Fred Wilson, one of the most influential venture capitalists in the United States, believes crypto’s defining moment in 2026 will come not from new blockchains, but from making them invisible to their end users.
“Blockchains are disappearing behind better consumer interfaces that allow users to use, spend, trade and send tokens without worrying about which blockchain they are on,” Wilson, who called Bitcoin an “attractive investment opportunity” in 2011, he wrote in a blog post published last week.
The prediction, embedded in a longer set of Wilson’s technology forecasts for 2026, reflects a view he has held for years: the promise of blockchain depends on ease of use, not technical power.
Wilson is a founding partner of Union Square Ventures (USV), the New York-based venture capital firm behind early bets on Twitter, Etsy and Tumblr. In crypto, it was very early on Coinbase (COIN), Ethereum and Filecoin and remains a consistent voice in long-term conversations about how blockchain could reshape the Internet.
Wilson, who has often described blockchains as the “next big thing” after social and mobile, has also openly criticized the crypto industry’s worst habits. He opposes the culture of hype and token speculation, warning that short-term greed threatens the long-term credibility of the space.
According to Wilson, this real work includes things like decentralized identity, peer-to-peer financing, and open protocols that anyone can build on.
In previous articles, he has compared the current state of cryptography to the early days of the Internet, when even sending an email required a level of technical know-how.
The way forward, he seems to believe, lies in better design. Applications need to manage infrastructure details, like which chain a transaction is on, in the background, so users can focus on what they want to do, not how they do it.
For Wilson, this isn’t just a UX issue: it’s the difference between crypto remaining a niche technology and wide adoption.
