Quick Breakdown
- Coinbase Ventures will focus its 2025 investments on real-world assets, next-gen DeFi and AI innovations.
- The firm expects growth in tokenization, prop-AMMs, prediction markets, and privacy-preserving crypto tools.
- AI-driven onchain business tooling and “proof of humanity” solutions are projected to gain traction by 2026.
Coinbase Ventures reveals 2025 investment priorities
Coinbase Ventures, the venture arm of America’s biggest crypto exchange, says it plans to channel fresh capital into real-world asset (RWA) trading, advanced decentralized finance (DeFi) systems and artificial intelligence in the coming year.
Short term price moves do not measure long term progress. 2025 was a huge year for fundamental progress in crypto adoption and innovation.
We’re sharing 9 ideas we’re ready to back that could define crypto’s next big thing in 2026. They break down into 4 main themes: 👇 pic.twitter.com/cqyYMBssUr
— Coinbase Ventures 🛡️ (@cbventures) November 25, 2025
In a new blog post, the firm announced that teams building asset tokenization platforms, specialized exchanges, trading terminals, and agent-driven AI infrastructure will be its top targets. Coinbase Ventures described these areas as the most promising pipelines for the next wave of breakout crypto companies.
A growing portfolio and recent bets
Since launching in 2018, Coinbase Ventures has backed 618 projects and now holds equity in 422 startups, per PitchBook data. Its latest disclosed investment was made in DeFi compliance platform 0xbow on November 18. Other recent deals include payments startups Zynk and ZAR, and the prediction market platform Kalshi.
New forms of RWA exposure and exchange models
Investor Kinji Steimetz noted the rising demand for synthetic exposure to off-chain assets, predicting growth in tools such as perpetual futures contracts built on real-world asset classes.
He also spotlighted the emergence of proprietary AMMs (prop-AMMs), a new exchange architecture designed to shield liquidity providers from exploitation by high-frequency traders and bots.
Prediction markets and capital-efficient DeFi
Investor Jonathan King expects prediction market aggregators to become a dominant interface for users, consolidating more than $600 million in fragmented liquidity and delivering unified event-odds dashboards.
Meanwhile, Ethan Oak highlighted potential integrations between perpetual futures platforms and lending protocols, allowing users to earn yield on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions, a boost to capital efficiency across DeFi.
Unlocking unsecured crypto credit through reputation
King further predicted that the DeFi space will soon see protocols combining onchain reputation with offchain credit data to enable unsecured lending at scale. He noted the enormous opportunity: the U.S. alone holds $1.3 trillion in revolving unsecured credit lines, a market that crypto could disrupt through superior accessibility and efficiency.
Looking toward 2026, Steimetz said the lack of high-quality training data for robotics and embodied AI remains a gap. He suggested that Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) could serve as a framework for collecting high-value real-world interaction data.
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