2026: Consolidation & Controvery
Enhanced Games shift sports norms, foundation model companies spin off assets, and biohacking DAOs begin to take hold
The biohacking supplement company, Elysium Health continues to have double digit MoM growth and uses its distribution edge to keep spinning out new supplement combinations. Not only that but they venture into basic R&D to try to develop and patent new supplements. The founder/CEO of Elysium becomes a household name for the company’s quick ascent. She’s (Amanda Smith) unfairly compared to Elizabeth Holmes due to biohacking skeptics as the broader supplement space faces serious testing and scrutiny. Though Elysium Health does rigorous third party testing, a slew of other, cheaper alternatives aren’t (reg here). In some cases, the testing of the cheaper alternatives show only trace amounts of the advertised molecule, with pills containing mostly rice flour as a filler. This leads to public disenchantment of supplements and creates a bifurcation between folks that stop biohacking and others that start doing higher interventions (like peptide injections and gene therapy). However, given Elysium’s rigorous standards, they continue to grow.
The general disenchantment leads the US government to require third party testing of all supplements sold in the US but with an effective date of 2029, leaving biohackers in the dark in 2026. MoleculeDAO continues to spin-out sub-DAOs, such as SupplementDAO. This DAO has many functions:
Test supplement content
Run decentralized clinical trials around the supplements
Publish the results via social media and medical journals, working towards both distribution and legitimacy.
SupplementDAO’s NEJM publication is the first high-profile publication by a biohacking company. Other studies have been published in niche journals. This publication slowly starts to engender more support from some areas of the academic community, though many remain skeptical. The broader supplement report by SupplementDAO is shared in mainstream news sources given the public’s awareness of the movement and a source of truth for supplement suppliers. This broad circulation leads to ‘normies’ buying some SupplementDAO tokens and joining the Discord for the first time for more supplement discourse. Biohacking brings many first-time crypto users to the industry broadly and DAOs specifically for the first time.
The James’ vs. Nike
More biohackers rise to prominence in the period of controversy and consolidation. Much like DIY home improvement specialists, biohackers DIY their bodies, open-source their protocols, and connect with others via social applications and Discord. Celebrity endorsements flow in with LeBron James and Bronny leading as they open-source their stack in a product placement deal with Elysium. Many compare this group of fervent biohackers to those promoting psychedelics five years ago. Nike expresses mild displeasure as they have thus far stayed away from the biohacking community.
After crunching numbers around lifetime spend of biohackers vs. average Americans, employers and insurers begin offering biohacking-related health benefits, adding biological age testing as a readout. New insurance startups, HealthAll and BioSure, spring up to layer in biological age+predicting disease onset based on lifestyle, and multimodal biomarkers to their risk adjusted health outcomes. For those that keep their biological age the same or decrease it, they get direct cost savings. This manifests as biohacking interventions being included in their FSA/HSA, covering third-party tested supplements and, in some cases, ‘approved’ gray-market peptides. This creates legal and commercial clarification as to what peptides are chosen and why, providing a framework for evidence that needs to be included for insurance reimbursement.
As genetic engineering takes off in humans, IVF clinics and genetic testing around them becomes much more sophisticated. Github repositories containing models which allow for the selection of eye color, height, and presumed intelligence spring up. Whispers grow louder that these and deeper analyses are being paid for by celebrities and successful entrepreneurs. The New York Times covers the deeper genetic selection phenomenon and riles up many readers with the heart of arguments centering around biologically separating the haves and have-nots. Fertility clinics outwardly deny these practices but further leaked documents demonstrate inconsistencies.
Cheating Death: Biohackers Bet on Digital Immortality
Biohackers are also pushing the boundaries of what it means to die. A new company, Haus of the Un-dead, collects multimodal data (blood, tissue, brain waves, videos of speech and interactions in the world, ingests all digital footprint) from biohackers. They’re also innovating on better preservation methods of organs, the brain, and the body itself. Though this research is more speculative, single digit millions in revenues from creating biohacker 'digital twins’ spur a $60M Series A from usual Silicon Valley suspects. Other private biohacking companies cross the $100M revenue barriers with news leaks they float in the upcoming months. Meanwhile bio DAOs reach an aggregate $5B fully diluted value (FDV). With all this excitement, rumors emerge that Ark is working on a biohacker ETF and biohacker DAO ETF to add onto their other Crypto-centric ETF products.
AllHormones ups its continuous hormone monitors to currently measure 20 metabolites in a flashy and sleek product form. Even though Apple watches have been patenting around this space for the past two years, they don’t integrate quickly enough leading many to compare their pace of development in biohacking to LLMs and AR/VR. The product-led growth and consumer delight of people using AllHormones is reminiscent of Tesla. Double digit month on month growth makes AllHormones one of the most coveted private companies in the space.
As incumbent monitoring modalities progress, other hardware comes to the forefront with development of biofeedback systems for mental health management and neuro (EEG and ultrasound-centric) wearables. The prior work on decoding images from brain waves is expanded to videos.
When we think we’ve hit the top, Magnus Genomics, starts selling 30x human genome sequencing for $5. Again, biotech is thrust into the mainstream, pushing $XBI past COVID-level highs for the first time.
QuantifiedSelf DAO (not to be confused with SupplementDAO) has a readout which shows they’re able to decrease biological age by 5% by optimizing supplement amounts + peptides + nutrition. They use this to launch a token and start a personalized supplement brand which uses genetic data and longitudinal biomarkers to formulate a personalized concoction of vitamins, peptides, and suggest what genome variants might be amenable to gene therapy in the long run. The personalized mix of vitamins and peptides is shipped directly to customers homes and a subscription-based model.
The year also sees the meteoric rise of the Enhanced Games, an Olympics-style competition where performance-enhancing substances are not only allowed but celebrated. The inaugural event shatters viewership records, with over one billion people tuning in worldwide, signaling a shift in public perception of human enhancement. The success of the Enhanced Games sends shockwaves through the world of professional sports. Traditional sporting bodies are forced to reckon with the growing public acceptance of performance enhancement, leading to heated debates about the future of competition. Some leagues consider creating separate divisions for enhanced athletes, while others double down on stricter testing protocols. The Enhanced Games also become a proving ground for new biohacking technologies, with companies vying for the chance to sponsor top performers and showcase their latest innovations.
D2C diagnostics businesses look at profiling of immune cells. Much like the neurotech space, biohackers chronicle their immune cells during infection and use peptides like Thymosin alpha-1 and beta-4 to show a ‘priming’ ability on the immune cells and decreased ‘sick’ time, and mechanisms therein.
In the realm of pain management, transmagnetic stimulation technology shows synergistic effects when combined with traditional therapeutics and digital therapeutics. This multi-modal approach to pain treatment reduces opioid dependence and improves quality of life for chronic pain sufferers. The success in pain management spurs research into applying similar combinatorial approaches to other complex conditions, such as depression and autoimmune disorders. Akili, pivoting from its clinical roots, finds success in the consumer market by pairing its digital therapeutics with popular weight loss drugs. This combination of pharmaceutical intervention and gamified behavior modification proves particularly effective in addressing the psychological aspects of weight management. The success of this approach leads to a wave of similar partnerships between traditional pharma companies and digital health startups.
With further datapoints, we see the introduction of AI-powered biohacking assistants for personalized health optimization as the team that published the personal health fine-tuned Gemini model finally leaves Google and starts a company with $50M in Seed funding. Their first use-case is in the metabolic disease market where personalized AI-driven dietary and supplement plans have a synergistic effect with retatrutide and tirzepatide (next-generation Ozempic) to reverse the percentage of the population that’s obese.
Concurrently, AI-driven drug discovery accelerates the development of targeted therapies for longevity itself (not just chronic or metabolic disease). Larger numbers of platforms see higher clinical trial success in primary and secondary endpoints. The increased chance of success leads to a public equity resurgence for computational platforms as wall street begins to ascribe value to “platforms” once again. Many backlogged companies go public. This too bolsters $XBI which turns to be one of the best performing ETFs.
Computational models predicted the drugs which had successful secondary endpoints in Phase I trials in Parkinson’s. The models are used to spin up potential therapeutics for 10’s of other neurological diseases. The encouraging readouts are watched by the biohacker community and immediately exported to Dubai, Mexico and Honduras. ARPA-N (N for Neuroscience) establishes the US government's continued buy-in in treating neurological disease with $5bn in funding per year. The anchors for this source of funding are the Department of Defense, Air Force, Space Force, and the Army.
All biological foundation models are now multimodal with incremental benefits occurring with architecture changes. The field temporarily stagnates as compute doesn’t drive more insights and the bitter lesson does not seem to hold. In this period of stagnation, foundation model companies such as Evolutionary Scale verticalize and spin-out a longevity therapeutics company. Crypto-turned-AI investors see biohacking as the next big thing. For startups building here, the quantum of capital and valuations increase.
