Author: Coinbase Ventures Team

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

The cutting-edge trends in the crypto industry change every year. In 2025, we witnessed:

1. Stablecoins reshaping the global payment landscape;
2. Cross-chain technology compressing settlement times from days to seconds;
3. Prediction markets breaking through barriers and gaining mainstream recognition;
4. New DEX infrastructure making "everything can be traded on-chain" a reality.

These breakthroughs pave the way for a new generation of entrepreneurs, with countless teams tirelessly building the next milestone in the crypto world. Compared to the state of the industry at the beginning of the year, on-chain liquidity is now deeper, privacy protection is smarter, cross-chain interoperability has become the norm, and blockchain and artificial intelligence are forming a complementary relationship. Regardless of daily price fluctuations, we remain confident in the future development prospects.

1. RWA Perpetual Contracts: The Trend of Perpetualization of Everything

With RWA regaining market attention, investors are seeking new types of risk exposure. As the most mature trading product in the crypto space, perpetual contracts offer a faster and more flexible participation path compared to the underlying RWA assets. Thanks to recent improvements in Perp DEX infrastructure, RWA perpetual contracts have created risk exposure to off-chain assets through perpetual contracts. We observe that RWA perpetual contracts are evolving in two directions: first, bringing alternative assets on-chain; since perpetual contracts do not require holding the underlying assets, the market can drive the "perpetualization" process of almost all underlying assets, from private equity to economic data. Second, as the intertwining of cryptocurrencies and macro markets becomes increasingly tight, more mature trading groups are no longer satisfied with simply going long on crypto assets but are seeking richer investment products. This has generated demand for exposure to macro assets on-chain, allowing traders to hedge or build positions using tools linked to crude oil, inflation hedging, credit spreads, and volatility. — Kinji Steimetz

2. Specialized Trading Products and New Trading Terminals

Self-Operated AMM

The rise of perpetual DEXs, application-specific chains, and Rollups highlights the importance of product structural design in building sustainable exchanges, especially in protecting market makers from malicious arbitrageurs. These emerging products can embed such protective mechanisms at the base layer, but replicating similar structures on general-purpose blockchains remains challenging unless significant protocol upgrades are made. Therefore, we are increasingly focused on innovative projects that concentrate on on-chain market structure. The self-operated AMM model emerging on Solana is one such example, where dormant liquidity can only be executed through aggregators, thus protecting LPs from attacks by bad actors. This self-operated model may significantly drive market structure innovation before improvements at the base layer and is expected to expand to applications beyond the Solana spot market. — Kinji Steimetz

Prediction Market Trading Terminals

Prediction markets have become one of the leading consumer applications, successfully crossing the crypto chasm and achieving mainstream adoption. However, current prediction markets are still plagued by early DeFi fragmentation issues, such as users having to navigate multiple interfaces, using limited-functionality tools, and facing fragmented liquidity pools. In this context, prediction market aggregators have emerged, and we expect aggregators to become the main interaction layer, integrating over $600 million of fragmented liquidity and providing a unified interface for cross-platform real-time event probabilities. Imagine future trading terminals (similar to Axiom user experience but dedicated to event contracts) equipped with professional tools: advanced order types, filtering and charting functions, multi-platform path optimization, position tracking, and cross-market arbitrage insights. — Venture Capitalist Jonathan King

3. Next-Generation DeFi Protocols

Composability of Perpetual Contract Markets

Perpetual contract platforms are evolving from isolated exchanges into composable DeFi markets, pushing capital efficiency to new frontiers. Leading perpetual contract DEXs like Hyperliquid and Lighter are integrating with lending protocols, allowing users to earn yields on collateralized assets while maintaining leveraged positions. With monthly trading volumes of perpetual contract DEXs reaching $1.4 trillion and an annual growth rate of 300%, by 2026, DeFi protocols are expected to expand perpetual contract functionalities, enabling traders to achieve the triple goals of hedging, yield generation, and leveraged operations while maintaining liquidity. — Ethan Oak

Unsecured Credit

The unsecured credit lending market will become the next frontier in DeFi, with breakthrough models potentially emerging in 2026 that integrate on-chain reputation with off-chain data to achieve large-scale unsecured credit. The market opportunity is immense: there is $1.3 trillion in revolving unsecured credit lines in the U.S. alone, and DeFi can capture this market through better capital efficiency and global accessibility. The challenge for entrepreneurs is how to design scalable and sustainable risk models. If successful, unsecured credit could evolve DeFi into a new financial infrastructure that can truly compete with traditional banks. — Venture Capitalist Jonathan King

On-Chain Privacy

Blockchain is known for its transparency, but without ensuring user privacy, it is still difficult to achieve mainstream adoption. If institutional investors and professional retail traders continue to leak strategies to counterparts, trading will ultimately become untenable. Additionally, ordinary users are often reluctant to expose their complete trading history on-chain for anyone to see. Currently, we see developers focusing significant efforts on privacy-protecting assets (like Zcash) and DeFi applications (such as private order books, lending protocols, etc.), with some blockchains specifically designed for payments making privacy protection their foundation. Whether these solutions are built on specific privacy networks or utilize advanced cryptographic techniques like zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), secure multi-party computation (MPC), or trusted execution environments (TEEs) deployed on existing public chains, they can effectively reduce the risk of users exposing themselves to bad actors while maintaining the verifiability of blockchain. — Ethan Oak

4. AI and Robotics

Robotics Technology and Bionic Data Collection

As artificial intelligence continues to develop, the market is beginning to focus on the next technological frontier, with an increasing consensus that robotics technology may become the next wave of innovation. Although many teams are moving in this direction, there remains a critical data gap in the training of robotic and embodied AI systems, as existing datasets are not only limited but also fragmented. Particularly scarce are data involving subtle physical interactions, such as grasping force, pressure values, or multi-object manipulation data for deformable objects like fabrics and cables. While this challenge is not limited to the crypto space, drawing on DePIN's incentive-based data collection model may provide a feasible framework for scaling the collection of high-quality physical interaction data, thereby accelerating the development and deployment of advanced robotic systems. — Kinji Steimetz

Human Proof

With the development of artificial intelligence, we are approaching a critical point: the content presented on digital screens of the internet will gradually become difficult to distinguish between human creation and AI generation. We believe that combining biometric technology, cryptographic signatures, and open-source developer standards is crucial for building "human proof" solutions, which will complement AI in new human-computer interaction models. Worldcoin has been at the forefront of anticipating and addressing this challenge. We look forward to supporting various solutions to tackle this increasingly complex problem space. — Hoolie Tejwani

AI-Driven On-Chain Development

Smart contract development is about to witness its "GitHub Copilot moment." By 2026, we may see AI agents further lowering the barriers to on-chain development: entrepreneurs without technical backgrounds could launch on-chain businesses in hours instead of months, with agents handling smart contract code generation, security audits, and ongoing monitoring. The real opportunity lies in the ecosystem of agent tools, which will make smart contract development and security risk management as convenient as modern web building, potentially leading to a Cambrian explosion of on-chain applications and experiences. — Venture Capitalist Jonathan King

Note: The "GitHub Copilot moment" is a popular metaphor in the developer community that describes a specific, surprising experience.

Looking ahead to 2026, we are excited about the vibrant atmosphere of entrepreneurs boldly experimenting and driving the development of the on-chain economy. While the aforementioned directions showcase potential tracks we are optimistic about, the most astonishing projects often emerge from unexpected fields, so let us look forward together.

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