Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives

Incumbents struggle to sell to startups because they're bound by the rules of P and L. I think taking a more crypto native approach is actually better regardless of whether you wanna offer the product to a crypto native audience or to a more traditional audience. Where you see autonomous labs and autonomous science being adopted first is probably more of a function of the market that it's operating in. If you attract all of the new companies at formation and then grow with them, as your customers become big companies in their own right, so will you. As the year winds down, our investment team looks ahead. Our twenty twenty six big ideas highlight the problems, opportunities, and shifts we expect builders to take on next. This episode is about three big ideas about new rails. Not incremental improvements to existing systems, but foundational primitives that make entirely new markets and workflows possible. You'll hear how programmable money evolves beyond basic stablecoins, how autonomy starts entering scientific research through labs, and how distribution itself becomes a strategy when startups sell to other startups at formation. We'll start with the rail that's already visible, stablecoins going mainstream. Guy Willett argues that stablecoins are only the beginning. The next phase is on chain credit origination and new synthetic products that are easier to scale than simply copying traditional assets onto a blockchain. Here's Guy. My My name is Guy Ouellette, and I'm a general partner on the crypto team here at a sixteen t. This year, my big ideas are origination and purplification. In 2025, we've seen stablecoins go mainstream with increasing outstanding issuance and payment volume. And one of the things I've been thinking about is what the most important second order effects of outstanding stablecoin issuance will be. I think a lot of the existing stablecoins look effectively like narrow banks today, where they hold user deposits in fiat or perhaps in treasury bills. I think it's very unlikely in the long term that we scale on chain finance exclusively through narrow banks. And so I've been thinking much more about how we can facilitate credit and capital formation on chain. There will be a sort of new role or entity that's very important, which is something akin to a private credit fund helping to facilitate loans on chain. If you look at the way things are maturing on chain for crypto, you see, I think, a very similar market structure to what's happening in the traditional financial world after the great financial crisis in part because of Basel three. There's a lot more non bank lending from entities like large private credit funds that have significant equity capital. So banks are doing much more lending to credit funds who are making loans to end depositors. This is very similar today in crypto to how I think stablecoins will effectively end up lending to curators or to asset managers who will end up making loans to end users. And …