Andreessen Horowitz Predicts Crypto's Next Phase Beyond Blockchains

Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm has identified three emerging areas that will drive cryptocurrency development beyond blockchain infrastructure in 2026. The venture capital firm's crypto investment division points to prediction markets, verifiable computing, and “staked media” as the next frontiers for industry growth.

This represents a significant shift from the previous focus on building new blockchains and scaling solutions. Instead, the emphasis is now on applications that leverage existing blockchain technology to create practical, decentralized services. The firm’s outlook suggests that the crypto industry is entering a more mature phase where utility and real-world applications take precedence over technical infrastructure development.

Andreessen Horowitz has been a major player in cryptocurrency investment since 2013. The firm's crypto arm has consistently backed blockchain projects and infrastructure development. Their latest forecast indicates a fundamental change in how the industry will evolve.

The venture firm's crypto division stated that the next phase of crypto will be defined by applications rather than protocols. This marks a departure from the previous cycle, which saw intense competition among blockchain platforms to achieve scalability and interoperability. The focus is now shifting to what can be built on top of these existing systems.

The timing of this prediction is significant, as it comes after years of infrastructure building across the crypto ecosystem. Major blockchains have established themselves, and the groundwork has been laid for more complex applications to flourish. Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm sees this as the moment when the industry can finally deliver on its promise of decentralized services.

The firm has identified three specific sectors that will define crypto's evolution in 2026. These areas represent different approaches to leveraging blockchain technology for practical applications.

Prediction Markets

Prediction markets allow users to bet on the outcomes of real-world events. These markets harness collective wisdom to forecast everything from elections to market movements. By using blockchain technology, prediction markets can operate without central authorities and with transparent, verifiable results.

The decentralized nature of blockchain makes it ideal for prediction markets. It ensures that no single entity can manipulate outcomes or control the flow of information. This creates a more trustworthy and efficient system for aggregating information and making predictions.

Verifiable Computing

Verifiable computing represents a breakthrough in how computational work can be proven and validated. This technology allows one party to prove to another that a computation was performed correctly without revealing the underlying data or requiring the verifier to repeat the work.

This has profound implications for cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and data processing. It enables trustless verification of computational results, which could revolutionize how businesses and individuals outsource computing tasks while maintaining privacy and security guarantees.

Staked Media

The concept of “staked media” involves using cryptocurrency stakes to validate, distribute, or monetize media content. This could include systems where content creators and consumers stake tokens to participate in networks, or where media platforms operate on decentralized, stake-based governance models.

This approach aims to create new economic models for digital content that reduce reliance on centralized platforms and give more control to creators and communities. It represents a potential solution to issues of censorship, platform fees, and content discovery that plague current media distribution systems.

The shift toward applications represents a maturation of the cryptocurrency space. For years, the industry has been dominated by discussions of scalability solutions, consensus mechanisms, and blockchain interoperability. While these remain important, the focus is now turning to what these technologies can actually accomplish.

This evolution mirrors the early days of the internet, when the initial infrastructure (TCP/IP, DNS, browsers) gave way to a flourishing of applications and services that transformed daily life. Similarly, the blockchain infrastructure that has been built over the past decade may now enable a new generation of decentralized applications.

For developers and entrepreneurs, this signals an opportunity to build products that solve real problems rather than just technical challenges. For investors, it suggests that value will increasingly accrue to applications and services rather than just base-layer protocols.

The prediction also highlights how Andreessen Horowitz views the competitive landscape. By identifying these three specific areas, the firm is essentially mapping out where it believes the most important innovations will occur. This could influence where venture capital flows and which projects receive funding in the coming year.

The year 2026 represents a pivotal moment in cryptocurrency's timeline. By this point, the industry will have had over a decade and a half to develop from Bitcoin's original launch. Major platforms like Ethereum have matured, and layer-2 scaling solutions have addressed many of the throughput limitations that previously constrained applications.

Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm's statement suggests that the pieces are now in place for the industry to deliver on its original promises. The focus on prediction markets, verifiable computing, and staked media indicates confidence that blockchain technology can now support sophisticated, real-world applications at scale.

This outlook also implies that the industry may be entering a phase where adoption is driven by utility rather than speculation. Applications that provide genuine value—whether through better forecasting, more efficient computing verification, or fairer media distribution—are more likely to achieve mainstream acceptance than purely financial instruments.

The prediction serves as a roadmap for where the crypto industry might be headed. It identifies specific technical capabilities that have matured enough to enable new types of services. For an industry that has often been criticized for lacking practical applications, this vision of 2026 offers a concrete picture of what widespread blockchain adoption might actually look like.