Pantera Capital: What changes have we made when crypto is treated as a service?

Original Title: 2026: The Invisible Revolution

Original Author: Paul Veradittakit, Pantera Capital

Original Compilation: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

2026 will be a pivotal year. We will see "crypto as an industry" transform into "crypto as a service."

The past decade has been filled with various hype in the crypto world. The approval of the Bitcoin ETF in 2024 brought mainstream financial recognition. In 2025, everyone focused on building the underlying infrastructure. By 2026, the real value will belong to those companies that use blockchain to solve longstanding problems in traditional industries while making users completely unaware of the blockchain's existence.

The future crypto unicorns will no longer rely on hype. They will be the kind of companies that leverage blockchain technology to enhance product efficiency by an order of magnitude, thereby tapping into trillion-dollar markets while completely concealing complex technology.

Crypto Technology Won the "Weekend"

When the conflict in Iran broke out, the U.S. stock market was closed for the weekend and could not react to the sudden global risks. However, the crypto market did not stop, with Bitcoin briefly rising to $74,000. Commodities completed price discovery on the decentralized prediction market Hyperliquid even before traditional markets opened. This is not an isolated incident—last month, the same was true when China announced its policies.

Traditional hedge funds are increasingly entering this space. The crypto market's "24/7 operation" is no longer just a slogan but a structural advantage that traditional finance cannot match.

Nevertheless, the current valuation of the crypto market is still far below what its fundamentals should reach. We are undoubtedly in a bear market again (this is the fourth one I have experienced), but this time it is completely different: regulation is becoming clearer, institutional funds have entered the market, and infrastructure is improving.

This sentiment was particularly strong at the recent Consensus conference in Hong Kong. The vitality of the Asian market stands in stark contrast to the West. There, the support of both parties in government, the influx of institutional funds, and a focus on consumer applications are driving strong bullish sentiment.

Highlights for Asia in 2026:

· Cross-border payments through stablecoins, especially in the B2B sector. For the more decentralized economic systems in Asia, crypto payments are a natural choice.

· Tokenization of gold, stocks, and real estate. Asian banks and fintech companies are catching up with the pace of the U.S.

· Perpetual contract trading on DeFi. Driven by retail investors, the growth rate may surpass that of the West.

· Prediction markets are expected to become an important track, although their form may differ from that of the West.

Core Trend: "Crypto as a Service"

The core theme of 2026 is the shift from "crypto as an industry" to "crypto as a service." The goal is no longer to make users see the blockchain but to make them completely forget about its existence.

Over the past decade, we have been keen on creating "crypto spectacles"—gas fee wars, TPS competitions, modular stacks, ZK proofs. The ETF in 2024 was a recognition from mainstream institutions. In 2025, we laid the groundwork for the underlying infrastructure. In 2026, it is time to turn around.

Farewell to the "Casino" Era

The new generation of unicorns will not be those "L3 networks built for AI-NFT." They will be companies that use blockchain to enhance product efficiency tenfold while completely hiding the technology, thus tapping into trillion-dollar markets.

This perfectly explains our recent investment logic:

Novig: Farewell to the "Rake" Era ($75 million Series B)

Traditional sports betting is a monopolistic and distorted market. Bookmakers take high commissions from every bet, resulting in a dismal user profit rate of only 2%. We led Novig's $75 million investment because they treat sports betting as a high-frequency financial product. Through a peer-to-peer trading model, Novig users achieve an average profit rate of 23%. Most users do not care whether a decentralized order book is used in the background; they only know they can get the best odds in the U.S. This is a vivid example of "crypto as a service."

Based: Consumer-grade Super App ($11.5 million Series A)

We recently led Based's Series A funding. This is a composable Web3 consumer-grade super app built on the Hyperliquid ecosystem. "Consumer-grade crypto" has often been equated with "clunky experiences." Based is changing that by making on-chain interactions as smooth as top fintech apps. Complex operations like cross-chain bridging and gas fees are abstracted away, and users are completely unaware of them. They only need to focus on the social and financial value that assets bring.

Doppler: Default Asset Issuance Infrastructure ($9 million Seed Round)

If Based and Novig are cool new cars, then Doppler is a high-performance fuel system. We led Doppler's $9 million seed round, aiming to become the default infrastructure for on-chain asset issuance. It allows developers to issue assets with institutional-level security and compliance standards without having to build all the underlying infrastructure from scratch. Doppler is like the Stripe of the on-chain asset world—purely functional, all wrapped behind a simple API.

Why "Invisibility" is More Important than "Viral Spread"

This trend of "invisibility" also runs through our entire investment portfolio:

· Real-world assets: Tokenized government bonds are no longer experimental in the crypto world; they are becoming the cornerstone of backend liquidity for global trade.

· AI agents: Blockchain provides a trustworthy "truth layer" through prediction markets and verifiable data, allowing AI agents to interact with digital assets autonomously and reliably.

· Agent payments will accelerate all of this. Payment standards like x402 enable AI agents to complete transactions directly with crypto assets. Meanwhile, the gradual clarity of stablecoin regulation makes this payment track smoother.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

If you are planning to start a business in 2026, my advice is simple: Stop talking excessively about technology and focus more on what practical problems you can solve. If the page in your funding presentation that discusses consensus mechanisms comes before the page on customer return rates, it indicates that your thinking is still stuck in 2022.

What we are looking for are teams that are building the next Novig, Based, or Doppler—those who truly understand what "mass adoption" means: When a technology becomes so seamless that people completely overlook its existence, it has truly entered every household.