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" completely transform into "crypto as a service."

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

The future crypto unicorns will no longer rely on hype to get started. 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 hiding the 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 respond to the sudden global risks. But the crypto market did not stop, with Bitcoin once rising to $74,000. Commodities completed price discovery on the decentralized prediction market Hyperliquid even before traditional markets opened. This is not an isolated case—last month, the same situation occurred when China announced its policies.

Traditional hedge funds are increasingly pouring into this field. The crypto market's "7x24 hours non-stop" is no longer just a slogan, but a structural advantage that traditional finance cannot reach.

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

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 via 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 let users see the blockchain but to make them completely forget about its existence.

For the past decade, we have been keen on creating "crypto spectacles"—gas fee wars, TPS races, modular stacks, ZK proofs. The ETF in 2024 was a recognition ticket from mainstream institutions. In 2025, we laid the groundwork for the underlying infrastructure. In 2026, it's 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 the companies that use blockchain to enhance product efficiency tenfold while completely hiding the technology, thereby tapping into trillion-dollar markets.

This perfectly explains our recent investment logic:

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

Traditional sports gaming 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 a $75 million investment in Novig because they treat sports gaming 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-Level Super App ($11.5 million Series A)

We recently led the Series A financing for Based. This is a composable Web3 consumer-level super app built on the Hyperliquid ecosystem. "Consumer-grade crypto" has often been equated with "clumsy 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 brought by their assets.

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 a $9 million seed round in Doppler, 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 components 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 experiments in the crypto world; they are becoming the cornerstone of backend liquidity for global trade.

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

· Proxy payments will accelerate all of this. Payment standards like x402 allow AI agents to complete transactions directly using crypto assets. 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 the actual problems you can solve. If the page in your funding presentation discussing consensus mechanisms comes before the one on customer return rates, it indicates that your thinking is still stuck in 2022.

We are looking for 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.