Nvidia started its 2026 fourth quarter revenue forecast at $65 billion. This signaled a quiet reshaping of the debate around AI.
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As the backbone of the global AI infrastructure, Nvidia shows that AI demand is accelerating rather than plateauing. Productivity is expanding faster than expected, and the long-standing narrative of an “AI bubble” is starting to fade.
The momentum of AI is not slowing down. It has become more autonomous, more operational, and more deeply embedded in the real economy.
As these systems expand, something else becomes inevitable: the need for rails. Cryptocurrency and blockchain increasingly provide infrastructure for fast payments, programmable value, verifiable execution, always-on coordination, and more.
As AI becomes more agentic, cryptocurrencies scale with it, positioning agentic AI as a key driver of AI’s next stage of economic growth.
To understand where this shift is headed in 2026, Blockstar spoke to Thomas Mayfield, Head of Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions at Cardano Foundation. His work is at the intersection of AI, digital identity, and decentralized infrastructure.
AI agents will act on our behalf in 2026
Mayfield believes 2026 will be the tipping point where AI moves from assistance to authority. Agent systems are increasingly trusted to not just support human decisions, but to act on behalf of users within predefined permissions and constraints.
He explains:
“In 2026, we expect to see a major shift in which Agentic AI is given delegated authority to proactively make decisions on behalf of individuals.” He believes this transition will eventually “surpass current human-based interactions in terms of security and resiliency to fraud.”
Thomas Mayfield, Head of Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions, Cardano Foundation
This represents a fundamental change in the way people interact with software. Rather than manually approving every action, users define intentions, permissions, and limits once, and autonomous agents continuously operate within those boundaries. Accelerate execution, reduce friction, and scale your systems without continuous human oversight.
But this level of delegation requires more than a smarter model. This requires a verifiable execution, identity, and trust framework that operates independently of centralized intermediaries. This is where decentralized identity and on-chain verification move from optional tools to core infrastructure.
Governments, not big tech, are in charge of digital identity.
While large technology platforms continue to debate standards and interoperability, Mayfield expects governments to be the first to act. He predicts that “government services will be the first to adopt decentralized identity (DID) technology at scale through national ID schemes.”
These systems don’t remain siled. Over time, the national identity framework is expected to be integrated with corporate identity systems and extended to supply chain infrastructure, such as digital product passports. Mayfield said:
“These government systems are then expected to be integrated with corporate identity systems and ultimately leveraged within supply chain infrastructure, such as Digital Product Passports (DPPs).”
Thomas Mayfield, Head of Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions, Cardano Foundation
This overturns long-held Web3 assumptions. Rather than start-ups pushing decentralized identities into institutions, national infrastructures will push identity frameworks downstream to businesses, logistics, and international trade, based on compliance rather than experimentation.
Once that happens, companies won’t adopt decentralized identity because it’s revolutionary. They will take it because they have no choice.
EU regulations force corporate identity reset
That regulatory pressure is already forming. Future EU supply chain and data regulations are expected to drive widespread business demand for verifiable identity and data attribution.
Mayfield sees 2026 as the year these requirements move from planning to implementation, noting that “new EU regulations will drive significant demand for verifiable data and encourage businesses to adopt verifiable identity and data technologies.”
Verification within an isolated system is not enough. To work across real-world supply chains, providers must support cross-domain secure attribution and enable identity and data verification across fragmented ecosystems and networks.
The challenge is not technical feasibility. It’s a balance. Mayfield said:
“The key challenge for these providers is balancing the need for interoperability and ease of use with important privacy concerns, self-sovereign control, and future-proof security.”
Thomas Mayfield, Head of Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions, Cardano Foundation
This is where many legacy systems break down. They are not designed for selective disclosure, cryptographic proofing, or cross-domain validation.
The decentralized identity framework was.
Digital product passport without surveillance
Privacy remains one of the most misunderstood aspects of this transition.
While digital product passports are often treated as potential surveillance tools, Mayfield makes clear that this outcome is not inevitable. In his view:
“Key to the Digital Product Passport is a self-sovereignty approach, allowing all actors in the value chain to selectively disclose data.”
Thomas Mayfield, Head of Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions, Cardano Foundation
Its selectivity depends on architectural separation. Rather than centralizing sensitive information, effective DPP systems rely on a “combination of off-chain and on-chain data repositories,” where private data is kept secure off-chain and only verifiable evidence is locked on-chain.
Preventing abuse is just as important as enabling access. Mayfield emphasized that “the use of open protocols that prioritize security and privacy is essential to prevent surveillance and protect personally identifiable information.” Regulation still acts as a backstop, specifically preventing verified data from being linked, enriched and resold by intermediaries.
The goal is not complete visibility. This is a selective proof.
The system must be able to verify everything that is important without revealing anything that is not. This balance, transparency without oversight, can only be achieved through encryption, decentralized identity, and programmable access controls.
Why is this important now?
Once an AI system gains delegation of authority, trust becomes infrastructure. Autonomous agents can only operate at scale if identity, execution, and accountability are verifiable by default.
This is the change Mayfield is pointing to. This means that AI will move from the tools we use to the agents we authorize.
And crypto is what enables that transition.
AI creates a demand for autonomy.
Encryption provides verifiable trust.
Decentralized identity allows for coordination without central control.
If 2025 is the year that agent systems prove they can work, 2026 is shaping up to be the year that agent systems are trusted to work.
