Coinbase Ventures: Four Key Investment Directions for 2026

Source: Coinbase Ventures

Compiled by: Zhou, ChainCatcher

Every year, the forefront of cryptocurrency is constantly changing. In 2025, we witnessed stablecoin infrastructure reshaping payment methods, cross-chain proofs reducing settlement times that once took days to unprecedented levels, prediction markets breaking through to achieve sustained mainstream applications, and new decentralized exchange (DEX) models realizing a "market where everything can be traded" on-chain. These breakthroughs have opened a new era for ambitious teams who work day and night to create the next major breakthrough in the cryptocurrency space. Comparing the current state of cryptocurrency to the beginning of the year, you will find stronger liquidity, improved privacy protection, more robust interoperability, and the synergy between on-chain infrastructure and artificial intelligence. Regardless of price trends, we remain consistently confident about the future of cryptocurrency.

Here are some ideas that our team is most focused on as we look ahead to 2026, which also serve as answers to the frequently asked question: "What should I develop next?" We believe these areas will give rise to the next groundbreaking companies and protocols, and we are actively seeking investments.

1. RWA Perpetual Funds ------ Everything Can Be Eternal

As interest in on-chain real-world assets (RWA) is reignited, investors are seeking new investment channels. Perpetual contracts, as the most mature trading product in the cryptocurrency space, offer a faster and more flexible investment avenue than tokenization. Thanks to recent improvements in the decentralized exchange (DEX) infrastructure for perpetual contracts, RWA perpetual contracts create synthetic investment opportunities for off-chain assets through perpetual futures contracts. We believe this field is developing in two directions.

First, introducing exotic asset investment opportunities on-chain: Since perpetual contracts do not require collateralization of the underlying assets, almost any asset can form a market, enabling the "perpetualization" of various assets from private companies to economic data.

Second, as the connection between cryptocurrency and macro markets becomes increasingly tight, a more mature group of traders wishes to express views that are no longer limited to going long on digital assets. This has led to a demand for on-chain macro asset investment opportunities, allowing traders to hedge or build positions through tools linked to oil, inflation breakevens, credit spreads, and volatility.

2. Professional Exchanges and Trading Terminals

Alternative Prop AMMs

The rise of perpetual decentralized exchanges (DEX), application-specific chains, and Rollups highlights the importance of market structure design in building sustainable exchanges, especially in protecting market makers from malicious traders. While these new environments can embed such protective mechanisms at the base layer, replicating similar structures on general-purpose chains without significant protocol upgrades remains quite challenging. We are increasingly focused on projects that can accelerate the development of on-chain market structures within these broader ecosystems. Prop-AMMs on Solana are an emerging model where idle liquidity can only be executed through aggregators, thus shielding liquidity providers (LP) from predatory trading flows. This Prop-driven approach can significantly advance market structure innovation before underlying improvements and has potential applications beyond the Solana spot market.

Prediction Market Trading Terminals

Prediction markets have become one of the leading consumer-grade cryptocurrency applications, successfully crossing the chasm into mainstream applications. However, today's prediction markets also face the same fragmentation issues as early DeFi. For example, users must switch between multiple interfaces, which offer limited tools and isolated liquidity pools. The emergence of prediction market aggregators is expected to become the mainstream interface layer, integrating over $600 million in decentralized liquidity and providing a unified view of cross-platform real-time event odds. Imagine a trading terminal (similar to Axiom's user experience but for event contracts) equipped with advanced order types, filters/charts, multi-platform routing, position tracking, and cross-platform arbitrage insights.

3. Next-Generation DeFi

Perp Markets Composability

Perpetual futures are evolving from isolated trading venues into composable DeFi markets, unlocking new realms of capital efficiency. Major perpetual futures exchanges like Hyperliquid and Lighter are leading the way in integrating with lending protocols, allowing users to earn collateral yields while maintaining leveraged positions. As trading volume on perpetual futures decentralized exchanges (DEX) reaches $14 trillion monthly, with a year-over-year growth of 300%, related protocols may further expand the utility of perpetual futures by enabling traders to hedge, earn yields, and use leverage simultaneously without sacrificing liquidity by 2026.

Unsecured Loans/Credit

Unsecured credit markets are the next frontier in DeFi, with breakthrough models potentially emerging in 2026 that combine on-chain creditworthiness with off-chain data, thereby unlocking the potential for unsecured lending on a large scale. The market opportunity is immense: the U.S. alone has $1.3 trillion in revolving unsecured credit lines, and cryptocurrency, with its superior capital efficiency and global accessibility, is poised to capitalize on this. For builders in this space, the challenge lies in designing scalable and sustainable risk models. If successful, DeFi will truly become a financial infrastructure capable of surpassing traditional banking systems.

On-Chain Privacy

Blockchain is known for its transparency, but mainstream applications may not be achievable unless users can maintain their privacy. Institutions and professional retail traders cannot trade if they continuously leak trading strategies to competitors; ordinary users also typically do not wish to expose their entire financial records on-chain. We see developers working on privacy-preserving assets (like Zcash) and DeFi applications (such as private order books, lending, etc.), as well as dedicated payment blockchains that prioritize privacy. Whether these tools are built on dedicated privacy networks or leverage advanced cryptographic techniques (like zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, end-to-end encryption, etc.) layered on existing public blockchains, they can enable blockchains to reduce the risk of user exposure to malicious actors while maintaining verifiability.

4. AI and Robotics

Robotics and Humanoid Robot Data Collection

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, the market is beginning to focus on the next technological frontier, with a growing consensus that robotics may define the next phase of innovation. While many teams are working in this direction, there remains a critical gap in training robots and embodied AI systems, namely the limited and fragmented availability of datasets. One major area of scarcity is fine-grained physical interaction data, such as grasping, pressure, or multi-object manipulation involving fabrics, cables, and other deformable materials. Although this challenge is not limited to the cryptocurrency space, incentive-based data collection models similar to decentralized physical infrastructure networks (like DePIN) could provide a viable framework for scaling the collection of high-quality physical interaction data, thereby accelerating the development and deployment of advanced robotic systems.

Proof of Humanity

We are approaching a tipping point where everything you see on connected digital screens will be indistinguishable from human-generated and AI-generated content. We believe that the combination of biometric technology, cryptographic signatures, and open-source developer standards is crucial for establishing a "proof of humanity" solution that can complement AI in new human-machine interaction models. Worldcoin (one of our portfolio companies) has been at the forefront, anticipating and working to address this issue. We are pleased to support various solutions to tackle this increasingly complex challenge.

On-Chain Development and Secure AI

Smart contract development is about to experience its "GitHub Copilot moment." By 2026, AI agents may further popularize on-chain building: founders without technical backgrounds could launch on-chain businesses in hours instead of months, with agents responsible for smart contract code generation, security audits, and ongoing monitoring. The opportunity lies in the emergence of agent tools that will make smart contract development and security/risk management as convenient as modern web building, potentially triggering explosive growth in on-chain applications and experiences.

Looking ahead to 2026, we are deeply encouraged by the many builders who are daring to experiment and push the on-chain economy forward. These ideas reflect the immense potential we see, but the most exciting projects often come from unexpected places.

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