- What’s next for DeFi in 2026?
- We reveal the trends that we will be looking closely at next year.
Last year, DL News attempted to predict the top three DeFi trends for 2025.
We predict that traditional finance would enter DeFi at an unprecedented pace, more protocols would launch their own blockchains, and fintech companies would integrate DeFi into their offerings at scale.
Well, we did pretty well.
In 2025, we saw banks launch stablecoins, asset managers allocate billions of dollars to DeFi lenders, and Wall Street firms accumulate tokenized assets.
In January, Coinbase launched fintech integrations with its Morpho-powered Bitcoin loans. In June, trading titan Robinhood began using Arbitrum to facilitate trading of tokenized stocks for European users.
And just two weeks ago, $75 billion neobank Revolut integrated Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange, for crypto onramping, swaps, and purchases.
As for bespoke blockchains, it’s not just DeFi protocols that are launching them now. Fintech companies are also entering the fray, with Stripe’s upcoming Tempo blockchain being the most notable example.
These trends are likely not over and are only expected to become more pronounced in the coming year.
But as 2025 comes to an end, we will attempt to predict three more trends that are expected to shake up DeFi in 2026.
Unified stablecoin layers
If there is one trend that has defined DeFi in 2025, it is stablecoins.
Dollar-pegged tokens in circulation have soared to more than $300 billion while everyone from family office managers to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has issued lofty predictions of exponential growth.
Yet for all their success, stablecoins suffer from a major obstacle to their continued adoption: liquidity fragmentation.
The largest stablecoins are spread across many different trading platforms, blockchains, and exchanges. This dispersion makes it more difficult for traders to execute large orders efficiently, leading to higher transaction costs, larger price fluctuations, and reduced market efficiency.
In 2026, we expect stablecoin issuers to make significant progress toward solving this problem by creating and promoting the adoption of unified liquidity layers.
Many stablecoin issuers have already started.
Circle has its cross-chain transfer protocol. This allows developers to transfer USDC on blockchains with native burning and minting.
Similarly, Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, launched USDT0, an omnichain stablecoin that functions as a single asset running across multiple blockchains.
If these companies succeed, “stablecoin transfers and conversions become more capital efficient, cheaper and more predictable,” said Jascha Samadi, co-founder of Greenfield Capital, a cryptocurrency venture capital firm. DL News.
DEXs compete with CEXs
For the longest time, using decentralized exchanges required a compromise. Despite being permissionless, DEXs have sacrificed liquidity and price competitiveness compared to their centralized counterparts.
In 2025, this has changed. The improved user experience, intent-based trading, and dark AMM models on Solana have made some DEXs just as, if not more, competitive than centralized exchanges.
At the same time, traders are increasingly fed up with the failures of centralized exchanges.
In May, Coinbase revealed that cybercriminals had bribed and recruited a group of rogue foreign support agents to steal customer data to facilitate social engineering attacks.
Then, in October, Binance issued an apology and refunded $283 million to users after the exchange system unfairly shut down user trading during a period of high volatility.
Others have complained more generally about centralized exchanges suffering from technical issues, account restrictions without warning, and difficulties managing customer support.
Over the past year, the proportion of crypto transactions conducted on DEXs has increased rapidly. As of November, DEXs accounted for just over 21% of all crypto exchanges, their highest percentage ever, according to an analysis by CoinGecko using data from DefiLlama.
We expect this trend to continue. Next year is probably too soon for DEXs to overtake centralized exchanges in terms of absolute trading volume. But they could reach 50% of all cryptocurrency trading by the end of 2026.
Privacy Policy Fuels Adoption
This year, privacy has become one of the major themes in DeFi.
Privacy-focused blockchain Zcash blew away the rest of the market in the last three months of the year with an 860% rally that saw its ZEC token hit $711 in November, its highest price since 2016. It has since fallen back to $395.
Elsewhere, the Ethereum Foundation announced an increased effort to integrate privacy into the $284 billion blockchain.
Proponents argue that cryptocurrency privacy is important to ensure the personal safety of those who use the technology. Just as people wouldn’t want their traditional bank statements made public, users often don’t want their entire financial lives exposed on blockchains either.
For institutions jumping into DeFi, the lack of built-in privacy leaves them with a dilemma, according to those behind Canton Network, a blockchain designed for institutional finance.
Enjoy the benefits of using blockchains, but at the risk of exposing sensitive pricing, strategy or investment positions, or sticking to slower, less efficient traditional rails.
Canton isn’t alone in making this point, either.
Privacy-friendly security features, such as multi-signature private wallets, are a prerequisite for many institutions looking to get on-chain, according to Alan Scott, co-founder and contributor to privacy protocol Railgun, previously stated. DL News.
Our latest prediction is that in 2026, the adoption of privacy-focused protocols and blockchains will continue, more blockchains – like Ethereum – will launch their own privacy infrastructure, and these developments will drive a new wave of institutional adoption.
Tim Craig is DL News’ DeFi correspondent based in Edinburgh. Contact us with advice at tim@dlnews.com.
