2026 Predictions: Blockchain × AI – the trust layer for institutional intelligence

This is an excerpt from our latest report: Zodia Custody 2026 predictions. Download the full report now to find out what next year holds for institutional digital asset custody.

Why now?

Regulation is accelerating provenance and audit requirements

The EU AI Act, adopted in 2024, mandates traceability and risk management for AI models and their data sources. Similar frameworks are emerging across the US and Asia. Institutions are under pressure to prove where data comes from, how models make decisions, and who is accountable. Blockchain’s immutable audit trails and timestamped attestations are becoming the natural foundation for that proof.

Data authenticity is now a systemic risk

With generative AI producing vast volumes of synthetic content, verifying authenticity is critical. Industry standards like the C2PA “content credentials” framework, supported by Adobe, Microsoft, and major media organisations, use blockchain to watermark and track data provenance. AI accuracy and traceability startups like Superficial and Galileo are gaining traction.

Custody for AI records will become a new need

Under emerging regulation, institutions may soon need to store immutable evidence of AI decisions, from financial forecasts to client communications. Custodians could hold traceability wallets for new client types such as law firms, healthcare professionals, energy companies, and insurers – securing verified AI outputs, model attestations, or decision logs as digital records that may one day be critical in audits or courts.

Agentic AI is creating new custody questions

As AI agents begin to act autonomously – running analyses, generating reports, or initiating programmable workflows – they will need secure, policy-based access to data and infrastructure. In a custody context, this could mean AI agents acting as controlled “makers” within programmable settlement systems: preparing transactions or reconciliations under strict permissions while humans retain final approval. It’s a provocative concept but one that hints at how custody and compliance could adapt to machine-level automation.

Institutional impact

• Operational integrity: Combining AI analytics with blockchain auditability creates “provable AI” enabling institutions to trust model outputs in compliance, trading, and risk functions.
• Compliance automation: AI can detect anomalies or AML flags in real time; blockchain ensures the detection event and evidence trail are immutable and regulator-ready.
• Data governance: Verifiable provenance helps satisfy regulatory obligations for explainability, record-keeping, and cross-border data integrity.
• Efficiency and scalability: Tokenised compute networks may reduce dependency on centralised cloud providers, cutting cost and improving resilience, while allowing financial institutions to collateralise compute and data as assets.
• Custody expansion: A new category of custody is emerging, safeguarding not just tokens, but the digital records and AI-generated evidence that define institutional accountability.

The bottom line: Blockchain gives AI memory and accountability; AI gives blockchain context and intelligence. Together, they form the next generation of trusted institutional infrastructure.

“AI will transform how financial institutions analyse risk and execute trades, but blockchain technology will make those decisions verifiable. Together, they create a new standard for trusted automation. As AI agents become part of enterprise workflows, custody will expand to protect not just assets, but the intelligence behind them, and provide the institutional foundation where that trust can live.”

Laura Dinneen,
Head of Product Marketing

Zodia in action

At Zodia, we view blockchain-AI convergence through the lens of trust infrastructure. Institutions will only adopt these technologies at scale if they can prove control, compliance, and recoverability.

• Custody for AI assets: As AI models, datasets, and compute rights become tokenised, they will require third party custody, with secure key management, attestation, and auditability.
• Interchange for programmable workflows: Multi-party settlement constructs may extend to AI-powered transactions, where smart contracts autonomously execute trades or collateral movements with embedded verification, where approved AI agents may one day play defined operational roles under Zodia’s policy-based controls.
• Traceability custody: Future iterations of Zodia’s custody model may include secure wallets for verified AI artefacts – datasets, reports, or model decisions – providing clients across finance, law, or healthcare industries with independent, third-party proof of integrity.

In short: Zodia provides the secure rails that make AI-enabled finance safe, controlled, and measurable – turning innovation into infrastructure.

 

This is an excerpt from our latest report: Zodia Custody 2026 predictions. Download the full report now to find out what next year holds for institutional digital asset custody.