Crypto Startup Ideas for 2026 That Actually Matter
Where crypto can add real value today
It’s the time of the crypto cycle when people start quitting, leaving, crashing out. Declaring that crypto is over. Regretting the years they spent in this industry. Arguing the tech will never be used for anything beyond crime and speculation.
You see this every few years.
This is not a vague call for “alt season.” But it is a call to be optimistic and understand that this is the best environment in history for building a real business in crypto. In this piece, I’ll share ideas that are waiting to be built and that have potential that extend beyond the normal Crypto Twitter silo. This is a list of ideas that are actionable, grounded, and capable of having real-world impact immediately.
First, an important disclaimer, because this type of post is usually written by VCs.
I am not a VC. I am not an investment fund of any kind. I am not an angel investor.
To put it more clearly, I cannot help you fund these ideas.
If you reach out saying you want to build something, I’ll genuinely be happy the article inspired you. But I won’t be able to give you money.
At most I may be able to pass you a retweet or a strategic introduction if I happen to know someone.
What I am is someone who built a successful DeFi media business. One of the larger DeFi YouTube channels. And someone who built out the recurring revenue program at one of the largest DeFi data companies.
That matters, because many of the ideas in this article come from opportunities I’ve seen firsthand.
I’ve been a heavy user of DeFi products for about half a decade. Between that and my work in the industry, I’ve developed strong views on what works, what doesn’t, and where there is actual opportunity.
Some people may reasonably ask why I don’t build some of these ideas myself. For one thing, I’m already having a sizable impact on the industry by running revenue and growth for @DefiLlama. For another thing, I actually would like to build several of these ideas. Part of me is hoping that no one who reads this chooses to build those particular ideas. But I thought they were too perfect to leave out and ultimately I’ll be happy to see someone else turn them into reality.
Starting From First Principles
To figure out which ideas would actually be useful, and not just appeal to crypto speculators, it helps to start from first principles.
And by first principles here, I mean something very simple: Why is crypto actually useful?
What are its inherent advantages over traditional finance?
Once you’re honest about that, you can work from first principles to come up with ideas that provide value without relying on the fact that they’re “crypto for X” and without relying on token incentives for people to use apps they would otherwise never dream of opening.
You stop forcing crypto into places it doesn’t belong. And start identifying businesses that actually make sense on crypto rails.
For this, I’ll start by identifying the core value propositions that would make crypto rails preferable to traditional rails. Among these are:
Global access to capital. With crypto, there are no forex fees or restrictions moving money across borders.
Instant settlement, 24/7. There’s no need to wait X business days for transfers.
Privacy. Not every crypto has this. Those that do enable true uncensorable applications.
Low fees. In addition to the straightforward advantage of this (i.e. payments without a credit card fee), this opens up an entire array of applications like streaming payments that aren’t possible with a higher fixed fee.
Programmability and composability. Because digital assets are bearer assets controlled by code rather than intermediaries, they can be used across decentralized applications and deposited into smart contracts which make them more useful.
Permissionlessness. Anyone can access crypto, anywhere, at any time. This makes the technology ideal for those at risk of debanking to fundraise and for testing out financial products that would normally need to jump through a lot of regulatory loopholes.
Transparency. Tracking things like ownership and onchain financials can happen in real-time with crypto, allowing for automation of normally intensive corporate processes.
I’ve divided the ideas in this article into 5 buckets, each of which taps into several of these value propositions of crypto:
Internet capital markets: global access to capital, programmability and composability, permissionlessness
Censorship resistance: privacy, permissionlessness, global access to capital
DeSci: global access to capital, programmability and composability
Stablecoins: all value propositions
Onchain Corporate Governance: transparency
Internet Capital Markets (And Why the Term Got Confused)
A large part of the future of crypto, and part of the future of finance and the internet in general, is internet capital markets.
This term has gotten a bad name recently. Mostly because it’s been used to apply the meme-coin model to things that were barely different from meme coins. Much of that involved poorly designed tokenomics and framing speculation as ownership.
Honestly, we may need new, fresh terminology. But the framework itself is correct.
Here’s what I think Internet Capital Markets actually are:
True Internet Capital Markets are not about speculation-first tokens. They’re about making cash flows natively investable on the internet.
You can imagine a future where not just onchain DeFi apps, but everything, has its cash flows tokenized.
That includes real world cash-flowing businesses, dividend producing equities, royalty streams, real estate, your friend’s HVAC roll-up, apps, micro-SaaS portfolios, and onchain and offchain products.
These become investable, tradable, organizable into entirely new financial products. Globally, permissionlessly, with minimal fees.
That’s what real Internet Capital Markets are.
I believe that each of these markets is ripe for someone to create applications for raising capital and distributing cash flows to investors onchain:
Small businesses
Micro-SAAS and Information Products
Royalty streams
Creator revenue
Capital Formation in a World Where “Friends and Family” Is Breaking
Traditionally, when people started businesses, they raised money from friends and family. That’s still largely true for small businesses and small real estate deals.
But the social reality has changed. People have smaller families. Friends are global. Friends are often in different countries.
It’s no longer trivial to ask friends to contribute capital, do it legally, or even to logistically collect capital.
Internet Capital Markets make this possible again. But globally. Across many asset classes.
Even more interesting, cash flows from those investments can then be repackaged, combined, and used in other financial products. Once millions of businesses and products have their cash flows tokenized, it’s possible to use primitives that have already been stress-tested on crypto-native DeFi to create new products on top of those assets.
Censorship Resistance Is Not Optional
Another core aspect of crypto assets is censorship resistance.
This comes down to permissionlessness and privacy.
Public blockchains already give us permissionlessness. Privacy has been largely neglected.
And I say this as someone whose current work depends on onchain transparency. But for many applications, privacy is preferable or mandatory.
The Line Between Allowed and Disallowed Is Moving
You may think you don’t need censorship resistance, but can you be so sure that you won’t tomorrow?
You can already see this in parts of Europe: crackdowns on dissidents, bank accounts being closed, people arrested over social media posts.
The next step seems obvious: political movements losing access to fundraising, bank accounts frozen, payment rails cut off entirely.
When that happens, how do those movements continue to function?
The obvious answer: crypto-based networks.
There are several products in this niche that crypto is perfect for:
Censorship-resistant fundraising for political groups. European governments are increasingly cracking down on populist political parties. It’s only a matter of time before the ability for those parties to use the banking system is hamstrung. Crypto-based solutions would allow them to raise and store funds without fear of debanking. To avoid reprisals against members, privacy is also preferable here.
Uncensorable crowdfunding. Even crowdfunding platforms that espouse the virtues of censorship resistance are ultimately at the mercy of payment processors. And activists and governments in the past have tried to shut down fundraisers by pressuring payment processors to threaten those platforms. Moving to crypto rails solves this problem instantly. If payments are on a decentralized network, there’s no one to pressure. The enemies of free speech can only screech into the void.
DeSci: Where AI and Internet Capital Markets Intersect
AI is making it easier than ever for individuals and small teams to conduct original scientific research.
You’re already seeing this with protein folding and other scientific breakthroughs. AI can ingest massive amounts of literature and data to find connections that might take decades to discover manually.
But discovery alone isn’t enough. Bringing ideas to market still requires capital.
This is where DeSci fills a real gap.
The Problem DeSci Solves
In a prior life, I worked at a pediatric cancer research nonprofit. The opportunities for DeSci to add value in medical grants and research are numerous.
If you look at smaller or lesser-known diseases, they’re often too small for pharma or not profitable in the near term. As a result, they rely on leftover drugs or receive minimal funding.
With permissionless global capital markets, you can find people who actually care.
When combined with AI, small teams or individuals can realistically attempt research.
One of the saddest scenarios is to encounter people with extremely rare diseases (i.e. they’re 1 of 20 people with this diagnosis). Research towards a cure is 0. The probability of research occurring is also basically 0.
This makes it realistic that someone might try anyway. And might even succeed.
This also applies to diseases with a large footprint, but which are deprioritized by big pharma companies.
Returning Capital in DeSci
Funding is only half the stack.
You also need a way to verify results and, in some cases, return value to funders, to package IP and royalties, to distribute returns.
Onchain milestone-based unlocks reduce admin overhead and push more money into actual research. This increased transparency also allows contributors to know where money is going, increasing the amount of capital they’re willing to contribute.
One opportunity to make these sorts of DeSci projects more investable would be to borrow the portfolio model from VC and film financing. One breakout can fund the rest.
One might construct a portfolio of 10 moonshot projects. Investors are funding a basket of research projects, increasing the surface area for breakthrough discoveries. In the event that a treatment is developed, AI tools could also help to identify other areas it could be commercialized.
Stablecoins: The Least Controversial Opportunity
The Stablecoin supply is already over $300B. Hundreds of billions added in the last two years.
Treasury forecasts put it near $3T by the end of the decade. That’s only 4 years away in case the last few years were a blur for you.
Conservatively, hundreds of billions more will move onchain. Optimistically, trillions.
And that doesn’t even account for what’s already onchain and underutilized.
Two Stablecoin Business Categories: Savings and Spending
A. Savings
People globally want to hold dollars. Especially in developing markets.
Despite flaws, the dollar is still stable, liquid, and the global trade standard.
But there are many saving products that can be built with stables that would far exceed what’s possible with tradfi. For example, one can imagine savers preferring custom currency and commodity baskets with yield from LPing forex pairs.
B. Spending and Use
Stablecoin advantages include instant settlement, no cross-border fees, minimal transaction costs, and always-on availability.
Several businesses already prove this works.
Here are a few fields ripe for stablecoin payments to be implemented:
Gig platforms. Labor arbitrage often involves cross-border payments and cumbersome transfers between accounts.
Remittances. Money wire services are probably the first businesses to be adversely affected by crypto. But there’s room for improved services that bridge the final gap between cash and crypto payments.
Disaster relief. Stablecoin distributions to mobile wallets can be used to bypass bureaucracy, corruption, and banking failures in disaster and warzones.
Programmable Money and Streaming Payments
Another key benefit of stablecoins is that they’re programmable.
This enables continuous payment streams, not discrete pay periods. LlamaPay is a great example of this.
There are many other products that could be built on this concept:
Streamed payments could be linked to payroll software. Clock in, pay stream starts. Clock out, pay stops. Paid up to the exact second instantly. No waiting two weeks for a paycheck and no uncertainty about whether you’ll be paid (an issue in some jurisdictions).
Pay-as-you-go SAAS. The world has subscription fatigue. Subscriptions to software and APIs could be linked to streaming payments, enabling users to pay only as they’re using a product, creating a cleaner link between usage and revenue and avoiding the need for invoices, billing, etc.
Onchain Corporate Governance (Beyond DAOs)
DAO governance has (justifiably) become a meme.
But corporate governance onchain may be one of crypto’s most transformative uses.
Even traditional finance leaders have acknowledged that onchain voting reduces massive overhead. Blackrock CEO Larry Fink wrote, “Tokenization makes that easier because your ownership and voting rights are digitally tracked, allowing you to vote seamlessly and securely from anywhere.”
DAO governance failed because people tried to implement direct democracy, which is a terrible way to run a business.
What Governance Should Look Like
Token holders fear their tokens don’t mean anything. That fear is often justified.
But the solution isn’t voting on everything.
Governance should mimic corporate structures, encode rights, protect minority shareholders, elect boards, and let management manage.
Day-to-day decisions should never be made by shareholders or tokenholders. Instead, tokenholders should elect a board that appoints management. Or, if a board carries too many legal connotations, shareholders could elect a CEO directly, who oversees company operations. There are ways to encode this onchain, such as allowing a majority of tokenholders to vote to take control of the treasury.
A product that replicates this corporate structure onchain is waiting to be built.
From Crypto Governance to Real Companies
Thousands of existing protocols are a sandbox. If this works, it can be stress-tested, proven, and iterated.
Eventually, it can be applied to real public companies with onchain equity and onchain shareholder voting.
In this way, there’s a clear path from niche DAO tooling to public equities market infrastructure.
Other Corporate Governance Products
As an ecosystem of companies conducting corporate governance onchain is built out, there is room for a variety of other related products:
Quarterly and other financial reporting. A lot of pain and uncertainty could have been avoided in the crypto market over the past few years with standardized financial disclosures, treasury movements, token emissions, buybacks, and material events. All of these tools can later be applied to other businesses that move onchain.
M&A tooling. As crypto teams run out of runway, expect a wave of consolidation and acquisitions. There’s an opportunity for a platform to execute this in a way that accounts for existing tokenholders: allowing token-for-token swaps, payouts, treasury consolidation and more, transparently.
Public company onboarding. Tools for public companies to experiment with and phase in onchain voting without breaking existing structures.
Compensation management. Tooling to manage performance-based bonuses (verified by onchain milestones), vesting, and other compensation management.
The Compounding Effect
One beauty of the next few years is that each real cash flow and payment stream brought onchain makes DeFi rails more useful and increases the value of other primitives.
All of the ideas in this article could add real value today. But the real magic comes when thousands of real businesses exist onchain and the DeFi primitives that have been stress-tested the past 5 years can be repurposed for those exogenous cash flows.