Fred Wilson, one of the most influential venture capitalists in the US, believes that the defining moment for cryptocurrencies in 2026 will not come from new blockchains, but from making them invisible to their end users.
“Blockchains disappear behind better consumer interfaces that allow users to use, spend, exchange and send tokens without worrying about which blockchain they are on,” Wilson, who called bitcoin an “interesting investment opportunity” in 2011, he wrote in a blog post published last week.
The prediction, included 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, Came Early to Coinbase (COIN), Ethereum and Filecoin and remains a constant 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 media and mobile devices, has also been an outspoken critic of the cryptocurrency industry’s worst habits. He has rejected the culture of hype and symbolic speculation, warning that short-term greed threatens the long-term credibility of space.
That real work, in Wilson’s view, includes things like decentralized identity, peer-to-peer finance, and open protocols that anyone can take advantage of.
In previous posts, he compared the current state of cryptocurrencies to the early days of the Internet, when even sending an email required a level of technical knowledge.
He seems to believe that the way forward is through better design. Applications should handle infrastructure details (such as which chain a transaction is on) in the background, so that users can focus on what they want to do, not how they are doing it.
For Wilson, this isn’t just a matter of UX: it’s the difference between cryptocurrencies remaining a niche technology and achieving widespread adoption.
