Coinbase Inventory for 2026: Nine Major Investment Tracks - Everything Becomes Perpetual Futures, Unsecured Lending, AI Agents Listed

Coinbase Ventures recently unveiled its top nine promising areas for 2026, including RWA Perptual Futures, specialized exchanges, prediction market aggregators, composable Decentralized Finance, unsecured credit lending, privacy assets, as well as AI agents, Bots data collection, and Proof of Humanity. This list serves not only as Coinbase's investment guide but also reveals the next narrative direction for the encryption industry.

The rise of RWA perpetual futures? Moving from tokenization to “everything becoming perpetual futures”

Coinbase believes that Perptual Futures will be the fastest way to bring RWA on-chain, and they are more flexible than traditional asset tokenization:

RWA Perptual Futures can provide exposure to various real-world assets such as oil, inflation, credit spreads, and private company valuations without the need to hold physical assets.

With the maturity of trading infrastructure, 2026 may usher in a new phase of “global market perpetual futures”, allowing crypto traders to conduct more strategies on-chain, including credit risk spreads and volatility-related hedging operations.

(Is a hundred times long on Nasdaq 100 feasible? Analyzing risks and potential from the launch of stock Perptual Futures on Hyperliquid)

Professional exchange and trading terminal

The Prop-AMM Revolution of Solana: Innovative Mechanism Protects LP from Being Cut

Decentralized Perpetual Futures exchange ( perp DEX ) and the rise of dedicated chains make market structure design crucial.

Coinbase specifically mentioned the new type of “Proprietary Automated Market Maker (Prop-AMM)” model on Solana, allowing LP's liquidity to be executed through the aggregator (aggregator), rather than interacting directly with the AMM, thus avoiding sandwich attacks by Bots for arbitrage.

This type of specialized AMM is seen as an innovative structure that can be scaled to multiple chains, expected to become the foundation of a new generation of decentralized exchanges.

Prediction markets are vying for attention: “Trading terminal” integrates billions of dollars in liquidity.

Polymarket, Kalshi, and various prediction markets are growing rapidly, but they face issues such as a multitude of platforms and fragmented liquidity.

Coinbase predicts that prediction market aggregators are also in high demand, requiring advanced features such as cross-platform odds views, professional order routing tools, cross-exchange arbitrage paths, and position tracking, to become a “Bloomberg Terminal” exclusive to prediction markets like GMGN.

(Coinbase has been exposed for developing prediction market and stock trading features, pursuing its ambition to become an all-in-one exchange)

Next Generation DeFi Transformation

Composable Perptual Futures and Lending: Capital Efficiency Upgrade

Hyperliquid and platforms like Lighter are integrating Perptual Futures and lending protocols, allowing traders to earn idle yield on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions, ensuring that liquidity remains unaffected.

Coinbase believes that the trend of composable DeFi will accelerate in 2026, where Perptual Futures will no longer be a standalone market but rather a component within the DeFi ecosystem.

Uncollateralized Lending: Trillions of Dollars in Credit Assets Awaiting On-Chain

Coinbase clearly stated: Unsecured credit lending will be the next billion-dollar market for Decentralized Finance.

The new model will combine “onchain reputation (” and “offchain data )”, making encryption lending closer to Web2 credit cards or personal bank loans:

The U.S. market alone has a $1.3 trillion revolving credit facility, and cryptocurrency can capture these funds through exceptional capital efficiency and global accessibility.

( Jane completed Paradigm's leading investment of 5.2 million USD financing to create a crypto-native unsecured lending market )

Privacy: The Last Piece of the Puzzle for Mainstream Finance

Whether it is institutions or professional traders, no one can trade on a completely transparent chain, as this will become a handle for competitors.

Therefore, Coinbase points out that the combination of privacy assets, hidden order books, private lending protocols, and cryptographic technologies such as ZKP, FHE, MPC, and TEE will become the next wave of infrastructure opportunities.

( From JPMorgan to Ethereum: How on-chain “controllable privacy” is changing the rules of the blockchain and finance game? )

The intersection of AI agents and encryption.

Bots and DePIN: Business Opportunities of 'Physical Interaction Data' in the AI Era

The next bottleneck for AI models is not computing power, but real-world motion and tactile data.

Coinbase believes that DePIN can incentivize users to upload interactive content with Bots, and also collect difficult data such as grip, pressure, and material at scale, thus accelerating the development and deployment of advanced robotic systems.

Proof of Humanity is a standard configuration in the AI era.

As AI-generated content floods the internet, Coinbase emphasizes that biometric identification, encryption signatures, and open protocols will be at the core of distinguishing real human identities: “While Worldcoin is a pioneer in this field, we are happy to see more diverse solutions emerge.”

AI agents reshape on-chain entrepreneurship, balancing efficiency and security.

Coinbase believes that AI agents next year will enable non-technical founders to establish on-chain businesses, participate in writing smart contracts, automatically audit risk vulnerabilities, and even monitor protocol operations within a few hours, promising a new wave of on-chain entrepreneurial explosion.

Coinbase is publicly searching for the next “encryption unicorn”.

It is not hard to see that this list is not just a trend forecast, but also a public statement from Coinbase Ventures. As long as there are teams working on the aforementioned related projects, Coinbase is interested in participating. Looking ahead to 2026, it will be a year of comprehensive intersection between encryption and AI.

(When encryption becomes a supporting role: Venture capital names the next unicorn will be born from “crypto-related rather than native companies”)

This article reviews the nine major investment tracks for 2026 by Coinbase: everything will be perpetual futures, uncollateralized lending, and AI agents are on the list. First appeared in Chain News ABMedia.