RWA Perpetualization, Prediction Market Termination, On-Chain Privacy, and AI Robots Will Erupt.

Author: Coinbase Ventures

Translation: Baihua Blockchain

Every year, the frontier of cryptocurrency changes. In 2025, we witnessed a significant amount of payments in our stablecoin infrastructure, cross-chain proofs repeating over several days, mainstream adoption breakthroughs in prediction markets achieving continuous settlement, and new DEX models supporting on-chain "market for everything." These breakthroughs have built a stage for ambitious teams who are working tirelessly to create the next big thing in the cryptocurrency space. If you compare the current state of cryptocurrency to the beginning of the year, you will see deep liquidity, smarter privacy protection, true interoperability, and on-chain infrastructure complemented by AI. Regardless of how price charts fluctuate, we are confident about what will happen next.

Here are the ideas our team is most interested in as we enter 2026, as well as answers to the frequently asked question — "What should I build next?" We believe that the next major breakthrough companies and protocols will support these areas, which is also where we are actively seeking investments.

1. RWA Perpetual Contracts – The Perpification of Everything

With a renewed interest in on-chain Real World Assets (RWA), investors are seeking new forms of risk reconstruction, and perpetual contracts, as the most mature trading product in the cryptocurrency space, offer a path that is structurally faster and more flexible than tokenization. Driven by recent improvements in perpetual contract DEX infrastructure, RWA perpetual contracts create synthetic risk reconstruction for off-chain assets through perpetual futures contracts. We see our category developing in two directions. First, exposing exotic asset risk on-chain: since perpetual contracts do not rely on underlying assets, markets can form economies around almost anything, achieving the "perpification of everything" from companies to data publishing. Secondly, as cryptocurrency and macro markets explode, more mature traders are seeking to express broader views than simply going long on digital assets. This has created a demand for on-chain macro asset risk exposure, allowing traders to hedge or build positions through tools linked to oil, inflation breakeven points, credit spreads, and volatility.

2. Specialized Trading Platforms and Trading Terminals

Alternative Market Makers (Prop AMMs)

The emergence of perpetual contract DEXs, specific applications, and Rollups highlights the importance of market structure design in building sustainable trading platforms, especially in protecting market makers from bad actor behavior. While these newer environments can embed such protections at the base layer, replicating similar structures on-chain remains challenging unless we undertake significant protocol upgrades. There is growing interest in projects that accelerate the development of on-chain market structures within these broader ecosystems. An emerging model is the Prop-AMM on Solana, where liquidity can only be executed through aggregators, thereby isolating liquidity providers (LPs) from the predatory behavior of liquidity grabbing. This market maker-driven approach can significantly drive market structure innovation, yielding improvements ahead of the base layer, and has potential applications beyond Solana's spot market.

Prediction Market Trading Terminals

Markets have become one of the leading consumer crypto applications and bridge the gap to mainstream adoption. However, front-running prediction markets also face the fragmentation issues that early DeFi encountered. For example, users must navigate multiple interfaces, facing limited tools and isolated liquidity pools. Therefore, we anticipate that prediction market aggregators will become our dominant interface layer, integrating over $600 million in fragmented liquidity and providing a unified view of real-time event odds across venues. Imagine a user experience with professional prediction tools in a trading terminal (e.g., similar to Axiom) but focused on event consistency, such as advanced order types, filters/charts, multi-venue routing and position tracking, and cross-venue arbitrage insights.

3. Next-Generation DeFi

Perpetual Market Composability

Perpetual futures are moving beyond isolated trading venues, transforming into composable DeFi markets, thereby unlocking new frontiers of capital efficiency. Major perpetual contracts like Hyperliquid and Lighter are intensely integrating with borrowing protocols, allowing users to leverage collateral returns while maintaining leveraged positions. With perpetual contract DEX trading volumes reaching $1.4 trillion monthly and growing 300% year-over-year, 2026 may see protocols expand the effectiveness of perpetual futures, allowing traders to hedge, gain forex returns, and use leverage simultaneously without sacrificing liquidity.

Uncollateralized Borrowing / Credit

Uncollateralized debt-based money markets are the next frontier of DeFi, and 2026 may see breakthrough models that combine on-chain credit with off-chain data to massively unlock uncollateralized debt. The market opportunity is enormous: the U.S. alone has $1.3 trillion in revolving uncollateralized credit lines, and cryptocurrency can enter this market through superior capital efficiency and global availability. For builders in this space, the challenge is to continuously design sustainable and scalable risk models. Success here could drive DeFi to become true financial infrastructure, capable of surpassing traditional banking rails.

On-Chain Privacy

Blockchain is known for its transparency, but unless users can maintain privacy, mainstream adoption may not occur. Institutional and professional retail traders cannot trade if their strategies are constantly betrayed to competitors, and ordinary users typically do not want to expose their entire financial history on a public chain. We are seeing a surge in developer energy focused on privacy-preserving assets (e.g., Zcash) and DeFi applications (e.g., private order books, crocodiles, etc.), as well as dedicated blockchains for privacy. Whether built on dedicated privacy networks or using advanced cryptography (e.g., ZKPs, FHE, MPC, TEEs, etc.) on top of existing public blockchains, these tools can allow blockchains to reduce users' public exposure to malicious actors while maintaining verifiability.

4. Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Robots and Human-like Data Collection

As artificial intelligence continues to expand, the market is beginning to focus on a technological frontier, with increasing consensus that robotics may define the next phase of innovation. While many teams are moving in this direction, there remains a critical gap in training AI systems on robots and machinery, with available datasets still limited and fragmented. A major area of scarcity is fine-grained physical interaction data, such as grasping and pressure mold operations involving fabrics, cables, and deformable materials. Although this challenge extends beyond the cryptocurrency world, the data collection model of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) can provide a simplified framework for scaling the collection of virtual physical data, enabling the rapid development and deployment of advanced robotic systems.

Proof of Humanity

We are approaching a tipping point where everything seen on any internet-connected digital screen will be indistinguishable as to whether it is human-generated or AI-generated. We believe that the combination of biometric technology, cryptographic signatures, and open-source development standards is crucial for establishing a "human" solution that complements AI in new human-computer interface models. Worldcoin (a portfolio company) has been at the forefront of recognizing and addressing this issue. We hope to support multiple solution approaches to this complex problem space.

AI for On-Chain Development and Security

Smart contract development is about to experience an exciting "GitHub Copilot moment." In 2026, we may see AI further democratizing on-chain building: non-technical founders could launch on-chain businesses within months, with agents handling smart contract code generation, security, and continuous monitoring. With agent tools, it makes smart contract development and security/risk management as accessible as modern web building, potentially unlocking a massive explosion of on-chain applications and experiences.

As we look forward to 2026, we are excited about those builders trying to push the on-chain economy forward. These ideas reflect the areas where we see tremendous potential, but the most exciting projects often come from the least expected places. If you are working in these areas or exploring something entirely new, please DM a member of our team — our members are eager to connect with you and learn about what you are building.

Article link: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/11/6138.html

Source: https://www.coinbase.com/zh-cn/blog/Coinbase-Ventures-Ideas-we-are-excited-for-in-2026

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