6 crypto predictions for 2026, according to analysts

Despite ending the year somewhat anticlimactically, 2025 marked an inflection point for the cryptocurrency industry.  

Drunk on President Donald Trump's promise to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world,” Bitcoin rose over 65% during the 12 months following the 2024 elections.

Recently, however, concerns about a possible stock market bubble have led investors to de-risk. Bitcoin has shed more than a quarter of its value in just two months, trading 13% lower year-to-date. But, unlike previous bear markets, this time the industry's survival isn't on the line. After more than a decade of boom-and-bust cycles, scandals, and regulatory crackdowns, crypto is moving past the fringe and settling into a new phase: institutional integration. 

"With a warm and welcoming regulatory environment, massive de-enforcement of rules that do exist, and a seeming willingness to pardon anyone for any financial crime, it's a great time to be either an innovator or a charlatan," says Dave Nadig, ETF.com president and director of research.

Here is what to expect for crypto in 2026, according to analysts.

Expect "CLARITY"

The White House crypto czar, David Sacks, indicated in an X $TWTR post last week that the Senate will vote on the CLARITY (Digital Asset Market Clarity) Act by January 2026, after it cleared the House of Representatives in July with bipartisan support.

CLARITY would create a framework for digital asset regulation, bringing the industry "out of the shadows and into the regulated economy,” Andreessen Horowitz's crypto venture fund wrote in July. “Such legal clarity would open the door to the next generation of decentralized infrastructure, financial tools, and user-owned applications,” it added. 

The same month, Consumer Reports warned the CLARITY act "prioritizes regulatory certainty for the crypto industry at the expense of consumer protection." The group's advocacy director Chuck Bell specifically cautioned that the legislation erodes the Securities and Exchange Commission's ability to "protect investors and maintain market integrity."

Crucially, the bill would divide and define oversight between the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This will allow regulators to issue guidance for how financial services can engage with crypto, says Ric Edelman, founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals (DACFP).

“All this paves the way for far greater engagement by institutional investors and major Wall Street firms to allocate to crypto,” he says.

Stablecoin circulation could triple

Stablecoins are poised to surpass $1 trillion in circulation by 2026, more than triple today’s market, according to a forecast last week by crypto ETF issuer 21Shares.

Passed in July, the GENIUS (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) Act is the first regulatory framework for payment stablecoins — digital assets backed 1:1 by fiat reserves. By July 2026, regulators are expected to announce their final implementing regulations to bring the Act into force. This is expected to accelerate institutional adoption among banks, fintechs and payment networks, with the likes of JPMorgan $JPM, PayPal $PYPL, Visa $V and Mastercard $MA already among those touching stablecoins.

“Realizing that fighting stablecoins is like fighting against the internet, next year, a vanguard of banks will instead begin to adopt them, either by banking them or launching their own,” says Austin Campbell, founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting and a professor teaching digital assets at NYU Stern.  

"Dawn of the institutional era"

Bitcoin has historically moved in a four-year cycle, due to an event that occurs every four years called the halving, which cuts the daily supply of newly minted coins by 50%. Conventional wisdom dictates that Bitcoin will have peaked in October, setting the stage a so-called “crypto winter" in 2026.

Yet, as institutional investors now account for a larger section of the market, the cycle is becoming a less reliable gauge of price. In 2025, the correlation between Bitcoin and the the tech-heavy NASDAQ 100 index has more than doubled, according to LSEG data, as of December 11. Correlation is measured from -1 to 1, with figures above zero indicating a positive correlation. The average correlation this year was 0.52, up from 0.23 in 2024.

Crypto-focused asset manager Grayscale predicts 2026 will mark the end of the four-year cycle, paving way for the “dawn of the institutional era.” In other words, the market's trajectory will transition from rapid, retail-fueled expansion to a more stable, upward channel, driven by institutional rebalancing.

Since launching in 2024, purchases of Bitcoin by U.S. spot crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have doubled the new issuance of Bitcoin, as of December 5. The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock $BLK, on Wednesday ranked iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) among its top three 2025 investment themes, having attracted around $25 billion in net inflows this year.  

As more supply moves into ETFs, corporate treasuries, family offices, and sovereign-adjacent pools of capital, it stops behaving like a retail-traded asset, because these holders don’t trade on momentum or short-term narratives, says Cory Klippsten, CEO of Bitcoin financial services firm Swan.com.

"The bigger story in 2026 isn’t where Bitcoin trades; it’s that a growing share of the supply simply stops moving, and the market is still adjusting to what that means," Klippsten says.

Brace for the "ETF palooza"

Less than two years since the SEC approved the first spot Bitcoin ETF, 39 funds tracking digital assets have launched in the U.S. These range from spot Ethereum, Solana and XRP products, through to index funds tracking more niche altcoins, like Cardano, Chainlink, Stellar, and Dogecoin. 

Following the SEC’s approval of generic listing standards in September, the pace of crypto ETFs launching has accelerated, with at least 125 filings awaiting approval as of December 17, according to Bloomberg data.

Jianing Wu, institutional analyst at Galaxy Research, projects more than 100 spot altcoin, multi-asset, and leveraged crypto ETFs launching next year, with net inflows exceeding $50 billion — more than doubling 2025 inflows. New products will “unlock pent-up demand and drive incremental inflows," she writes, with “wirehouses lifting restrictions on advisor recommendations and major platforms such as the once-standoffish Vanguard adding crypto funds."

Asset manager Bitwise also thinks more than 100 crypto-linked products could launch next year, in what it calls the "ETF palooza," suggesting not all will find success. Indeed, the filings pending approval include prospectuses for $BONK, $TRUMP, and $MELANIA ETFs.

"We're going to see a lot of liquidations in crypto ETP products...Issuers are throwing A LOT of product at the wall," James Seyffart, research analyst within Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote on X last week.

Bet on 'essentially anything'

Friend or foe, prediction markets are one of the fastest-growing corners of crypto. Proponents contend they aggregate information more efficiently than polls, while critics argue they turn the world into a casino. With the U.S. midterms approaching, they’re set to draw in traders, journalists, and political operatives alike.

Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market, is already approaching $1 billion in weekly notional volume, but Galaxy Research analyst Will Owens forecasts this figure will consistently exceed $1.5 billion next year, “as new capital efficiency layers deepen liquidity and AI-driven order flow increases trading frequency." Bitwise also projects Polymarket open interest will set a new all-time high, surpassing 2024 election levels.

The removal of certain regulatory headwinds is also driving optimism. Earlier this month, Polymarket announced it's available in the U.S. once more, after a four-year hiatus. On top of this, Coinbase is suing Michigan, Illinois and Connecticut, asking the courts to affirm that states cannot interfere with the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets, it told Bloomberg in a statement. Moreover, in May the regulator dropped an appeal of a court decision that allowed platform Kalshi to list investment contracts that U.S. users can use to bet on election outcomes.

“Given the massively deregulatory environment, I suspect that prediction markets will become wildly out of control in 2026 going into the election,” says Nadig. “Essentially anything will be legal to bet on through a prediction market, from who wins a contested primary to how many times U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent sneezes,” he says.

Bearish or bullish, crypto markets will remain "emotional"

Despite consensus that crypto will continue to go mainstream next year, analysts are torn about how this will translate into Bitcoin prices, with options markets currently pricing about equal odds of $50,000 or $250,000 by year-end 2026.

Among the optimistic camp: Edelman sees the currency rising between 50% and 100% due to "massive increases in advisor engagement," while Grayscale forecast Bitcoin reaching a new all-time high in the first half of 2026, in a recent report.

"A more complete regulatory architecture across major economies is deepening the integration of public blockchains with traditional finance and fueling long-term capital inflows into the marketplace,” Grayscale analysts wrote.

Galaxy Research analyst Alex Thorn notes an all-time is “still possible” but says that 2026 is “too chaotic to predict,” with “risk [remaining] to the downside in the near term.” Regardless, Galaxy’s “bullish outlook (over longer time periods) is only growing stronger,” he continues, forecasting the asset to hit $250,000 in 2027.

Coinbase has avoided offering a price prediction, and instead likens the current outlook to "1996" — the dot com era’s early stages — rather than "1999" — its subsequent bust. The analogy suggests the crypto boom is only just beginning, while also nodding at future consolidation.

But some argue that droves of institutional investors won't change a universal truth about crypto markets: They're powered by hype.

"Trump switched from antagonist to zealot. That pumped [Bitcoin] up to a peak that got too expensive. To me, 2024 was as good as it gets, 2025 is the hangover, and 2026, I think, is more of an extreme bear market," says Mike McGlone, Bloomberg Intelligence's Senior Commodity Strategist. "A lot of [crypto] traders and investors, I think, are just way too emotional," he says, adding that most of the 37 million cryptocurrencies are "speculative" and will need to be "flushed out" in order for the market to stabilize.

While avoiding providing any price target, Nadig echoes this sentiment: "Bitcoin will trade, as it has since day one, as a psychological commodity. It will and only ever has been worth exactly what someone else will pay you for it."