The 2026 Rare Evo Conference, held in Las Vegas, delivered on two days exploring the latest trends in crypto and web3.

On the crypto front, the ongoing crypto winter left sentiment muted, as did the lack of movement on the Clarity Act. 

Some participants noted that the Clarity Act could still get passed before the midterms, but the path forward on that legislation has become increasingly difficult. Some institutions are moving forward even without that regulatory clarity, but most remain on the sidelines.

“The biggest disappointment is that the Clarity Act could have been passed a year ago,” noted Cody Carbone of The Digital Chamber. 

The U.S. House of Representatives did pass a version of the Clarity Act last year, but it has been held up in the U.S. Senate. “Capital is flowing to the Caymans and BVI [British Virgin Islands] instead of the U.S. right now,” he added.

Jake Salerno of 0G Labs noted that users need, “infastructure you can verify, not by policy alone,” suggesting that legislation may not be the most important factor to focus on right now.

Another speaker suggested that the biggest benefit of the Clarity Act would be the ability to put idle capital into vaults, earning higher income than traditional banking systems.

Even though the Clarity Act remains stalled and crypto price action remains lackluster, several crypto-related projects are ongoing.

Stablecoins remain a growth spot for the crypto space. Agentic payments via were a popular topic of conversation given their soaring growth. Sam Kazemain of Frax stated, “The price may not feel bullish, but there’s so much good business deals going that it doesn’t feel like the prices and deals are meshed.”

Sam Green of the Cambrian Network noted that stablecoins have, “99.9999% reliability, essentially a military standard.”

Given that AI agents are now making up an increased amount of internet traffic, and that payments need to be made for services, demand for stablecoins looks likely to exponentially increase, not decrease. The consensus is that the trend is still in its early days, and may not have even truly gotten started yet.

Tokenization of assets remains a strong trend as well. Porter Stowell of W3.io notes that there’s still little adoption of blockchain technology, but it’s been useful for modernizing areas such as global donations and for tokenizing assets in the wealth management space.

Stowell sees this time as a “golden age of entrepreneurship,” as AI tools will allow individuals to rapidly develop ideas and bring them to market. “AI budgets should always be going up,” he added.

The tokenization trend can eventually expand to cover just about everything. As Milton Ault of Ault Blockchain sees it, “There are $130 trillion in assets that can be tokenized.” Ault sees silver getting tokenized first, then other real-world assets will also get tokenized and tracked on blockchains.

Prediction markets, while not obviously a theme related to crypto or web3, attracts some of the investor interest that altocoins used to. Brian Quintenz, a former CFTC commissioner and now on the board at KalshiFx, stated, “Individuals can now get exposure to event risk with prediction markets,” effectively claiming that prediction markets are more akin to a derivatives market rather than a betting market.

Data protection came up during the conference, presciently ahead of the ColdCard debacle.

Joe Suzuki of CertiK notes that “continuous security implementation” is critical today, and that agentic programs can make it happen. Oliver Maroney of OpenSea sees security as a critical component across the web3 space, notably in gaming and NFTs.