massive “data wall,” as it cannot be trained the way simple LLMs were. 2025 proved that DePIN/DePAI is the only way to accelerate robotics training at scale. By using tokenised incentives, we can mobilise global contributors to collect the unique motion and environmental data needed for physical AI. Crypto isn’t just about finance anymore; it’s will become the coordination layer for the machine economy.
Schizoxbt
80% of altcoins and chains will trend down to 0, as most of them have a combo of horrible tokenomics and a product that no one wants, resulting in an uninvestable asset. Memecoins should also go the way of the Dodo, as they have to be one of the dumber things we’ve created in our industry.
I also think that DeFi has an absolute renaissance in 2026. With institutions and TradFi coming onchain in a greater volume than before, DeFi protocols (the closest thing we have in our industry to stocks/investable businesses) will be big gainers here and should increase their TVL in line with institutional inflows (hopefully lmao). Wouldn’t be surprised if we get really heavy inflows from institutions that DeFi TVL goes ballistic, and we see these coins start going straight up and to the right.
While we’ve had a mini explosion of privacy, it fizzled out. I think that comes back with a vengeance and sticks around as a main narrative for 2026.
Also hoping that we get a lot of discourse around tokenomics and tokenholder rights to find a better solution there than what we have. Tokenomics are fairly bleak and most are just bad. Would love to see some innovation here going forward!
Noveleader
Crypto Audience is maturing, and people are generally not too inclined towards the scams, at least the year 2025 taught us. Moreover, the core crypto audience has started placing greater weight on essential factors such as revenue, what token holders receive, and their rights. We will see more such debates next year to clarify these factors and protocols that would need to generate value for token holders in the end to stay relevant.
Perps, Privacy, AI, and Robotics are gonna come even stronger next year. While general users won’t care much about privacy since they are already pseudonymous, institutions, protocols, DAOs, and HNWIs will place greater emphasis on privacy-enabled flows. Perps and onchain spot will take a larger share of the CEXs than in 2025, and more finance will be enabled onchain.
The onboarding flow and capital flow into DeFi will find new ways. Generally, the way onboarding currently works will undergo a significant shift and be replaced by consumer applications. Applications like Aave App, Worldcoin, and others will be among the first venues new crypto users interact with. This will also help the newer audience avoid hacks, and “Low-Risk DeFi” will become more prominent.
Predictions Markets will win, but only Polymarket and Kalshi will be eating most of the pie. Though other players will contribute equally to the innovation, they will have their own niche audience. Apart from this, building on top of the already established apps will be super beneficial. Bots on Polymarket are going to explode, and any mispricing will be snatched in seconds, if not milliseconds, on markets with faster resolution.
2. Castle Cap Community Predictions
Ultra - Kalshi
2025 was the year prediction markets turned from apps to financial layers, from niche to the new way to trade theses. We are in an industry where it has been obvious to us for the past several years that the world was moving towards financialization of many aspects of our lives, including expertise. The rest of the world is now learning about what the future of finance looks like through exposure to PMs, every person is an expert at something, and they should have the tools to monetize such knowledge.
ProofofJake - RIP.FUN
Overall think the collectable space will grow expentionally over the next year to come, with the 30th anniversary of pokemon upcoming, with one pieces 30th also being in 2027. The previous year has given strong pmf indicators across many onchain rwa & specifically onchain collectible projects (courtyards exceptional growth, followed by others (https://dune.com/zkayape/pokemontcgsol)).
Kirby - HypurrCo
Hyperliquid will be the liquidity layer for all of finance.
HIP-3, volumes will be 10x with new deployers looking at long-tail assets. We’re gonna see unique perps and innovation powered by Hyperliquid.
Builder codes are already empowering existing apps with distribution (Phantom, Metamask), with revenues. Where the money is, attention will go and we’ll see more apps building with builder codes.
Eventually the lines would be blurred and abstracted away and people wouldn’t even know they’re trading on Hyperliquid’s infrastructure.
Building the blockchain to house all of finance is an ambitious goal, the road ahead might be tough and uphill but when you see a 100x, you drop everything to help make it a reality.
Matt - BackedFi
Tokenisation gives traditional assets the composability and the modularity that enable new opportunities for a more inclusive financial ecosystem for everyone, from institutional investors to retail. The insane growth of tokenised stocks in 2025 demonstrated that the demand is here and it is only going up by adding new use cases in DeFi and beyond.
Ericonomic - Supercexy
Perps are much closer to becoming truly mainstream beyond the CT echo chamber, largely thanks to Hyperliquid. Its success has helped many traders realize the extent to which most CEXs operate in opaque ways, driven primarily by their own incentives to extract value, while decentralized trading venues have matured into a real alternative. These venues can now offer a CEX-like user experience without the same structural conflicts of interest.
I expect that by 2026, DEX perp volume will reach 50% of CEX volume, and likely exceed it in practice, given how much reported CEX volume is inflated or outright fabricated. As a result, many regional and smaller CEXs will increasingly migrate to Hyperliquid’s infrastructure via builder codes.
Dan - Rysk
2026 will be a decisive year for DeFi.
The infrastructure is finally mature. The products that survived this cycle are battle-tested, and institutional players are starting to move meaningful size on-chain. That creates a real chance to prove that DeFi isn’t a niche or a casino but a cleaner, safer, and more efficient alternative to traditional finance rails.
Trading will still be led by perps and Hyperliquid will keep widening the gap.
Perps remain the dominant on-chain trading product. Liquidity, UX, and execution quality decide the winner, and Hyperliquid is far ahead. The emergence of new perp markets such as equity perps is a promising experiment, but onboarding new users and fresh liquidity from traditional finance will be the real challenge and the primary growth opportunity.
2026 will also be the year where options finally become mainstream in DeFi.
Not as a trading instrument. Perps won that.
The real opportunity is using options for targeted use cases like generating income from volatility and building payoff structures that don’t require users to interact with the underlying complexity.
Capital is already shifting toward products that use options behind the scenes rather than as a trading venue, and 2026 is the year this becomes obvious.
Tobias - Hyperliquid
2025-2026 for Hyperliquid
The coming year will be the time when Hyperliquid fulfills it’s vision to become the Blockchain to House all Finance. We have seen more of this lately with teams launching HIP-3 Markets for Forex, Rare metals and even Pokemon Cards. Besides Hyperliquid pushing better tech we recently saw more competition for Hyperliquid in terms of other perp DEXes launching, it will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Generally speaking a growing market is positive.
Insomniac - Thetanuts Finance
InfoFi is dead!
No, it isn’t. Not even close.
Just like every new space, InfoFi is going through its own growing pains. From accusations of facilitating AI Slop and projects that failed to deliver on their rewards, to questions about incentives and content quality, the space has definitely faced its fair share of drama in 2025.
But let’s take a step back.
Since Kaito Yaps launched over a year ago, it has become clear that InfoFi is here to stay. It will continue to evolve, and if you’ve been paying attention, you’d have seen signs of the changes to come. Banning and slashing bot behaviour is actively being pursued, onchain history will be used to build better participant profiles, and more thought is being given to how mindshare is measured and rewarded.
My bet is that 2026 is when we’ll see InfoFi mature further, with better mechanisms, streamlined incentives, and outcomes that meet the expectations of both users and projects.
So no, InfoFi isn’t dead. It’s in a state of metamorphosis.
And personally, it’s the phase I personally find interesting to watch.
Herres
AI will maintain its popularity and continues to be the main driver of stock returns, but first cracks will begin to show that it is partly in a bubble (overvaluations of AI startups in TradFi, Financial commitments-circle jerk, long-term loans 100bps above treasury yields).
Fundamentally, the Crypto and AI sector will flourish on segments such as Provenance and automation. What will work in web2 will work in web3, but maintaining provenance (of data) can efficiently be done in web3 with, e.g., ZKPs (zero-knowledge proofs) for specific use-cases (what is real and what is AI-generated).
We will NOT see the first major consumer app yet that uses an LLM (500m+ MAU).
95% of all AI value to humans will come from consumer apps utilising the best LLMs. However, the ‘’LLM Frontier’’ battle has to be fought first, and this will take time (at least 3-5 years).
A hallucinating ChatGPT misinterpreting/outright lying about provenance and data is not a real fundamental value.
The current apps with the highest MAU are mainly generative apps for Speech, Text, Video, and Audio. AI slop/bots will only get worse in 2026 as margins and competition increase.
We will see more enforcement of the distinction between generated content and human-generated content across different platforms. The more AI slop is generated, and bot networks are present, the more vocal people will get.
0xmars - Moonpay
2025 marked a defining moment in how fintech moved onchain. Financial apps are no longer just integrating crypto. They’re rebuilding their stacks directly on blockchain rails.
This shift has been enabled by two critical primitives maturing at the same time. On and offramps have evolved from basic infrastructure into scalable, UX-first onboarding layers that make onchain finance usable for anyone, while stablecoins have become a default way value is held and moved onchain.
What’s emerging is not just new infrastructure, but a foundational layer for global money movement. One where value moves as freely as information on the internet.
Sakshi - A1 Research
USD shares in global reserves are falling down meaning money is moving away from USD(fiat global reserve) to hard assets like gold. Since Gold is a physical asset it comes with its own set of problems, hence, bitcoin is the asset where money will be parked. Many counties already are thinking of BTC reserves and many will follow.
Real world tokenisation is also seeing the momentum and will have aggressive onboarding of institutions tokenising and playing on onchain rail. 2025 -> institutions started with DATs(majorly investing in crypto) but 2026 will be on the onchain rails themselves. If institutions are coming onchain they cannot operate on such transparent environment, hence many chains will be following the privacy as a service playbook. Which means on the already popular chains today they will get an option to make their activities private.
I feel volatility will continue in Q1, but we will have a strong Q2 in terms of BTC price action and later Q2 certain alts will follow but as we got to know in this cycles, winners will be very few so position yourself carefully.
Darren - IPOR
Continued rate cuts going into US midterms spark a risk on rally, treasury yield drops and DeFi stablecoin lending optimizers print a nice risk returns. Ethena rates back on the rise and the return of DeFi native yield bearing stables and their loops create plenty of carry trade opportunities for new RWA collaterals entering the market. Fusion grows on all three fronts across lending optimization, leveraged looping strats, and take trades.
Route2fi
My outlook for the crypto industry in general is positive, but not for altcoins. I think we are getting close to saturation for altcoins, and as an example over the last 3 months we’ve seen countless ICOs that launches on TGE 50-70% down within the first 24 hours.
Crypto is constantly evolving and I think we’re moving from a phase where People stop shilling altcoins, and instead start focusing on the actual usecases of protocols instead. IMO this is a good thing, because we don’t need more tokens without any usecases.
For 2026 I think we will see even more TradFi dominance. KYC-gated products like Stocks for both spot/perps backed 1:1 and leverage products within prediction markets. Also, I think TradFi will rule this industry. People like us won’t be hired anymore for roles based on thing we post on Twitter. With that said I still think we have 2-5 years left.
unexployed - VC Fund
“Spray-and-pray VC is dead. Projects have been much better off proving their product with an MVP first, then raising through a public launch. Many VCs have collapsed and pivoted to servicing, advisory, market making, and OTC, scrambling to maintain a private edge over retail. Many will realise they do not have an edge there either. The collapse of these funds are an inevitable, healthy wash for this space. Bold VCs pivoted to liquid and entered the arena as equals.”
cryptopleb - Chad memecoin trader
In crypto trading, the market often swings rapidly between extreme greed and extreme fear. Eventually, we’ll return to a state of extreme greed—altcoins will recover, and everything will stabilize. Keep an eye on emerging narratives such as robotics and prediction markets, as these sectors are attracting significant capital. They may present some of the most promising opportunities ahead.
3. Friends of Castle’s Predictions
Joshua - Mantle
RWAs are moving past experimentation and into scale — from roughly $36B today to a path that points toward the trillion‑dollar mark this decade. Fixed income proved demand first, but tokenized equities growing over 100x in a year signal where velocity will come from next. In 2026, issuance will matter less than utilization: assets that are borrowed against, traded 24/7, and reused across DeFi will dominate. Institutional adoption will deepen through infrastructure like onchain settlement and messaging layers, not retail-facing brands. Retail traction will accelerate where minimums fall from millions to dollars and liquidity stays open on weekends. The gap between 0.01% tokenized penetration and real market size is the opportunity. Fragmented liquidity remains the constraint, and interoperability is the release valve. By 2026, RWAs won’t be judged by how much value sits onchain, but by how often that value moves.
Nader - EigenCloud
Three things seemed to have clicked in 2025: crypto earned real legitimacy with traditional finance, AI agents found genuine product-market fit with crypto primitives, and x402 opened the door to internet-native payments at scale. In the past people would ask “why would you use crypto for this?”, now we have a real answer to “why wouldn’t you?”
Tim - Chaos Labs
DeFi is only going to get more complex. Over the past year, activity has been clustered around highly sophisticated Ethena/Pendle-style looping, with Maple and others following into similarly structured trades. Yield-bearing stables are going to diversify significantly: more risk tranching, more source variety, and more products engineered around predictable risk/return profiles rather chasing the highest (non-risk-adjusted) returns.
DeFi is also getting more layers. Assets are starting to behave like L1s, lending/borrowing protocols like L2s, and vaults like L3s—stacked abstractions where each layer packages risk, liquidity, and composability differently. Market efficiency is likely to increase substantially as more quantitatively-minded participants enter the space, bringing tighter pricing, faster arbitrage, and less systemic capital allocation.
The continued narrative-based debate between liquidity fragmentation versus risk segregation is going to persist. No clear “winner” emerges until TVL grows by orders of magnitude.
Wizzdom - Researcher
Privacy tech will become the moat and continue to mature while being deeply integrated across emerging crypto verticals, from prediction markets to stablecoins, with early examples of this convergence seen in projects like mirageprivacy.
New forms of prediction markets are also emerging as of late 2025, such as Bentodotfun, predictdotfun, and 42space to name a few.
x402 activity is set to rapidly increase on the Solana network, coming from Tempo, Arc, and more. More so, most enterprises will prefer Solana’s neutrality, and as such, activity increases on the network.
Meanwhile, the pace of new L2 launches is likely to slow, as investors, institutions, and users increasingly prioritize product-market fit and real-world utility over TPS.
Alessandro - The Block
Heightened fragmentation across the ecosystem (L1s/L2s/DeFi) leads to an increased dependency on interoperability protocols/intents systems.
Stables, Perps, and Privacy get the most attention from institutions/new comers.
UX improvements arise across the stack, with non-natives becoming the new primary target audience.
Lito - Socket Protocol
Think we are firmly in a bear market and have been for a while. The sooner you accept this and stop anchoring your portfolio to ATH’s the happier and more successful you will be. Why are we in a bear market? In one word: uncertainty. I don’t think I have to list all the factors here, I mean look at the fucking world e This will improve over time as key issues get either resolved (tarrifs, wars, quantum etc.) or priced in but for now the uncertainty hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles.
On top of being in a bear market it feels like a regiment change for crypto. The fluff years are over. Wall street and Sillicon Valley is moving in and with it they bring their P/E’s and CAC’s and unit economics.
Personally, I am excited for this next period. I think we’ll see an acceleration in product development and utility we’ve never seen before in crypto. You had a glimpse of this with hyperliquid and ethena the past two years, where two exceptional founders scaled their products to multi billion dollar businesses at breakneck speed and built better products than founders had in the 10 years of crypto before.
I am not exactly sure how to best summarize how you can prepare for this new phase of crypto aside from having a pulse on the market and a ry good read on founder skills but i will share more about this as my thinking crystalizes.
Btw this doesn’t mean that only banks and wall street will capitalize from this next era. Far from it. The crypto native gtm is still superior (token incentives, global, highly active global user base etc.) and cypherpunk ideas like privacy have more PMF than ever, i simply think the cards will be reshuffled. Some DeFi founders won’t adapt to this next phase and die. Others will thrive and also new ones will surface.
Sectors that I’m bullish on:
credit (things like USDai or Daylight) that issue credit for infrastructure expansion/financing alongside solid data-driven models to underwrite these investments
innovation in DeFi like Fluid improving capital efficiency by blending their money market and DEX into 1 (i think DEX v2 will make them #1 DEX) and protocols that make DeFi Yield easier to use for the outside world (e.g aggregating, tranching, interest rate swaps etc.)
exchanges aka “perpification of everything” the trend of perp trading moving on chain is clear and i think we’ll have a similar dynamic than with CEX’s where you have 5 big ones. Hyperliquid is the winner here for now but good contenders are lighter, extended, ethereal, ostium, (hyena not rly competing as its built on HL).
prediction markets; the CFTC’s decision to legalize prediction market was a watershed moment for prediction markets. There’s no fundamental reason PM’s are part of “crypto” but given it’s a completely new industry it makes sense all the main players use crypto rails (stablecoins, smart contracts for settling markets, tokenisation for composability etc.). Polymarket, Kalshi will 100% launch tokens and we’ll see upstream innovation (lending markets, pro terminals like Fireplace.gg)
Neobanks and SuperApps; nothing controversial here. Bundling all the crypto primitives, perps, spot, stablecoins, yield into an easily usable but NON-CUSTODIAL mobile app is still a massive untapped opportunity that feels ripe for its time.
And who knows maybe new things will appear out of the blue as has often been the case in this industry. We can’t predict everything but one thing is guaranteed:
CRYPTO WILL WIN.
Tim - DeFi Strategist
This year it’s been a rollercoaster. Positive start, ETH DD due to political factors. Hitting the ATH due to DATs purchases amplified by reemerged belief and now we are back driving the highway down. BTC has stabilized at it’s range due to Tradfi capital inflow
During the next year I expect BTC price action in the range 75-140k and ETH 2000-6000. Expect the growth of RWAs and private credits to diversify from onchain risks along with the drop of onchain yield. DATs in 2026 concentrate on moving assets to vaults to generate additional yield for underlying assets.
Crypto Linn
We have never had more tailwinds than now, crypto has just lost it’s identity of pushing against something, drawdowns are infinitely easier to withstand if you feel like you’re fighting the good fight against tradfi and banks, little harder when they are involved, with tradfi comes tradfi games...little patience will be rewarded and expecting 2026 to be a hell of a year for those that steadily DCA in while we dump/chop.
Also no one is ready for what Pendle has coming up in 2026.
pendle.
DeanKD - rwa.xyz
The U.S. has led tokenisation so far, but Europe, and more specifically Germany, is starting to grab more market share. Germany’s stablecoin market cap grew from roughly $500m to nearly $4b in 2025. This is primarily due to MiCA leading to more institutional demand.
We’re going to see a huge wave of tokenised money market funds launched by traditional institutions and commercial banks. Incumbents have now realised that tokenisation increases liquidity and lowers operational overhead, which makes it an obvious evolution for them.
Tokenised private credit will likely double in value as issuers see that having an off-chain loan represented on-chain materially improves operational efficiency.
IMO, 2026 is the year when tokenised US equities will take off. Whereas I still expect corporate bonds to remain relatively subdued as the existing market structure works to a ‘fine’ level for most issuers.
Across the board, institutional interest has shifted from ‘should we explore tokenisation?’ to ‘how fast we can move’. I’m speaking daily with banks, regulators and asset managers - it’s very clear that more liquidity is preparing to enter the space, particularly in H1.
Most tokenized assets are facing B2B GTM problems not techincal issuance problems. In 2026, I predict the biggest shift in tokenisation will be in GTM, not in technology. Most are forgetting basic growth principles, such as thinking buyer first rather than asset first. Institutions don’t buy any ‘tokenised assets’, they buy those that already fit within their compliance and custody constraints
Wajahat Mughal - Spreads Finance
Thoughts on yield in general (stablecoins & other yield assets):
Yield in general is getting commoditised, so offering high APRs isn’t good enough for a business, protocol or asset issuer. It’s rare there is a moat around this now. Everything is always about distribution ability. The exceptions are things that normally you cannot access at all - Rysk (option yield), Yield basis (AMM yield no IL), & Neutrl (OTC trade yield).
We’ll end up seeing all sorts of weird and wonderful yield products come from web2, things usually like private credit & insurance yield
DeFi yields come entirely from speculation. If there isn’t demand for leverage or speculation on crypto, yields will collapse to the T-Bill rate.
When people start speculating on BTC again, when eventually it starts putting in some green candles, expect the yield to go up again!
What to expect in 2026 with DeFi?
Huge tokenised stocks ecosystem. Not just asset issuing, but I think we’ll have AMMs, orderbooks, derivatives, yield products & more for every stock practically on chain, frictionless & easy as buying ETH onchain today.
(Spreads is going to build in this domain going forward too)
Blue - LayerZero
Crypto marketing matured more in 2025 than in any previous year. As the industry enters an early phase of adoption, marketing’s role is shifting from proving relevance and capturing attention to earning trust. We’ve seen a clear split emerge between short-term, algorithm-driven tactics aimed at viral reach and more disciplined brand strategies focused on long-term positioning and expansion beyond the traditional DeFi power-user audience.
Larger crypto brands are increasingly investing in traditional channels such as email, paid social, research, and a growing presence on LinkedIn. With Crypto tech effectively validated in 2025, institutional and financial services adoption has accelerated, driving a lot of logo x logo marketing as brands seek to grab credibility and alignment to well established brands outside of DeFi, momentum that will continue into 2026. At the same time, messaging is moving beyond product-led narratives toward emotional resonance and identity alignment, as audiences grow fatigued with surface-level metrics, blockchain jargon, and marginal performance claims. While mindshare gimmicks are fading, mindshare itself remains a key indicator of brand relevance and share of voice, and I don’t see it disappearing from the marketing landscape at all.
What I’m most interested in next is how acquisition strategies evolve. There’s a real opportunity for a crypto-powered neobank to win meaningful market share with the right execution, borrowing heavily from the playbooks of traditional banks.
Huf - Pear Protocol
My core view in 2026 will be increased dispersion of returns between the “good” and the “bad”.
Assets like BTC have a structural buyer in the form of ETF allocations, and an asset allocation decision at tradfi firms to move from a 1% allocation to a 3% allocation can be meaningful. Additionally, revenue-producing protocols can widen their offering into equities and other RWAs that previously faced higher regulatory barriers. Meanwhile, there are still large pending emissions from many other top 100 projects and no marginal buyer for that supply. In 2026, I expect to see BTC.d find a floor around 60% and move higher throughout the year, and the “Long BTC / short trash” to play out in both bull and bear scenarios.
Other thematic Long/Short ideas that I like include long MNT / Short BNB as Bybit aggressively wins CEX market share from Binance and integrates MNT utility more deeply into their ecosystem. In the DEX Space competition is heating up and we will continue to see innovation in the form of optimising collateral and the yield thereof. The merger of CLOBs with DeFi tooling is interesting and will continue to evolve with the likes of Nado, Extended and Hyperliquid redefining the value proposition for a user to trade there.
Overall, I am macro cautious and think BTC finds a floor around 65-70k and recovers closer to the mid-terms in November 2026.