Institutional investment and clear regulations lay the foundation for a strong start through 2026 for the broader cryptocurrency industry.
Industry players, including Anthony Scaramucci, Christine Smith, Eli Ben-Sasson, Ian Rodgers, Reeve Collins and Joseph Chalom, made upbeat predictions for the new year after a year of positive change, especially in the US.
Cointelegraph’s recent LONGITUDE event included panels focusing on Solana’s growth, increased interest in privacy protocols and lessons learned from security incidents in 2025.
“There has been a tremendous amount of progress in 2025, an unprecedented amount,” Smith said. The head of the Solana Policy Institute has been closely involved in cryptocurrency-focused discussions in Washington over the past 18 months.
“I think now the US is catching up, as you see policymakers around the world figuring out what they need to do to maintain competitiveness and keep crypto within their borders, which is different from trying to keep crypto outside their borders.”
Scaramucci said educating policymakers remains a major hurdle to helping the traditional financial system adopt innovative protocols that run on blockchain paths.
“Kristen should go into those rooms, and she should explain to these people why we need to pass this regulation so that we can retool the financial system and make the system less expensive and more streamlined,” Scaramucci said.
The SkyBridge Capital founder added that current TradFi systems currently spend more than $4 trillion on verifying transactions globally. Switching to protocols like Ethereum and Solana, which currently rank number one in RWA tokenization and onchain activity, can provide unparalleled efficiency and cost savings.
“That’s credit card fees, transfer fees, a whole bunch of different things. If we can adopt Solana and use it in the asset tokenization process, we could potentially save 75% of that, and that could be transformative for the global economy.”
Again, the main obstacle in recent years has been a lack of regulation that has hindered innovation and the ability of organizations to actively explore the use of blockchain protocols.
“We can do that today. In fact, it’s fairly easy to issue a stock or bond on the blockchain. The problem is that the regulations don’t make sense when it comes to trading those assets. And that’s the piece we’re working on,” Smith said.
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Scaramucci delivered an upbeat parting message, highlighting the intention of the largest US financial institutions, BlackRock, Blackstone and JPMorgan, to move to tokenizing assets on blockchain protocols.
“Don’t myopically sit here in 2025 and see this as a myopic opportunity. Look at the massive technological opportunity that’s coming.”
Privacy is in vogue
StarkWare founder Eli Ben Sasson, who also co-founded the Zcash protocol, participated in a thought-provoking conversation to explain why privacy protocols will be popular in the latter half of 2025.
“I’ve spent several decades of my life thinking about privacy, both in terms of mathematics and production. Privacy is a broad spectrum.”
Ben Sasson commented on the tremendous interest in Zcash (Like you) in 2025. The privacy-focused cryptocurrency has been around since 2016, but has seen a massive surge in value and interest on the back of support from various big names in the industry.
“On the one hand, you have the things we did at Zcash, which is a resistant level of financial privacy. If you need to jump on a plane and the government is after you and you need to be completely off the radar, you know, you have that,” Ben Sasson said.
However, Ben Sasson said the cost of this luxury lies in the user experience. It’s difficult to provide wallets, programmability, and user experience with this level of privacy. The lower-tech end of the spectrum provides a much-needed use case.
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“Businesses will come in, and they’ll want a different kind of privacy and also a different kind of privacy than the kind we did on Zcash. They’ll want privacy where they, as businesses, and their customers are protected from other customers and from their competitors,” he said.
Security wake-up call
Security was another major discussion point in LONGITUDE VII, given the spate of high-profile hacks and security incidents in 2025.
$1.6 billion worth of ether stolen (Ethereum) from Bybit in March was a wake-up call for the industry. As Federico Farriola, CEO of Phemex, explained, social engineering and unverified access continue to be a major threat to cryptocurrency users on a daily basis.
“I think that by combining the social class of being involved in cryptocurrencies and the financial class, these types of devices should never interact with each other.”
“It’s difficult in cryptocurrencies because sometimes you need to participate in an airdrop, or you want to link your Twitter account to a MegaETH ICO, for example. However, you should be aware that you are always exposing yourself to significant risks,” Fariola said.
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The onus is on service providers and infrastructure builders to think critically about the risks their platforms and users face, said Ian Rodgers, chief experience officer at Ledger.
“There’s no way to bring the risk to zero,” Rodgers said. “But the responsibility is to reduce the risk as much as possible, to think about the worst that could happen, what could go wrong here.”
Cointelegraph’s exclusive LONGITUDE events will return to the calendar in 2026, with editions planned in New York, Paris, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Abu Dhabi.
