Fred Wilson, some of the influential enterprise capitalists within the U.S., thinks crypto’s breakthrough second in 2026 gained’t come from new blockchains — however from making them invisible to their finish customers.
“Blockchains disappear behind higher client interfaces that enable customers to make use of, spend, commerce, and ship tokens with out regarding themselves with which blockchain they’re on,” Wilson, who called bitcoin an “attention-grabbing funding alternative” again in 2011, wrote in a blog post revealed final week.
The prediction, tucked into an extended set of Wilson’s tech forecasts for 2026, displays a view he has held for years: blockchain’s promise depends upon ease of use, not technical horsepower.
Wilson is a founding accomplice of Union Sq. Ventures (USV), the New York-based VC agency behind early bets on Twitter, Etsy, and Tumblr. In crypto, he was early to Coinbase (COIN), Ethereum , and Filecoin , and stays a constant voice in long-term conversations about how blockchain may reshape the web.
Wilson, who has typically described blockchains as the “next big thing” after social and mobile, has additionally been brazenly important of the crypto business’s worst habits. He’s pushed again in opposition to the culture of hype and token speculation, warning that short-term greed threatens the long-term credibility of the area.
That actual work, in Wilson’s view, consists of issues like decentralized identity, peer-to-peer finance, and open protocols that anybody can construct on.
In previous posts, he’s in contrast the present state of crypto to the early web, when even sending an e mail required a degree of technical know-how.
The trail ahead, he appears to imagine, lies in higher design. Apps ought to deal with the infrastructure particulars — like what chain a transaction is on — within the background, in order that customers can deal with what they wish to do, not how they’re doing it.
For Wilson, this isn’t only a UX challenge — it’s the distinction between crypto staying a distinct segment know-how and attaining broad adoption.
