Coinbase Ventures’ 9 Crypto Investment Bets For 2026

The enterprise capital division of America’s largest crypto trade says it’s focusing on its funds towards real-world asset buying and selling, decentralized finance and synthetic intelligence subsequent yr. 

In a weblog put up, Coinbase Ventures stated that it’s actively looking for to spend money on groups concerned in asset tokenization, specialised exchanges and buying and selling terminals, next-generation DeFi and agentic AI developments. 

“These are the classes the place we imagine the following large breakout corporations and protocols will emerge, and the place we’re seeking to actively make investments,” the agency wrote. 

Coinbase Ventures has made 618 investments since 2018 and has a portfolio of 422 startups, according to PitchBook. Its most up-to-date was an funding in DeFi compliance platform 0xbow on Nov. 18, whereas it invested in cost infrastructure companies Zynk and ZAR and prediction markets platform Kalshi in October. 

In a thread on X, Coinbase Ventures’ Kinji Steimetz stated he expects to see new types of publicity to real-world property corresponding to perpetual futures contracts, which “create artificial publicity to offchain property.”

He additionally highlighted the rise of “prop-AMMs” — proprietary automated market makers — a brand new trade design that protects liquidity suppliers from exploitation by refined merchants and bots. 

Coinbase Ventures investor Jonathan King predicted the emergence of prediction market aggregators, “which we anticipate to emerge because the dominant interface layer consolidating $600 million in fragmented liquidity and offering a unified view of real-time occasion odds throughout venues.”

Subsequent era DeFi to emerge in 2026

Integrating perpetual futures exchanges with different DeFi protocols, corresponding to lending, would allow merchants to earn yields on collateral whereas sustaining leveraged positions, unlocking new capital effectivity, said Coinbase Ventures investor Ethan Oak.

Oak additionally predicted progress in onchain privacy-preserving instruments, observing a “surge of developer vitality” centered on privacy-preserving property corresponding to Zcash (ZEC). 

Associated: DeFi is already 30% of the way to mass adoption: Chainlink founder

In the meantime, King noticed an emergence of DeFi protocols that mix onchain popularity with offchain knowledge to allow unsecured borrowing at scale. “The market alternative is huge,” he stated.

“The US alone has $1.3 trillion in revolving, unsecured credit score traces that crypto can seize by superior capital effectivity and international accessibility.”

Agentic AI, DePIN and “proof of humanity” progress predicted

The ultimate three improvements have been within the AI sector. There’s a hole in coaching robotic and embodied AI methods, “the place out there knowledge units are nonetheless restricted and fragmented,” stated Steimetz. 

Decentralized bodily infrastructure networks (DePIN) might supply a viable framework for scaling the gathering of high-quality bodily interplay knowledge for robotics.

“Proof of humanity” options, which mix biometrics, cryptographic signing and open requirements to confirm human versus AI-generated content material, can be a progress space in 2026, stated Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures.

Lastly, there will likely be an emergence of AI agent tooling that permits non-technical founders to launch onchain companies shortly. “2026 may see AI brokers additional democratize onchain constructing,” stated King, who added that they’d have the ability to deal with good contract code era, safety audits and steady monitoring.

Journal: Ethereum’s Fusaka fork explained for dummies: What the hell is PeerDAS?