Bitcoin Suisse Group Crypto Outlook 2026
2025 will be remembered as the year crypto under-delivered on price but over-delivered on fundamentals. While equities and gold marched to record highs, digital assets reset and rebuilt. Stablecoins shattered settlement records, ETF flows and deepening derivatives markets shifted market structure, and the application layer consolidated around real revenue. The infrastructure for the next leg up was quietly put in place.
The report translates these developments into 12 actionable predictions. The Fed's cutting path steepens beyond what markets expect, setting the stage for an accelerating economy and cross-asset bull run, which could see Bitcoin approach $180K and Ethereum reach for $8K. Yield is reshaping the stablecoin stack, softening the Tether-Circle duopoly as new issuers gain ground. Beneath the surface, Ethereum's L1 is scaling exponentially, while Bitcoin takes its first steps toward quantum resistance. And Polymarket's U.S. entry signals how on-chain applications can capture real-world utility at scale.
The macro backdrop is turning supportive, the rails have been built, and valuations have room to run. If 2025 laid the groundwork, 2026 is when it gets priced in.
2026: What We Expect to See
A high-level snapshot of our predictions and the major shifts we anticipate across markets, infrastructure, and institutional participation in the year ahead.
Economic activity is set to accelerate in 2026 as the global macro regime transitions into its most supportive configuration since 2022.
Progress in quantum computing is a threat to protocols relying on elliptic curve cryptography.
For the first time, stablecoin adoption is being catalyzed more by utility than speculation.
Bitcoin enters 2026 with its secular bull market intact, despite what will retrospectively be viewed as an unusually complex and sentiment disrupting year in 2025.
For most of its history, crypto rallied on market breadth. When liquidity hit the system, everything went north. In our view, that era is ending.
The investment landscape entering 2026 presents one of the most constructive cross-asset configurations since the early 2010s.
Crypto markets have shown a rising correlation with traditional markets; however, the two differ in their most-traded instruments.
Prediction markets moved from a crypto native niche into the mainstream during the 2024 US presidential election. And they are expanding rapidly.
The baseline execution throughput (gas target/slot time) of Ethereum has doubled during 2025, from 1.25 Mgas/s to 2.5 Mgas/s. The previous doubling took more than 3 years.
Ethereum enters 2026 with one of the strongest structural, fundamental, and institutional setups it has exhibited in any prior cycle.
During Q2 2025, the crypto market entered a full-fledged digital-asset treasuries (DAT) mania.
Revisiting Our Predictions from Outlook 2025
2025 Predictions in Numbers
Predictions are a dangerous sport, especially in crypto. Yet at the turn of every year, Bitcoin Suisse Research takes that risk deliberately. In our Outlook 2025 from last December, we mapped out how macro conditions, policy shifts, and crypto market structure might unfold in the year ahead.
75%
100%
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2026
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