A note from Tally's CEO: What I’m hoping for from 2026
Reflecting on what happened in 2025 and what 2026 needs to bring
What I’m hoping for from 2026
This article is adapted from a video essay by Tally CEO & Co-founder, Dennison Bertram. Watch the full video on X.
2025 was an extraordinary year. It started with hope, and now the industry is going through both a reckoning and a struggle to accept what winning looks like. It’s worth reflecting on what happened and what 2026 needs to bring.
2025 was the year crypto became legitimate
We can’t undersell how big that is. For years, building under the Gensler era meant living through lawfare and attacks on crypto. Elizabeth Warren’s “anti-crypto army.” Politicians using words of violence against developers who were just writing code. That was hard for the industry, hard for Tally, and hard for me personally. I was subpoenaed by the SEC for work I did on an NFT project. It cost thousands of dollars to deal with and sapped my enthusiasm for a space I’d been working in since 2013.
My co-founder Raf and I had real conversations about whether building in America was even possible. We live in New York. We have families here. We’re proud of this country and want to build our company here. But we kept asking ourselves: do we have to leave?
That just sucked. And having that cloud lifted this past year has been incredible.
Real progress happened
The GENIUS Act passed in July, the first federal crypto legislation ever signed into law. Stablecoins now have real rules: 100% reserve backing, monthly disclosures, clear licensing paths. This isn’t a small thing. It’s a transformative foundation, and we’ve seen the results. Stablecoin usage has exploded. Traditional businesses building on stablecoins have exploded. That’s what clear regulation gives us.
The SEC under Chair Paul Atkins has been transformative. The crypto task force led by Commissioner Hester Peirce has been incredible. Peirce has run roundtables on everything from custody to DeFi tokenization. We attended the SEC and CFTC harmonization roundtable. We’ve spoken with Commissioner Peirce directly. It’s exciting to see.
But it’s not enough.
What we need in 2026
We need Congress to finish the job and give us a market structure bill so the innovation we’ve seen in stablecoins can play out across all of crypto. We need 2026 to be the year the United States goes from accepting crypto to competing for it. We should be the center of the financial world in crypto.
We need clear regulations that let us build with clarity. We need to know what can be listed where, who regulates what, and what the path is from startup token to network token.
There’s been promising work. Uniswap’s unification proposal. The DUNA (decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association) out of Wyoming, developed by Miles Jennings and co. The DUNA gives participants in decentralized organizations legal liability protection from private plaintiff lawsuits. Now that we have the start of clarity from the government, we have to address private lawsuits, and that’s what the DUNA does. It’s just the start. I expect more states to compete in this space.
Props to Hayden for the unification proposal and moving Uniswap forward in a way that aligns the equity and token discussion happening now in Aave and other communities. There are open questions we’ll hopefully see addressed in 2026. At Tally, our vision is to help make all of this possible, practical, regulated, and clear. But we need to work in partnership with the government. We need clear regulation.
The L2 reckoning
The L2 space is going through challenges. We ended 2024 with an explosion of L2s. The vision was clear: scale Ethereum. And we did. Block space is effectively free now. There’s no excuse not to be on chain when it comes to cost.
But people haven’t moved on chain. The usage numbers are still pretty bad. Ethereum has struggled financially because the revenue that used to go to Ethereum has moved to the L2s, and the L2s aren’t paying that back to Ethereum. The whole ecosystem is suffering.
And here’s the thing: there’s still no app that would make you use an L2. What are the apps driving usage? It’s all speculation, perps, trading, and now capital formation. At the moment, it looks like maybe that’s all we’re going to get. That doesn’t make me happy.
Tally works in the world of capital formation, so that’s exciting for our business. But it’s not exciting for my personal vision of what the ecosystem could be. We need more. We need apps. We need people building fun things, useful things.
It’s fine to abstract away crypto so people don’t know they’re using it. But that means we have to have our own soul-searching moment about what the community of crypto looks like. For years, people used these applications because they were crypto applications. If we move into a world where users don’t even know an app is crypto, then you have to build applications people actually want. That’s hard.
We’re seeing it happen with Shopify, Stripe, Circle, stablecoins, neobanks, all building abstraction layers on top of crypto rails. But that’s payments. Where are the social networks? Why haven’t the social networks worked? We end the year with Farcaster basically becoming a wallet. Where are the social media apps on crypto? They haven’t worked. Props to Friend.tech for trying something exciting. It didn’t work out, but props for trying.
AI has sucked some momentum and excitement out of things. But in 2026, we need to keep building.
Revenue on chain
I want to see scaling revenue on chain. Real businesses. People have been building on token emissions, points programs, airdrop farming disguised as community building. But we want revenue. We want businesses that charge for their services.
Ethereum spent too long trying to nuke anyone being able to have a business by making everything a public good. That was a negative experience. Most public goods besides Ethereum haven’t fared well because there’s no structural market mechanism to invest properly, to search for product-market fit. There’s no revenue at the end of it. You can’t operate organizations without revenue. They have to make money.
In 2026, I’m looking forward to more revenue-generating organizations that lean into charging users. This matters because Gmail is free, Google is free, because you are the product. They’re monetizing you. In crypto, you pay for stuff so you don’t get monetized.
I’m willing to pay to use something so I’m not the product. I don’t want my data to be the product. We need to step back from “free as in free” and build real businesses. Protocols need to generate revenue. Otherwise, the music stops. When you look at the VC investment market, the music has already stopped. Investments have gone down dramatically and focused on a small number of large winners. That’s not positive.
More Ethereum, more innovation
I want to see more from Ethereum. I’ve been excited to see the updates the Ethereum Foundation has made. They’ve listened to the community. They got their act together. I still love building on Ethereum. It’s fun to write smart contracts. It’s fun to build in an ecosystem that’s so deep. You can do anything here.
Props to all the other ecosystems too. I’m a bit of an ETH maxi, although that has hurt me financially. But I’m also excited for the alt L1s: Monad, MegaETH, Kanto, Tempo. I’m especially excited for ultra-fast EVM chains. What can we build when things are really fast?
I’m excited about the ecosystems we work with: ZKsync, Arbitrum, and many more. There are a lot of teams keeping the spirit alive.
Privacy matters
For years, I gave up on privacy. I felt like people didn’t care. The government already knew everything about you. I was wrong.
Privacy is real and critical. It’s probably going to be the most important thing because now, with LLMs and AI, privacy is essential. ChatGPT literally knows everything about you. And now that crypto knows everything about you too, we need private crypto. We need private blockchains. We need to build an entirely new category.
Privacy is one of the things I’m most excited about. I don’t know yet how to get deeper involved or how to use it in a way that works, but it’s deeply on my mind.
Looking ahead
It might feel like the doldrums right now, but keep the spirit up. We’re doing great things in this ecosystem. Tally is building cool stuff. If you’re looking to launch a protocol or a token in 2026, come talk to us. We’re building the best ICO platform in the industry, along with the best suite of tools for operating organizations on chain.
See you in 2026.
Tally provides token infrastructure for the most successful teams in crypto. We help teams launch, govern, and operate token-based systems at institutional scale. If you’re interested in launching with Tally, schedule a free sales consultation.