Three Major Trends in the Future of Crypto: Asset Transformation, Subject Transformation, and Rule Transformation.

As we approach 2026, bidding farewell to the past four years focused on "infrastructure building," the crypto industry is undergoing a profound paradigm shift. OKX Ventures defines this as the beginning of the "Kinetic Finance" era, where the core focus is no longer on how fast the network is, but on the liquidity of on-chain assets and the efficiency of making money.

To get straight to the point, we believe that future opportunities in Crypto will concentrate on three core transformations:

• Asset Transformation: From "on-chain" to "global settlement." RWA will enable seamless 24/7 circulation of real-world assets (such as US Treasuries, real estate, and IP) on-chain, leading to a qualitative change in capital efficiency.
• Subject Transformation: From "humans" to "AI Agents." The main actors in trading will shift from humans to AI. DeFi protocols will become "financial APIs" for AI, with funds actively seeking the best global returns as if they possessed intelligence.
• Rule Transformation: From "post-regulation" to "code compliance." Privacy and compliance will no longer be obstacles but will be embedded in the code as infrastructure, paving the way for large-scale institutional funds like those on Wall Street to enter the market.

We firmly believe that projects capable of solving real-world trust costs and enhancing capital efficiency through code will become the cornerstones of the new era. OKX Ventures' investment logic over the past few years has primarily focused on the robustness of underlying protocols and the expansion of network capacity. We will continue to seek and support these builders who define the future.

The year 2025 has seen many significant advancements in the industry: On the compliance funding front, the approval of the BTC spot ETF has opened up traditional capital pathways, with cumulative net inflows surpassing $50 billion, officially making crypto assets a standard for global macro hedging; on the underlying technology side, Ethereum's Pectra upgrade in May and the subsequent advancement of the Fusaka phase have reduced consensus layer communication load by over 90%, while network Blob data throughput has increased fourfold, clearing obstacles for high-frequency interactions of hundreds of millions of users with its native account abstraction capabilities; on-chain trading performance has seen a qualitative leap, with high-performance DEXs like Hyperliquid repeatedly setting records for daily trading volumes of $20 billion; in terms of asset scaling, RWA has made a critical leap, with BlackRock's BUIDL fund alone surpassing $2.5 billion by the end of the year, proving the complete functionality of the "two-way valve" for on-chain and off-chain liquidity.

In 2025 alone, OKX Ventures participated in investments in dozens of projects across multiple sectors, including RWA, Infra, DeFi, AI, stablecoins, and consumer applications, continuously committed to supporting innovation in the industry.

1. Deep Financialization of RWA

RWA is no longer simply about issuing a "digital receipt" for real-world assets (like houses and bonds). We are entering the RWA 2.0 phase, where the core is transforming the blockchain into a global 24/7 settlement center. Imagine that in the past, selling an asset required two days to settle (T+2), but now, using blockchain, it can achieve instant settlement (T+0). This is not just a slight improvement; it fundamentally changes the operational efficiency of global capital.

RWA Asset Layering: From On-Chain US Treasuries to Synthetic US Stocks and Non-Standard Credit

The US dollar is a widely accepted global currency, and stablecoins like USDT and USDC have rapidly developed as a reflection of this. Consequently, we see a significant number of DEXs and CEXs venturing into the tokenization of US stocks. However, there remains a vast amount of global assets that are non-dollar denominated. Assets inherently have liquidity gaps. For example, US Treasuries have extremely high liquidity, while real estate and private credit are considered deeply non-standard assets. The core of RWA 2.0 lies in abandoning the "one-size-fits-all" AMM model and constructing adaptive issuance and trading frameworks for different tiers of assets. Standardized assets are the easiest category to go on-chain and achieve scale. According to RWA.xyz data, the tokenized US Treasury market has surpassed $7.3 billion (a year-on-year increase of over 300%). On-chain US stocks are becoming the second-largest growth area for standardized assets after US Treasuries, currently valued at around $500 million, with its core value being the breaking of traditional stock market trading hour restrictions (enabling 24/7 trading) and geographical access barriers. This trend indicates that on-chain finance will not only possess "risk-free rates" (US Treasuries) but also "equity risk assets" (US stocks), thereby constructing a complete on-chain investment portfolio. In contrast, non-standard assets like private credit maintain active loan amounts in the $8 billion range. This significant gap indicates that high-yield non-standard assets are still constrained by pricing and circulation challenges. According to BCG's predictions, by 2030, the RWA market size will reach $16 trillion, with 2026 being a critical inflection point in this growth curve, as the scale of on-chain non-stablecoin RWA is expected to surpass $100 billion. We believe this is important because it marks RWA's transition from a niche experiment to a mainstream narrative in a trillion-dollar market. RWA has surpassed the simple mapping stage and evolved into a layered structure based on asset liquidity characteristics.

Stablecoins Reshaping the Global Settlement Network

Undoubtedly, stablecoins themselves are a killer product in Crypto. They are not merely trading pairs in exchanges; they are an alternative for cross-border payments, with the potential to gradually replace the traditional SWIFT system. Traditional cross-border payments typically involve fees of 3-5% and a settlement period of 2-3 days. In contrast, on-chain stablecoin payment fees are below 1% and are almost instantaneous. As of November 2025, the annual settlement total for on-chain stablecoins has surpassed $12 trillion, officially exceeding Visa's annual settlement volume. The current market capitalization of stablecoins has stabilized above $210 billion, with over 40% of trading volume occurring during non-trading hours (when traditional banks are closed), filling the "liquidity vacuum" in global financial infrastructure. Additionally, the composability of fully tokenized assets is noteworthy: leading DeFi protocols (such as Aave, MakerDAO) have integrated RWA assets, creating a "Lego effect." Whether it is government bonds (like BUIDL, USDY), real estate, or private credit, assets have successfully served as the foundational collateral for DeFi lending protocols. By the end of 2025, BlackRock's BUIDL fund and Ondo Finance's USDY have officially integrated with Aave V4 and Sky (formerly MakerDAO) protocols. Approximately 30% of tokenized government bonds (around $2.2 billion) are being directly used as underlying collateral for lending protocols, rather than sitting idle in wallets. Traditional financial institutions will leverage on-chain T+0 real-time settlement capabilities to increase capital utilization by 2-3 times, completing a substantial migration of backend infrastructure to decentralized ledgers.

Key Projects of OKX Ventures

These projects focus on addressing the three core obstacles to the large-scale adoption of RWA: lack of liquidity, audit opacity, and unsustainable yields.

• Axis is building a structured finance layer on-chain. It introduces a "layered" mechanism similar to traditional investment banks, packaging assets into priority layers (low risk, low yield) and subordinate layers (high risk, high yield). Through an Oracle-less auction and quoting mechanism, Axis enables independent price discovery for non-standard RWA assets on-chain, providing compliant fixed-income product access for institutional funds.
• Accountable is the trust middleware for RWA. It not only provides simple APIs but also integrates auditors, bank APIs, and on-chain data to offer real-time asset reserve proofs. It upgrades traditional "annual/quarterly audits" to "real-time streaming audits." For large RWA issuers seeking regulatory compliance, this is essential infrastructure to eliminate the black-box risk of "false assets on-chain."
• Verio is a liquidity protocol focused on the financialization of IP assets within the Story ecosystem. It transforms static intellectual property into tradable, collateralizable financial derivatives through programmable IP standards, addressing the long-standing issues of non-standard pricing and liquidity fragmentation for IP assets, thereby opening up a trillion-dollar market for intangible assets in the RWA sector.

2. Deep Integration of AI and the Crypto World

The AI wave is sweeping the globe, and as the most prominent technological trend today, its every move profoundly impacts all aspects of society. In the future, what sparks will AI ignite in the crypto field? We believe AI will have significant potential in areas such as agency and machine payments.

AI Agent Economy and M2M Payment Networks

In a multi-agent collaborative network, different agents (such as data analysts, trade executors, and risk controllers) require high-frequency interactions. Blockchain smart contracts provide a permissionless trust foundation and payment track for this machine-to-machine (M2M) collaboration. This is primarily reflected in three aspects: The AI Payment sector has entered an early explosive stage. Four major players—Google AP2, OpenAI × Stripe ACP, Visa Agentic Commerce, and x402—are simultaneously laying out agent payment infrastructure. Google has launched the AP2 protocol to standardize agent payment interfaces, and Stripe ACP (Agentic Checkout Protocol) is processing over 2 million API calls daily. Visa's Agentic Commerce pilot shows that the success rate of e-commerce payments completed autonomously by AI agents reaches 98.5%, far exceeding traditional automated scripts. M2M payments are also set for rapid growth. VanEck predicts that as Web3 native agent payment protocols like x402 become widespread, on-chain automated trading volume driven by AI agents will reach $5 billion daily by 2027, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 120%. Service invocation costs will be significantly reduced. Utilizing blockchain micropayments for on-demand agent service calls, compared to the traditional Web2 API subscription model (SaaS), will lower service invocation costs by 60%, with single interaction costs as low as $0.0001, greatly reducing economic friction and loss in the multi-agent collaboration process. When Agent A completes a specific task, Agent B can achieve millisecond-level USDC micropayments through the Lightning Network or Layer 2 protocols, with no human intervention, establishing an automated value transfer system.

AI and the Verifiable Data Layer

With the evolution of artificial intelligence, the "world models" such as JEPA and Sora proposed by deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun are replacing pure LLMs. The core demand has shifted from text generation to the precise simulation of the physical world's causal laws (Physics & Causality), requiring AI to have more real and reliable data from the real world. Gartner's predictions indicate that by 2026, 75% of global AI training data will consist of synthetic data, and the lack of real physical feedback in data loops will likely lead to a "Model Collapse" effect. According to Messari's market analysis, verified physical world datasets (Verifiable Real-world Datasets) are typically valued at 15 to 20 times that of ordinary web-scraped data due to their scarcity and authenticity. The high-fidelity training of world models heavily relies on high-dimensional physical data that includes 3D space, depth information, and motion trajectories. Blockchain, through cryptographic signature technology, provides immutable on-chain proof for every data point collected by sensors, fundamentally addressing the common issues of "data pollution" and "synthetic fraud" in AI training, thus building a trustworthy bridge between the physical world and digital models. As of the third quarter of 2025, the number of active edge sensor nodes on blockchain networks has surpassed 4.5 million, providing approximately 20 PB of verifiable physical data daily for various world models, becoming the cornerstone for the next generation of AI cognition.

zkML and Decentralized Edge Computing: Trusted Inference on the Edge with Privacy Protection

The performance leap of high-performance small parameter models (SLMs) like Llama 3-8B and Phi-3 is driving a paradigm shift in AI inference computing from centralized cloud to edge devices (mobile phones, PCs, IoT devices). Market data shows that decentralized edge inference networks built using idle consumer devices (such as io.net or Akash) have a unit computing cost at the H100 level of about $1.49/hour, which is 60% to 75% lower than AWS or Nvidia cloud inference services (approximately $4.00 - $6.50/hour), presenting significant economic arbitrage opportunities. Thanks to the technological advancements of projects like Accountable and Modulus Labs, the demand for zkML verification services in on-chain prediction markets, insurance protocols, and high-value asset management achieved a 230% quarter-on-quarter growth in Q3 2025, indicating a rigid demand for "trusted inference" in high-value DeFi scenarios. To address the risks of data fraud or model tampering caused by untrusted edge devices, zkML (Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning) has become a key trust infrastructure. Emerging protocols like Accountable are building standardized verification layers that allow nodes to generate mathematical proofs, enabling rigorous on-chain verification of "the inference result is indeed produced by a specific model running correctly on the edge device" without disclosing input data (such as medical images or financial private keys), thus achieving a "trustless" closed loop for decentralized computing.

Key Projects of OKX Ventures

• Aspecta: In essence, it builds a "digital passport" for Multi-Agents. In the future world, AI will collaborate and trade with each other like humans. But the question is, how can one AI trust another unfamiliar AI? What Aspecta does is provide each AI with a "digital passport." By analyzing its past behavior and code records, it assigns a credit score. This way, trust can be established between AIs, even enabling collateral-free lending. In the economic network where agents call each other's services, Aspecta generates verifiable credit scores for each agent by analyzing on-chain interaction graphs and GitHub code contributions. This is a prerequisite for achieving M2M collateral-free lending and trusted collaboration.
• LAB: It is the AI intent compiler in the Web3 space, utilizing the latest multimodal understanding capabilities to transform vague natural language from humans (such as "arbitrage with the lowest risk") into structured on-chain execution instructions. It addresses the "last mile" connection issue between AI technology and complex DeFi protocols, significantly lowering the barrier for non-technical users to utilize advanced DeFi strategies.
• Hyperion: It serves as the physical anchor point for AI world models, providing verifiable physical world data. It collects geospatial data using a decentralized mapping network and combines it with AI inference to provide on-chain agents with zero-knowledge proof-verified "location services." This is crucial for RWA asset management and embodied intelligence (robot) scheduling that relies on real physical states.

3. Institutional Adoption: Macro Hedging, Privacy Infrastructure, and Smart Compliance

Crypto assets have completed their transformation in the eyes of institutions from "speculative assets" to "global macro hedging tools." A very obvious change is that in the last cycle, retail investors might not pay attention to macro events, but in this cycle, failing to consider data such as the Federal Reserve, US-China tariffs, and CPI can easily lead to passivity. Compliance is no longer an obstacle but a moat for institutions. The issuance of digital banking licenses will allow seamless exchange between crypto assets and fiat currencies. Currently, three types of innovative products have emerged in the market. First, basis arbitrage and volatility products, where institutions are no longer satisfied with passive holding. The open interest in CME Bitcoin futures has repeatedly hit new highs, and institutional long positions have significantly increased. Second, basis trading, which utilizes the price difference between spot ETFs and futures contracts for risk-free arbitrage, has become a mainstream strategy for hedge funds, with annualized returns stabilizing in the 8%-12% range, far exceeding US Treasury yields. Third, structured notes, which package "BTC spot + Ethereum staking yields," provide institutions with configuration options similar to "dividends + appreciation" in traditional finance, without having to engage in complex DeFi interactions. Institutional portfolios have expanded from a single BTC allocation (as digital gold) to a structured combination of "BTC + ETH/SOL + DeFi blue chips"—where BTC acts as a store of value, and the staking yields of POS chains are gradually being viewed as the risk-free benchmark interest rate in the digital economy.

Privacy Renaissance: Rigid Demand for Institutional Entry

Privacy Renaissance: Rigid Demand for Institutional Entry With TradFi giants deeply entering the crypto market in 2026, the double-edged sword effect of transparent ledgers is becoming apparent. In a fully public on-chain environment, it is challenging for institutions to execute complex arbitrage strategies or complete large transactions, as any exposure of trading intentions could lead to severe front-running risks and strategy leaks. This structural contradiction makes "privacy" an unavoidable prerequisite for institutional funds to go on-chain. In this context, the connotation of privacy is being redefined. It is no longer seen as a means to evade regulation but has transformed into a compliance protection tool for business secrets—neither undermining regulatory capabilities nor sacrificing the strategic security of institutions. Specifically, the investment and technological focus of institutions is shifting towards "programmable privacy." Privacy computing protocols based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and trusted execution environments (TEE) allow institutions to prove their asset solvency and compliance to the outside world without exposing trading strategies and position details, thus achieving a balance between transparency and confidentiality. Meanwhile, "compliance privacy pools," similar to traditional financial market dark pool trading mechanisms, are forming on-chain. These liquidity pools hide trading details from the public but open viewing permissions to regulatory nodes, enabling large-scale institutional funds to execute low-impact, high-efficiency trades in DeFi, regarded as the "last mile" solution for institutional capital entering the on-chain financial system. Privacy is not a denial of the transparent spirit of blockchain but an upgrade towards the institutional era. Future on-chain finance will no longer pursue "everyone sees everything" in a single dimension but will ensure that what should not be seen is properly hidden under compliance conditions. This privacy capability is transitioning from a marginal demand to the foundational infrastructure for whether institutional funds can truly go on-chain.

Emergence of On-Chain Compliance Tracks

In the future, AI agents will take over on-chain interactions on a large scale, posing a risk of collapse for traditional financial compliance systems. Multiple institutions predict that by 2026, the daily average number of on-chain interactions will grow exponentially, with over 45% of transactions initiated by non-human entities. Faced with tens of thousands of high-frequency machine trades per second, the traditional KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering) review model, which relies on "manpower tactics," may become completely ineffective. Institutions cannot hire enough compliance officers to handle this throughput. Therefore, the focus of compliance is shifting from "post-event accountability" to "code-level blocking." The new generation of compliance architecture requires embedding regulatory rules into smart contracts to achieve millisecond-level automated risk control, which is not only a regulatory requirement but also a prerequisite for the safe entry of institutional funds into DeFi. CipherOwl introduces an AI-driven on-chain audit and compliance layer focused on on-chain evidence collection and transaction tracking, utilizing AI-assisted analytical tools to identify money laundering risks and illegal fund flows, providing necessary safety barriers and due diligence tools for institutional investors and regulatory authorities. Its SR3 technology stack automatically identifies money laundering risks or sanctioned entities by filtering, reasoning, reporting, and researching complex on-chain transaction graphs using large language models (LLM). Additionally, CipherOwl provides API interfaces that allow trading agents on Hyperion to query the compliance score of counterpart addresses in milliseconds before executing transactions. If the risk is too high, the smart contract will automatically reject the interaction. This makes regulatory rules not a post-event punishment but a code constraint embedded in the transaction process. For Wall Street institutions looking to enter DeFi in 2026, CipherOwl is an essential compliance middleware.

4. DeFi Proactive Intelligent Services and Prediction Markets

The open finance revolution that erupted in 2020 shook the blockchain industry, with its elegant AMM and permissionless features depicting the future potential of Crypto finance.

DeFi 3.0 Proactive Intelligent Services: Intent-Based Kinetic Finance

We believe that DeFi is undergoing a transition from DeFi 1.0 (passive smart contracts) to DeFi 3.0 (proactive intelligent services). If the core of the DeFi Summer in 2020 was the "democratization of asset issuance," then the transformation in 2026 will be dominated by "active capital cruising." The logic of institutional capital participation is evolving from merely RWA to "strategies on-chain," executing 24/7 programmatic market-making and risk control through customized institutional-level agents. The market is abandoning the old model of "designated paths." Data shows that the monthly trading volume of CoW Swap, based on the "solver" model, has consistently exceeded $3 billion, demonstrating the overwhelming advantage of intent-centric liquidity transport. Investment logic is shifting from general DeFi AI terminals to autonomous agents in vertical scenarios. Compared to the general Chat UI facing implementation bottlenecks, vertical agents focused on yield optimization and liquidity management possess complete closed-loop execution capabilities and verifiable cash flow abilities, which are key to mastering the underlying pricing power of the agent economy. In terms of investment, we believe the trading paradigm is shifting from "human-to-machine (H2M)" to "machine-to-machine (M2M)." Given that AI large models (LLMs) cannot directly parse complex Solidity bytecode, there is an urgent need to build a DeFi adapter layer. By introducing standards like MCP (Model Context Protocol), heterogeneous protocols can be encapsulated into standardized, semantic "toolkits," allowing AI to call financial services as if invoking an API. Under this architecture, assets evolve into "smart packages" that can automatically seek yields, with core metrics shifting from TVL (Total Value Locked) to TVV (Total Value Velocity).

Prediction Markets: Global Information Infrastructure in 2026

We believe that in the era of high signal-to-noise ratio information overload, prediction markets are not only gaming platforms but also high-resolution, high-timeliness "truth oracles." In October 2025, the compliance platform Kalshi surpassed Polymarket with a 60% market share and a weekly trading volume of $850 million, and the market's open interest (OI) rebounded to $500-600 million, marking the entry of long-term non-speculative capital. Investments should focus on projects that can solve capital utilization issues at the protocol level: Polymarket's NegRisk mechanism enhances capital efficiency in multi-outcome markets by automatically converting "NO" shares into mutually exclusive "YES" combinations, increasing capital efficiency by 29 times and contributing 73% of the platform's arbitrage profits; Kalshi's "collateral return" releases capital tied up in hedging positions. Whoever can make capital move faster will capture liquidity. Polymarket captures liquidity through an extremely low fee strategy of 0-0.01%, effectively establishing a data factory, ultimately selling "sentiment indicators" to institutions through ICE's (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) $2 billion investment intention and channels, supporting its $12 billion valuation. In contrast, Kalshi maintains a high fee rate of about 1.2% using its compliance moat and adopts an "embedded" expansion strategy, achieving conversion of 400,000 monthly active users through integration with Robinhood, while Myriad captured 30,000 active trading users through embedding in Decrypt media streams, proving that the embedded model has a lower customer acquisition cost than independent apps. The legal battle over regulatory jurisdiction is the biggest variable in this track, with the core conflict being whether prediction markets fall under the CFTC's jurisdiction as "commodities" or under state jurisdiction as "gambling." Kalshi has chosen a "federal priority" path, holding a DCM license from the CFTC, attempting to leverage the exclusivity of federal law to cover state laws, but this also exposes it to lawsuits from at least eight state gaming commissions. While this compliance status brings strong pricing power (such as a 1.2% fee premium), it also comes with significant legal costs. On the other end, Polymarket has chosen an "offshore evasion" path, using DeFi architecture and geographic blocking to avoid U.S. jurisdiction, but constantly faces threats from the SEC's long-arm jurisdiction and ISP bans from various EU countries. OKX Ventures believes that future investment opportunities will concentrate in the following three directions:

• Long Middleware: Focus on underlying middleware (such as Azuro) and specialized oracles (such as Pyth, EigenLayer AVS). They are not restricted by a single regulatory jurisdiction and can capture the value generated by all front-end applications, making them the highest risk-reward "infrastructure bets."
• Finding Embedded Traffic Entrances: The customer acquisition cost for independent prediction market apps is extremely high. Focus on projects that develop Telegram Bots or modularize prediction market integration into news/social platforms. These projects can reach users with zero friction and have stronger viral outbreak potential.
• Arbitrage Opportunities in Vertical Tracks: Avoid general political/macroeconomic markets that have formed a duopoly and look for leaders in vertical tracks such as sports and high-frequency crypto assets. The sports track has a significant product gap due to the complexity of parlay functions, while high-frequency crypto predictions are a necessity for DeFi traders, and these two areas have yet to see absolute dominators.

5. Conclusion

Looking ahead to 2026, we predict that the industry's focus will shift from "supply of network capacity" to "release of asset efficiency." We will no longer focus solely on the storage and confirmation capabilities of ledgers but will concentrate on the speed, intelligence level, and settlement efficiency of on-chain capital flows. We define this as the era of "kinetic finance," representing a macro change from "asset on-chain" to "economy on-chain." In this new paradigm, traditional financial boundaries are dissolving. OKX Ventures believes that 2026 will be a critical turning point for the crypto industry to strip away speculative bubbles and return to value creation, and those projects that can solve real-world trust costs and circulation efficiency through code will become the cornerstones of the new era. We are firmly optimistic about this transformation and will continue to bet on foundational projects that can reduce trust costs and enhance capital efficiency through code. At the singularity where the digital and real worlds deeply integrate, those who can define the speed of asset flow and the boundaries of truth will master the pricing power of the new era.

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