Coinbase Reveals 9 Crypto Ideas It Wants To Bankroll In 2026
Coinbase Ventures outlined nine investment priorities for 2026, spanning RWA perpetuals, specialized exchanges, DeFi composability and AI-powered development tools.
The venture capital division of America’s largest crypto exchange says it is targeting its funds toward real-world asset trading, decentralized finance and artificial intelligence next year.
In a blog post, Coinbase Ventures stated that it is actively seeking to invest in teams involved in asset tokenization, specialized exchanges and trading terminals, next-generation DeFi and agentic AI advancements.
“These are the categories where we believe the next big breakout companies and protocols will emerge, and where we’re looking to actively invest,” the firm wrote.
Coinbase Ventures has made 618 investments since 2018 and has a portfolio of 422 startups, according to PitchBook. Its most recent was an investment in DeFi compliance platform 0xbow on Nov. 18, while it invested in payment infrastructure firms Zynk and ZAR and prediction markets platform Kalshi in October.
In a thread on X, Coinbase Ventures’ Kinji Steimetz said he expects to see new forms of exposure to real-world assets such as perpetual futures contracts, which “create synthetic exposure to offchain assets.”
He also highlighted the rise of “prop-AMMs” — proprietary automated market makers — a new exchange design that protects liquidity providers from exploitation by sophisticated traders and bots.
Coinbase Ventures investor Jonathan King predicted the emergence of prediction market aggregators, “which we expect to emerge as the dominant interface layer consolidating $600 million in fragmented liquidity and providing a unified view of real-time event odds across venues.”
Integrating perpetual futures exchanges with other DeFi protocols, such as lending, would enable traders to earn yields on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions, unlocking new capital efficiency, said Coinbase Ventures investor Ethan Oak.
Related: DeFi is already 30% of the way to mass adoption: Chainlink founder
Source: CoinTelegraph
