Hashed announces 'Protocol Economy: Hashed 2026'…"Application services will begin in earnest"

Global Web3 venture capital (VC) firm Hashed predicted that next year application services using virtual assets and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure will begin in earnest.

Hashed said on the 8th that it released its annual report 'Protocol Economy: Hashed 2026.' In the report, Kim Seojun, CEO of Hashed, said, "What ran through 2025 is not volatility but that the industry as a whole has begun to reorganize in the same direction," and added, "As the excessive narratives and liquidity that persisted in recent years are being sorted out, the market's interest has converged on the question, 'Which services actually work?'"

Hashed said major regions such as the U.S., Korea, Japan, and the Middle East are entering a stage where stablecoins are being applied to real-world finance such as payments and settlement. Hashed's diagnosis is that stablecoins have already established themselves as substantive financial infrastructure covering not only digital means of transaction but also intercompany payments and cross-border remittances. Kim Seojun said, "(Stablecoins) are the case among digital asset infrastructure that has first entered large-scale real-world use."

It is analyzed that the importance of AI has also greatly increased from this year. Hashed said, "The basic unit of the digital economy is shifting from the traditional 'user-based model' to an 'AI agent-based model,' and AI agents will establish themselves as new actors in economic activity by collecting data, making judgments for specific purposes, and autonomously executing payments and transactions." It added, "(AI agents) will rapidly expand the points where digital money and smart contracts combine."

Hashed emphasized that these changes are forming a 'protocol economy.' The protocol economy is a system in which payments, settlements, data management, credit systems, etc. are all on-chain and operate like the same operational layer. On the surface, the user experience (UX) may not be greatly different from existing web/mobile services, but internally AI and digital money are combined and operate in real time.

For next year it predicted, "a year when the application phase will begin in earnest." The observation is that as digital assets and AI infrastructure enter a mature stage, application services that utilize these technologies in actual industry and financial fields will emerge in earnest. Intercompany stablecoin settlement, AI agent-based payments, DeFi within regulatory frameworks, and tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) were introduced as early examples of such transitions.

Accordingly, Hashed plans to focus next year on structural transitions such as stablecoin infrastructure, AI agent-based payment and settlement systems, and the convergence of real and digital finance. Kim said, "Rather than predicting the future, we will directly build the structures we spread," and added, "As the digital asset industry has entered a stage that touches the real economy, we will respond with actions that can prove this."