Bankless
10 Crypto Predictions for 2026: $1M BTC, Wall Street Onchain & ETF Takeover | Matt Hougan & Ryan Rasmussen from Bitwise
16 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I think crypto Twitter has sort of lost its ambition totally. The chairman of the SEC, the most important financial regulator in the US and the world, said all US stocks would be on chain in a couple of years. For context, the tokenized stock market today is $680 million. US stocks are $68 trillion. I'll save you the math. That's 100,000x bigger. What are we even talking about?
I think we've lost sight of how big a deal crypto really is. Because we've made this regulatory progress, it's entering this period where we can move the full financial economy on chain. It won't happen overnight, but the chairman of the SEC is telling you it's going to happen in the next couple of years. We're not really bullish enough, I think, is my take.
Bankless Station, we've got end of the year predictions going into 2026. What's going to happen in 2026?
Chapter 2: What predictions are made for Bitcoin's price in 2026?
And the two best predictors we could get on the show today. We've got Matt Hogan and Ryan Rasmussen, both from Bitwise. Guys, how are you doing?
Chapter 3: How will Bitcoin's volatility compare to NVIDIA's?
Doing great. Thanks for having us on. Excited to be here. Is this the third year that we've done this? Yeah. It's round three?
Chapter 4: What role will ETFs play in the crypto market?
I think so. I think so. It's a tradition. If you guys remember 2025, last year's predictions, do you guys know how you ranked? How did your predictions hold up? Ryan said you guys were the best, so I would like to actually audit that. Wait, which Ryan said that? Did I say that?
Chapter 5: Why are crypto equities expected to outperform traditional equities?
My Ryan. My co-host Ryan. You have to differentiate during this episode, David. Uh-huh. Okay. We didn't do terrible, but we didn't do as great as one would have hoped. 2025 was just a weird year for crypto.
Chapter 6: How will prediction markets perform in the upcoming election year?
So we got a number of these correct that we're super excited about. I think we're ambitious around some that were directionally accurate. Perhaps we set the bar too high. So I would grade us decently well, all things considered. Matt, what would you say?
Chapter 7: What impact might stablecoins have on emerging market currencies?
I think with one glaring exception, which was Ryan's prediction about meme coins, we had all the information right. And then some of the price returns didn't line up with the fundamentals of the space. I think the story of crypto writ large was the story of our prediction. So I'd give us like a gentleman's C for our efforts. A gentleman's C. Okay. So I actually, I ran this through chat GPT.
Chapter 8: How are on-chain vaults expected to grow in AUM?
All right. And you're 2020. Yeah, we rated you guys actually. Yeah, we rated you guys. Okay. And of course, I'm not going to grade you guys, right? I mean, that's a lot of effort. Go fact check everything. But ChatGPT was happy to do it. And it took about seven minutes on the response, which usually it doesn't think for seven minutes, okay? And so the net of that is... Drum roll.
B minus for last year. Oh, there we go. So it said A minus for narrative and regime calls. So that's your higher grade. You got the direction right. C plus for the precise numbers. Everyone gets precise numbers wrong. Giving out precise specific numbers is such a mistake. Just never do it. But it said you got four solid correct answers.
three to four partial credit, and then three were just clear misses. So that's pretty darn good for 12-month predictions, I think. We'll take it. I love it. I love the B-minus from chat. That sounds right. I'll take it. Marking myself up. Do you mind if we go through a few of these that you guys predicted last year?
One of them is, and I'm trying to get into the place, into the headspace of the end of last year. We were all very bullish at the end of 2024, weren't we? We were very excited. We were very bullish. Seemed like regulatory headwinds were disappearing and we'd have tailwinds on our side going into 2025. We had momentum. We had momentum. You guys called a prediction.
Your first prediction last year was Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana will hit new all-time highs with Bitcoin trading above 200K. So we got ETH and Solana, new all-time highs. I think ETH barely clipped it last year. It was a close one. Bitcoin did not hit 200K. Why do you think we didn't get to 200K last year? Or this year, I guess I should say, 2025. We're still in 2025.
So yeah, all three hit new all-time highs. So we're happy about that. And if you do set the stage for where we were at heading into 2025, we wrote these predictions over the month of November. Trump had just won the election. Crypto had just won the election. Prices were soaring towards new all-time highs. And the market was overall... broadly euphoric.
And I think that helped inform where we thought things were headed. And then as soon as we hit the new year, chaos ensued. Like it was, you know, January, we had fears of an AI bubble with that AI company out of China kind of saying they're going to disrupt at a low cost what was happening in AI in the US. And then we had the tariff tantrum, and we had more macro shocks and more headwinds.
And things just went kind of chaotic from a macro factor perspective. And so I think that was probably the biggest driver around the volatility that we saw. And then you had a number of events happen. Of course, later in the year, we had this liquidity flush that happened In October, we saw more AI headwinds. The government shut down the longest on record.
I think a number of those things, combined with the fact that the Clarity Act didn't get through Congress, I think those things all combined led investors to feel uncertain about the outlook for crypto. And that led to prices not rising. Hitting that 200K mark, we're not sustaining all-time highs, but overall, we're headed in the right direction. I have another take as well.
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