Coinbase Reveals Nine Key Areas It Plans to Focus On in 2026

Coinbase Ventures has outlined nine investment priorities for 2026, covering RWA perpetual contracts, specialized exchanges, DeFi composability, and AI-driven development tools.

The venture arm of the largest U.S. crypto exchange stated that its funding next year will focus on real-world asset trading, decentralized finance, and artificial intelligence.

In a blog post, Coinbase Ventures said it is actively seeking to invest in teams working on asset tokenization, specialized exchanges and trading terminals, next-generation DeFi, and advancements in agent-based AI.

“We believe the next explosive companies and protocols will emerge from these categories, which is precisely where we are actively positioning our investments.” According to PitchBook data, Coinbase Ventures has made 618 investments since 2018, with its current portfolio comprising 422 startups.

Its most recent investment was in DeFi compliance platform 0xbow on November 18, while October saw investments in payment infrastructure firms Zynk and ZAR, as well as prediction market platform Kalshi. In an X post, Coinbase Ventures' Kinji Steimetz stated he anticipates new forms of exposure to real-world assets, such as perpetual futures contracts that “create synthetic exposure to off-chain assets.”

He also highlighted the rise of “prop-AMMs”—proprietary automated market makers—a new exchange design protecting liquidity providers from exploitation by sophisticated traders and bots. Coinbase Ventures investor Jonathan King predicted the emergence of prediction market aggregators: “We expect it to become the dominant interface layer consolidating $600 million in decentralized liquidity and providing a unified view of real-time event odds across venues.”

Coinbase Ventures investor Ethan Oak stated. Oak also forecasted growth in on-chain privacy tools, noting a “surge in developer enthusiasm” around privacy-preserving assets like Zcash. Meanwhile, King anticipates DeFi protocols merging on-chain reputation with off-chain data to enable scalable, uncollateralized lending.

“The market opportunity is enormous,” he said. “There's $1.3 trillion in revolving unsecured credit lines in the U.S. alone, and crypto can capture these lines with superior capital efficiency and global accessibility.” DeFi TVL has declined 33% from its 2021 all-time high. Source: DefiLlama Predicts Growth in Proxy AI, DePIN, and “Human Proof” The final three innovations stem from AI. Steimetz noted gaps in training robots and embodied AI systems, stating “existing datasets remain limited and fragmented.” Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) offer a viable framework for scaling high-quality physical interaction data collection for robot training.

Hoolie Tejwani, Head of Coinbase Ventures, stated that solutions combining biometrics, cryptographic signatures, open standards, and “human proof” mechanisms to distinguish human-generated content from AI-generated content will become a growth area by 2026. Finally, AI agent tools will emerge, enabling founders without technical backgrounds to rapidly launch on-chain businesses.