Merry 2026: Bold Economic Predictions That Demonstrate Why the Best Is Yet to Come

How Decentralization, Truth, and Participation Unleash Unprecedented Prosperity

Inside this year’s predictions:

• Media Disinformation Becomes Profitable

• Cryptocurrency Valuations Rise as AI Valuations Come Back to Earth

• Blockchain Emerges as the Income Layer of a Post-Labor, AI-Driven Economy

• The Accelerating Shift to Alternative Health, Media, Finance, and the Road to Free Alternative Energy

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Since 2011, I have begun each new year with the publication of my annual predictions article. Over the years, I have made some pretty bold calls. While several have already come to fruition, others, like my 2025 bitcoin forecast, were simply ahead of their moment.

After accurately predicting that bitcoin would surpass $100,000 in 2024 (when it was only trading at around $45,000), the crypto bellwether failed to reach my $171,000 target in 2025. That said, nothing fundamentally has changed. If anything, regulatory tailwinds, renewed quantitative easing, and growing corporate treasury adoption have only strengthened the case to own bitcoin.

I also prophesied last year that 2025 would bring the constitutionality of the accredited investor rule into serious national contention. While the issue has not yet dominated mainstream headlines or debate stages, 2025 nonetheless marked a year of material and undeniable progress.

On August 7, President Trump signed an executive order directing the SEC to actively consider reforms to the accredited investor definition - an explicit acknowledgment that all Americans should be afforded the same opportunity for portfolio diversification long enjoyed by the financially privileged. In parallel, a landmark lawsuit filed by Investor Choice Advocates Network (ICAN) directly challenged the legality of the accredited investor rule itself, forcing the issue into the judicial arena for the first time in a way that policymakers, regulators, and courts will no longer be able to ignore.

But my most precise prediction of all was that traditional industry titans - long the arbiters of our diets, healthcare, media, entertainment, and investment choices - were nearing a moment of historic displacement. See: Welcome to 2025 and The Alternative Era - by Dara Albright

In 2025, models that once lived on the fringe moved decisively into the mainstream. In terms of user growth, alternative industries outperformed - not because they were subsidized, protected, or politically favored, but because they realigned incentives away from intermediaries and back toward consumers. Alternative medicine scaled faster than conventional pharmaceuticals as patients increasingly rejected perpetual symptom management in favor of holistic and preventative care. Independent and creator-led media captured attention and advertising by optimizing participation and critical thinking instead of enforcing centralized narratives. Crypto wallets expanded faster than traditional brokerage accounts as investors migrated toward decentralized systems that reward engagement, transparency, and autonomous research.

The Alternative Economy: 2025 by the Numbers

Health
Complementary & Alternative Medicine (CAM) gained widespread adoption in 2025, reaching $193B–$242B globally and compounding at 22–28% annually, with projections exceeding $2T by the mid-2030s. Growth was driven by consumer migration toward prevention-first care, including nutrition, mind-body therapies, herbal medicine, and digitally enabled wellness. By contrast, pharmaceutical revenue growth remained in low single digits, driven not by improved health outcomes but by pricing power, patent extensions, and the use of artificial intelligence to produce even more artificial drugs.

CAM is also benefiting from regulatory tailwinds. The expansion of the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement reflects growing recognition of the failures inherent in centralized, pharmaceutical-first care. MAHA-aligned proposals - such as Congressman Eric Burlison’s patient-centered framework that includes a proposed $150 monthly “Wellness Purse” for health food, supplements, and fitness - explicitly reorient incentives toward prevention and holistic care, marking a clear break from the chronic-dependency model.

Media
Media followed a similar divergence. In 2025, trust in legacy outlets hit historic lows while independent and creator-owned platforms expanded - without subsidies or regulatory protection. Podcasts, subscription journalism, and decentralized media gained share as legacy outlets faced declining ad revenue, subscriber losses, and accelerating newsroom layoffs. According to Winterberry Group, creative and content investment is growing 2-3 times faster than traditional media spend, confirming a fundamental shift away from centralized narrative control toward performance-driven, audience-aligned models.

Finance
Finance tracked the same trajectory as individuals migrated toward crypto and prediction-market platforms. The 2025 Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index reports approximately 950M global crypto users, up from 560M the year prior. Crypto wallet revenue is now growing 31–32% annually, nearly 3X the 11% YoY new-account growth at Interactive Brokers, one of the fastest-growing traditional platforms.

The growth of prediction markets was even more remarkable, with user bases estimated to have expanded 3 to 4X - from roughly 4 million users in 2024 to as many as 15 million in 2025 - while total trading volumes surged an estimated 400% year over year, potentially reaching $40 billion. Together, these trends underscore a broader shift toward financial systems that price information in real time, reward participation, and reduce reliance on centralized intermediaries.

You can read all my previous prediction articles here.

None of my forecasts relied on clairvoyance, crystal balls, or a DeLorean with a flux capacitor. Instead, they were grounded in methods far more dependable than folklore - methods that hide in plain sight and are available to anyone willing to use them.

First, I subscribe to the Abraham Lincoln approach to foretelling, often attributed to his oft-quoted line: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” This method requires nothing more than the conviction to actively shape a future one envisions rather than passively waiting for one to unfold.

It should be noted, that while many credit that quote to Lincoln, there is a good chance he never uttered those words at all. Without the ability to time travel back to the 1800s and verify the quote firsthand, the best one can do is rely on what has been reported.

Which brings me to the second - and most effective - forecasting technique: questioning the reports emanating from legacy media. The media apparatus has become so deceptively inaccurate that predicting the future is often as simple as inverting the mainstream narrative and allowing reality to assert itself.

It turns out that media contrarianism can be a pretty powerful trading tool. When media narratives detach from fundamentals, markets misprice assets. And because truth always wins, the louder the media pushes a distorted narrative, the more profitable the resulting information asymmetry becomes.

Nowhere was this dynamic more visible than in 2025, when legacy media once again got tariffs - and the broader economy - spectacularly wrong. As markets pulled back from February all-time highs, Chicken Little journalism went into overdrive, manufacturing an economic doomsday narrative that prompted many investors to prematurely liquidate assets. In April, I explicitly cautioned against relying on agenda-driven media - a warning that proved prescient as markets went on to soar to record levels. See: The Sky isn’t Falling - Stop Depending on Unreliable News Sources and Antiquated Economic Barometers and Why I am Doubling Down on Economic Optimism - Even as Markets Slide

Over the past year, the gap between media narrative and observable reality widened beyond denial. As legacy institutions clung to control through messaging and “story management,” alternative models quietly strengthened - gaining users, capital, and credibility as incumbents hemorrhaged trust, relevance, and pricing power.

None of this can be shrugged off as a temporary trend. This is all evidence of a decisive shift away from centralized systems and toward the alternative economy. The organic outperformance of alternative health, media, and finance in 2025 offers a clear preview of what lies ahead - which brings me to my 2026 predictions, my boldest and most optimistic to date.

My 2026 Predictions

Prediction 1: An AI Valuation Reset Will Propel Crypto Outperformance

I feel that a reset in seed-stage AI valuations will be the catalyst that allows cryptocurrencies to outperform the S&P 500. There is no logical justification for $1B+ AI seed rounds - especially when many are untethered from revenue, defensibility, or proven utility. These valuations don’t just defy fundamentals; they expose structural flaws in modern capital markets that deny everyday investors meaningful participation in innovation upside. I mean, what’s next – trillion-dollar IPOs?

The pattern is also eerily familiar to the early dot-com era, when internet stocks surged simply for adding an Amazon affiliate link to a web page and pawning it off as a “partnership.” Likewise, slapping “AI” onto a pitch deck won’t be enough to sustain inflated valuations.

As capital rotates away from speculative AI excess, cryptocurrencies stand to benefit in two important ways:

1. Cryptocurrencies will be valued more on core fundamentals - such as user growth, network utility, and their role as a hedge against monetary debasement - and less on short-term technicals. As fundamentals reassert themselves, institutionally imposed correlations will weaken, and investors will increasingly recognize digital assets as important portfolio diversifiers.

2. Corporate balance sheets will continue to absorb Bitcoin. I predict that more publicly traded companies - including members of the Magnificent Seven - will add Bitcoin to their balance sheets. This trend has already begun and is likely to accelerate as more corporations seek treasury diversification amid concentration risk, valuation fragility in public equities, and ongoing currency debasement.

This is not an indictment of artificial intelligence. AI will undoubtedly transform productivity, automation, and the global workforce. But the current capital structure surrounding AI is riddled with weaknesses - most notably accuracy constraints, centralized data control, and a profound lack of originality.

AI is notorious for providing incorrect data. Just recently, I had an argument with ChatGPT because it adamantly refused to acknowledge RFK Jr as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a role he has held for nearly a year.

This is where blockchain becomes indispensable. Distributed ledgers provide verifiability, provenance, and accountability - the very attributes AI lacks as it scales. As jobs become increasingly commoditized by machines, it will be human creativity that emerges as the scarcest - and most valuable - skill.

In a world where technology can draft legal documents, diagnose illness, and rebalance investment portfolios in seconds, it will be the visionaries, storytellers, and critical thinkers who retain true economic leverage and job security.

In short: blockchain will supply the truth. AI will supply the speed. And, humans will supply the vision.

Prediction 2: Blockchain Will Replace the Wages Lost to AI

For those agonizing over artificial intelligence displacing jobs and hollowing out the human workforce, I have very good news to share. Beyond truth and verification, blockchain provides the missing income layer required to sustain consumption, economic growth, and long-term retirement security as AI transforms the modern workforce.

Blockchain innovation enables the emergence of two new types of earnings streams that I call Participatory Returns and Consumptionary Returns. These new sources of capital together form the foundation of Participatory Consumption Economics (PCE), a macroeconomic framework designed for modern decentralized, post-labor, AI-driven economies.

• Participatory Returns represent income generated from the measurable economic value individuals create through engagement such as data, attention, interaction, and influence - value that technology can now capture, quantify, and monetize at scale.

• Consumptionary Returns represent the compounding wealth effects created through economic participation itself such as spending, loyalty, and contribution to market growth. Unlike conventional consumption, which results in economic leakage, consumptionary returns recycle value back to households and enterprises, driving sustained personal, business, and national prosperity through continuous reinvestment.

Distinct from the failing, depression-era Keynesian theory, PCE recognizes a fundamental truth of the 21st-century digital economy: every act of participation - every search, purchase, step, interaction, and contribution - produces computable economic value. Through tokenization, blockchain finally makes it possible to capture that value and return it to the very individuals who create it. In this model, participation itself - through everyday activities such as learning, playing, exercising, and engaging with brands - becomes a new, quantifiable form of income.

PCE also redefines consumption. No longer are consumers the endpoint of the economic food chain. Instead, PCE introduces a revolutionary return channel that allows consumption to regenerate household savings while simultaneously supporting corporate growth. In this model, capital no longer moves linearly or depends solely on wages to fuel demand. Rather, it circulates through a continuous, robust economic engine - enabling consumers to both consume and produce value on an ongoing basis, independent of employment levels. In doing so, PCE stabilizes labor-dependent economies while fostering enduring prosperity for all.

Prediction 3: Participatory Consumption Economics Will Rescue Broken Healthcare, Retirement, and Education Systems While Strengthening and Democratizing Capital Markets

Healthcare costs outpace wages and inflation. Retirement access is increasingly inadequate and inaccessible for those who need it the most. Universities saddle students with debt for skills the market no longer values. Capital markets funnel gains to late-stage public equities while shutting households out of early-stage value creation where real wealth is formed. These are not policy failures - they are failures of a macroeconomic framework divorced from how value is created in the modern economy.

Participatory Consumption Economics offers a permanent solution to America’s faltering healthcare, retirement, and education systems that decades of legislative Band-Aids and Federal Reserve interventions have proven incapable of fixing - while simultaneously fostering healthier, more dynamic, and broadly accessible capital markets.

PCE begins by identifying the actual root cause of socioeconomic decline: America remains anchored to a depression-era, wage-dependent macroeconomic theory that modern technology is rapidly obsoleting.

Healthcare, retirement, and education were all designed for a production-driven, wage-based economy in which employment served as the central economic engine. For more than a century, wages funded household consumption, employer-sponsored benefits delivered healthcare and retirement security, and workplace retirement plans became the primary gateway into capital markets. As a result, economic stability - at both the household and national level - became entirely job-contingent.

That model is now collapsing. Labor’s share of GDP has steadily declined. Job tenure has shortened. Gig work has surged. Automation and AI are rapidly displacing wage-based income, particularly across the services sector.

In today’s digital, platform-driven economy, value is increasingly created through networks, data, engagement, automation, and capital - not factory labor or even traditional services.

Under these conditions, stimulus spending, deficit expansion, and prolonged interest-rate suppression no longer catalyze productive growth. Instead, they inflate asset prices, distort risk, erode household balance sheets, and deepen inequality.

Participatory Consumption Economics is the first macroeconomic framework to recognize that modern technology enables participation - not just employment - to function as an economic driver, and that consumption no longer destroys savings but regenerates it.

By realigning income, savings, and capital formation with participation, PCE reconnects households to healthcare access, retirement security, education funding, and early-stage wealth creation - without reliance on perpetual fed intervention, tax hikes, or job dependency.

Prediction 4: The Rise of Alternative, Democratized and, Yes, Free Energy

The energy sector is poised to follow the same decentralization arc already reshaping finance, media, and healthcare. Grid fragility, accelerating AI growth, geopolitics, and demands for transparency are converging to mobilize a new wave of energy innovation that will reexamine long-standing constraints around energy access, production, and ownership.

As a result, I believe that we will see breakthroughs in energy models that will increasingly challenge the assumption of permanent scarcity. I would not be surprised to see ideas once dismissed as impractical - or even absurd - regaining relevance, from Nikola Tesla’s vision of wireless energy transmission to Henry Ford’s 1921 proposal for an “energy currency.”

Tesla’s vision of free, wireless energy stalled in part due to capital constraints, as financiers like J.P. Morgan prioritized profits over abundance. Ford’s vision failed primarily because the technological infrastructure to measure, verify, and distribute energy-based value did not yet exist.

What a difference a century makes. Today, blockchain and cryptographic consensus make it possible to measure, verify, tokenize, and exchange energy without centralized intermediaries. This is also where energy could converge with Participatory Consumption Economics.

Under PCE, households could become far more than passive end users, they could emerge as energy producers, optimizers, and beneficiaries. Imagine the possibility if Tesla was correct, and energy can ultimately be made free and globally accessible, without centralized meters, by tapping into the Earth’s natural electrical properties and transmitting power wirelessly. Now combine that with a blockchain-based evolution of Henry Ford’s vision - one capable of measuring, verifying, and exchanging energy-derived value without a centralized exchange. Energy would become an abundant, participatory resource, capable of generating enduring household wealth.

Although I am not betting that this particular scenario is what will unfold, I am predicting that humanity is moving toward a future of abundant, natural, and increasingly monetizable energy, whether incumbents welcome it or not. For there is one thing I know for certain: if the mind can conceive it, mankind will achieve it.

And once energy is liberated, every downstream system - finance, manufacturing, healthcare, food, housing, and even money itself - will be forced to evolve.

Tesla was silenced for trying to free energy.
Ford was ignored for trying to free money.
Blockchain makes both inevitable through participation.

Prediction 5: Information Asymmetry Becomes Highly Profitable and Politically Exposing

As media narratives continue to diverge from economic reality, information asymmetry is becoming a durable source of alpha in traditional markets as well as an increasingly powerful profit engine in rapidly proliferating prediction markets.

New York City’s Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) offers a textbook case of narrative-driven mispricing. Despite extensive historical evidence showing that similar right-of-first-refusal regimes in San Francisco, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. resulted in liquidity freezes, stalled transactions, declining asset values, and worsened affordability, mainstream coverage has largely framed NYC’s COPA as a housing breakthrough rather than the capital-markets risk that it is.

That disconnect is already creating pricing distortions - particularly for REITs and institutional capital exposed to New York City multifamily assets. And the risk does not stop at city borders. As the chart below illustrates, NYC-focused REITs have averaged losses exceeding 20% over the past year. These losses are not confined to a handful of niche NYC vehicles; they are embedded across many of the most widely held REIT ETFs, with some carrying materially higher concentration than investors may realize. Because NYC-focused REITs are woven throughout index funds and target-date portfolios, COPA’s impact automatically transmits into retirement accounts nationwide. An estimated 40–60 million U.S. savers now hold indirect exposure through 401(k)s, pensions, and passive vehicles - effectively importing a proven localized housing policy failure into retirement portfolios across the country.

Fortunately, advances in fintech and regulatory easing have enabled REIT alternatives to emerge. Tokenized real estate structures and Reg A+ real-estate-backed private credit offer investors modern ways to bypass region-specific regulatory shocks, diversify geographic exposure, and reclaim control from policy-concentrated risk embedded in traditional vehicles.

Prediction markets make profiting on media disinformation, like COPA narratives, even more compelling. While users on Polymarket are not yet betting directly on COPA outcomes, they are actively pricing the likelihood that Zohran Mamdani will implement a citywide rent freeze before 2027.

These crypto-native platforms allow participants to trade directly on policy outcomes and future events, with market prices functioning as real-time probability signals. In doing so, they introduce an entirely new dynamic to both trading as well as politics. Incentive-aligned crowd intelligence has repeatedly outperformed institutional punditry and narrative-driven analysis - while also revealing what voters actually want, not merely what they are told to believe.

As the movie Trading Places famously demonstrated, a single false orange crop report can turn billionaires into paupers and paupers into billionaires. Media misinformation functions as the modern-day fake orange crop report. The difference today is that individuals no longer need a seat on an exchange to trade against the distortion and capture the spread between perception and reality.

Information asymmetry, amplified and priced by prediction markets, will do more than transfer wealth. It will expose flawed policy in real time, force accountability, and draw an increasingly visible line between political regimes that destroy economic value and those that create it.

We live in fascinating times. As the alternative era accelerates and decentralized innovation scales, I’m confident humanity will experience the greatest democratization of prosperity that the world has ever seen. And since creating the future is the best way to predict it, this isn’t a forecast - it’s a foregone conclusion.

The architects of tomorrow’s economy aren’t waiting for permission. They’re already building the participatory consumption infrastructure, questioning inherited systems, and rejecting economic models that no longer reflect reality.

The game has changed. The rules have broken. And legacy institutions are betting everything on a fake orange crop report, convinced it is inside information.

With that, I’ll close by channeling my best Eddie Murphy from Trading Places and wish all my readers a Merry New Year.

The best is truly yet to come.