Holding 1 billion USD, Electric Capital analyzes 26 investment directions in the Web3 industry for 2026

Author: Electric Capital

Translation: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

Trust in institutions around the world is collapsing. People have lost confidence in entities that once sat at the core of economic, political, and social life: governments, banks, media, and schools. This is not a short-term trend nor a reaction to a single event. It is a long-term shift in expectations. People no longer assume that institutions are neutral, reliable, or aligned with their interests.

Distributed systems and cryptography provide builders with new trustless tools. These technologies are designed to operate in adversarial environments: they assume participants may be malicious, software must be verifiable, and systems should continue functioning even if counterparts go bankrupt.

AI makes this shift toward “minimized trust systems” more urgent and feasible than ever. AI not only centralizes power but also reduces development costs. Now, an individual can build what previously required a team of months in just a few hours. This puts pressure on middlemen, opens new possibilities for builders, and increases demand for infrastructure that “empowers users.”

Systems controlled by users are the only way to truly safeguard freedom. User-owned systems minimize reliance on trust in intermediaries by transferring control back to users. These systems cannot be unilaterally altered. They enable people to build without permission. Ideally, if existing systems no longer serve users, they can opt out freely without losing access to features or data.

This article outlines 26 key opportunities in critical areas by 2026.

These opportunities span user-owned systems, globally accessible markets, entertainment built on new financial primitives, and infrastructure for a world where AI is ubiquitous and deeply embedded. They share a common theme: exploring how power, access, and ownership should operate in an AI-saturated world.

The opportunities focus on six key domains:

2. Personal Software: AI enables the creation of tailored tools, not just SaaS adapted for general users. Private agents, encrypted collaboration, and locally run software are now feasible and increasingly necessary.

3. Agent-Oriented Infrastructure: As AI agents become primary builders of software, existing development stacks will be disrupted. New primitives are needed for testing, deployment, payments, data access, and coordination among agents.

4. Fintech and DeFi: Over 4 billion people and millions of businesses are accessing dollars via stablecoins—representing the largest expansion of the dollar network in decades. As stablecoins provide global access to USD—from $3 billion in 2019 to over $300 billion today—millions of new dollar holders need more than just digital cash. They want yields, equity exposure, insurance, and more. The demand for global, programmable, accessible financial infrastructure is accelerating.

5. Financial Entertainment: The younger generation views markets as entertainment. Trading is fast, social, and fun. This transforms financial products and opens new markets. Fast-turnover products like zero-DTE options, settling in hours, now account for over 55% of S&P 500 options volume. Prediction markets, where anyone can bet on headlines, are projected to reach $44 billion in trading volume by 2025, a fivefold increase from the previous year. They turn trading into content—discussing positions in real-time on Discord, sharing wins and losses on TikTok, reviewing portfolios on Twitch. As markets become entertainment, new platforms will emerge that treat financial data as engaging, participatory content.

6. Metaverse Revival: Immersive digital worlds are now economically feasible. Over the past two years, AI-generated images, videos, and simulations have drastically lowered asset and environment creation costs. Individual creators can now build what once required entire game studios. Meanwhile, demand for personalized, interactive content is surging: Dispatch, a “choose-your-own-adventure” TV/game hybrid, sold 3.3 million copies in three months, earning $85 million with a 98% positive rating. In Q3 2025 alone, Roblox’s daily active users grew 70% year-over-year, paying out $428 million to creators. Personalized, AI-driven character chat apps like Character AI also show strong early demand for personalized entertainment. These new environments not only entertain but will generate rich structured data for world models and robotics.

We are investing in these specific ideas:

• World Compiler: Personal creators need tools to convert natural language into fully interactive 3D environments. AI can automate asset creation, physics, NPC logic, and memory, enabling individuals to publish rich virtual worlds in days instead of years.

• Procedural Narrative Engine: Players want stories that adapt to them and never end. A platform that generates real-time, personalized stories—like a detective universe where each case is unique, remembers past interactions, and responds to choices—will keep stories perpetually fresh.

• “World as Dataset” Platform: World models and robotics need diverse interaction data. An immersive VR game where every interaction is logged and used to train AI, with user consent and compensation, can capture real human behaviors that are hard to synthesize.

6. New Cryptographic Primitives and Applications: Proof-of-stake and proof-of-work are maturing, leaving room for new consensus models. Zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption are becoming practical. These primitives unlock new design spaces: consensus tied to human or physical inputs, privacy-by-default infrastructure, and applications built on regulated entities, energy markets, or jurisdictions.

We are investing in these ideas:

• Human Time as Consensus: Blockchain networks anchored on human effort rather than just capital—proofs of useful work, where consensus involves completing externally valuable tasks like data labeling or verifying real-world events, based on demonstrated ability rather than staking.

• Physical Resource Networks: Small-scale infrastructure operators need coordinated systems to make their contributions economically viable—like energy grids where production or storage influences consensus weight, combining grid stability with security.

• Privacy-Native Layer 1: Blockchains for healthcare, enterprise, regulated finance, and other sectors requiring default privacy—confidential state machines that compute on encrypted data, using ZK or FHE to verify transactions without revealing content.

• Use-Case Specific FHE: Institutions often need to collaborate on data without revealing it—banks detecting suspicious activity across institutions using encrypted queries, identifying shared contacts without exposing customer lists.

• Energy Contract Settlement: Traditional markets need encrypted, 24/7 settlement layers for energy contracts. Deregulated energy markets are a good starting point—outdated and under strain from AI-driven energy demand. Automated, real-time payments based on delivery data, with no single party controlling the ledger.

• Encrypted Jurisdictions: New jurisdictions built on cryptographic infrastructure—on-chain identities, programmable courts, tokenized capital markets, and smart contract-based regulation—reimagining governance and finance.