Hashdex is out with its 2026 crypto investment outlook, and the vibe is pretty clear: stop treating crypto like a weird side-bet and start treating it like… an allocation. The firm’s CIO Samir Kerbage says “most investors” should be thinking in the 5–10% range, framing it as a pragmatic response to a messier macro regime (sticky inflation risk, debt burdens, the 60/40 portfolio looking less like a law of nature and more like a historical artifact). Look, you can debate the exact number, but Hashdex’s point is that the underweight has become the active decision. Crypto is now “well above $3 trillion” in market cap and about 1% of the global investable market by its math—meaning a sub-1% allocation is basically a deliberate fade. They also cite a Charles Schwab survey where 45% of financial advisors said they planned to allocate to crypto ETFs over the next year. And they’re not just waving their hands. Hashdex runs a simple portfolio thought experiment: adding crypto exposure (represented by the Nasdaq Crypto Index US) to a 60/40 improves risk-adjusted returns in their backtest window, with higher allocations juicing total return while, yes, drawdowns get uglier. That trade-off isn’t hidden — it’s the whole point of sizing the position instead of YOLO’ing it. Related Reading: Crypto Tanks After Fed Cut: Santiment Breaks Down The Trap But the meat of the report isn’t “buy crypto because number go up.” It’s three themes, three predictions — basically a roadmap for what they think does the heavy lifting in 2026. Top 3 Crypto Predictions For 2026 First up: the “cryptodollar”. Hashdex argues stablecoins are starting to do something geopolitically weird and financially consequential: while some sovereigns try to de-dollarize, stablecoins re-dollarize at the user and corporate level, with issuers recycling that demand into short-duration Treasuries. Their baseline is stablecoins going from roughly $295 billion to well over $500 billion in 2026. If that accelerates, they suggest it changes the shape of Treasury demand — in one scenario, stablecoin growth could shorten the average duration of US debt by around four months (because the backing skews short). That’s the kind of detail bond people obsess over. Crypto people probably should, too. Related Reading: Will The Crypto Market Benefit From The Trump Fed Takeover? Second: tokenization finally acting like a flywheel instead of a conference slide. Hashdex points to tokenized RWAs at roughly $36 billion as of late 2025 and says the market could grow 10x to about $400 billion by end-2026. They also flag that tokenized Treasury bills have already climbed to over $8 billion, from a little above $700 million two years earlier. They namecheck real-world rollout examples — BlackRock’s liquidity fund, Franklin Templeton’s on-chain government money fund, UBS’s tokenized VCC fund in Singapore, Siemens’ on-chain bond — as proof this isn’t just crypto teams talking to themselves anymore. “We’re not spending enough time talking about how quickly we’re going to tokenize every financial asset.” Third: AI, but not the “add AI to the pitch deck” version. Hashdex says decentralized AI networks pulled nearly $1 billion in venture funding in 2025, largely aimed at problems like verification, coordination, and compute cost. Their call is the “AI Crypto” segment growing from about $3 billion to $10 billion in 2026. The throughline is simple even if the plumbing isn’t: stablecoins deepen on-chain liquidity, tokenization pulls more assets onto rails, and AI pushes demand for crypto-native infrastructure that can verify and coordinate without a single gatekeeper. Hashdex’s punchline is that 2026 is when “exploratory” turns into “strategic.” Not a tidy ending, sure — but markets rarely give you one. At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $3.03 trillion. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
