Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives

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Software Eating The World, Business, Technology, Disruption, Culture, Innovation, Science, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

New infrastructure primitives are creating entirely new rails for building. In this episode of Big Ideas 2026, we explore three foundational shifts that unlock new markets and workflows, not through incremental upgrades, but through primitives that compound over time. First, programmable money evolves beyond stablecoins into on-chain credit origination and synthetic financial products, offering lower operational costs and greater composability than traditional finance. Second, autonomy begins entering scientific research through collaborative labs, where AI reasoning models work alongside automation and robotics, and interpretability becomes essential for progress. Third, distribution itself becomes a primitive, as AI-native startups win early by selling to other startups at formation, then scale alongside the next generation of companies. You will hear from Guy Willette on the next phase of on-chain finance, Oliver Shu on autonomous labs and AI-assisted discovery, and James da Costa on the greenfield go-to-market strategy. Together, these ideas define what new infrastructure primitives really mean: the rails that enable entirely new systems to emerge, compound, and scale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Incumbents struggle to sell to startups because they're bound by the rules of P&L.
0:05.0	I think taking a more crypto-native approach is actually better regardless of whether you want to offer the product to a crypto-native audience or to a more traditional audience.
0:13.0	Where you see autonomous labs and autonomous science being adopted first is probably more of a function of the market that it's operating in.
0:26.3	If you attract all of the new companies at formation and then grow with them, as your customers become big companies in their own right, so will you. As the year winds down, our investment
0:32.5	team looks ahead. Our 26 big ideas highlight the problems, opportunities, and shifts we expect builders to take on next.
0:39.9	This episode is about three big ideas about new rails, not incremental improvements to existing systems,
0:45.8	but foundational primitives that make entirely new markets and workflows possible.
0:50.2	You'll hear how programmable money evolves beyond basic stable coins,
0:53.8	how autonomy starts entering scientific research basic stable coins, how autonomy starts
0:54.8	entering scientific research through labs, and how distribution itself becomes a strategy when
0:59.3	startups sell to other startups at formation.
1:04.5	We'll start with the rail that's already visible, stable coins going mainstream.
1:08.3	Guy Willett argues that stable coins are only the beginning. The next phase is
1:11.9	on-chain credit origination and new synthetic products that are easier to scale than simply copying
1:16.7	traditional assets onto a blockchain. Here's Guy. My name is Guy Willett and I'm a general partner
1:23.4	on the crypto team here at A16C. This year, my big ideas are origination and purplification.
1:30.6	In 2025, we've seen stable coins go mainstream with increasing outstanding issuance and
1:36.6	payment volume.
1:38.0	And one of the things I've been thinking about is what the most important second
1:41.1	order effects of outstanding stable coin issuance will be.
1:44.0	I think a lot of the existing stable coins look effectively like narrow banks today,
1:48.3	where they hold user deposits in fiat or perhaps in treasury bills.
	...

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