Coinbase Ventures Reveals Top 2026 Crypto Bets Worth Watching

Coinbase Ventures has outlined seven key investment areas for 2026, targeting real-world asset trading infrastructure, specialized decentralized exchanges, next-generation DeFi protocols, and AI-powered development tools.

Short term price moves do not measure long term progress. 2025 was a huge year for fundamental progress in crypto adoption and innovation.

We're sharing 9 ideas we’re ready to back that could define crypto’s next big thing in 2026. They break down into 4 main themes: 👇 pic.twitter.com/cqyYMBssUr

— Coinbase Ventures 🛡️ (@cbventures) November 25, 2025

The venture arm of America’s largest crypto exchange published its strategic priorities in a blog post, signaling where it expects breakthrough companies and protocols to emerge next year.

Coinbase Ventures has deployed capital across 618 investments since 2018 and maintains a portfolio of 422 startups, according to PitchBook data.

Recent deployments include DeFi compliance platform 0xbow in November and payment infrastructure firms Zynk, ZAR, and prediction markets platform Kalshi in October.

The firm emphasized that perpetual futures markets, unsecured lending protocols, and privacy-preserving technologies represent the most promising opportunities for builders and entrepreneurs.

Coinbase Perpetual Futures and Trading Infrastructure Take Center Stage

Coinbase Ventures investor Kinji Steimetz highlighted RWA perpetuals as a priority investment area. These instruments create synthetic exposure to offchain assets through perpetual futures contracts, eliminating the need to secure underlying assets.

The technology enables markets for virtually any asset class, from private companies to economic data prints. Traders can access exposure to oil, inflation breakeven, credit spreads, and volatility instruments directly onchain.

Steimetz also identified proprietary automated market makers, or prop-AMMs, as an emerging design pattern. These systems protect liquidity providers from sophisticated traders and bots by routing executions exclusively through aggregators.

Jonathan King, another Coinbase Ventures investor, predicted prediction market aggregators would dominate as the interface layer. These platforms would consolidate over $600 million in fragmented liquidity across multiple venues.

King described trading terminals with professional features including advanced order types, multi-venue routing, position tracking, and cross-venue arbitrage insights. The model mirrors traditional financial terminals but focuses on event contracts.

DeFi Expansion and AI Development Tools Attract Capital

Perpetual futures exchanges are integrating with lending protocols, according to investor Ethan Oak. Hyperliquid and Lighter are pioneering systems that allow users to earn yield on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions.

Monthly perpetual DEX volumes reached $1.4 trillion with 300% year-over-year growth. Oak stated these integrations unlock new capital efficiency by enabling simultaneous hedging, earning, and leveraging without sacrificing liquidity.

Unsecured lending represents another major opportunity. King noted the U.S. market alone holds $1.3 trillion in revolving, unsecured credit lines that crypto protocols could capture through superior capital efficiency and global accessibility.

Oak observed a surge in developer activity around privacy-preserving assets like Zcash and private DeFi applications. These tools use zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, and trusted execution environments.

Meanwhile, AI development tools are approaching a breakthrough moment for smart contract development. King predicted AI agents would democratize onchain building by handling code generation, security reviews, and continuous monitoring.

Steimetz identified robotics training data as a key bottleneck. Fine-grained physical interaction data covering grip, pressure, and deformable materials remains scarce. Decentralized physical infrastructure networks could provide a framework for scaling high-quality data collection.

Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures, emphasized proof of humanity solutions combining biometrics, cryptographic signing, and open standards. These systems would verify human versus AI-generated content as digital screens become increasingly populated with synthetic media.

Coinbase Ventures portfolio company Worldcoin has been developing solutions in this space. Tejwani stated the firm would support multiple approaches to addressing the human verification challenge.

The venture arm invited builders working in these areas to connect directly with team members through X for potential investment discussions.