Most people think the next crypto cycle will be about better tokens.
It probably won’t.
By 2026, the real bottleneck isn’t assets.
It’s infrastructure.
Here’s what’s changing:
Crypto is moving from experimentation to production.
Trading desks aren’t “testing” anymore.
Treasury teams aren’t sandboxing.
Risk systems aren’t forgiving.
Stablecoins are being used for settlement.
Execution is mostly automated.
Capital is consolidating into fewer platforms.
That creates a new failure mode.
When markets were narrative-driven,
“close enough” data was fine.
When markets are machine-driven,
it isn’t.
Two systems can trade the same asset
at the same time
and still be seeing different markets.
Different venues.
Different timestamps.
Different aggregation rules.
Different versions of “the truth.”
That’s not a UX issue.
It’s an infrastructure problem.
In traditional finance, this is solved with canonical market views.
In crypto, it’s still mostly hand-waved away.
Which raises the real question:
At what point does “good enough” market data stop being good enough?
And do you think most crypto systems today are built for that shift,
or still optimized for experimentation?
