AI and Crypto in 2026: How Blockchains Are Becoming AI Infrastructure

On 1 April 2026, the Akash network reported that its customers had passed 5 million dollars in cumulative spending on compute, real money paying for real processing power on a blockchain marketplace. That figure captures the shift of the year: in 2026 the fusion of artificial intelligence and crypto stopped being a story the sector told itself and became a layer other things are built on. AI-focused crypto tokens are worth roughly 21 billion do…