Coinbase Ventures Reveals 4 Key Crypto Trends to Watch in 2026

A closer look at the firm’s thesis for next-cycle capital deployment

TL;DR

• Coinbase Ventures outlines four strategic pillars for 2026 funding: RWA perpetuals, specialized exchange infrastructure, next-gen DeFi, and AI + on-chain identity.
• “Perpification of everything” emerges as its highest-conviction arena, arguing perpetual markets enable exposure to assets without tokenizing them.
• The firm signals that DeFi credit, privacy, Prop-AMMs, prediction-market aggregation, and proof-of-humanity tech could define the next wave of crypto growth.

Coinbase Ventures released its 2026 investment outlook on November 25, 2025, describing where capital is most likely to flow over the next year and why synthetic markets, derivatives-based asset exposure, next-generation financial infrastructure, and autonomous on-chain systems represent the highest-conviction opportunities. The firm positions these priorities not as exploratory experiments but as domains where it expects the next breakthrough companies to emerge, stating directly that it is looking for founders aligned with these themes. 

Internal framing calls 2025 “one of crypto’s most important years yet,” reflecting deeper liquidity, maturing infrastructure, renewed institutional appetite, and an innovation cycle accelerating after years of structural development. Venture deployment resurged across the sector, with Q3 2025 recording roughly US$4.65 billion in funding — a 290% quarter-over-quarter increase — reinforcing the view that market readiness and capital availability are converging just as new infrastructure layers begin to demand scale.

Coinbase’s clearest position centers on real-world asset perpetuals, a thesis described as the “perpification of everything,” where markets can form around data points, commodities, private equity proxies, macro indicators, or unconventional datasets without requiring traditional tokenization. Perpetual futures are referenced as crypto’s most proven trading product and labeled structurally “faster and more flexible” than tokenization, with the argument that perpetuals enable price discovery for virtually any form of off-chain exposure. The firm divides the opportunity into two vectors: macro-level synthetic exposure — oil, inflation breakevens, volatility, credit spreads — and new market surfaces such as private company equity, alternative data streams, or niche economic metrics. The message signals a shift away from the industry’s early assumption that RWAs must first be tokenized to trade, instead suggesting synthetics may deliver scale earlier and more efficiently.

Exchange and market-structure innovation appears as a second core theme, especially around proprietary automated market makers on networks like Solana, where liquidity providers receive protection from harmful flow and price-seeking takers. Media reporting around Coinbase’s thesis notes that Prop-AMMs accounted for 13% to 24% of Solana DEX volume at different points in 2025, and that September marked the first month these AMMs surpassed classic designs. The firm also highlights what it views as missing infrastructure in the prediction-market sector: unified trading terminals, cross-venue routing, advanced execution types, arbitrage interfaces, and analytics layers capable of connecting fragmented liquidity across Polymarket-like platforms. A separate sub-trend involves composable perpetual markets able to plug into lending and collateral layers, enabling capital recycling and improved margin efficiency across protocols.

Next-generation DeFi is treated as a structural phase shift rather than a continuation of yield-driven experimentation. Coinbase identifies unsecured on-chain credit systems as a key frontier, pairing off-chain reputation, identity signals, and verifiable behavioral history to underwrite loans without collateral. Institutional-grade privacy also stands out, with zero-knowledge, multiparty computation, homomorphic encryption, and privacy-first chain environments described as necessary infrastructure for asset managers who cannot operate transparently. The outlook suggests DeFi is evolving into a capital-market stack intended to compete with or supplant legacy rails, rather than remaining a speculative arena built around emissions and liquidity incentives.

The fourth pillar intersects AI, robotics, and crypto, with the firm anticipating increasing overlap between physical-world data networks and blockchain-based incentive systems. Decentralized data collection is described as critical for training embodied AI models, particularly where robots and physical-environment interaction requires high-volume real-world input. Autonomous smart-contract agents and AI-assisted development tools appear as scaling enablers that reduce friction and expand protocol surface area. A final thread — proof-of-humanity — is flagged as a rising necessity as generative content scales, with biometric-anchored identity potentially becoming a baseline infrastructure primitive. Coinbase names Worldcoin as a project already addressing the problem, while indicating an expectation that parallel frameworks will emerge as demand for authentication increases.

The firm closes its note with a direct message to builders: founders working in any of these tracks are encouraged to initiate discussion, underlining that capital is actively positioned for deployment. The combination of synthetic derivatives, smarter AMMs, composable collateral systems, on-chain credit, cryptographic privacy, AI-robotics data engines, and human-verification frameworks paints a clear picture of where Coinbase believes the next institutional-scale crypto expansion will form — not only around financial tokens, but around high-bandwidth markets, autonomous computation, and identity-anchored infrastructure designed for a world where machines and markets operate in parallel.

This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.