Coinbase Ventures sets out the sectors it believes will define crypto’s next growth phase in 2026: real-world asset trading, next-generation DeFi, improved market structure, and the intersection of AI, robotics, and blockchain infrastructure. The firm frames this outlook as an open call to builders, highlighting areas where it sees the strongest momentum and is actively looking to invest. Central to their view is a shift in how real-world assets are represented and traded onchain, alongside deeper integrations between derivatives, lending, and emerging AI-driven use cases.
Coinbase Ventures' 2026 Crypto Outlook
In its end-of-year report, Coinbase Ventures outlines a multi-pronged vision for crypto in 2026, emphasizing infrastructure that supports more sophisticated onchain markets and broader applications beyond pure finance. The note points to both market-structure innovations and new asset types as engines of growth, suggesting projects that address custody, liquidity, and professional-grade tooling will be important. For readers who want a related institutional perspective, see Coinbase Institutional forecast for additional context on outlooks for the year.
Real-World Assets (RWAs) and Perpetual Futures
A core theme in the report is the evolution of RWAs through perpetual futures rather than traditional tokenization. Coinbase Ventures highlights that RWA perpetuals create synthetic markets that allow faster and more flexible exposure without requiring custody of the underlying assets, removing some settlement and custody frictions. The firm explains this model could enable onchain markets tied to private companies, commodities, and macroeconomic indicators, offering traders new tools to hedge and express macro views.
The conversation around RWA markets also connects to broader coverage of tokenized assets and their onchain infrastructure; for readers focused on RWA token markets, see RWA tokens 2025 for background on existing market categories and chains. At the same time, the report notes synthetic approaches like perpetuals may accelerate market formation where full custody or settlement would otherwise be a barrier.
DeFi Evolution in 2026
Coinbase Ventures describes DeFi’s next phase as one of capital efficiency and maturation, where composable perpetual futures become foundational building blocks. The firm highlights integration between perpetuals and lending protocols, allowing traders to earn yield while holding leveraged positions, and points to unsecured, credit-based lending as a significant opportunity. Privacy-preserving infrastructure is also mentioned as an important element to attract both institutions and everyday users as markets mature.
Alongside these protocol-level shifts, the report points to innovations in exchange design and trading tools that address current structural gaps, including approaches that better protect liquidity providers and platforms that consolidate fragmented liquidity. These developments are framed as part of a broader push toward professional-grade onchain trading and clearing functionality.
AI and Robotics in Crypto
Beyond financial primitives, Coinbase Ventures highlights the role of AI and robotics in expanding crypto’s use cases, particularly through decentralized approaches to collecting high-quality robotics training data. The report points to proof-of-humanity systems to distinguish people from AI agents and to AI-driven tools that could lower the barrier to building and securing smart contracts. Together, these trends are presented as a way for crypto infrastructure to support applications outside traditional trading and settlement.
Why this matters
For a miner with between 1 and 1000 devices in Russia, most of these trends are indirect but still relevant because they change the crypto ecosystem that buyers, exchanges, and services operate in. If RWAs and perpetual derivatives grow, they can broaden the set of traders and institutions active onchain, which may affect liquidity and demand dynamics for onchain services. Similarly, DeFi’s move toward capital-efficient products and privacy tools can shift where and how liquidity concentrates, with downstream effects on markets miners interact with.
What to do?
Keep monitoring infrastructure and market-structure developments, since changes in trading venues or liquidity aggregation can influence where your mined coins are most easily sold. Follow RWA perpetuals and DeFi integrations as they emerge, but treat them as market developments rather than immediate drivers of mining operations, since these are primarily trading and protocol-layer changes. Maintain operational basics—secure firmware, wallet hygiene, and reliable payout configurations—so you can react quickly if liquidity or exchange routing shifts.
- Subscribe to updates from trusted sources and review changes in exchange routing and liquidity.
- Ensure payouts and wallets are set up to move funds quickly if needed, keeping security practices current.
- Consider diversification of counterparties or payout destinations to reduce dependency on a single market path.
