The venture capital arm of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States has stated that its funding will focus on real-world asset trading, decentralized finance, and artificial intelligence next year.
In a blog post, Coinbase Ventures indicated that it is actively seeking investments in teams engaged in asset tokenization, specialized exchanges and trading terminals, next-generation DeFi, and agent-based AI advancements.
"We believe that the next explosive companies and protocols will emerge in these categories, which is precisely the direction we are actively investing in."
According to PitchBook data, Coinbase Ventures has made 618 investments since 2018, with its current portfolio containing 422 startups. Its latest investment was on November 18 in the DeFi compliance platform 0xbow, while in October it invested in payment infrastructure companies Zynk and ZAR, as well as the prediction market platform Kalshi.
In a post on X, Coinbase Ventures' Kinji Steimetz expressed his expectation for new forms of exposure to real-world assets, such as perpetual futures contracts, which "create synthetic exposure for off-chain assets."
He also highlighted the rise of "prop-AMMs"—proprietary automated market makers, a new exchange design that protects liquidity providers from exploitation by sophisticated traders and bots.
Coinbase Ventures investor Jonathan King predicted the emergence of prediction market aggregators, stating, "We expect it to become the dominant interface layer that integrates $600 million of decentralized liquidity and provides a unified view of real-time event odds across venues."
Integrating perpetual futures exchanges with other DeFi protocols (such as lending) allows traders to earn yields on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions, thereby unlocking new capital efficiency, said Coinbase Ventures investor Ethan Oak.
Oak also predicted growth in on-chain privacy protection tools, noting a "surge in developer enthusiasm" around privacy-preserving assets (such as large zero-coin).
Meanwhile, King anticipates the emergence of DeFi protocols that merge on-chain reputation with off-chain data to enable scalable unsecured lending. "The market opportunity is enormous," he stated.
The last three innovations come from the AI field. Steimetz noted a gap in training robots and embodied AI systems, stating, "Existing datasets remain limited and fragmented."
Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) could provide a viable framework for scaling the collection of high-quality physical interaction data for robot training.
Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures, stated that solutions combining biometrics, cryptographic signatures, and open standards to distinguish between human and AI-generated content, known as "human proof" solutions, will become a growth area by 2026.
Finally, AI agent tools will emerge, enabling founders without technical backgrounds to quickly launch on-chain businesses. King remarked, "By 2026, we may see AI agents further democratizing on-chain development," adding that they will be capable of handling smart contract code generation, security audits, and continuous monitoring.
Related: "Institutions have arrived"—US Bancorp launches stablecoin pilot on the Stellar network
Original article: “Coinbase reveals nine major crypto innovation directions it plans to bet on in 2026”
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