According to Gate Ventures, its 2026 forecast identifies five emerging frontiers that are expected to shape the next stage of industry development. First, real-time information aggregators for cross-chain markets have become an essential intelligence layer that unifies fragmented and fluid data.
Second, decentralized payments and foreign exchange rails are increasingly replacing traditional neobanks by enabling borderless, real-time settlement.
Third, automated financial systems are beginning to take shape with autonomous robots coordinating and transacting across the chain.
Fourth, institutional DeFi is shifting toward unified over-the-chain platforms by standardizing diverse on-chain returns.
Fifth, cryptocurrency miners are evolving into distributed power providers and computing infrastructure for the AI era.
Gate Ventures notes that collectively these developments point to a tectonic shift in how value, computing and intelligence move across the global economy, while also signaling growing momentum for cryptocurrency companies and ecosystems seeking public listings and expanding investment pipelines ahead of an IPO.
The cryptocurrency industry enters 2026 at a crucial moment for the cryptocurrency and computing ecosystem. After more than a decade of building core infrastructure, Web3 now intersects the fastest growing sectors of the global economy.
The coming year will not be defined by incremental improvements, but by the emergence of completely new order surfaces: real-time information aggregators for onchain markets become the smart layer of cryptocurrencies; Borderless payment solutions and FX networks that replace legacy fintech pathways; Autonomous robots began to coordinate and transact on-chain through automated financial systems; Integrating institutional DeFi into unified risk and return drivers; Miners are evolving into globally distributed AI-driven computing and energy service providers.
Together, these forces point to a tectonic shift in how agents of value, computing, and intelligence move around the world, creating one of the most powerful asymmetric investment environments since the beginning of the cryptocurrency industry.
For projects being developed in these areas, Gate Ventures welcomes the opportunity to network.
Interested teams can contact Gate Ventures on X at @gate_ventures or send proposals to [email protected]
Real-time information aggregators for cross-chain markets
A new class of information aggregators has become one of the most important layers in Web3. With on-chain activity accelerating and market forecasting, governance data, social feeds, trading flows, and AI-generated signals spreading across Polymarket, Hyperliquid, Kalshi, Hedgehog, and multiple chains, the real issue is no longer access to data.
It makes sense. Each platform produces its own stream of possibilities, incentives, and narratives, none of which line up into a unified vision. The next major breakthrough is the infrastructure that brings these signals together and turns them into a coherent image.
These complexes go far beyond the charts. They ingest fragmented event data, unify probabilities and sentiment, blend on-chain telemetry with social context, and turn dispersed activity into clear insights for traders, institutions, DAOs, institutions, and automated systems. It’s a shift similar to what Bloomberg brought to traditional markets, organizing chaos into something you can actually act on.
The emergence of artificial intelligence agents makes this even more important. Agents need clean, structured, real-time data to manage risk, allocate liquidity, react to events, and execute strategies without human supervision.
As autonomous systems begin to participate in markets, the demand for an integrated intelligence feed that streamlines the entire information landscape becomes inevitable.
By 2026, the most powerful platforms in this category will be those that can combine decentralized information at scale with fast, interpretable intelligence. In a world awash in noise, the ability to standardize and interpret signals is the defining advantage, and one of Web3’s most overlooked opportunities.
Neo-banking and borderless payment infrastructure and forex settlement via Onchain
New fintech banks have improved the user experience but remain limited by legacy rails such as ACH, SWIFT, card networks, correspondent banks and friendly payment providers, systems designed for humans and business hours rather than machines, global commerce or real-time settlement.
In contrast, blockchain networks now enable the unlimited and permanent transfer of value at scale. Stablecoins serve as global settlement assets, while decentralized liquidity layers and smart contract routers provide persistent, programmable tokens between currencies such as USDC, EURC, and Japanese Yen-denominated stablecoins.
This opens up a new financial architecture where payments and foreign currencies move as freely as data. Businesses can automate cross-border payroll, invoicing, treasury flows, and hedging; Traders can quote in one currency and settle instantly in another; The machines can transact independently without bank accounts.
As an open, permissionless system, it becomes a global settlement layer that connects real-world trade with on-chain economies, not a replication of neobanks, but the fintechs of payment and forex infrastructure could never achieve.
Infrastructure for robots and automated financial bars
AI and robotics in Web2 are progressing rapidly, with significant advances from 1X, Figure, Skild, and Unitree and increased investment in physical AI. As robots shift from scripted machines to autonomous embodied agents, a critical gap emerges: different models and manufacturers cannot communicate or coordinate through a common neutral layer.
This creates a demand for an open operating layer across devices, something Web3 can provide. On-chain identities (DIDs) allow bots to identify themselves without vendor control; Smart contract registries allow them to publish capabilities, status, and telemetry; Tamper-resistant records provide verifiable accountability.
Smart contracts can coordinate tasks and workflows across multi-vendor fleets, providing a layer of interoperability that traditional robotics suites lack.
Autonomous robots also need a machine-native financial system to pay for power, data, computing, and services, yet traditional finance is unusable for them: robots cannot open accounts, pass KYC, or operate human-centric payment paths. Web3 gives bots direct economic agency through wallets, signatures, and global micropayments without intermediaries.
Blockchains provide instant, low-cost settlement, and standards like x402 enable agents to pay for access or services automatically. Smart contracts add escrow, conditional payments, insurance and reputation systems, forming a limitless programmable financial layer specifically designed for machine-to-machine commerce.
Cryptocurrencies do not become an optional add-on, but the only viable infrastructure for autonomous automated ecosystems.
As CeDeFi infrastructure matures, trading, lending, and returns are converging on unified risk platforms where users can borrow, trade, and earn in a single environment. Next-generation venues integrate companies with lending and treasury markets so that collateral can generate income while supporting leveraged positions, and the shared margin system across spot transactions, puts and options makes these platforms functionally similar to a 24/7 multi-asset prime broker.
However, on-chain returns are still scattered across staking and re-staking rewards, per capita funding and basis, MEV and order flow, LP and IL (non-permanent loss) fees, stablecoin and FX basis, RWA versus NAV gaps for off-chain assets, and liquidity premiums in prediction markets and InfoFi markets.
The opportunity for 2026 is to manipulate these synthetically productive “atoms” and assemble them into descriptively productive products. Aggregated strategies can aggregate market structure income (funding, basis, MEV, FX spreads), stack underlying returns with hedging and arbitrage layers, and use prediction markets and AI proxies as allocation signals – transforming fragmented sources into regulated and transparent on-chain fixed income products and repositioning CeDeFi as full return and risk drivers rather than standalone trading fronts.
Cryptocurrency miners as computing and energy providers for distributed AI
With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence, the demand for energy has increasingly increased, while the current energy supply capacity is facing a major shortage. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), electricity consumption in global data centers is expected to double from 415 TWh in 2024 to 945 TWh by 2030, representing 2.5-3% of total global electricity consumption.
However, the development of new energy sources is often hampered by complex grid connection procedures, stringent site requirements, and long construction and approval cycles. The imbalance between power supply and demand for computing power has become a new pain point in the era of artificial intelligence.
In this context, cryptocurrency mining companies, which already possess abundant energy reserves and have over the past decade developed highly efficient models for managing the costs of electricity use, are becoming increasingly attractive.
These miners typically hold existing energy supply permits and have long-term contracts for low-cost electricity, along with well-established infrastructure such as substations, cooling systems, and emergency response mechanisms. Converting their machines from cryptocurrency mining to AI computing workloads is technically simple as well.
As a result, in 2025, several major mining companies such as Erin Ltd., Core Scientific, and HT8 will see their stock prices reach new highs following strategic expansions into high-performance computing (HPC) and AI cloud services.
It is worth noting that most of these mining operations are located in North America. Mining companies located in the Asia-Pacific, Central Asia, Middle East, and other parts of the world continue to have significant growth potential and upward valuations as they pursue similar transformations.
These five frontier themes: real-time information aggregators powering on-chain markets, borderless payments and FX bars, native bot infrastructure, institutional meta-revenue systems, and the transformation of miners into AI computing providers, capture the evolution of Web3 into a global coordination and computing layer for the AI-based economy.
At the same time, an increasing number of ecosystem companies are reaching a meaningful revenue level and regulatory readiness, opening clearer paths to public markets through IPOs, De-SPACs, and mergers and acquisitions.
As the industry looks toward 2026, the winners will be the teams that build at the intersections, where blockchain technology provides structural advantages in liquidity, computing, coordination, and settlement.
As these forces converge, Gate Ventures believes next year could be one of the most transformative in the history of the cryptocurrency industry, opening the way to a new generation of investable opportunities for founders, institutions, and users around the world.
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Gate Ventures, the venture capital arm of Gate.com, focuses on investments in decentralized infrastructure, middleware, and applications that will reshape the world in the era of Web 3.0. Working with industry leaders around the world, Gate Ventures helps promising teams and startups that have the ideas and capabilities needed to redefine social and financial interactions.
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