Tech Giant to Launch Crypto Wallet, Fintech L1s to Bomb in 2026
A Big Tech company will integrate a crypto wallet in 2026, and more Fortune 100 companies will start their own blockchains, crypto VC firm Dragonfly’s managing partner Haseeb Qureshi has predicted.
He also tipped that fintechs launching L1s to compete with public chains like Ethereum and Solana will fail to attract enough users.
In a post to X on Monday, Qureshi said much of the Fortune 100 adoption is likely to come from the banking and fintech sectors, with many leveraging the Avalanche blockchain and existing crypto toolkits like OP stack, Orbit, and ZK Stack. The setup would enable these networks to more private and permissioned while remaining connected to a public blockchain.
A number of Fortune 100 firms in the financial services industry have already built private blockchains, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and IBM — though many of these solutions are still in the testing phase or have only been used in limited ways.
Earlier this month, crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital predicted at least one Fortune 500 bank, cloud provider, or eCommerce platform would launch a layer 1 blockchain that settles more than $1 billion of real economic activity in 2026 and build a bridge for decentralized finance access.
Qureshi also believes one of the Big Tech companies that dominate online life — potentially Google, Meta, or Apple — will launch or acquire a crypto wallet in 2026 — a move that has the potential to onboard billions of users into crypto.
Public fintech chains won’t threaten Ethereum’s dominance
However, Qureshi isn’t bullish on new L1 blockchains built by fintech firms — arguing that they won’t attract sufficient users or capture enough network activity to challenge crypto-native networks like Ethereum and Solana.
“Despite the excitement around the recent crop of fintech chains, their metrics will underwhelm.” Daily active addresses, stablecoin flows, and RWAs—Tempo, Arc, and Robinhood Chain will underdeliver, while Ethereum and Solana will overdeliver.”
“Best developers will continue to build on neutral infra chains,” Qureshi added.
Bitcoin to top $150K but lose market share
When it comes to price forecasts, the Dragonfly executive expects Bitcoin to trade above $150,000 by the end of 2026, but tips that Bitcoin dominance will fall.
Galaxy Digital took a hard pass on making a solid prediction and said 2026 would be “too chaotic” to even guess, as the price could range anywhere between $50,000 and $250,000 by the end of next year.
Meanwhile, Qureshi expects the $312 billion stablecoin market to grow by 60% in 2026, with the current market leader Tether (USDT) seeing its dominance drop from 60% to 55%.
Qureshi bullish on prediction markets, but not AI in crypto
Prediction markets will continue to boom next year, but AI won’t find a use case in crypto beyond security, Qureshi said.
Related: 2026 is the year Ethereum starts scaling exponentially with ZK tech
“AI agents will still not be ‘paying each other’ or spending any meaningful money in 2026,” Qureshi said, while also predicting that no effective solution will emerge to curb spambot proliferation on social platforms.
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