2025 was marked by stablecoin infrastructure that reshaped payments, with settlement periods shortened significantly. We also saw prediction markets becoming mainstream with decentralized exchanges enabling “markets for everything”. As a result, various teams are building the next big thing in crypto.
Such a transformational year is setting the stage for innovations in 2026, despite the price volatility across the crypto sector. Coinbase’s venture capital arm has set its sights on several categories where it sees new breakout companies emerging.
The rise of RWA perps
Kinji Steimetz from Coinbase Ventures sees renewed interest in on-chain real-world assets (RWAs), as investors are looking for new ways to increase exposure; perpetuals are already a proven product with both a faster and more flexible path than tokenization.
This technology was enabled by improvements in perpetual decentralized exchange (DEX) infrastructure. As a result, Steimetz sees RWA perpetuals developing across two paths:
- Bringing exotic asset exposure on chain with “perpification” of everything.
- Professional traders looking for portfolio exposure in ways other than simply being long digital assets, that will enable them to hedge their positions through instruments tied to credit spreads, volatility, inflation breakevens, and oil.
Advanced trading terminals and specialized market platforms
With the rise of perpetual DEXs and application-specific blockchains, users saw that market infrastructure is critical to building exchanges that support retail traders. These upgrades can embed their features at a base layer, but it’s still hard to replicate that on general-purpose chains without making serious upgrades.
Coinbase Ventures is interested in projects that create an on-chain market structure that can achieve this. One of the models they are interested in is Prop-AMMs on Solana, such as HumidiFi, where liquidity is managed through aggregators that insulate LPs from predatory flows. Coinbase believes that this approach could advance market structure innovation with potential applications beyond spot markets.
Prediction markets are one of the leading consumer crypto applications that bring it closer to mainstream adoption. But today’s prediction markets are still fragmented, just as early DeFi was.
Instead of a unified market, users have to navigate multiple interfaces and isolated liquidity pools. Prediction market aggregators are the solution, according to investor Jonathan King. Prediction market aggregators are expected to become the main interface layer that will consolidate over $600 million in fragmented liquidity.
This should bring pro tools like advanced order types, filters, position tracking, cross-venue arbitrage insights, and more.
The new DeFi stack unlocks credit, privacy, and composability
Ethan Oak, a Coinbase Ventures investor, sees the composability in the perpetual futures market, which is unlocking new capital efficiency frontiers. Hyperliquid and Lighter, two major perp exchanges, are already integrating with lending protocols to enable users earn yields on collateral while keeping their leveraged positions open.
Perp DEXs have already hit over $1.4 trillion in monthly volume, growing 300% year-over-year. As a result, 2026 might see these protocols expand perpetual futures that enable users to simultaneously hedge, earn, and leverage without losing liquidity.
Unsecured credit-based money markets are likely to be DeFi’s next target, with 2026 probably seeing breakthrough models that merge on-chain reputation with off-chain data for unsecured lending.
Jonathan King sees a massive opportunity in this area as the US alone has $1.3 trillion in revolving, unsecured credit lines that crypto can capture through its superior capital efficiency. The main issue here is building sustainable risk models that scale. Whoever succeeds here can outcompete traditional banking.
On-chain privacy is another aspect required in today’s blockchain environment, given how blockchains are famous for their transparency. Institutions and pro traders want to keep their strategies hidden from competitors, and users don’t want to expose their financial history on-chain.
As a result, various projects are focused exactly on privacy assets like Zcash, as well as applications and blockchains that keep private order books or payments.
Crypto infrastructure for AI and robotics
With AI expanding, markets look toward the next technological leap. The consensus is that robotics may be the next phase of innovation as various companies, including Tesla, compete to roll out the best humanoid robot.
Similar to crypto liquidity in DeFi, datasets are fragmented. Robots lack physical interaction data for grip, pressure, or object manipulation involving various materials. Kinj Steimetz sees incentivized data-collection models like DePIN as a framework for gathering and scaling such data to enable faster robot deployment.
Thanks to widely available AI-generated content, a crucial step would be using “proof of humanity”. This would be a combination of biometrics, crypto signing, and open source dev standards. Worldcoin is currently working against this problem, but Hoolie Tejwani, the head of Coinbase Ventures, would love to support multiple approaches to solve this problem.
Additionally, Jonathan King believes that smart contract development will hit its “GitHub Copilot moment” and we might see in 2026 AI agents that democratize on-chain building. This will allow founders who aren’t necessarily technical enough to launch on-chain businesses in hours as agents handle code generation and security reviews.
Start your crypto journey with Coinbase
To start trading, visit Coinbase and open an account. You will need to verify your ID to fund your account and start trading.
Coinbase is one of the leading crypto exchanges, offering over 200 assets. Once you buy your crypto, you can put your idle cryptocurrencies to work and earn up to 15% annual percentage yield (APY) on select assets.
Thanks to the Base App (formerly Coinbase Wallet), users can connect to various decentralized applications for yield farming or prediction markets, or bridge across blockchains.
Seasoned traders gain access to pro trading tools via Coinbase Advanced, including over 500 spot pairs with maker fees as low as 0.0% for maximum capital efficiency. TradingView powers advanced charting tools, while advanced traders gain access to powerful APIs.
Coinbase is the leading choice for many crypto investors, thanks to its regulated structure and insurance for US customers. The company has completed a SOC 2 Type 1 audit for Coinbase’s staking services, which evaluates how effectively the company safeguards and manages customer data against five criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
Key reasons traders continue choosing Coinbase
Coinbase is still unmatched with its deep liquidity and order books that provide safe execution across more than 200 cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. The platform is regulated and secure, and trusted by over 100 million users globally.
With its industry-leading mobile and desktop platforms, suitable for beginners and seasoned traders, Coinbase is the top choice.
Coinbase Ventures, the venture capital arm of Coinbase, continues to back and invest in the next wave of founders that will revolutionize modern banking, AI, and the blockchain future.
