Greenfield 2026 Crypto Outlook: Top 10 Key Issues and Opportunities

Source: Greenfield

Compiled by: Zhou, ChainCatcher

The digital asset ecosystem is evolving in unexpected ways: new fundamental elements, new behavioral patterns, and new coordination tools are constantly emerging. What was considered experimental a year ago may now be a basic element. As investors, our responsibility is to closely monitor these changes, understand which emerging ideas can develop into lasting infrastructure, and truly gain market acceptance.

Last year, we shared our predictions for trends in the coming year. This year, we're taking a different approach. Instead of claiming to predict the future, we want to share our vision: a wish list of ten ideas, questions, and products that we hope founders will begin addressing in 2026.

Through these reflections, we can gain a deeper understanding of the next wave of significant opportunities that may emerge in the infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), and consumer sectors, and how the evolving regulatory environment will shape the foundation of these opportunities.

1. Infrastructure - BuilderNet for Solvers

question:

Over 50% of “non-toxic” (i.e., low-risk) retail order flows through the EVM via an intent aggregator that utilizes a solver model. However, the solver often faces latency when integrating new routes because a significant amount of work is required to fully understand its logic, prevent rollbacks, and maintain low simulation latency.

This presents a chicken-and-egg problem for many new Automated Market Makers (AMMs) such as Uniswap v4 hooks: solvers need existing order flows to integrate new liquidity sources, but they themselves are responsible for routing the majority of those flows. This hinders innovation in AMMs, as hooks often have to "lobby" large solvers for integration, sometimes even requiring behind-the-scenes deals. In particular, v4 hooks offer a very broad design space where every invariant can be broken, yet currently only 4% of v4 trading volume flows through pools with hooks.

Chance:

Flashbots' BuilderNet coordinates order flows and MEV-boost boosts by coordinating independent block builder instances within a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment). A similar idea could be applied to solver marketplaces, where solvers can coordinate and share information such as intent order flows, RFQ (Request for Quote) integrations, analytics/liquidity metrics, routing integrations, and collaborative solving, i.e., intent auctions sold in wholesale, without requiring trust.

2. Infrastructure – DePIN, combining hybrid cryptography and hardware security for high-performance and private computing.

question:

TEE promises "private AI in the cloud," but recent side-channel attacks demonstrate that they can still leak data—especially in decentralized, permissionless environments. On the other hand, while pure cryptography (MPC/FHE) is highly secure, it's too slow and complex for most real-world AI workloads. Currently, no platform simultaneously offers TEE-level speed, cryptographic security, and a clear, usage-based model billing model.

Chance:

This product is a secure AI runtime environment that runs models in a high-speed terminal environment (TEE) by default, but automatically routes the most sensitive steps to a small MPC cluster and logs verifiable "proof of correct execution" and metered usage. Customers gain cloud-like performance, audit-compliant privacy protection, and a built-in model provider monetization model. This is crucial for regulated industries and a growing target audience, as businesses and consumers increasingly rely on AI, and the exposure of sensitive data threatens IP ownership, thereby jeopardizing profitability and freedom.

3. Infrastructure – Unified Stablecoin Liquidity Layer

question:

The stablecoin liquidity layer provides a shared infrastructure for stablecoin trading and settlement across multiple blockchains. Instead of maintaining separate liquidity pools on each network, liquidity providers pool funds to establish a unified reserve accessible to any chain. A coordination mechanism tracks the total balance and instructs local contracts to deliver funds when a transaction occurs. Liquidity is dynamically rebalanced to meet demand, ensuring consistent depth and pricing efficiency across all connected networks.

Chance:

This infrastructure addresses one of the core inefficiencies of DeFi—the fragmentation of stablecoin liquidity. By consolidating liquidity, stablecoin transfers and exchanges become more capital-efficient, cheaper, and more predictable. This architecture offers traders lower slippage, liquidity providers higher capital utilization, and a universal settlement layer for payments, vaults, and stablecoin-based applications. It represents a foundational step towards frictionless, cross-network financial infrastructure.

4. DEFI – Risk Management and Smart Underwriting

question:

Risk management in the DeFi space remains a massive and unresolved issue. There are numerous approaches to risk management, ranging from in-protocol governance mechanisms to outsourcing to risk management firms.

Chance:

In a highly competitive field like cryptocurrency, it's not surprising that some institutions are willing to push the limits of risk, especially given the lack of clear safeguards or frameworks to ensure the broader market understands these risks. One approach to addressing these risks is to more clearly define them, such as by introducing structured stratification or other mechanisms to more precisely allocate risk exposure among participants. Historically, effective pricing and allocation of risk has been difficult and costly due to limited historical data, weak trust frameworks, and inadequate risk monitoring infrastructure.

However, tools are improving, confidence in DeFi is growing, and on-chain risk assessment capabilities are increasing. This is gradually narrowing the gap between those seeking returns and those willing to take specific risks. We hope to see more experiments focused on building and mitigating risk across DeFi systems. Furthermore, the lack of industry-wide risk scoring standards and inter-protocol dependencies (often hidden behind complex code) is also a problem. This creates an opportunity for the emergence of DeFi-native, real-time on-chain risk scoring entities.

5. DeFi – Transparent Market Making Protocol

question:

Market maker (MM) protocols remain one of the least transparent and most obscure parts of the industry, with the actual terms rarely disclosed. Many token project teams lack understanding and control over these trades, leading them to pay excessive fees for market maker services due to their inability to fully understand the market. They also often give away more tokens than necessary and spend considerable time learning how to achieve ideal market maker trades. While this is partly a matter of social coordination, and investors and exchanges (or regulators) can demand increased disclosure, coordination remains extremely difficult.

Chance:

We believe that innovation can improve the efficiency of this market. A simple aggregation front-end platform where project teams or market makers can post trading quotes and the parameters they are willing to meet would be extremely useful. Coinwatch has already improved the transparency of market maker behavior by embedding API keys in the TEE, enabling project teams to track the activities of their market makers. We can also see that the combined use of zkTLS and staking mechanisms can always enforce certain behaviors (especially for market makers with less brand influence), such as deducting staked amounts if the bid-ask spread (or any other metric) exceeds a certain threshold.

6. DEFI – DeFi Smart Investment Advisor 2.0 (LVR Capture)

question:

Current automated investment tools are unable to capture on-chain microstructure alpha returns on a large scale.

Chance:

Leveraging LVR to capture opportunities in AMMs (bulk auctions, solver rebalancing, dynamic fees) allows "arbitrage" to generate returns for our portfolio while maintaining a balanced asset allocation (hint: impermanent loss is a characteristic, not a flaw, if you explicitly want your portfolio to be rebalanced). This could be similar to DeFi robo-advisors that convert arbitrage into returns. Tokenized RWA funds/ETFs (AAA-rated fixed income, money market funds, S&P 500 index funds) are growing rapidly, complementing crypto-native investable assets (BTC, staked ETH, etc.).

Account abstraction enables a streamlined user experience: smart contract-enforced strategies provide transparent risk control, and compliant encapsulation offers regulated yield tokens. Battle-tested infrastructure, coupled with potential additional insurance, provides state-of-the-art security. Asset allocators gain access to automatically rebalanced portfolios, and traders gain liquidity. Smart contracts achieve a win-win situation of disintermediation—all the components are already in place—they just need someone to assemble them for scalability.

7. Consumer-grade – LLM ⇋ Prediction Market Interface

question:

Prediction markets have gained widespread acceptance, and new markets are constantly emerging, but discovery problems persist. Currently, users either browse the front-end pages of these prediction markets to find one that suits them or use external aggregators or front-ends for discovery, which is largely based on manual screening—time-consuming and laborious. There is currently no intuitive way to directly express predictions (e.g., "Team A will win") and act accordingly. Therefore, most potential bettors never translate their opinions into actual on-chain bets.

Chance:

The discovery problem in prediction markets can be solved through an LLM-based interface. We believe that a chat-like interface that can parse user predictions and route them to the best on-chain market will significantly reduce friction in the user experience, dramatically increase engagement, and make prediction markets even more dominant than they are now, as more predictions bring more liquidity.

8. Consumer-grade – Expanding the scale of on-chain capital formation

question:

On-chain fundraising tools (such as Echo.xyz, pump.fun, and Zora) have validated the effectiveness of community-driven on-chain fundraising models, but current participants are primarily limited to native cryptocurrency users. Now, it's time for these models to expand beyond the native cryptocurrency user base and into the mainstream market through distribution channels.

Chance:

Coinbase's acquisition of Echo is a first step in this direction. Next, we'll see the next major step in on-chain capital formation—embedding these fundamental functionalities into mass-market platforms. Imagine reaching hundreds of millions of users globally by integrating on-chain token/equity sale infrastructure as a white-label solution into apps like Revolut, Nubank, or Kickstarter. This would unlock massive new capital pools and expand proven fundraising models far beyond niche token buyers.

9. Consumer-grade – Cryptocurrency Discovery Layer

question:

The cryptocurrency space still lacks a unified "landing page" or search engine. Existing tools offer limited coverage, forcing users to rely on cryptocurrency Twitter and decentralized forums for information. No platform integrates all relevant information—prices, on-chain metrics, news, social media activity, yields, governance, attention, and market sentiment—in one place. This fragmentation means that most participants today need a complex and extensive set of specialized tools to stay informed about the latest developments in the cryptocurrency space.

Chance:

Aggregation in the cryptocurrency space has long been siloed, and no one has yet solved the discovery problem. We see an opportunity to build a fully-fledged, AI-driven landing page (a true "Google of cryptocurrency") that integrates on-chain data, news feeds, and social signals into a coherent search/discovery feed. Occupying this position will lock in early adopters and new entrants, building a strong distribution moat as cryptocurrency adoption grows.

10. Regulation – Clear agreement rules and open access for banks

Clearly, this is not a challenge that any single agreement can solve alone—it requires the coordinated participation of the entire ecosystem. Given that regulatory clarity is crucial to everything we build in the future, we have added it to our wish list as an expectation for all stakeholders to work together.

question:

Despite significant progress, regulatory frameworks continue to play a crucial role in shaping the pace of the next phase of cryptocurrency growth. Decentralized protocols still lack clear and applicable rules: the US has no explicit definition of when a token ceases to be a security, and the EU lacks clear decentralized standards under the MiCA framework. Frameworks designed for intermediaries impose undue burdens on decentralized systems and introduce legal uncertainty into protocol design, token architecture, and ecosystem participation.

Meanwhile, due to Basel III's imposition of punitive risk weights of up to 1250% on most digital asset exposures, regulated financial institutions, particularly banks, are effectively excluded from cryptocurrencies. This prevents banks from investing, providing liquidity, or supporting the ecosystem's development. The combination of ambiguous decentralized rules and restrictive prudential standards has led to market fragmentation, reduced liquidity, and makes it difficult for protocols and institutions to participate with confidence.

Chance:

Clear, globally consistent regulatory standards will unleash innovation and encourage institutional participation. For decentralized protocols, simple, transparent standards—such as the maturity test in the U.S. Clarity Act—will ultimately provide teams with the necessary certainty to design architectures that are appropriate to their risk profiles and subject to regulation. Europe could follow suit by adopting practical, decentralization thresholds, rather than vague or overly complex tests.

At the institutional level, the ongoing Basel III reassessment and the US proposal to differentiate stablecoins reflect a growing recognition that existing rules are not aligned with actual risks. Updating prudential regulatory standards will allow banks to hold digital assets, participate in DeFi, and provide new liquidity channels. Taken together, these reforms will build a regulatory foundation that supports borderless decentralized innovation, facilitates institutional capital inflows into the ecosystem, and expands global access to liquidity without compromising consumer protection.