The Infrastructure Thesis Is Playing Out

Six months after publishing our 2026 predictions, the areas where our conviction has increased the most.

Authors: Augie Ilag, Aryan Sheikhalian

At the beginning of the year, our Head of Research, Aryan Sheikhalian, published CMT Digital's predictions for 2026. The argument was that crypto had entered a different phase of development. The question was no longer whether the technology worked, but where it delivered structural advantages over existing systems.

Six months later, we believe that core thesis has only strengthened.

The biggest change is not that new narratives have emerged. It is that many of the trends we highlighted at the start of the year are beginning to move from theory to implementation. Regulatory uncertainty has declined. Institutional participation has expanded. Stablecoins have moved further into the financial mainstream. Capital markets activity onchain continues to grow.

Most importantly, adoption is increasingly being driven by utility rather than speculation. Businesses are using stablecoins to move money more efficiently. Institutions are exploring tokenized assets to improve settlement and collateral mobility. Enterprises are evaluating digital asset infrastructure to solve operational challenges. While we continue to have conviction across many of the themes outlined in our original predictions, several areas have emerged as particular points of focus for our investment team.

Stablecoins Have Moved From Product to Platform

At the beginning of the year, we argued that stablecoins were becoming the settlement layer of the dollar. Today, we believe the opportunity has expanded beyond settlement.

More than any other category in crypto, stablecoins have achieved meaningful product-market fit. Before decentralized finance, DePIN, and other onchain applications can achieve mass adoption, tens of millions of users must first hold and transact in stablecoins through custodial or non-custodial wallets.

Much of the industry's attention has focused on cross-border payments. While this remains one of the clearest adoption vectors, the market is rapidly becoming crowded. The more interesting question is what comes next.

Once a business receives payments, manages balances, and settles obligations in stablecoins, an entirely new set of financial products becomes possible. Treasury management, payroll, foreign exchange, supplier financing, and working capital solutions all become natural extensions of the stablecoin account. We believe some of the most attractive opportunities over the coming years will emerge from companies that transform stablecoin payment flows into broader financial operating systems. Our portfolio company Tazapay, already a leading provider of cross-border payments across Asia, is expanding beyond payments by building a suite of business banking solutions on top of its world-class payments infrastructure.

On the consumer side, we are increasingly interested in products that combine stablecoin infrastructure with differentiated distribution. Card issuance remains an attractive category, particularly among program managers targeting large, underserved user segments with unique value propositions. We are also paying close attention to crypto-native neobanks that use stablecoins as the settlement layer while abstracting blockchain complexity from the user. Companies such as MoretaPay exemplify this approach by connecting real-time payment networks globally through stablecoin infrastructure, effectively connecting the world’s local rails into one overarching network, with stablecoins on the backend. 

Beyond Tokenization

One of the strongest themes from our original predictions was tokenization and the expansion of collateral markets. Six months later, we believe the market increasingly understands that the opportunity is not tokenization itself, but market structure.

Traditional financial markets continue to rely on delayed settlement, fragmented balance sheets, and opaque over-the-counter coordination. Blockchain technology offers a path toward improving capital formation, collateral mobility, and settlement efficiency.

We remain particularly excited about onchain lending. The most attractive credit categories tend to exhibit homogeneous assets, legible underwriting risk, and meaningful coordination inefficiencies. U.S. consumer credit is a compelling example. The asset class is relatively straightforward to underwrite, yet lacks the equivalent of the securitization infrastructure that transformed the mortgage market. We believe blockchain-based coordination can create meaningful efficiencies in these markets. Tare.io is one company tackling this challenge by building a lending infrastructure marketplace that routes borrower demand to compatible lenders via origination, servicing, and marketplace APIs.

At the infrastructure layer, we are increasingly interested in companies solving operational challenges for financial institutions. Businesses such as Canton, Onyx, and portfolio companies Hamsa and Superstate are notable because they address real enterprise pain points rather than simply putting assets onchain. Hamsa is modernizing clearing, settlement, and other back-office workflows through a unified ledger that automates financial operations, while Superstate is building the operational infrastructure that enables asset managers to bring existing investment funds onchain without disrupting their existing service providers or workflows. In both cases, tokenization is a natural consequence of better financial infrastructure rather than the product itself.

We believe the winners in RWAs may ultimately look less like tokenization platforms and more like enterprise software companies.

AI and Crypto Are Narrowing Toward Real Use Cases

The AI conversation has only intensified since the start of the year. Much of the capital, talent, and attention entering technology continues to concentrate around AI.

Our view remains that most AI and crypto projects will struggle because they apply blockchain technology where traditional infrastructure would suffice. However, a small number of categories continue to stand out.

The first is agentic payment infrastructure. While standards may eventually consolidate around a small number of protocols such as x402 and MPP, significant challenges remain unsolved. Identity, attribution, reputation, recourse, and trust all sit within the operational layer between payment execution and real-world commerce. These challenges become increasingly important as autonomous agents begin interacting not only with other machines but also with businesses and consumers. Our portfolio company TrustPixel is building this trust layer, enabling secure agentic commerce through identity verification, policy enforcement, and verifiable transaction receipts.

The second area is decentralized data acquisition. As AI inference becomes increasingly commoditized, proprietary data becomes one of the most valuable sources of competitive advantage. We believe this dynamic will create a new wave of experimentation around data collection and coordination.

Crypto-native incentive systems may play an important role in these markets, although the challenge remains substantial. Successful data networks must continuously evolve alongside frontier AI models rather than simply incentivizing the collection of data that is already widely available. The opportunity lies in building systems capable of continuously producing increasingly valuable datasets as AI capabilities advance.

Our view is that quality data is the constraint in the AGI arms race. Frontier labs need training data that teaches agents to do long running tasks, and we see a multi-billion dollar opportunity for companies that can produce a continuous supply of increasingly difficult datasets.

New Trading Venues Continue to Expand the Universe of Tradable Assets

At the beginning of the year, we discussed the "perpification of almost everything." That thesis continues to play out. We are increasingly focused on businesses creating entirely new categories of financial markets rather than simply competing within existing ones.

Equity perpetuals remain one of the most visible examples. We continue to be excited by companies such as our portfolio company Architect, which is pursuing a vision of global asset access beginning with U.S. equity perpetuals through a regulated exchange structure.

We are also increasingly interested in compute derivatives. Compute exhibits many characteristics of a commodity market, yet price discovery remains immature and fragmented. For this category to develop, participants must solve challenges around supply concentration, fungibility, standardization, and physical settlement. If successful, we believe compute could become one of the most important new financial markets created during the AI era.

Beyond exchanges themselves, we are interested in specialized trading experiences built for specific customer segments. The success of products such as Axiom demonstrates the value of deeply understanding a particular trader archetype and designing workflows specifically for that audience. We expect future category leaders to emerge from highly focused products rather than generalized trading interfaces.

Looking Ahead

Across each of these themes, we see the same underlying pattern. The infrastructure layer has largely been built. The next phase of value creation is occurring higher in the stack through financial products, enterprise software, trading venues, and applications that own customer relationships and transaction flow.

Six months after our original predictions, our conviction has increased not because new narratives have emerged, but because existing ones are increasingly being validated by real adoption. The most compelling opportunities are those where crypto creates a meaningfully better outcome than the alternative.

Disclosures:

For informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.  The views expressed herein are those of the author as of the time of writing and may not necessarily represent the views of CMT Digital and its affiliates. Certain information contained in the piece has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of CMT Digital. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, CMT Digital has not independently verified such information.

 References to any securities, digital assets, tokens, and/or cryptocurrencies are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation to invest in any such instrument nor do such references constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services. This content is not intended for investors or prospective investors and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision, including a decision to invest in any vehicles managed by CMT Digital. Such offerings are only made via formal offering documents. 

Past performance is not indicative of future results. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, and/or opinions expressed in this piece are subject to change without notice.