# Why I'm Bullish on 2026

Canonical: https://gaboesquivel.com/blog/2025-11-bullish-2026

**Published:** 2025-11-15
**Summary:** Why I expect AI agents, stablecoins, wallet signing, and tokenized markets to converge in products over the coming year.
**Categories:** Web3, Artificial Intelligence, Stablecoins, Tokenization, DeFi, Fullstack, Institutions
**Technologies:** Ethereum, Blockchain, OpenAI, AI SDK

This year I spent most of my time building at the intersection of AI and Web3, with Cursor writing code alongside me and assistants shipping inside client products, and the financial infrastructure that seemed perpetually "almost there" started arriving at the same time the AI tooling became dependable enough for production work.

## Agents inside shipped products

At LegalAgent this year I added a voice and chat assistant to their React Native Expo app. Chat runs on the Vercel AI SDK, voice runs on OpenAI's Realtime API, and RAG supplies case context, document summaries, and procedural guidance in Spanish and English, while an internal admin built with TanStack Start keeps system prompts and document categories editable without a client release.

What changed for me is how much of that work is now integration and design rather than model plumbing. Cursor and similar AI-powered IDEs have changed how I write code, and RAG pipelines on Supabase and vector databases put domain knowledge within reach of an ordinary application team, so the hard part moves to deciding what the assistant is allowed to do and how the product recovers when it is wrong.

### Conversational interfaces for financial actions

On Bitlauncher, the batch auctions ran on Gnosis auction contracts deployed to EOS EVM, and the chatbot at bitlauncher.ai used tool calls for current news and YouTube content and RAG for longer answers about projects. That pairing is where financial interfaces are heading: a user describes an intent such as "swap 1000 USDC for ETH at best price over the next hour," and an agent turns it into an execution strategy, gas decisions, and batched transactions that the user approves.

The pieces for that are in place: vector databases for semantic search, function calling for deterministic actions, and wallet integration for transaction signing. I laid out the architecture in [Agentic Finance](https://gaboesquivel.com/blog/2025-09-agentic-finance), and the constraint that still matters most is where the agent's authority ends.

## Stablecoins as payment infrastructure

After [Stablecoin Summer](https://gaboesquivel.com/blog/2025-10-stablecoin-summer), the regulatory environment is clarifying, and U.S. policy is shifting from skepticism to support that treats dollar-backed stablecoins as an extension of American financial infrastructure rather than a threat to it.

Living in Costa Rica, I see this from the receiving end. An international bank transfer takes days and costs me 3–5% in fees, while a USDC transfer arrives in seconds for a few cents, and that gap changes how I move money.

Latin America doesn't need to rebuild correspondent banking networks or payment processing to get there, because it can adopt stablecoins directly. El Salvador tried the direct route with Bitcoin, and the next phase is stablecoin-native services for payroll, remittances, savings, and lending on transparent, programmable rails.

## Tokenized venues running in parallel

I expect institutional tokenization to develop alongside traditional market infrastructure rather than replace it in one move. A new settlement system needs brokers, custodians, issuers, and regulators to agree on more than the technology recording ownership.

What interests me is the possibility of securities whose ownership and transfer rules can be represented programmatically. The potential benefits include clearer settlement records, more flexible operational workflows, and interoperability with financial applications. Those outcomes still depend on regulation, custody, and functioning markets.

On Bitcash I worked on WebAuthn-based signing, and on Bitlauncher I built wallet and token flows across blockchain systems. That experience makes the interfaces around signing, permissions, and transaction state particularly interesting to me. It doesn't establish that institutional tokenized-securities infrastructure has already reached production.

## Wallet signing without seed phrases

Bitcash had the constraint that users had to sign transactions in the browser without an external wallet, so I built WebAuthn key management for it, and QR signature requests over Supabase subscriptions later let bitlauncher.ai and other partner apps authenticate and sign through the Bitcash session instead of asking for a browser extension.

That is the direction for wallets generally: smart contract wallets with session keys, account abstraction for gas sponsorship, and agents that translate intent into transaction sequences. ERC-4337, passkeys, Safe multisig contracts, and JSON-RPC interfaces already exist, and the remaining work is integration, because every wallet has its own signing methods, contract interfaces, and error handling, which is why standards, tooling, and developer documentation matter more now than new primitives.

## DeFi as backend infrastructure

DeFi is becoming programmable financial infrastructure: composable primitives for lending, swapping, derivatives, and yield behind standardized smart contract interfaces. Institutional interest follows from resilience, since the protocols that survived the 2022 collapse have been through several stress tests, and the ones gaining traction now have sustainable economics and clearer regulatory paths.

I treat DeFi as the backend layer for the rest of this stack, because AI agents need programmatic access to financial services, stablecoin applications need yield and liquidity, and wallets need protocols to interact with.

## What I'm building toward in 2026

In 2025, production AI assistants, stablecoin infrastructure, and wallet tooling gave me practical components to build with. Institutional tokenized securities remained a development direction, not a completed transition. For 2026, I'm most interested in the boundaries between those systems: who authorizes an action, how settlement is recorded, and what an agent is permitted to execute.