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6 trends for 2026: Stablecoins, payments, and real-world assets - a16z crypto

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This entire week, we’re running our observations on what’s ahead this year… stay tuned here, and be sure to also subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more trend updates, industry reports, builder guides, news analysis, and other resources. Stablecoins accounted for an estimated 46 trillion dollars in transaction volume last year, constantly hitting new all time highs. To put that into perspective: That’s more than 20x the volume of PayPal; close to 3x the volume of Visa (one of the largest payment networks in the world); and rapidly approaches the volume of ACH, the electronic network for financial transactions in the United States. Today, you can send a stablecoin in less than a second for less than a cent. What remains unsolved, however, is how to connect these digital dollars to the financial rails people actually use already every day — in other words, on/offramps for stablecoins. A new generation of startups is filling this gap, linking stablecoins to more familiar payment syste

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