The first month of 2026 is closing and as we look to what the year will bring, founders and investors point to stablecoins, AI and regulations, among other topics, to drive business and investment this year.
“2026 could be the inflection where crypto becomes core financial infrastructure rather than a parallel ecosystem.” — Daniel Liu, CEO and founder of Republic Technologies
Stablecoins’ Starring Role
“Stablecoins will become much more prevalent as applications in remittance and overseas payments for consumers and businesses grow. We have seen consumers in the U.S. using stablecoins for crypto trading and on/off-boarding between fiat currency and cryptocurrencies, but 2026 will also see the rise of stablecoins as a means of paying overseas vendors who prefer to hold onto U.S. dollar until they need to convert and spend in their local currencies. In this regard, the interest in some emerging markets to hold assets in USD will drive the adoption among payers in the U.S. — Don Butler, managing director at Thomvest Ventures
“Stablecoin issuance will remain an important foundation of the digital-asset ecosystem. For 2026, however, the strategic focus will start to shift toward the orchestration of transactions built on stablecoin infrastructure. Market participants will look to capture the value from coordination, routing and settlement across on-chain and off-chain environments. We will see an increased focus on interoperability, which means platforms that span payment networks, DeFi protocols, bank systems, etc.” — Emily Goodman, Partner at strategic consulting firm FS Vector
“We’re in the early innings of stablecoin adoption for commerce use cases, and 2026 is the year that the velocity starts to really ramp. The delineation between fiat and stablecoins will be increasingly blurred as banks start managing both for their customers. AI is the macro wave that will pull together many sub-categories of fintech that have emerged over the past few years. Embedded lending and payments, tokenization, stablecoins, micropayments and real time payments will all see increased adoption as everything becomes more contextual in an AI first world.” — Jay Ganatra, co-founder and managing partner at early-stage fintech investor Infinity Ventures
Where the Money Will Move
“…On the ground, it seems like there’s more curiosity about breakthrough innovation today than what we have seen in the past five years. Everything from materials technology through life sciences is seemingly vibrant. I would contribute this innovation cycle to the traditional VC model, which remains alive and well, albeit somewhat inflated relative to prior cycles. The shift toward later-stage startups is driven by growing retail demand rather than traditional VCs.
The retail market has observed the momentous rise of a few large private companies and unlike prior cycles, this market can now readily access a piece of these meteoric stories through secondaries, which are somewhat disintermediated from the capital flow that supports innovation. I think the access to late-stage private companies is a net positive for the market.” — Nik Talreja, CEO of Sydecar, an SPV and fund administration platform for venture
“The startups that raised during the 2021 boom will have to either manage to raise if they haven’t already or they will have to sell or close down. The number of startups from that vintage are going to go down substantially.” — Farzin Shadpour, managing director at Silicon Foundry
Get ready for a thaw
“Early?stage will thaw before late?stage: seed and A rounds pick up modestly while mega?rounds remain selective and concentrated in infrastructure, real?time money movement, and AI?native risk/compliance.” — Matt Brown, partner at Matrix
AI Proves Its Point
“We’re witnessing an acceleration in both technological capability and consumer acceptance that suggests traditional adoption timelines for emerging technologies may no longer apply,” Parikh said. “At the start of 2025, AI integration within fintech was largely theoretical. By year-end, we saw major infrastructure providers like Google and Stripe launching agentic commerce platforms — Cash App included — in a matter of months rather than the typical multi-year development cycles.” — Tanuj Parikh, head of commercial North America at Cash App and Afterpay
“You’re going to start seeing the very first sort of real-world applications where people are going to figure out what’s the point in which you need an interaction, for example, with the buyer to make an authorization. Rather than me doing the research, I’m going to ask an agentic to figure out what is the best thing for my requirements, and then bring it to me so I can make a decision on whether I should buy it or not. There’s a giant evolution on ERPs, where they’re starting to build in agentic experiences to automatically do payables, to manage receivables and give the accountant or CFO all of the context, the data and the information to decide if they should make a payment or not.” — Avinash Chidambaram, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency payment rails company Cybrid
“As AI agents and large language models become embedded in critical financial operations, the risk conversation will expand dramatically beyond bias and hallucinations. In 2026, financial institutions will grapple with AI risks that directly threaten operational resilience, from data residency challenges to systemic failures that could trigger regulatory sanctions. European regulators are already signaling stricter oversight, and boards will demand comprehensive risk frameworks that treat AI deployment as seriously as any other mission-critical system. Firms without robust data foundations will find themselves unable to deploy AI at scale.” — Rinesh Patel, Snowflake’s global head of financial services
