On My Radar: H1 2026

My Own XXL Freshman Class

XXL Freshman Class is an annual list by hip-hop magazine XXL, selecting ten upcoming artists to grace their cover. Its authority has faded in recent years, but not long ago, making the XXL Freshman list was a serious stamp of credibility, a curated bet on which hip-hop artists were about to blow up.

The On My Radar series, which I started last year, is essentially my own crypto version of the XXL Freshman Class. Nobody asked for it, but the idea is simple: highlight projects that are still relatively under the radar, and then follow up on how they develop over time.

I first published five projects on my website at the end of 2025. The original plan was to write a dedicated article for each, but between work and excuses, I only managed to cover Ornn and Numo before half of 2026 had already passed. I never got around to writing up Meanwhile Finance, Merit System, or Street individually, but they are just as interesting as Ornn and Numo, so I hope to cover all three together at some point.

The five projects selected for H2 2025 were:

On My Radar: H1 2026

In this post, I want to introduce new projects worth watching as we approach the end of H1 2026. Previously, I tried to write a separate article for each project, but realistically that's hard to sustain. From now on, I'll cover everything in a single post, and aim to curate On My Radar projects on a semi-annual or quarterly basis.

Seismic & Friends: The Synergy of Privacy + Neobanks

Seismic is the only infrastructure project among this batch, and it's the one I've been following the longest, ever since I first encountered it at the 2024 DBA Research Day presentation about two years ago.

Seismic can be viewed from two distinct angles.

From a technical perspective, Seismic is an alt L1 that provides privacy features. This naturally groups it with privacy-focused infrastructure projects like Aztec and Payy, but Seismic's advantage is its familiar developer experience.

Unlike most privacy-focused blockchains that require separate languages or developer tooling, Seismic follows the standard EVM development experience. Seismic provides privacy through two main mechanisms:

From a business perspective, Seismic can be seen as neobank-focused infrastructure, which puts it in the same bucket as projects like Plasma and Stable.

My sense is that most blockchains targeting neobanks these days try to build services in-house to bootstrap their ecosystem, but Seismic takes a more classic approach, focusing on onboarding external projects. The services currently building on Seismic include:

Many more projects are building on Seismic, and the full list is available on the Seismic website.

As someone who is interested in and bullish on both "privacy" and "neobanks," I think Seismic and the projects building on top of it are worth keeping an eye on.

Privacy and neobanks might seem unrelated at first glance, but as mentioned in this post, privacy is one of the most needed features for crypto neobank users. People obviously don't want their spending history to be transparently visible on-chain, and for teams that want to easily integrate this functionality, Seismic could be a compelling option. Of course, the entry barrier of choosing a relatively unproven new infrastructure when existing chains are shipping their own privacy solutions, along with the lack of an existing user base, are unavoidable weaknesses for any new blockchain. How well Seismic can overcome these is an important point to watch.

Seismic is currently running a play similar to a VC with a stablecoin neobank investment thesis. If even one of these projects becomes a successful case study, it could serve as a springboard for onboarding many more. For now, Brookwell looks the most polished and likely to succeed, but the other services are each tackling different problems, which makes it fun to watch how they all develop.

Tomorrow: The Rise of Niche Fintech

Tomorrow is a lending service for digital creators. Creators can borrow against a portion of their future Google AdSense revenue, and investors can earn interest by lending into the pool.

I feel like I've mentioned this quite a few times already, but I'm a big fan of the specialized stablecoin fintech thesis by Multicoin Capital. In short, stablecoin-native fintechs have very low dependency on intermediaries like banks and card networks, which means they're cheaper to launch and operate, which means they can sustainably serve highly segmented target audiences, much like SaaS.

I personally find this argument quite realistic, and I've been expecting the emergence of fintech services that leverage stablecoin rails to target niche audiences while serving globally from Day 1. Tomorrow Finance could be a representative example of this.

It's not as if fintech for digital creators didn't exist before. Karat feels like a business banking app for creators, and as far as I know, it doesn't offer lending services. Creative Juice, which Mr.Beast invested in, offered advances based on AdSense revenue but was acquired last year by Rho, another business banking fintech. Spotter has Creator Capital, where they purchase existing video catalogs and provide advances in return, primarily targeting large long-form creators. Tomorrow's differentiators seem to be that it leverages onchain infrastructure so anyone can participate as an LP, it uses a loan structure so creators retain content ownership, and it outsources underwriting to external partners.

Tomorrow might look like a simple lending or RWA service right now, but much like SoFi started with student loans and gradually expanded into other layers, Tomorrow could develop into a fintech service specialized for digital creators. Demand for borrowing will always exist, and as a first step toward building a niche fintech for digital creators, lending seems like a solid choice.

Tomorrow is slated for launch in H2 2026, so there isn't much information available yet, but it recently joined Base Batch 003.

Lightcone: Trading the Multiverse

Through 2025 and 2026, prediction markets have become one of the most proven use cases in crypto. Weekly trading volume across prediction market platforms including Polymarket and Kalshi has reached $6B, and there are recent moves to expand into the perp market as well.

Lightcone is not a prediction market. It's an impact market project.

What we trade in prediction markets is fundamentally probability: betting on how likely a specific event is to occur. But what if you could trade the impact an event would have on asset prices? That's exactly what Lightcone's impact market is about. If a prediction market lets you bet on the probability of Saylor defaulting, an impact market lets you trade the impact that Saylor's default would have on the price of BTC.

Let's walk through an example. Say I hold 10 ETH (assuming a current price of $4,000) and I'm worried about the scenario where quantum computers emerge and threaten Ethereum's cryptographic foundations. I can use Lightcone as follows:

  1. Deposit 10 ETH into Lightcone. Receive 10 "Quantum_Realized_ETH" and 10 "Quantum_Not_Realized_ETH."
  2. These two tokens trade independently. Market participants price in what ETH would be worth if quantum computers are realized versus if they're not. For example, if the market consensus is "ETH drops 75% if quantum computers arrive," then "Quantum_Realized_ETH" trades at $1,000.
  3. I want to hedge against this event, so I sell my 10 "Quantum_Realized_ETH" at $1,000 and receive $10,000 in "Quantum_Realized_USDC."
  4. The event resolves.
    • If quantum computers are realized: The $10,000 "Quantum_Realized_USDC" becomes real USDC. I got out before the market panic.
    • If quantum computers are not realized: My 10 "Quantum_Not_Realized_ETH" become 10 real ETH. Cost is zero.

Options and insurance require you to pay a premium regardless of whether the event occurs, but Lightcone's cost (selling at a discounted price) only kicks in under the bad scenario. If you tried to achieve the same hedge through a prediction market, you'd need to estimate the probability of the event, estimate its impact on price, and then manually calculate how much to bet.

This concept actually has roots in economics. It's known as Arrow-Debreu securities, or state-contingent claims, a theory that has existed since the 1950s. However, it was never implemented in traditional finance due to constraints around settlement, oracles, and liquidity. This naturally brings perps to mind. Perpetual futures also existed only as theory in traditional finance until 2016, when BitMEX's funding rate mechanism brought them to life in crypto. They are now the highest-volume product in crypto. If perps were possible, there's a cautious hope that impact markets could follow a similar path.

Of course, implementation won't be easy. The biggest challenge is liquidity. Since each event creates a separate market, liquidity inevitably fragments, and even prediction markets took years to reach meaningful liquidity. There's also the oracle problem. Determining whether an event has occurred, and how, is still a point of contention even in prediction markets. Events that occur partially or have ambiguous interpretations can make settlement complicated.

Still, what makes Lightcone interesting is that it sits on the extension of the "financializing events" trend that prediction markets opened up, while being an entirely different kind of product. If prediction markets are about "will this event happen?", Lightcone is about "what happens to my assets if this event occurs?"

TechDollar: Assets Scarcer Than Money

TechDollar offers lending products collateralized by private equity in frontier tech companies (AI labs, space, defense, robotics, etc.). Private equity in frontier tech companies will only become scarcer over time, and currently the options for raising capital against it are limited.

The idea Packy McCormick laid out in Scarce Assets is precisely this: when something becomes abundant, adjacent things become scarce and rise in value. As AI drives down the cost of producing software, run-of-the-mill software companies proliferate, but companies with truly differentiated positions (e.g. Anthropic, SpaceX) become scarcer by contrast.

Furthermore, these companies are choosing to stay private longer and longer. Most recently-listed VC-backed companies have underperformed the Nasdaq, and according to PitchBook, the median age of companies at Series D and beyond grew from 6.92 years in 2006 to 9.57 years in 2023, with 44.6% of unicorns being 9+ years old.

The problem is that during this extended private period, the options available to employees and early investors are limited. Employees in particular hold what may be the scarcest asset, but unless the company goes public, it's nearly impossible to convert that equity into cash. Even if they manage to sell on the secondary market, they face wide spreads and the opportunity cost of permanently giving up upside.

TechDollar lets people holding private equity borrow against their shares when they need to buy a house, pay taxes, or diversify their portfolio. If you think about it, whenever an asset class reaches sufficient scale, lending products naturally emerge around it. Public equities have margin lending, real estate has mortgages, and even private funds have something called NAV financing. TechDollar believes private tech company equity is next in line.

The differences between TechDollar and existing private equity liquidity services like EquityBee and Forge are as follows:

Of course, private equity carries inherent risks: it's difficult to value accurately, and disposing of collateral when a borrower defaults is a complex process. TechDollar appears to mitigate this by focusing on the top handful of private companies with active secondary trading and applying conservative LTVs (20-40%).

Agra: The Missing Piece of the Bond Market

Tokenized assets onchain currently total roughly $29B, and private credit is one of the fastest-growing categories. But tokenized private credit has one fundamental problem: once you buy in, there's no way out until maturity.

Say you purchase a tokenized private credit position yielding 14% annually. Three months later, you urgently need cash, but there's nowhere to sell this position. You either wait for the issuer's redemption window (typically semi-annual or quarterly) or just hold. Tokenization solved the technical settlement problem of "who holds what," but it hasn't touched the practical liquidity problem of "can I convert what I hold into cash when I want to?"

This isn't just an inconvenience. Without liquidity, these positions can't be used as collateral either. For DeFi lending protocols like Morpho or Euler to accept tokenized private credit as collateral, they need the ability to liquidate that collateral on the market if a borrower defaults. But if there's no market to sell into, liquidation is impossible. And if liquidation is impossible, the position can't be accepted as collateral. Tokenized private credit ends up existing solely as a 14% yield product, unable to be composed with other assets or leveraged within the DeFi ecosystem. This is a completely different situation from traditional finance, where bonds serve as collateral, get leveraged through repo transactions, and underlie derivatives.

Agra is building a secondary market for tokenized credit to solve this problem.

There's an interesting design choice here: Agra uses a yield-based orderbook rather than a conventional price-based one. The reason lies in the nature of bonds. With stocks, "I'll buy this at $150" is straightforward. But for bonds, the same price means completely different things depending on the maturity. A $98 bond maturing in 1 year versus 10 years has a vastly different yield. In traditional bond markets too, traders quote on yield, not price: "I'll buy at 5.2% annualized." Agra follows this approach because AMMs and price-based orderbooks simply don't fit the nature of bonds as an asset.

Concretely, if you're holding a 14% private credit position with 6 months to maturity and want to exit now, you'd post an ask at a yield above fair value, say 16%. This is effectively telling buyers: "take a higher yield in exchange for holding the remaining duration." The buyer gets in at a discount, and the seller takes a small hit but gains liquidity. The trade happens between market participants without any involvement from the issuer.

For this to actually work, market participants need to trust that they can sell at any time. To achieve this, Agra is designing a three-tier liquidity structure:

  1. In normal conditions, active market makers like Wintermute provide quotes at tight spreads.
  2. Passive vaults stand by at defined price levels.
  3. Even when the market is stressed and active quotes pull back, a separately reserved capital pool steps in to buy at wider spreads, serving as the buyer of last resort.

Agra is currently operating in beta. As the tokenized credit market grows, the need for secondary infrastructure will grow alongside it.