links wednesday

20 Predictions for Crypto in 2026 (via Peteris Erins from Auditless)

"Fintech L1s accrue no value to $ETH. Ethereum becomes a marketing term and the “Ethereum community” starts caring about the asset again.More stablecoins than L2s. Same mechanism but way easier to launch. In general, the industry learns to monetize TVL as much as it monetizes transaction volume."

"Privacy retracts. I think we are still a couple iterations away from mass adopted applications of privacy tech so while it’s great to see the the value spike I think it is a little premature."

"The first non-USD stablecoins see adoption. I don't think anybody particularly cares about GBP stable coins but CHF or SGD would be another matter entirely. More to explore there."

"AI replaces communities and social media for asset discovery. Memecoin communities have peaked."

"A major celebrity launches a Creator Coin on Base, then everyone forgets about Creator Coins. I think Creator Coins are going to follow a similar trajectory to memecoins and friend.tech. The negative flywheel effect when early holders start to actually lose money does not facilitate long-term patronage in current iterations."

"AI vulnerability detection starts working. First tools that can find independent vulnerabilities in smart contracts are established. However, they still don't replace audits and teams that rely entirely on AI auditing get burned."

"1-2 major prediction market betting categories disappear. We discover that insider incentives lead to unfair markets and platforms self-regulate or get regulated."

"2025 is coming to a quiet and painful end and we’re questioning everything again starting from blue chip chains like Optimism and Bitcoin to AI."

Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?

"The economics have changed dramatically now with agentic coding, and it is going to totally transform the software development industry (and the wider economy). 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard."

"Take an average project for an internal tool in a company. Let's assume the data modelling is already done to some degree, and you need to implement a web app to manage widgets."

"Previously, you'd have a small team of people working on setting up CI/CD, building out data access patterns and building out the core services. Then usually a whole load of CRUD-style pages and maybe some dashboards and graphs for the user to make. Finally you'd (hopefully) add some automated unit/integration/e2e tests to make sure it was fairly solid and ship it, maybe a month later."

"And that's just the direct labour. Every person on the project adds coordination overhead. Standups, ticket management, code reviews, handoffs between frontend and backend, waiting for someone to unblock you. The actual coding is often a fraction of where the time goes."

"Jevons Paradox says that when something becomes cheaper to produce, we don't just do the same amount for less money. Take electric lighting for example; while sales of candles and gas lamps fell, overall far more artificial light was generated."

"Engineers need to really lean in to the change in my opinion. This won't change overnight - large corporates are still very much behind the curve in general, lost in a web of bureaucracy of vendor approvals and management structures that leave them incredibly vulnerable to smaller competitors."

"But if you're working for a smaller company or team and have the power to use these tools, you should. Your job is going to change - but software has always changed. Just perhaps this time it's going to change faster than anyone anticipates."

James Cameron On AI in Hollywood

"A typical Avatar film takes 1,000 VFX people and he intends to keep it that way: [I want to work with] 1,000 people but for half the time. Then, we start the next one. So, nobody loses a job. Our cadence increases. Our throughput increases.Look, I’m 71. I got a finite amount of time, maybe another 30-40 years at most."

Cameron thinks the potential cost-savings of GenAI will be a positive for the industry by allowing the creation of new ideas that wouldn’t be financially viable otherwise: "[Look at] Dune or Wicked. They don’t have a lot in common as storytelling.But they both have big sets and they cost a lot of money in VFX. […]How many movies are going to get greenlit where you’re spending that amount of money on VFX that are not tried-and-true blue chip IP? Where does the young up-and-coming aspiring filmmaker — whose head is bursting with ideas like The Terminator or Aliens or The Abyss — get their foothold? They don’t [right now]. [So, the VFX] has got to be cheaper."

"Cameron doesn’t think AI will ever fully replace human actors and our individual-ness is the key going forward: [GenAI is] trained on everything we ever valued artistically. They don’t put the crap stuff into the training data. They put the stuff that’s been published. That’s online. The art. The performances. The movies. Whether they’re doing it legally or ethically…to be determined. Let’s assume that [GenAI] is almost de facto selection for that which the human eye and the human consciousness enjoys, right? That goes into the training data. So, millions and millions of images and thousands of hours of performance. What you’re going to get is the average. It goes in a blender, right? Then it precipitates out as a single unique new image, but it’s based on a sort of a generic feedstock. What [GenAI] can never do is create a unique lived experience reflected through the eyes a single artist. Whether that’s a single writer or single director or single actor.[AI] won’t select for the quirkiness or the offbeat-ness.I think what we celebrate is the uniqueness of our actors. Not their perfection, not their kind of glossy, Vogue-cover beauty. But their off-centerness."