The 4 Big Crypto Trends Coinbase Ventures Is Betting On for 2026

Coinbase Ventures outlines 4 strategical themes it expects to thrust crypto innovation successful 2026. The concern limb shared its outlook successful a caller blog post, identifying the precedence areas successful which it aims to invest.

These see Real-World Asset (RWA) perpetual contracts, specialized trading infrastructure, next-generation decentralized concern (DeFi), and artificial quality (AI) and robotics.

The archetypal taxable centers connected Real-World Asset (RWA) perpetual derivatives. These supply synthetic vulnerability to off-chain assets.

Unlike accepted tokenization, perpetual futures supply a faster and much flexible mode to present on-chain vulnerability without requiring teams to custody the underlying asset.

"Because perpetuals bash not necessitate securing an underlying asset, markets tin signifier astir virtually anything, enabling the 'perpification' of everything," the blog read.

Coinbase Ventures expects maturation successful 2 directions:

• On-chain macro exposure, which gives traders a mode to presumption astir vigor prices, ostentation expectations, recognition spreads, and volatility without touching accepted fiscal rails.

• New categories of markets, including backstage companies, niche datasets, and alternate metrics that are hard to tokenize but casual to replicate synthetically.

It is worthy noting that RWAs person experienced singular maturation this year, expanding from astir $13.8 cardinal to astir $36 cardinal successful on-chain value. At the aforesaid time, the fig of plus holders has risen to 550,194, a 7.58% summation implicit the past month.

The 2nd taxable focuses connected specialized exchanges and trading terminals, with Proprietary Automated Market Makers (Prop-AMMs) rising crossed Solana. These models support liquidity providers from harmful flows.

According to Messari, proprietary AMMs handled 13% to 24% of Solana's full DEX measurement done 2025. Moreover, successful September, they surpassed accepted AMMs successful Solana’s DEX measurement for the archetypal time. HumidiFi unsocial generated astir 50% of each SOL–stablecoin DEX trading measurement that month.

"This prop-driven attack could meaningfully beforehand marketplace operation innovation up of base-layer improvements and has imaginable applications beyond Solana’s spot markets," Coinbase Ventures added.

Meanwhile, the steadfast emphasized that prediction marketplace aggregators could look arsenic a "dominant interface layer," combining fragmented liquidity. They could connection tools presently missing from the sector, specified arsenic precocious orders, cross-venue routing, arbitrage insights, and unified analytics. These trends people greater marketplace sophistication.