Coinbase Ventures: The 2026 Crypto Frontiers — From RWA Perpetuals to AI-Driven Onchain Builders

Coinbase Ventures: Ideas we are excited for in 2026

Every year, the frontier of crypto shifts. In 2025, we watched stablecoin infrastructure reshape payments, cross-chain proofs collapse settlement times that once took days, prediction markets break through to sustained mainstream adoption and new DEX models enabling “markets for everything” onchain. These breakthroughs have set the stage for a new era of ambitious teams working nights and weekends to build the next big things in crypto. If you compare the state of crypto now vs. the beginning of the year, you’ll see deeper liquidity, smarter privacy, real interoperability, and onchain rails complementing AI. Regardless how price charts read on a given day, we are as bullish as ever about what’s next.

Below is a look at the ideas our team is most energized about heading into 2026, the answer to the question we get all the time: “What should I build next?” These are the categories where we believe the next big breakout companies and protocols will emerge, and where we’re looking to actively invest. If you’re building in any of these areas: let's chat. Feel free to DM us on X to get in touch. 

1. RWA Perpetuals - The Perpification of Everything

With renewed interest in onchain real-world assets (RWAs), investors are seeking new forms of exposure, and perpetuals, crypto’s most proven trading product, offer a structurally faster and more flexible path than tokenization. Enabled by recent improvements in perpetual DEX infrastructure, RWA perpetuals create synthetic exposure to offchain assets through perpetual futures contracts. We see this category developing along two vectors. First, to bring exotic asset exposure onchain: because perpetuals do not require securing an underlying asset, markets can form around virtually anything, enabling the “perpification” of everything from private companies to economic data prints. Second, as crypto becomes increasingly intertwined with macro markets, a more sophisticated trader base is seeking to express a wider range of views than simply being long digital assets. This creates demand for macro asset exposure onchain, allowing traders to hedge or position through instruments tied to oil, inflation breakevens, credit spreads, and volatility. — Kinji Steimetz, @kinjisteimetz on X

2. Specialized Exchanges & Trading Terminals

• Alternative Prop AMMs 

The rise of perpetual DEXs, application-specific chains, and rollups has underscored how critical market structure design is to building sustainable exchanges, particularly in shielding market makers from toxic takers. While these newer environments can embed such protections at the base layer, replicating similar structures on general-purpose chains remains difficult without major protocol upgrades. We’re increasingly interested in projects that accelerate onchain market structure development within these broader ecosystems. One emerging model is Prop-AMMs on Solana, where resting liquidity can only be executed through aggregators, insulating LPs from predatory flow. This prop-driven approach could meaningfully advance market structure innovation ahead of base-layer improvements and has potential applications beyond Solana’s spot markets. — Kinj Steimetz, @kinjisteimetz on X

• Trading Terminals for Prediction Markets

Prediction markets have emerged as the one of the leading consumer crypto applications, crossing the chasm into mainstream adoption. However, today's prediction markets suffer from the same fragmentation that plagued early DeFi. For example, users must navigate multiple interfaces with limited tooling and isolated liquidity pools. Enter prediction market aggregators, which we expect to emerge as the dominant interface layer, consolidating $600M+ in fragmented liquidity and providing a unified view of real-time event odds across venues. Imagine trading terminals (think Axiom-like UX, but for event contracts) with pro tools like advanced order types, filters / charts, multi-venue routing and position tracking, cross-venue arbitrage insights, and more. — Jonathan King, @jonathankingvc on X

3. Next-gen DeFi

• Perp Markets Composability 

Perpetual futures are evolving beyond isolated trading venues into composable DeFi markets that unlock new capital efficiency frontiers. Major perp exchanges like Hyperliquid and Lighter are pioneering integrations with lending protocols, enabling users to earn yield on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions. With perp DEX volumes hitting $1.4 trillion monthly and growing 300% year-over-year, 2026 might see protocols expanding the utility of perpetual futures allowing traders to simultaneously hedge, earn, and leverage without sacrificing liquidity. — Ethan Oak, @0xNoroc on X

• Unsecured Lending / Credit

Unsecured credit-based money markets are DeFi's next frontier, and 2026 may see breakthrough models that blend onchain reputation with offchain data to unlock unsecured lending at scale. The market opportunity is massive: the U.S. alone has $1.3 trillion in revolving, unsecured credit lines that crypto can capture through superior capital efficiency and global accessibility. For builders in this sector, the challenge is designing sustainable risk models that scale. Success here turns DeFi into genuine financial infrastructure that can outcompete traditional banking rails. — Jonathan King, @jonathankingvc on X

• Onchain Privacy

Blockchains are famous for their transparency, but mainstream adoption may not occur unless users can maintain their privacy. Institutions and pro retail traders cannot trade if they constantly leak their strategies to competitors, and everyday users generally do not want to expose their entire financial history to the world onchain. We are seeing a surge of developer energy focused on privacy-preserving assets (e.g., Zcash) and DeFi applications (e.g., private orderbooks, borrow/lend, etc) and dedicated blockchains for payments touting privacy as a raison d'etre. Whether built on purpose-built privacy networks or layered atop existing public blockchains using advanced cryptography (e.g., ZKPs, FHE, MPC, TEEs, etc), these tools can allow blockchains to maintain their verifiability while reducing user’s public exposure to bad actors. — Ethan Oak, @0xNoroc on X

4. AI and Robotics

• Robotics & Humanoid Data Collection

As AI continues to expand, markets are beginning to look toward the next technological frontier, with growing consensus that robotics may define that next phase of innovation. While many teams are moving in this direction, a key gap remains in training robotic and embodied AI systems, where available datasets are still limited and fragmented. One major area of scarcity is fine-grained physical interaction data such as grip, pressure, or multi-object manipulation involving cloth, cables, and other deformable materials. Although this challenge extends beyond crypto, incentivized data-collection models similar to decentralized physical infrastructure networks (i.e., DePIN) could offer a viable framework for scaling the collection of high-quality physical interaction data, enabling faster development and deployment of advanced robotic systems. — Kinj Steimetz, @kinjisteimetz on X

•  Proof of Humanity

We are approaching the tipping point where everything you see on an internet connected digital screen will be disassociated and indistinguishable from human provenance vs. AI generated. We believe a combination of biometrics, cryptographic signing, and open source developer standards will be crucial to establishing a “proof of humanity” solution that complements AI in the new human/computer interface model. Worldcoin (portfolio company) has been ahead of the curve on seeing and working against this problem. We’d love to support multiple approaches at solutions to this increasingly complex problem space. — Hoolie Tejwani, @HoolieG on X 

• AI for Onchain Development & Security

Smart contract development is about to hit its "GitHub Copilot moment." 2026 might see AI agents further democratize onchain building: non-technical founders launching onchain businesses in hours, not months, with agents handling smart contract code generation, security reviews, and continuous monitoring. The opportunity lies in agentic tooling that makes smart contract development and security/risk management as accessible as modern web building, potentially unlocking a cambrian explosion of onchain apps and experiences. — Jonathan King, @jonathankingvc on X

As we look ahead to 2026, we’re energized by the builders taking big swings and pushing the onchain economy forward. These ideas reflect where we see huge potential, but the most exciting projects often come from places no one expects. If you’re working on anything in these areas, or exploring something entirely new, DM one of our team members above – we’d love to connect and learn what you’re building.