Coinbase Ventures: Four Key Investment Focus Areas for 2026

Source: Coinbase Ventures

Translation: Zhou, ChainCatcher

Every year, the frontier of cryptocurrency evolves. In 2025, we witnessed stablecoin infrastructure reshaping payments, cross-chain proofs shortening settlements that once took days to unprecedented speeds, prediction markets breaking through into sustained mainstream adoption, and new decentralized exchange (DEX) models enabling "everything tradable" on-chain.

These breakthroughs have opened a new era for ambitious teams working around the clock to build the next major innovation in crypto.

If you compare today’s state of crypto with the beginning of the year, you’ll find greater liquidity, stronger privacy protections, enhanced interoperability, and deeper synergy between on-chain infrastructure and artificial intelligence. Regardless of price movements, our confidence in the future of crypto remains as strong as ever.

Below are some of the ideas our team is most excited about as we look ahead to 2026—and answers to the question we’re often asked: “What should I build next?” We believe these areas will give rise to the next wave of groundbreaking companies and protocols, and we’re actively looking to invest.

1. RWA Perpetual Funds—Everything Becomes Eternal

As interest in on-chain real-world assets (RWA) resurges, investors are seeking new avenues for exposure. Perpetual contracts, the most mature trading product in crypto, offer a faster and more flexible alternative to tokenization. Thanks to recent improvements in perpetual DEX infrastructure, RWA perps create synthetic investment opportunities for off-chain assets via perpetual futures contracts. We see this space evolving along two key directions.

First, bringing exotic asset exposures on-chain: because perpetuals don’t require collateralizing the underlying asset, nearly any asset can be marketized, enabling the “perpetualization” of everything from private company stakes to macroeconomic data.

Second, as crypto becomes increasingly tied to macro markets, more sophisticated traders seek views beyond simply going long digital assets. This creates demand for on-chain macro exposure, allowing traders to hedge or take positions using instruments linked to oil, inflation breakevens, credit spreads, and volatility.

2. Specialized Exchanges and Trading Terminals

Alternative Prop AMMs

The rise of perpetual DEXs, app-specific chains, and rollups highlights the importance of market structure design in building sustainable exchanges—especially in protecting market makers from predatory traders. While these new environments can embed such protections at the base layer, replicating similar structures on general-purpose chains without major protocol upgrades remains difficult. We’re increasingly interested in projects that accelerate the development of on-chain market structures across broader ecosystems. Prop-AMMs on Solana represent an emerging model where idle liquidity can only be executed via aggregators, shielding liquidity providers (LPs) from predatory order flow. This prop-driven approach can significantly advance market structure innovation even before base-layer improvements, with potential applications beyond Solana’s spot markets.

Prediction Market Trading Terminals

Prediction markets have become one of the leading consumer-grade crypto applications, successfully crossing into mainstream use. However, today’s prediction markets face the same fragmentation issues early DeFi did. For example, users must switch between multiple interfaces with limited tooling and isolated liquidity pools. Prediction market aggregators could emerge as the mainstream interface layer, unifying over $600 million in fragmented liquidity and offering a single view of real-time event odds across platforms. Imagine a trading terminal—akin to Axiom’s user experience but for event contracts—equipped with professional tools like advanced order types, filters/charts, multi-platform routing and position tracking, and cross-platform arbitrage insights.

3. Next-Gen DeFi

Perp Markets Composability

Perpetual futures are evolving from siloed trading venues into composable DeFi markets, unlocking new frontiers in capital efficiency. Leading perp exchanges like Hyperliquid and Lighter are pioneering integrations with lending protocols, enabling users to earn yield on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions. With perpetual DEX trading volumes reaching $1.4 trillion monthly—a 300% year-over-year increase—related protocols may further expand perp utility by 2026, allowing traders to hedge, earn yield, and use leverage simultaneously without sacrificing liquidity.

Unsecured Lending/Credit

Unsecured credit money markets represent the next frontier in DeFi, and 2026 may bring breakthrough models combining on-chain reputation with off-chain data to unlock unsecured lending at scale. The market opportunity is vast: the U.S. alone has $1.3 trillion in revolving unsecured credit lines, and crypto—with its superior capital efficiency and global accessibility—is well-positioned to capture value. For builders in this space, the challenge lies in designing scalable and sustainable risk models. If successful, DeFi could become a true financial infrastructure surpassing traditional banking systems.

On-Chain Privacy

Blockchains are known for transparency, but mainstream adoption may remain out of reach unless users can protect their privacy. Institutions and professional retail traders cannot operate if they constantly leak trading strategies to competitors; ordinary users typically don’t want their entire financial history exposed on-chain. We’re seeing developers build privacy-preserving assets (e.g., Zcash), DeFi applications (e.g., private order books, lending), and dedicated payment blockchains whose very purpose is privacy. Whether built atop specialized privacy networks or layered onto existing public blockchains using advanced cryptography (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, end-to-end encryption), these tools enable blockchains to maintain verifiability while reducing user exposure to malicious actors.

4. AI and Robotics

Robotics and Humanoid Data Collection

As AI advances, the market is turning toward the next technological frontier, with growing consensus that robotics may define the next phase of innovation. While many teams are moving in this direction, a critical gap remains in training robots and embodied AI systems: usable datasets are still limited and fragmented. One major scarcity is fine-grained physical interaction data, such as grasping, pressure, or multi-object manipulation involving fabrics, cables, and other deformable materials. Though this challenge isn't unique to crypto, incentive-aligned data collection models like decentralized physical infrastructure networks (e.g., DePIN) could provide a viable framework for scaling high-quality physical interaction data, accelerating the development and deployment of advanced robotic systems.

Proof of Humanity

We’re approaching a tipping point where everything you see on a connected digital screen will be indistinguishable between human-originated and AI-generated. We believe a combination of biometrics, cryptographic signatures, and open-source developer standards is essential to establishing a “proof of humanity” solution—one that complements AI within new human-AI interaction models. Worldcoin (a portfolio company of ours) has been ahead of the curve, anticipating and addressing this issue. We welcome support for multiple solutions to tackle this increasingly complex challenge.

On-Chain Development and Security AI

Smart contract development is approaching its “GitHub Copilot moment.” By 2026, AI agents might democratize on-chain building: non-technical founders could launch on-chain businesses in hours instead of months, with agents handling smart contract code generation, security reviews, and continuous monitoring. The opportunity lies in agent-powered tools that make smart contract development and security/risk management as accessible as modern web development, potentially triggering an explosion of on-chain applications and experiences.

Looking ahead to 2026, we’re inspired by the boldness of builders pushing the on-chain economy forward. These ideas reflect the immense potential we see—but the most exciting projects often come from unexpected places.