2026 Predictions from the TRM Team

Ari Redbord (00:02):

Hi, I'm Dick Clark. No, no, no. I'm Ryan Seacrest. No, no, no, no, no. I'm Anderson Cooper. No. I'm just kidding. I'm Erie Redboard and welcome to TRM Talks New Year's Spectacular. On this episode, I am joined by friends and inspiring colleagues from across TRM to talk about what's next, their 2026 predictions for product, people, investigations, compliance, and beyond. This is going to be our most special TRM Talks and so excited to share it with you. But first, what's my prediction for 2026? My prediction for crypto policy in 2026 is that it's the end of theory. The era of execution is going to begin in 2026 in the most meaningful way. For more than a decade, crypto regulation has lived in drafts, speeches, enforcement actions, sandboxes, and pilot programs. We debated definitions, argued over classifications, tested frameworks. All of that groundwork mattered, but 2026 is the year the conversation shifts decisively from policymaking to making regulated systems actually work.

(01:19):

By 2026, the big story won't be new laws or regulatory headlines, at least after we get past market structure. It will be real world implementation. Stablecoin frameworks like GENIUS turned into live infrastructure. Tokenization pilots become balance sheet products. Markets stop debating permission and start proving reliability. Exchanges, custodians and payment platforms won't be just judged on their licenses. They'll be judged on how well supervision actually functions. Audits, exams, transaction monitoring, enforcement, and consumer protection operating in real time in the real world. We'll also see global convergence accelerate. Not around identical rules. We won't have regulation across the globe, but around shared expectations, market integrity, AML compliance, consumer safeguards, and operational resilience. Regulatory arbitrage, something we've talked about for years, is going to get harder because accountability is going to sharpen as frameworks develop all over the world. Most importantly, 2026, and you heard it here first, is when the technology itself finally fades into the background.

(02:38):

Let's talk about blockchains, protocols, tokens, more about what actually works for people. Crypto becomes the rail, not the headline from a policy perspective. Picking up the bill seamlessly at a bar with friends, sending money across borders without friction, running payroll globally in minutes, not days. Tokenize settlement quietly reducing risk in capital markets. Users won't think, "I just use blockchain." They'll think that worked. Success won't be measured by how exciting the tech sounds, but whether scams are down, payments are faster and cheaper, compliance is real, investigations are quicker and trust is growing. 2026 is going to be the year crypto policy stops being theoretical and becomes everyday infrastructure in the real world. And now, hear from my inspiring colleagues from across TRM on what to expect in 2026.

Chris Wong (03:39):

My name's Chris Wong and I lead the Beacon Network at TRM. 2025 was a big year of change for me leaving the FBI after 10 years, running a lot of investigations over there and being part of our virtual assets unit. I'm most proud of launching Beacon Network publicly and already having over $40 million in assets that have been disrupted, growing this ecosystem to more than 60 law enforcement agencies in 16 different countries on five different continents. It truly is an amazing accomplishment for TRM. In 2026, we're going to expand Beacon coverage to include more decentralized protocols and traditional financial institutions so that illicit assets have very little space to move in the ecosystem where we can proactively identify victims and reduce the scale of victims as we see them in the future.

Emma Henshaw (04:22):

Hi, I'm Emma Henshaw with TRM Labs as an investigator. So one of the things I wanted to touch on today when we look into the new year is what trends are we going to see next year in 2026 as investigators. And one of the things that comes to mind is the confluence of AI and stablecoins. There's a lot about being an investigator in which you are constantly learning, constantly having to understand what the threats are, and then also seeing just normal societal pressures on those threats. And what does this mean as an investigator in crypto? While it's AI and how that is a toolkit for criminals to expand their enterprises or even move into new spaces. And alongside that is we know that the key asset right now for crime groups is stablecoins. That ability to hold value and move at pace is a real challenge for investigators.

(05:17):

So for 2026, the learning for an investigator is something that will be constantly evolving. It isn't just about learning cryptocurrency, it's learning what AI is and how AI is being implemented. So you have to have a comfort in merging those two worlds and learning is not just limited to one blockchain or one asset. So learning how those crime types evolve, learning how they move that money on-chain and those assets on-chain and leaning on your network as well. It needs to be not one single point of failure learning, but a network coming together to share that knowledge and keep it safe for victims.

Gabby Green (05:55):

I'm Gabby Green. I'm a deployment strategist at TRM Labs, and these are my three 2026 predictions. First, I think we're going to see a lot more growing demand for AI agents to help streamline and even lead compliance reviews with minimal oversight by their human partners. Hello, robot takeover. Second, and certainly not totally groundbreaking, I think we'll see a lot more intersection of off-chain with on-chain data. What does that mean? That means that we're going to be seeing a lot more of our traditional KYC solutions, their data migrating over to your favorite blockchain intelligence companies. Third, you'll see a lot more crypto in your community. That means we're going to see an even more diverse subset of customers and clients that are impacted by crypto risk exposure. And I'm predicting that you're going to be able to buy coffee in your local coffee shop with crypto in 2026.

Angela Ang (06:46):

I'm Angela Ang, the Head of Policy and Strategic Partnerships for APAC at TRM Labs. If 2025 was about a change in direction of crypto policy, then I believe 2026 will be about the execution of the direction. In 2025, we saw a turning of the tides when it came to the tone of crypto regulation. We saw a change in regulatory attitudes led by the US to become friendlier towards institutional adoption of digital assets, for example. And I think that will continue into 2026. And what we are really looking forward to is seeing how the kind of legislative frameworks, the policy directions get implemented, the nuts and bolts of that. And here in Asia, I'm watching for developments such as how Australia's consultation process on its digital asset and stablecoin legislation will shake out, how that will then translate into practice, how countries like Vietnam and Pakistan that have laid out their digital asset regulatory frameworks in 2025 will actually implement that and watching stablecoin frameworks in places like Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore start to come alive in the industry as well.

(08:03):

And of course, all eyes will definitely be on the US. We'll be watching to see how the GENIUS Act will be put into practice. 2026 is going to be a year of execution and looking forward to seeing how regulators take that forward and how the industry then builds in response.

Jonno Newman (08:25):

I'm Jonno Newman, and I lead deployment strategy across APAC at TRM Labs. I'm coming to you from the future because I am fortunate enough to live in Australia, so my predictions are going to be rock solid. I'm actually going to start with something that's less of a prediction and more of a known, and that is that the great Ari Redboard is coming down under in 2026. He's joining us for Policy Week in March, and we're going to set up a run club around the Sydney Harbor. So I am super stoked about that. All right, let's get into my predictions for 2026. Something that we saw coming into 2025, and I think is going to continue, is the adoption of cryptocurrency across the APAC region. It was phenomenal. We had Southeast Asia as the fastest growing crypto region worldwide, and APAC housed seven of the top 10 countries for adoption.

(09:17):

We had India, number one, Pakistan, number three, Philippines, number four, Indonesia and Vietnam, six and seven. We had Republic of Korea, number eight, and Japan at number nine. So that is incredible. The other thing that we're seeing is the adoption of stablecoins. Now, this is quite common globally, but we're also seeing this within the APAC region. We've seen Hong Kong, they've released their regime with a very high bar to get into. Japan has granted stablecoin approvals. Korea is advancing bills, Singapore, Philippines. And so the question is no longer, will stablecoins matter, but it's how are they going to be integrated and how do we regulate that environment? One thing I'm interested on is the investigative aspect of this change. And so while we're seeing this tightened regulation at the on-ramp and off-ramps, we might see a bit of disbursement in how criminals are trying to access cryptocurrency.

(10:15):

And so what we might see is criminals using things like crypto ATMs, unlicensed OTC desks, and maybe peer-to-peer brokers as well. What is really interesting is previously illicit actors moved away from native assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum and towards stablecoins because they were less volatile. But now with this stablecoin regulation, I think the spotlight's going to be on them a lot more and we might see that reversed a little bit. Because of the features such as blacklisting where they can freeze the stablecoin accounts, this could be top of mind for how illicit actors are going to operate within 2026. One other thing that I find interesting is that the next stage of blockchain intelligence outside of the illicit ecosystem. As we see stablecoins and we see real world assets and tokenization of assets move on the blockchain, we're going to see financial institutions move from what risk does this customer have that has a cryptocurrency nexus to then looking at other things like auditability.

(11:13):

Maybe if we're looking at loans and credit, what are the records that are transparent and arO accessible on the blockchain? So it's a really exciting new era. I want to close off with one more prediction that I'm pretty confident with for 2026. Now, not financial advice, but I'm pretty confident on this. We are going to see a lot more region-based food picks from Angela on our LinkedIn feeds. So that is something I am certainly looking forward to. They're delicious. They are scroll stopping and I love them.

Jenny Gai (11:42):

I'm Jenny Gai. I am on TRM's Product Marketing team. My 2026 prediction on the product side is really how we're going to see more AI embedded. And so for a little bit of backstory, I think up until very recently, one of the things that we talk about a lot is that crime has really been limited by just the number of people in a physical location. And with blockchain technology, crime has really become borderless, autonomous, and instant. And I think our crypto community has built a really strong playbook to combat this, but we're really starting to see a shift heading into 2026, and that is the increasing adoption of AI and how that's really accelerating the scale and velocity of crime at a magnitude that we've never seen before. So over the summer, we looked at some data from Chainabuse, which is TRM's open source platform for fraud and scam reporting, and found that this time in the summer, reports of AI-enabled scams had increased over 456% relative to the same time last summer, which is a wild number that is incomprehensible.

(13:01):

And so we're really evolving our product in two ways to help our customers to meet this challenge head on. And this is not to say that we are going to be in this iRobot kind of era. I think we're taking a really intentional and thoughtful approach to AI, and this is really grounded in the principle that we leverage AI to accelerate human judgment and not to replace it. So what is that going to look like in 2026? The first is really embedding AI into our user interface to make our users faster. These are things like natural language summaries of complex graphs, of transaction monitoring alerts, and of entity risk profiles to help bring relevant context to our users faster to enable them to make decisions. And then the second area, which I'm really excited about, which I think is a real step change, is that we are building and optimizing our platform to be accessible by AI agents.

(14:07):

And we're already starting to see some early pilots in the private sector with compliance teams, and these teams can't rely on just scaling their headcount one for one in order to meet this kind of new scale and magnitude of transaction and alert volumes. And for us, this really isn't a futuristic idea. We recently announced our integration with Sphinx. They're a platform that builds AI agents, and the purpose is really to allow these agents to access different platforms, they consolidate information across lots of different data sources, and then execute tasks along a predefined workflow within the compliance space and help to automate a lot of that information gathering and really speed up alert disposition. And so I think that's the foundation that we're building on and ultimately it is to better enable private public disruption. So things like the Beacon Network and T3 Financial Crime Unit, and that's really how we're going to meet the scale problem that AI creates and really help our community meet that head on.

Tom Armstrong (15:20):

Hey Everybody, I'm Tom Armstrong.

(15:22):

I'm Luke Dufour.

(15:23):

And we are TRM's compliance advisory team, and we are here with our 2026 predictions. My prediction for 2026, I think this is going to be the year of regulatory examination wake-up calls. I think there's a bunch of things driving this. You've got fintechs, banks, and VASPs who are all kind of starting to compete on similar grounds and territory. They're rolling out a bunch of new products and services that they've never offered before. You have regulators who are supervising these things and they're early on in their journey. They've never supervised some of these products and services before. And then you have compliance teams who are also still early on their journey and trying to figure out what are the risks and controls for these things that we've never offered before. And I think regulators are going to come into a lot of these scenarios and say, "Hey, if you're going to offer these new rails, if you are going to offer new products and services, you have to understand them. And right now, I don't know if you do."

(16:15):

I think that's going to be the big risk that institutions of all kinds face. And so the teams who are starting to work on some of that regulatory messaging, blending the on- and off-chain kind of control environments are going to have a dramatically easier 2026 than everybody else. I think the other point that Luke and I will talk a lot about next year is intelligence-driven controls. There's so much data out there that compliance teams are almost drowning in, finding the real signal in that intelligence and then using that to leverage into how you build out your control environment, I think is going to be super, super important. And we're really excited to share that with folks and tell you what we see from an intelligence perspective to help you get more informed on how to build out your new programs.

Luke Dufour (16:56):

My prediction in 2026 is that it's going to be the year of the harmonized control environment. And what I mean when I say that is we're going to go beyond just purely attribution-based blockchain intelligence and monitoring on chain. We're going to look at behaviors. We're going to look at things like how the participants we're interacting with on-chain, risky or not, are transacting. And our control environments of regulatory expectations are going to move towards having this holistic view of activity, who you're transacting with and how they're transacting. And for the participants that aren't able to achieve that robust control environment, I think as Tom says, that the regulatory exams are going to be pretty tough.

Alicia Strait (17:31):

I'm Alicia Strait, Head of Talent at TRM Labs, and here are my top predictions for how recruiting will fundamentally shift in 2026. Prediction number one is that AI powered expertise becomes the currency. Top talent will pair deep expertise with AI accelerated execution, moving faster, experimenting more, and compounding their judgment. What does this look like in action? Mastery becomes the moat. Experimentation speed becomes the advantage. AI accelerates craft, but it doesn't replace it. This is the new talent equation. Prediction number two is that mission alignment becomes the ultimate competitive edge. As AI accelerates everything, mission alignment becomes the differentiator. The individuals who will thrive will choose companies where the mission aligns with their personal purpose, not because of the perks, not because of compensation, but because the work feels like the most meaningful thing they are spending their time on. Mission alignment becomes the force that fuels high velocity teams and the filter that separates those who are just interested from those who are all in.

(18:37):

Prediction number three is that AI becomes the backbone of recruiting. Now, AI will not replace recruiters, but it will rewrite the job description. Automated sourcing, prioritization, scheduling, and workflow agents will become the foundation of modern recruiting. The recruiters who thrive will not only use AI tools, but also develop their own to extend their judgment, not outsource it. Recruiting in 2026 will be faster, more precise, more AI enabled, and far more demanding of real expertise, judgment, and clarity of purpose. And this is exactly why I feel so grateful to be part of the team at TRM and why I'm so excited for all that the future holds next year. As our very own Arie Redbord puts it, careers are a team sport at TRM. Here we move insanely fast, experimenting like it's our hobby, and we build stunning teams inspired by doing their very best work, all while building a safer financial system for billions of people.

(19:34):

I couldn't be more pumped for all that's in store next year, and I'm so excited for how it shapes up.

Rita Martess (19:40):

I am Rita Martess, and I am on the North American Law Enforcement team here at TRM Labs. And my 2026 prediction is that the bad guys will get a little bit better, but so will we. What I mean by that is this, 2025 was the year of Beacon Network, our first ever block conference, technical integration with our partners over at Magnet. These things that are now live in the world that we've been dreaming about for many years, all of those are incredibly impactful, but so are bad guys, frankly. This kind of bottleneck is opening up. They're leveraging AI to do orchestrated nation state attacks. The world is going to get a little bit more complicated, but it is on us to use these kind of tools that we have, use these existing relationships that we have within our law enforcement community. I have to give a shout out to our friends over at Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Protection who are doing an incredible job having some real life impact.

(20:33):

So whether that is rescuing children from a active CSAM production situation or targeting longtime high stakes targets of some investigations that are going on across the law enforcement enterprise, we are seeing some real wins kind of rack up and it's exciting to be a small part of those wins.

Taylor Windemuth (20:56):

Hi, everyone. I'm Taylor Windemuth, Head of TRM Academy. In 2025, it was the year we learned a lot about AI and on-chain risk, and 2026 is the year that we're turning that into a force multiplier. Both for our traditional investigators and for financial institutions, because Stablecoin use is surging and compliance expectations are rising right along with it. So I have a few predictions for TRM Academy next year. First one, teach AI to scale the good and counter the bad. AI is already part of financial institutions compliance programs and investigations, so we're going to train teams to use it responsibly and visibly. This means we're going to use AI to scan massive databases, spot cross-chain patterns and draft first pass narratives, but humans make the final calls always. And so every AI assist with show your work controls, we'll have examiners, reviewers, and courts see what was automated and what was human judgment.

(21:57):

We'll also train teams on how illicit actors use AI, automated cash out, scam playbooks. Why does this all matter? Well, adversaries won't sit out on the AI era, so neither can we on the training side. My second prediction for Academy is that we really just need a shared on-chain language, but also tailored by role. The same on-chain behavior needs to translate into decisions for financial institutions, compliance teams, investigators, national security, prosecutors, judges, regulators. It goes on and on. So we start with shared behavioral patterns. We tailor our workflows, our evidence standards, and our guardrails to each role. So this really just means clear thresholds, defensible alert tuning, and documentation that's ready for examinations. Across roles, it means faster decision making that are easier to explain. So we want to reduce false positives, improve due process, and speed legitimate outcomes. And finally, something that I am constantly working on is just being able to scale this globally.

(23:01):

So that's through localization, this is through stackable credentials. So within training, we'll really try to localize our core courses into top requested languages, but also with cultural nuance. We'll teach in modular micro lessons and labs that stack into role-based paths from first alert to final disposition in court. And we'll keep everything aligned with credentials and recertification so teams can share the same vocabulary and habits worldwide. TRM Academy's job is really just to make this all practical. We'll stay the go-to for investigators. We'll step up even more for financial institutions as stablecoins go mainstream, focused on practical controls, documentation, and exam-ready program practices because AI-ready skills, clear behavioral patterns, and global credentials, that's how we win in 2026.

Ari Redbord (23:52):

On this New Year's Eve, hopefully you have a window into the extraordinary team that we have at TRM, a team that I'm honored to work with every day, a team that I learn from every single day. And what am I most looking forward to in 2026? Continuing to work really hard to build and to learn from the extraordinary people you met today. Here's to an extraordinary 2026 from our team to yours.

Alicia Strait (24:18):

Cheers. Happy New Year.

Emma Henshaw (24:19):

Happy New Year. Happy New Year.

Chris Wong (24:21):

Happy New Year. Cheers to 2026.

Emma Henshaw (24:23):

Cheers, as we would say in the UK, to 2026.

Chris Wong (24:27):

Happy New Year.

Emma Henshaw (24:28):

Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Cheers to 2026.

Tom Armstrong (24:32):

Happy new year, everyone. Happy new year, everyone. Happy New Year.

Ari Redbord (24:40):

That is some delicious, sparkling apple juice that I just made.

TRM Labs (24:44):

TRM Talks is brought to you by TRM Labs, the leading provider of blockchain intelligence and anti-money laundering software. This episode was produced in partnership with Voltage Productions.

Ari Redbord (24:56):

Now let's get back to building.