Bitcoin Suisse Crypto Outlook 2026
Despite a volatile 2025 in markets, the crypto ecosystem made its strongest fundamental progress to date, from record stablecoin settlement to the rise of prediction markets and resilient on-chain infrastructure. With clearer regulation, expanding institutional access, and improving macro liquidity, 2026 may be the year the industry’s groundwork begins to pay off.
What It Is About?
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.
Our Crypto Outlook 2026 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.
The 2026 Crypto Outlook: Full Report
Access our full analysis of the themes, structural shifts, and market dynamics we expect to shape the digital asset landscape in the year ahead. The report provides data-driven insights across macro conditions, institutional flows, stablecoins, infrastructure, and much more.
VERIFIED Podcast Outlook Special: Our Predictions for 2026 and more!
In this episode of the Verified Podcast by Bitcoin Suisse, Dominic Weibel sits down with investment strategist Denis Oevermann, crypto market analyst Luca Gnos, and junior portfolio manager Matteo Sansonetti to dissect crypto's performance in 2025 and share their predictions for 2026. The discussion examines why 2025 was a year where crypto overdelivered on fundamentals but underdelivered on price.
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.
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2026
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