TL;DR
- Coinbase Ventures shifts its investment strategy towards eight key growth areas.
- Real-world assets and their derivatives become a major institutional bridge.
- New priorities include AI data tools, privacy, and human-verification systems.
Coinbase Ventures adjusts its position and defines a plan centered on real-world assets, market infrastructure, privacy and artificial intelligence. The firm presents eight core areas that guide its capital deployment and mark where growth in the crypto sector is taking shape. The company reports 618 investments, with recent activity in 0xbow, Zynk, ZAR and Kalshi.
A large share of the 2026 focus concentrates on products that link traditional markets with on-chain liquidity. The firm observes rising interest in real-world-asset-based perpetual futures, where traders gain exposure to commodities, credit or macro benchmarks through digital instruments.
Investor Kinji Steimetz states that these instruments create a direct bridge to external markets without leaving crypto rails. The expansion of tokenized bonds, treasuries and other real-world assets fuels demand for derivatives tied to physical-market references, not only spot exposure.
Specialized exchanges, Prop-AMMs and prediction layers gain attention
The firm channels capital toward specialized trading venues, moving away from generic order-book platforms. Interest also grows around Prop-AMMs, designs that aim to protect liquidity providers from advanced traders and bots that exploit pricing gaps.
Another area under review is prediction-market aggregators, which combine liquidity and odds from platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket. Investor Jonathan King notes that a unified interface can offer traders a single view of event probabilities scattered across several venues.
Next-gen DeFi built around perps, lending and on-chain reputation
Coinbase Ventures outlines a near-term DeFi stage where perpetual futures, lending and collateral functions operate inside one integrated system. Investor Ethan Oak explains that this structure improves capital efficiency compared to today’s fragmented design.
Another category draws on on-chain reputation supported by off-chain data. King highlights that credit histories, cash-flow metrics and behavioral records can support unsecured borrowing, a massive segment in the U.S. that allows room for crypto-native credit models.
The broader environment reinforces this direction, as total value locked in DeFi remains below previous peaks, giving room for more stable and less yield-driven structures.
Privacy and compliance infrastructure advance together
The firm shows interest in privacy-oriented infrastructure, with confidential transactions, privacy-focused assets and zero-knowledge tooling that enables complex activity without exposing sensitive data.
At the same time, it supports solutions that keep protocols aligned with regulatory expectations while maintaining composability. The investment in 0xbow, a compliance platform for DeFi, fits inside this track.
AI, DePIN and human-verification systems
The group identifies a gap in training data for robotics and embodied AI. Steimetz points to DePIN as a way to gather high-quality physical-interaction data through incentives that aggregate distributed inputs at large scale.
Head of Coinbase Ventures Hoolie Tejwani highlights interest in “proof of humanity” systems that combine biometrics and cryptography to differentiate humans from AI-generated agents. The spread of synthetic media increases demand for tools that verify identity and authenticity in consumer and financial use cases.
The firm also follows agentic AI tools that help non-technical founders build on-chain. King notes that these agents already support tasks such as contract generation, security checks and deployment steps, lowering barriers for creating crypto-native products.
One of the most active investment arms in the sector
The firm now holds 422 active positions. Recent deals include:
- 0xbow (DeFi compliance)
- Zynk and ZAR (payments)
- Kalshi (regulated prediction markets)
Coinbase Ventures continues to deploy capital across its eight priority areas and uses this framework to identify teams capable of shaping the next wave of crypto-driven products.
