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Andreessen Horowitz, a technology venture capital firm with more than $90 billion in assets under management (AUM), unveiled its “3 Ways Crypto Goes Beyond Crypto in 2026” on X today, as it prepares for another year of growth.
The article was published by A16z Crypto and highlights new and existing trends it expects to continue to materialize over the next year, specifically new primitives powered by zero-knowledge SNARKs, prediction markets, and what it calls “this rise of staked media.”
The firm specifically calls for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the prediction market landscape, where large language models (LLMs) can serve as oracles for disputes and power AI-agent-led trading on prediction platforms.
As for zk-SNARKs, short for zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge, A16z says that zk virtual machine (zkVM) provers are set to deliver 10,000x productivity, be fast enough to run on phones, and be cheap enough to deploy and “run everywhere.”
Staked Media is the wild card out in the set of predictions.
A16z claims that traditional media is flawed and that its problems are becoming more prevalent as AI-generated content becomes more widely available and affordable.
Robert Hackett, a member of the A16z editorial team, says in the article that “Tokenized assets, programmable lockups, prediction markets, and onchain histories offer stronger foundations for trust.”
“A commentator can publish an argument and also prove they’re putting their money where their mouth is. A podcaster can lock tokens to show they’re not opportunistically flipping or “pumping and dumping.” An analyst can tie forecasts to markets that settle publicly, creating an auditable track record.” Hackett continues.
This tokenization-backed media is what the firm is calling staked media, which enables proof of “skin in the game” for media publications, and functions similarly to prediction markets in the sense that having an opinion is one thing, but actively placing financial value on that opinion, or in this case, content, lends more credibility to the media itself.
A16z Crypto’s portfolio spans dozens of crypto and crypto-adjacent projects, including Anchorage Digital, Kalshi, Coinbase, Morpho, and Yuga Labs.