What Crypto Will Look Like in 2026: 9 Major Trends Shaping the Next Era
2025 has already proven to be a defining year for crypto.
As with every cycle, we’ve watched narratives rise, hype fade, and entirely new ideas take center stage. Stablecoins quietly became a core pillar of the ecosystem. Prediction markets broke into mainstream awareness. And perhaps most importantly, crypto took real steps toward regulatory clarity and institutional participation.
With that momentum building, a natural question follows:
What will crypto actually look like in 2026?
To answer that, it’s useful to look not at social media hype—but at where serious capital is placing early bets. One of the clearest windows into that future comes from Coinbase Ventures, the venture arm of Coinbase that invests in early-stage crypto startups across infrastructure, DeFi, and emerging on-chain markets.
According to their latest research, crypto’s underlying infrastructure has quietly leveled up in a way most people haven’t fully appreciated yet. Prices may not always reflect it, but the foundations for the next phase are already in place.
From that work, Coinbase Ventures identified nine major ideas likely to shape crypto in 2026—organized into four overarching themes.
Let’s break them down.
Theme 1: The Perpification of Everything
1. Real-World Asset (RWA) Perpetuals
One of the most important shifts underway is the rise of real-world asset perpetuals.
A perpetual future (or “perp”) allows traders to speculate on the price of an asset without owning it. There’s no expiration date, positions can be opened or closed instantly, and pricing tracks the underlying market in real time.
Now imagine applying that model not just to crypto—but to:
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Stocks
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Commodities
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Economic indicators
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Volatility indexes
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Even private market valuations
And doing so without tokenizing the asset itself.
Tokenization has long been promoted as the bridge between traditional finance and crypto, but in practice it’s slow, legally complex, and capital-intensive. Perpetuals bypass that friction by creating synthetic exposure instead.
Coinbase Ventures sees two major unlocks here:
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Markets for Anything
Assets that currently have no liquidity—private company metrics, niche datasets, regional economic indicators—could suddenly become tradable. -
On-Chain Macro Trading
Crypto traders gain access to tools traditionally reserved for professional macro desks: oil prices, inflation expectations, credit spreads, and volatility—all fully on-chain.
They describe this shift as “the perpification of everything”, and it could dramatically expand what crypto markets are able to price and trade.
Theme 2: A New Generation of Exchanges
2. Prop-AMMs (Proprietary Automated Market Makers)
Decentralized exchanges are also undergoing a quiet redesign.
Most DEXs today rely on user-supplied liquidity pools, where individual liquidity providers absorb losses from toxic order flow and arbitrage. Prop-AMMs flip that model entirely.
Instead of relying on thousands of external LPs, the protocol:
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Supplies its own liquidity
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Uses internal capital
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Sets custom risk rules
This allows exchanges to protect themselves against predatory trading strategies that historically drained LPs.
Coinbase Ventures is particularly interested in how this model is emerging on Solana, where some exchanges:
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Restrict direct interaction with liquidity
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Route trades through aggregators
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Shield market-making strategies from exploitation
These changes could meaningfully improve DEX efficiency and trader experience before major blockchain scalability upgrades even arrive.
Theme 3: Markets for Information, Prediction, and DeFi Capital
3. Prediction Market Aggregators
Prediction markets have become one of crypto’s first genuinely mainstream applications—used for elections, macro forecasts, sports, and cultural events.
The problem?
They’re fragmented.
Different platforms, different liquidity pools, different interfaces.
Coinbase Ventures expects the next step to be prediction market aggregators—unified terminals that:
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Pull odds from every major platform
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Track all positions in one place
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Offer professional trading tools and analytics
Think of it as a Bloomberg Terminal for prediction markets.
4. Perpetual Futures + Lending Convergence
Perpetual futures already see over $1 trillion in monthly trading volume, making them one of the most active instruments in crypto.
What’s changing is how they integrate with lending.
Instead of choosing between:
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Depositing collateral to earn yield or
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Using collateral to trade
Protocols are merging both.
Traders can now:
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Deposit collateral
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Earn yield on idle assets
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Use that same collateral for leveraged positions
This convergence could redefine how hedging, yield generation, and leverage work across DeFi.
5. Unsecured Lending Comes On-Chain
Traditional finance runs on unsecured credit—credit cards, personal loans, working capital lines—representing trillions of dollars globally.
DeFi, by contrast, has relied almost entirely on over-collateralization.
Coinbase Ventures believes that could finally change by combining:
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On-chain behavior
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Reputation systems
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Off-chain identity signals
If DeFi captures even a small slice of unsecured credit markets, it begins competing directly with traditional banking—not just experimenting alongside it.
6. Privacy-Preserving Financial Systems
Transparency is one of crypto’s greatest strengths—but also one of its biggest adoption barriers.
Very few people want their full financial history visible on a public ledger.
The next phase of DeFi is likely to introduce:
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Encrypted order books
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Private lending systems
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Selective disclosure mechanisms
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Privacy-focused assets
These systems aim to remain verifiable and secure without forcing total transparency, striking a balance between trust and discretion.
Theme 4: AI, Robotics, and Human Verification
7. Decentralized Data for AI & Robotics
Robotics and embodied AI face a massive bottleneck: training data.
Robots need real-world interaction data—grip strength, pressure, movement, handling soft materials—but collecting this at scale is extremely difficult.
Coinbase Ventures sees decentralized networks, similar to DePIN models, as a way to:
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Collect physical-world data globally
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Incentivize participation
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Accelerate progress in robotics and embodied AI
8. Proof-of-Humanity Layers
As AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from human output, a new problem emerges:
How do you know a real human is behind an action?
Coinbase Ventures expects the rise of shared “proof-of-humanity” layers that verify:
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Real human presence
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Authentic authorship
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Human-initiated actions
This could involve:
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Biometrics
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Cryptographic signatures
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Cross-platform identity standards
They note that Worldcoin is an early attempt—but expect multiple competing solutions to emerge.
9. AI Agents for On-Chain Development
Finally, AI is set to radically change how on-chain applications are built.
By 2026, Coinbase Ventures believes AI agents will allow non-developers to:
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Write smart contracts
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Test and audit them
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Patch vulnerabilities
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Monitor risk automatically
They compare this to what GitHub Copilot did for software development—a massive acceleration in speed, creativity, and accessibility.
Final Thoughts: What This Means for 2026
Taken together, these themes paint a clear picture:
Crypto in 2026 will be:
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More institutional
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More financialized
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More integrated with real-world markets
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More private
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More automated
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More AI-driven
Importantly, many of these changes are happening before prices fully reflect them.
For builders, investors, and operators, this is where the real edge lives—not in chasing hype, but in understanding where infrastructure and capital are quietly moving.
Crypto’s next chapter won’t be defined by louder narratives—but by deeper ones.
