Crypto is shifting from being an independent industry to an invisible infrastructure, with the best applications being those users don’t even realize exist.

I’ve been in the Crypto industry for six or seven years, and over the past two years, I’ve also been deeply involved in the AI space, residing in Silicon Valley. Being active in both circles, one clear feeling is: in mainstream Silicon Valley, the term “Crypto” is mentioned less and less, but the things built with Crypto are increasingly integrated into daily use.

I want to bring back some signals from the AI side for Crypto practitioners to consider.

This disconnect is most evident at YC.

YC Winter 2026 just announced, with 149 companies, 5 of them related to Crypto. The number isn’t high, but if you look at the historical data, behind these 5 companies lies a very clear story.

A set of data

Since YC started investing in Crypto projects in 2014, they’ve funded a total of 177 companies. Here’s the trend across batches:

2018-2019: 3-7 companies per batch, steadily increasing.
2020: 5-7 per batch, acceleration begins.
2021: jumps to 13-15 per batch.
2022: peaks — Winter batch with 24, Summer with 20, totaling 44 Crypto companies that year.

Then, a sharp decline.

2023: 10-13 per batch, holding for a year.
2024: crashes — Winter with 7, Fall with 4, Summer down to just 1. The entire summer, YC funded only one Crypto company.

2025: Winter briefly rebounds to 10, but Spring and Summer drop again to just 2 each.

By Winter 2026: 5 companies.

If you’re a Crypto practitioner, seeing “from 1 back to 5” might seem like a sign of recovery. But if you look at what these 5 companies are actually doing, you’ll find they are almost a different species compared to the 24 companies in 2022.

What were YC-funded Crypto companies doing in 2022? DeFi protocols, NFT infrastructure, DAO tools, Layer 2 scaling, blockchain games, social tokens.

And in 2026? These 5 are working on stablecoin deposit APIs, cross-border neobanks, trade execution engines, AI agent payment gateways, attention-based exchanges.

None are building chains, protocols, or anything you’d traditionally call “Crypto tracks.”

This isn’t a recovery — it’s a blood transfusion.

Three certain projects

Let’s quickly review three relatively understandable ones.

Unifold, a New York team building Stripe for Crypto deposits. An API + SDK that allows any app to integrate cross-chain, cross-token on-chain deposits in under 10 lines of code. Co-founder Timothy Chung previously worked on Streambird (wallet-as-a-service, later acquired by MoonPay to become MoonPay Wallets), and has also been at Polymarket and Instabase. Another founder, Hau Chu, graduated from Cornell Tech. It’s a typical developer tools business — users don’t need to understand the underlying Crypto.

SpotPay, a San Francisco team creating a cross-border neobank based on stablecoins. CTO Thomas previously worked at Google and was the 4th engineer at Brex. CEO Zsika, also from Google, has a Stanford MBA, grew up in the Caribbean and Latin America, and has firsthand experience of how painful cross-border remittances can be. The product is straightforward: one account handles overseas payments, local payments, global spending (with physical cards), and savings. It runs on stablecoins underneath, but the front end looks like a fintech app — no visible Crypto.

Sequence Markets, a five-person team in New York, doing intelligent trading execution for digital assets. They help institutional investors route trades across exchanges for better prices and lower slippage. Fully non-custodial, they don’t touch user assets, only provide technology — a classic “selling water” model.

What these three have in common is clear: Crypto is a pipeline, not a selling point.

Two projects worth more discussion

Orthogonal — AI Agents spend Crypto

I think Crypto practitioners should seriously look into this.

Founder Christian Pickett previously worked on payments at Coinbase and also at Vercel. Bera Sogut has worked on reCAPTCHA and Maps APIs at Google, and at Amazon Robotics. Both are ACM ICPC world finalists.

Their problem: increasingly, AI Agents need to call various paid APIs to complete tasks. But these Agents don’t have credit cards or bank accounts, so they can’t go through registration, card binding, and payment like humans do. Currently, developers pre-fund or bind API keys to Agents. When only a few Agents are involved, it’s manageable, but when thousands or tens of thousands of Agents need to autonomously call hundreds of paid services, the system breaks down.

Orthogonal built a unified gateway: Agents connect via MCP or SDK, accessing hundreds of paid APIs in real-time, paying per request, without managing API keys or establishing billing relationships. API providers only need to list once, and all Agents can discover and call them. Settlement is done with Crypto, supporting the x402 protocol — on-chain implementation of HTTP 402 Payment Required.

Why does this matter for Crypto? Because machine-to-machine micro-payments in real time are exactly what traditional finance struggles with — credit card fees, bank transfer delays. These frictions are tolerable in human transactions but become critical bottlenecks when Agents call thousands of APIs daily. Crypto’s programmability, instant settlement, and permissionless nature make it a perfect fit.

Notably, YC’s 2025 Fall Request for Startups (RFS) highlighted “Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems,” and six months later, they invested in Orthogonal. Early supporters include YC alumni like Precip (W24), Riveter (F24), Andi (W22), Fiber AI (S23), all working on Agent products, indicating this isn’t just theoretical — the demand is real.

An interesting intersection: recently, a viral article claimed “Agents are the new masters of software,” suggesting SaaS is shifting from B2B/B2C to B2A (business-to-Agent). If true, then payments between Agents become a fundamental infrastructure problem — and Orthogonal is betting on Crypto to solve it.

Forum — Turning “attention” into tradable assets

This project is the most imaginative and riskiest.

Founder Owen Botkin previously traded long/short equities at Balyasny, a top global hedge fund. Joseph Thomas has worked at NASA and DreamwaveAI. YC’s partner for this project is Jared Friedman, one of YC’s core partners.

Forum aims to create “the first regulated attention exchange.” Specifically: constructing indices from search engines, social media, streaming platforms’ data to quantify how much attention a topic, brand, or cultural phenomenon is getting, then allowing users to go long or short on these attention metrics.

For example: if you believe a brand is about to lose public attention due to a PR crisis, you can short its attention index. If you think a cultural trend is heating up, you can go long.

Their core argument: attention is the primary driver of business success in the digital age — advertising, traffic, user growth — all are monetizations of attention. But attention itself has never been directly priced or traded.

This project isn’t currently labeled as Crypto/Web3, but “regulated exchange” plus “creating new asset classes” strongly suggests tokenization. In YC’s Spring 2026 RFS, the phrase “new financial primitives” first appeared, aligning with this direction.

For the Crypto industry, Forum points to a much broader horizon than stablecoin payments — if tokenized objects are no longer JPEGs or real estate shares, but intangible things like “attention,” it’s a completely different story. Whether this can work remains to be seen.

Changes in RFS

Besides what YC invests in, it’s also worth noting what YC explicitly says it wants to fund.

YC releases RFS (Request for Startups) each quarter, serving as an official topic guide. Here’s a summary of recent three Crypto-related RFS:

Summer 2025: 14 directions, no mention of Crypto at all. Even “AI for Personal Finance,” which discusses investment and tax optimization, omits Crypto. YC’s focus is entirely on AI.

Fall 2025: still no dedicated Crypto section, but two directions hint at future focus — “AI-Native Hedge Funds” (crypto markets 24/7, open data, naturally suited for AI quant strategies), and “Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems” (the scene Orthogonal later entered).

Spring 2026: a change. Daivik Goel wrote a dedicated “Stablecoin Financial Services” section, explicitly referencing the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act, two US stablecoin bills, noting that stablecoins are caught between DeFi and TradFi regulation. The quote: “The regulatory window is open. The rails are being laid.”

At the same time, the overall RFS introduced “new financial primitives” alongside AI-native workflows and modern industrial systems.

This is the first time in two years YC has explicitly opened a dedicated track for Crypto-related directions. The language is specific — not just “blockchain” or “Web3,” but “stablecoin financial services,” with concrete focus areas like yield-bearing accounts, tokenized real-world assets, and cross-border payment infrastructure.

My perspective

As someone active in both Crypto and AI, I see this data as good news — but perhaps not in the way many expect.

YC hasn’t abandoned Crypto; instead, it’s redefining what kinds of Crypto companies are worth investing in.

In a nutshell: YC is no longer investing in Crypto as an industry, but in companies that use Crypto to solve real problems.

The difference? The former’s value proposition is “building the Crypto ecosystem,” while the latter’s is “solving real problems with Crypto as the most suitable tool.”

The former’s users need to understand wallets, gas fees, on-chain interactions. The latter’s users don’t even realize they’re using Crypto — SpotPay users think they’re using a bank app, Unifold clients think they’re integrating a payment SDK, and Orthogonal’s Agents don’t even have the concept of “thinking” about it.

What does this mean for us?

First, good news: stablecoin payments have shifted from niche consensus to mainstream Silicon Valley recognition. YC’s dedicated RFS, the progress of the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts, and Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge all signal that the regulatory path for stablecoins is opening. For teams deeply involved in this track, funding and market perception are improving.

Second, new opportunities: Agent payments are a demand emerging from within the AI industry. Crypto practitioners have a natural advantage in capturing this. Real-time machine-to-machine micro-payments, programmable money, permissionless settlement — these have been discussed for years, and now they have a concrete application in the Agent economy. It’s not us seeking a scene — the scene is seeking us.

Of course, there are realities to face: the profiles of competitors are changing. The CTO of SpotPay was Brex’s 4th engineer; the founders of Orthogonal come from Coinbase and Google. These aren’t Crypto-native backgrounds, but they bring traditional tech company engineering and product methodologies. To compete, Crypto folks need to improve not just on blockchain understanding but also on product experience and engineering.

Additionally, directions like L1/L2, DeFi protocols, NFTs, DAO tools — while valuable — are no longer prioritized by Silicon Valley accelerators and VCs. This doesn’t mean they’re dead, but if you’re working in these areas, your fundraising strategies and narratives may need adjustment.

Finally, the “24→1→5” data trend suggests that Crypto is being redefined, not simply recovering or declining.

YC took two years to realize one thing: the greatest value of Crypto might not be as an independent industry but as foundational infrastructure for other sectors. Whether this judgment is correct remains to be seen. But as someone active in both tracks, I see huge opportunities for Crypto practitioners — provided we’re willing to look at ourselves from a different angle.

Crypto doesn’t need to disappear, but the best Crypto products might be ones users don’t even realize are Crypto.

This isn’t a compromise — it could be the greatest victory.

You may disagree with this view, but this is the stance of Silicon Valley’s most influential startup accelerator, expressed with real investment.

Data sources: YC Directory (Crypto/Web3 tags, all batches, 177 companies), YC Winter 2026 Launch List (149 companies), YC Request for Startups (Summer 2025 / Fall 2025 / Spring 2026). Details on the 5 Crypto-related projects are from YC’s official site and public info of the companies.

Author: aiwatch, six+ years in Crypto, recent two years also deeply involved in AI, based in Silicon Valley, focused on GenAI product analysis and Crypto×AI intersection research.