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

Author: Electric Capital

Translation: Jiahui, ChainCatcher

Trust in institutions worldwide 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 tools to operate without trust. These technologies are designed to function in adversarial environments: they assume participants may act maliciously, software must be verifiable, and systems should continue to operate normally even if counterparts go bankrupt.

AI makes this shift toward “trust-minimized systems” more urgent and feasible than ever before. 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 intermediaries, 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. All user-owned systems minimize reliance on intermediaries by transferring control back to users. These systems cannot be unilaterally altered. They allow people to build without permission. Ideally, if existing systems no longer serve users, they can freely opt out without losing access to functions or data.

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

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

These opportunities focus on six key areas:

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

3. Agent-Oriented Infrastructure: As AI agents become the 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: Stablecoins give over 4 billion people access to USD. Now, they seek yields, equity exposure, insurance, and more. The demand for global, programmable, and 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 the door to new markets.

6. Metaverse Revival: World models and generative AI drastically reduce the cost of building immersive, personalized environments. People will step into experiences shaped around them, rather than passively consuming content. There are huge opportunities in building platforms that simplify world creation and empower users to control how their data is shared, stored, and monetized within these worlds.

7. New Cryptographic Primitives and Applications: Proof-of-stake and proof-of-work are maturing and 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, infrastructure with default privacy, and applications built on regulated entities, energy markets, or even new jurisdictions.

Personal Software

For the first time, individuals can build tailored software based on their exact needs, without being limited by big companies’ products. As AI agents now handle complex workflows (like reading emails, scheduling meetings, and managing files), new demands for data privacy, ownership, and persistence arise. Cryptographically enabled systems can make these tools private, durable, and support multi-party collaboration.

Specific ideas we want to invest in:

• Private AI Agents: People need to run AI on sensitive data securely.

  • What it might look like: An AI assistant that automatically manages your personal workflows and protects your privacy. Connects to your health and financial records to provide insights. Runs in trusted execution environments or compute networks, with queries anonymized. Responds without enterprise providers or malicious actors seeing your data.

• Encrypted Collaboration Spaces: People need private collaboration with others (whether humans or intelligent agents). Remember, “the cloud” is just someone else’s computer.

  • What it might look like: A shared workspace for friends, family, or small businesses. Financial data, documents, and tasks synchronize via peer-to-peer storage solutions. Selective disclosure allows agents to access specific data types. No accounts needed, no big companies reading, storing, or training on sensitive data, and offline work is supported.

• Desktop Agents: People need automation tools for their local computer data.

  • What it might look like: An agent running locally on your desktop to read emails, draft replies, create schedules, and organize your life. This idea could evolve into a new kind of desktop OS in an AI-first world.

• Privacy Payment Services: People need a way to pay for software services without identity verification.

  • What it might look like: Buying VPNs, games, cloud storage, or AI compute without accounts. Pay-as-you-go, measured by the service, settled with stablecoins via protocols like x402. The service knows someone paid and how much, but not their identity.

Agent-Oriented Infrastructure

Smart agents will write most of our code and perform much of our mental work. Key impacts include: (1) software tools need to be rebuilt from scratch because AI-generated code introduces new failure modes; (2) development shifts inward as custom software becomes economically viable; (3) agents need new pathways for mutual transactions; (4) formerly labor-constrained enterprises can suddenly scale through automation. These ideas capture the second-order effects and opportunities they bring.

Specific ideas we want to invest in:

• AI-Native Computing Infrastructure: Companies need to test, isolate, and rollback AI-generated changes at the infrastructure level.

  • What it might look like: An AWS or GCP rebuilt for agents. Agents code in sandboxed environments, safely test against production data, and deploy with automatic rollbacks if issues arise. Entire workflows assume code is from agents, not humans.

• End-to-End Product Development Tools: Non-technical staff need to go from idea to working software.

  • What it might look like: A platform where users specify business goals, data sources, and desired outcomes. The system generates plans, designs, code, and a working product. It eliminates the need for technical translation, enabling non-technical users to go from “idea” to “deployed product” in hours instead of months.

• Agent-Enabled Commerce: Agents need to buy and sell autonomously without human identities or bank accounts.

  • What it might look like: An API marketplace where agents purchase services from other agents. Discovery, negotiation, and pay-per-use protocols like x402 settle instantly with stablecoins.

• Data Networks and Markets: AI needs infrastructure to compensate contributors and give them control over their data.

  • What it might look like: A network where users share medical records, consumption patterns, investment behaviors, or creative works for AI training. Contributors set permissions and get paid when their data improves models. AI companies access high-quality, provenance-verified data.

• Scalable Professional Services: Service firms need AI-native operations to surpass human labor limits.

  • What it might look like: A law firm where each lawyer has an AI assistant for research, drafting, and review. A firm that once served 1,000 clients now serves 100,000. Any professional—lawyer, architect, marketer, accountant, financial advisor—can be restructured around AI.

Fintech and DeFi

Over 4 billion people and millions of businesses facing currency risk are actively seeking USD exposure through stablecoins, representing the largest expansion of the USD network effect in decades. As stablecoins provide USD access worldwide—growing from $3 billion in 2019 to over $300 billion today—millions of new USD holders need more than just digital cash. They want yields, investment opportunities, and financial services. Opportunities are increasing in financial products that give users ownership and global access.

Specific ideas we want to invest in:

• Yield Unrelated to Crypto: Stablecoin holders need yields that don’t decline when Bitcoin’s price drops.

  • What it might look like: A platform that brings real-world infrastructure yields to stablecoin holders. Yields could come from bonds on data centers, solar farms, and EV charging networks with predictable cash flows and no crypto correlation.

• Global Accessible Equity: Investors worldwide need low-friction, low-cost ways to directly own foreign opportunities.

  • What it might look like: Financial products replicating equity ownership with price exposure, no funding rate, and no expiration. A trader in the Philippines builds a US tech stock portfolio; a Canadian builds a Korean semiconductor exposure.

• New Insurance: Businesses need fast, transparent underwriting for operational risks that traditional insurance can’t cover.

  • What it might look like: A platform creating new insurance products via prediction markets. Chain hotels buy hurricane coverage for Florida properties. Ski resorts hedge against warm winters. Capital providers supply liquidity in exchange for uncorrelated yields.

• On-Chain Commodities Markets: Commodities need markets with 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and global access.

  • What it might look like: A marketplace for trading energy storage capacity. Battery storage is a potential starting point, as data centers require reliable power and are investing in storage to reduce grid reliance and integrate renewables. Excess capacity can be sold to nearby facilities during peak demand. Grid operators can trade capacity seasonally.

• Crypto-Native Jurisdictions: Economic zones and frontier jurisdictions need new governance and financial infrastructure models.

  • What it might look like: A new jurisdiction built from day one on crypto rails. On-chain identities, programmable courts, tokenized capital markets, and smart contract-based regulation.