Where are the opportunities for entrepreneurs in 2026? Below are opportunities that are worth tens if not hundreds of billions. In the crypto space, the best product is what wins out, rather than the ones with the most money or most government connections. A company with a few million dollars in investment can build a business that services hundreds of thousands of users, moving or saving billions of dollars a year. There's not many other industries where this kind of leverage and growth is possible, which is why 2026 will continue to attract investment and enterpreneurial spirit. The biggest areas I see, based on my clients and work in this space are:

1. Stablecoins

2. Customized crypto experiences

3. On-chain stocks

4. Exotic Markets

5. Crypto security

6. Wallets

7. Big Finance

Stablecoins

There's approximately 500x more dollars in stablecoins today than there was when Kesem Frank and his team approached me with their idea for QCAD, which in 2026 is the reigning champ for Canadian Dollars. Globally, stablecoins are around $300 billion USD, with more than half of that being in the venerable Tether USDT, $75 billion in USDC, and the rest split amongst Paypal, algorithmic stablecoin DAI, and a variety of other smaller players. But the biggest opportunity isn't in making a new stablecoin, it's in making stablecoins useful. More specifically: improving existing payment/financial flows by using stablecoins.

Stablecoins don't move themselves, and they don't replace existing financial functions without skilled developers who deeply understand financial technology. One Canadian team that's deeply involved in this is Cybrid. They happen to be a client, but I'd be talking about them even if they weren't, because there's surprisingly few examples of these sorts of stablecoin connector businesses. It's obvious how to send a stablecoin, or receive it, or sell it on a crypto exchange, it's not obvious how to make things work seamlessly in the background with non-crypto applications. Since stablecoin transfer costs are nearly zero, and they're immediate, there's plenty of scope for improving financial plumbing by adding stablecoins and APIs into the mix.

Beyond the creation of stablecoins and the plumbing for financial applications, stablecoins enable direct payments between applications. This is most obviously useful for LLM agents, because the money is digital first and can literally be moved using code, unlike bank accounts or credit cards. As agents become more useful, more companies will be exposing access points for agents but they're not going to do that for free. We've already seen many more paywalls go up as LLMs have grown because content providers fear (and sue) LLM developers. Micropayments using traditional means are a dead end. Micropayments (and macropayments) using stablecoins work right now, out of the box, with no application form or special licensing. LLMs have led to hundreds of billions in CapEx by major tech firms like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, and the return on that capital will inevitably involve the financialization of LLMs, as opposed to merely being answer factories or document drafters. Once LLMs have access to commerce, there's a whole new game being played.

Customized Crypto Experiences

Platforms like Jupiter/Meteora made it big over the last few years in the Solana space by providing APIs and tooling for people to craft new experiences for interacting with markets. There are endless examples of this sort of approach in crypto, as people have recognized that large liquidity pools are already out there, so the next step is to find new ways to interact with them. This goes well beyond wallets. What does this actually mean? It means a larger stack for trading, that has new elements at the top. It's no longer simply the exchange-wallet paradigm that dominated in the 2017-2018 crypto boom.

The lengthening stack of crypto includes new tools for interacting with liquidity, but they're also new tools for users to interact with those tools. For example, using LLMs to interact by translating plain English directions into the on-chain interaction that the user is aiming for. A Canadian example of this approach is Kuvi.ai.

2026 could be the year for MCMA to take off, something I first set out in 2021, based on my experiences with clients, and with being the President of a crypto wallet company in 2017-2018 (Decentral, in Toronto). Wallets that merely offer crypto are not what people want. Sure, that's what crypto people want. But the boundary between what counts as crypto is dissolving, amist things like stablecoins (see above), intent-based applications (re: LLMs), and new on-chain assets like stocks, bonds, and gold (see below). There's an enormous opportunity to develop these new applications that make it easy for people to do what they want. For example, having a single address that someone sends stablecoins to, and it automatically rebalances into the S&P500 (80%), gold (15%), and Kenyan real estate (5%). Kenyan real estate isn't an on-chain asset class yet, but there's no reason to think we won't get there. Eventually, all dollars flock to the most liquid and easiest to use markets, and on-chain has proven to be the fastest and often cheapest mechanism for doing that. It's a lot of work, and it's early days, but the elements of the future are in place.

On-Chain Stocks

The first good quality ETF tokens appeared in 2025. I explained how these work in a detailed blog post back in September. These are already worth hundreds of millions on-chain, and they'll inevitably grow like stablecoins have. The reason for the inevitability is that having a tokenized stock is better than having tokenized cash. Tokenized stocks grow, whereas cash is always losing value due to money printing by national authorities (even though the number of currency units owned doesn't decrease). Tokenized stocks are also a global opportunity because they're an asset that anyone in the world can own, even if they can't access US stocks through their local stock brokerage (or, the fees for doing so are exorbitant, re: $10 a trade fees that used to predominate in Canada and the USA in the era of discount brokerages).

If stocks can be brought on-chain, there's no reason why other types of standardized securities can't also. This means tokenized bonds and REITs are going to be followers. Right now, the deep liquidity and popularity of the S&P500 is driving that to be the #1 choice for on-chain securities, but this is a function of how early the market is rather than where the demand will end up.

The key to on-chain stocks is that they exist within blockchains, which can be accessed by anyone with a wallet. There's no permissions for using a blockchain wallet, and so there's no restrictions on what people can own so long as someone can make it on-chain. Now that people have figured out how to get these securities on-chain and globally accessible (see my explanation blog post), it's only a matter of time before they become standard options within crypto wallets.

Exotic Markets: Betting, Perpetuities, Prediction Markets, And More

Sports gambling has been legalized in Ontario and many other places in recent years. TV watchers decry the ads and sports fans decry the impact on the games, but sports gambling isn't disappearing. And neither is the world of perps. There are now hundreds of global markets for people to make leveraged bets on price movements in crypto (among other things). This is now so mainstream that TD Securities even has a helpful explanatory page. What was once a strange corner of the crypto trading world is now being explained by the second largest bank in Canada.

There's two opportunities in this market: making the infrastructure and helping people navigate it. For the latter, Canadian company DexPal (a client of mine) has mapped the ecosystem, including the many incentives offered by markets. The world is full of people who want to interact with perps/futures and other instruments, for crypto and for other assets. How they'll be connected to those opportunities will be through exchanges, wallets, explorers, and other tools. It's unclear right now what the market will turn into, but it is clear that the opportunity is more than just building the marketplaces themselves. This is especially helpful because these kinds of markets are typically offside of securities laws, so they're almost always being made in foreign jurisdictions, and so the opportunity is to help people find those opportunities, rather than directly serving them. In other words: there's an opportunity for building a Google to help people find these opportunities, rather than making all the websites, and it's probably more profitable to build the tools than the markets, in the long run.

But what markets are legal to operate? In the last few years there's been court victories in the US for prediction markets, which look a lot like gambling. Where's the boundary between these various types of speculation? That too is dissolving amidst consumer demand, because if there's one thing crypto does it's to put the user at the forefront of what gets built. When the systems are permissionless, the user gets to choose what they want to buy, rather than the system choosing for them. It's not just an uphill battle to reverse this, it's impossible. The services already exist. They can be accessed on-chain, or through VPNs. People want access to more opportunities to take risk, and they want that risk to be thematic and relevant, whether that's sports (DraftKings), crypto prices (Binance), or world politics (Polymarket). People are no longer limited to betting on their own deaths (life insurance), stocks (brokerages), or random numbers (lottery). This is a trend that will only accelerate in 2026.

Crypto Security

It's probable that there's several countries in engaged in the theft of cryptocurrency using their spy services. North Korea is always the prominent example, but no one really knows what's North Korea and what's blamed on North Korea (as a pariah state, they don't respond to allegations and don't care). Whether it's national hacking, organized crime, or the always popular disorganized crime of individuals/small teams, crypto losses are clearly in the billions per year. That's money not only drained out of the ecosystems and the personal lives of millions of people, but it's also an existential threat to the nascent world of crypto. Yes, we're now more than a decade and a half since the invention of Bitcoin, but the practices and systems that safeguard crypto are still in their infancy.

Crypto wallets can do better and so can exchanges, but there's also room for many other players. There's now a number of specialty companies that operate purely in the crypto security space. For example, Immunefi (a client of mine), based in Singapore. Companies like Immunefi typically act to intermediate technical talent (security researchers) and projects that might have bugs. There's also technical security audit companies like Trail of Bits, and their many competitors. But the opportunity isn't limited to improving the code that someone else has written.

Crypto security means building better products, but it also means designing more secure workflows for people to interact with crypto. Today, there's many hundreds of billions of crypto/stablecoins being safeguarded by a relatively small number of players, such as Coinbase Custody and Bitgo. How do people safely withdraw from these vaults? What protocols help to prevent employee thefts? What workplace monitoring programs need to be in place, like those that banks have developed over the centuries? This is both a technical problem, a process problem, and a modernization issue.

For many businesses, the security issues with crypto are what will hold them back from embracing the full benefits, because their only option will be to adopt centralized platforms and make limited use of the technologies available. With improved security, there's less likelihood of loss, and therefore higher ROI for adopting these technologies. The companies that build these solutions will be the ones who capture enormous value in the coming years. For example, US cybersecurity company Wiz was bought by Google for $32 billion USD. That isn't a crypto deal, but it's indicative of how much cybersecurity is worth these days, and how even companies like Google need to purchase that expertise. This is a big open field of a market.

Wallets

Wallets are still big business in 2026! Coinbase bought a Toronto-based client of mine, Tensor Labs, in late 2025. There are many opportunities to build new ways for people to hold, access, and transact with their crypto. Wallets that build new features or that have a unique take on the market will continue to pop up, and gain mindshare. Even a hundred thousand user wallet is a great business for a small, dedicated team. Larger players will continue to act like Coinbase did to acquire great people who are building great products because wallets are always at the heart of crypto. There are certainly many people who only interact with dealers/exchanges, but cryptocurrency is at its heart a user-controlled system, and the user control is enabled by wallets. Wallets also have a great regulatory profile because they're downloadable software that users use, rather than being centralized intermediaries (which is what most laws are aimed at).

Big Finance: Big Banks, Insurers, Brokerages, and RWAs

Crypto is now a mature market in many respects. For example, there's comprehensive laws in Canada governing the platforms that buy and sell crypto. Mature markets attract the winners from adjacent markets, which often means big banks, insurers, brokerages, and other players. I expect these companies to continue to invest and build now that they see there's a sufficient market and sufficient regulatory understanding.

In addition to the obvious play of buying into a new market, there's also modernization efforts that have been underway for years. For example, DTCC in the US (a gigantic business few people have heard of) recently obtained regulatory approval for a new tokenized RWA platform. DTCC sees the chance to do more with existing assets, just like the many other players in the world of tracking, tracing, and transferring assets. This is a truly massive industry that involves lawyers, trust companies, technology companies, back office companies of all types, banks, etc. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people in North America go into work and make sure the right assets move to the right places. The more this can be made secure, and the faster it can take place, the more business can be won and the more money can be made.

I expect 2026 to be a year of serious investment by existing players in the financial/asset world who can now buy the technologies they need to improve their businesses, and can see the pathway to developing their own solutions that make their businesses better. Wherever that's happening there's always room for startups to build what the majors need, and flip it for a healthy profit. Most startup teams find this to be a daunting market, because they can't understand the byzantine ways that assets move, but for the ones who do know, this is a potential goldmine because the tech is infinitely scalable. Probably the teams that will win in this market are a combination of financial professionals, lawyers (or even law firms), consultants, and programmers. Only by combining knowledge about how this works now with how it can work, and then building a product, can startups unlock the customers that are waiting to buy solutions to their problems.

A Note On Canadian vs. Foreign Opportunities

I'd like to say that 2026 is the year that all the Canadian developers and entrepreneurs move their projects from foreign shares back to Canada, but that won't happen. There will still be a bifurcation of opportunities into those that are legal in Canada and those that aren't. So I expect more service providers and technology companies, and less market operators. That isn't to say that existing market operators, like Canada's crypto asset trading platforms, won't do well, but rather that some of the more interesting opportunities will go to the teams abroad that are either in low-touch jurisdictions or willing to embrace risk. I often find that American teams ask what the penalty is for not following a law whereas Canadian teams ask if there is a law. Obviously the latter is more what lawyers want to hear, and likely to lead to a better engagement with someone like me, but there's something to be said for taking risks. In 2026, legal risk is probably not the biggest consideration though, as regulators have started to realize that they were too conservative before, and because of the adoption of crypto by traditional businesses, for which there's limited legal implications. For example, a Canadian company can build a new application and license it to banks, and the activity of the banks is covered by their existing bank licenses.

Opportunities For Lawyers & Other Professionals

One of the most common questions I get is how lawyers and other professionals can be a part of this, as it sounds (and is) very technical. The best place to learn about that is Canadian Jacob Robinson's Law of Code podcast. It's a who's-who of professionals, talking about what they do and the many angles to solving problems in crypto. He's on episode 168 as of today. Give it a listen if you're not sure where you fit into the ever-growing ecosystem.

Happy New Year

Almost everything on the list above is an opportunity that Canadians can participate in. There are already probably at least a hundred startups in Canada tackling these problems. 2026 is looking to be a big year for the solutions that entrepreneurs are building both here and abroad. Happy New Year to all the builders out there.