27 Crypto Predictions for 2026 | Mike Ippolito

Bankless nation, I'm here with Mike Ippolito. We're gonna talk about what we think is coming down the pipe in 2026. Mike, welcome to Bankless. David, it's been a while since we've done one of these. I thought you were angry with me. Wasn't getting my invites. Oh, you know, I like to I like to rotate who the guests in or out and, you know, I go in phases. You know? Saving the best for last of 2025. Best for last. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is coming into people's podcast feeds on the 30, so this might be people's very last podcast of 2025 as we go into 2026. On that note, how would you rate or describe or evaluate 2025 for our industry? 2025 was the best worst year ever in my opinion. And what I what I mean by that is, obviously, was not in a lot of ways, it was a sort of disappointing year. And the way that I would say it was disappointing was, one, we certainly didn't get the bull market, from a price perspective that I think a lot of us wanted. And we got new all time highs in Bitcoin for some of the other majors even that did better than most of the other alts. Ethereum, Solana had very minor all time high breaks. They occurred at different times. It was generally confusing. I think this was one of the hardest years that it's ever been to be an investor in crypto, especially if you were out along the risk curve on alts, and you you got destroyed most likely Mhmm. Unless you were very, very lucky and picked one of the handful of five or six that actually did well on the year. So I think it was very confusing, or I think it was very challenging from a price perspective. I do think that the industry makes more sense to me at least than it ever has. And I think the one of the themes of the year that I would call out is cognitive dissonance. And I think that there are a lot of people who are saying, wait a second. This doesn't make sense. The US just did a massive bear hug of crypto. We got Genius this year. We've got Clarity potentially right around the corner. I thought my bags were supposed to be going up. And I think what's confusing people is we because a regulated route is emerging, I think that a lot of this kind of wild west, very irrational market is starting to get much more rational and much more fundamentally driven. And this is something that people have called way too early, but I think that it's finally, this is a market that's starting to follow a very predictable curve around maturity. And I think what's confused a lot of people is there are very good projects in the space, that have continued to improve, but the price has …