If you expected 2025 to be filled with espresso-headed ballerinas and sequential numeric memes, well, I don’t believe you. Predicting the future is an inexact science, especially when the internet’s volatile culture becomes part of the equation.
That said, there are data-driven forms of divination that are a bit more precise than palmistry or tea leaves — and that’s the approach Whatnot is taking. The virtual auction house looked at its fastest-growing categories to make some guesses about the direction the live shopping ecosystem will take in the year to come.
Whatnot, which recently announced its second nine-digit funding round of 2025, keeps its users glued to its shoppable live streams for an average of 80 minutes per day. That watch time provides Whatnot with a deep trove of data, which the company mined to produce its 2026 insights.
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The first trend mentioned in the resulting report is a phenomenon that has grown throughout 2025: Interest in women’s sports is on the rise. Whatnot noted that the percentage of female users on its platform has doubled year-over-year, and trading cards featuring WNBA players have become a popular auction item for users of all genders. In 2025, search traffic for those cards increased three times faster than for NBA trading cards. At the top of the pyramid, a Caitlin Clark rookie card broke records by fetching a $660,000 price on Whatnot.
Ancient coins also enjoyed a glow-up in 2025, and Whatnot expects that uptick to carry into 2026. Forget NFTs — the hot new forms of alternative currency are old forms of payment made from gold, silver, and platinum. All of those elements saw their Whatnot search traffic more than double this year.
Some of Whatnot’s 2026 predictions align with elemental facets of internet culture. Nostalgia, for example, has always been a big deal online, but Whatnot expects next year’s shoppers to retreat further into the past by revisiting classic toys like Furbies and Beanie Babies. I don’t know what’s causing the sudden surge of early 2000s nostalgia, but I’m going to blame all of those Joey episodes that made it to YouTube.
But the internet of the future won’t just repeat the recent past. Whatnot, for example, is seeing a clear pivot to louder fashion choices like patterned shirts and bold makeup. So if we say goodbye to the “clean girl aesthetic” in 2026, don’t say that Whatnot didn’t warn you.
Whatnot is not the first platform to attempt this type of clairvoyance. Last year, for example, Pinterest guessed that pickles and boho outfits would spike in 2025. While we’re still waiting for some of those predictions to come true (where is all the cream soda content I was promised?), studies like these take the temperature of contemporary social media culture. Even the biggest live shopping success story of 2025 can’t view the next 12 months with perfect accuracy, but if we spend the next 12 months talking about drachmas, talents, and pieces of eight, I for one will be satisfied.
