Author: Coinbase Ventures Team

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

The cutting-edge trends in the crypto industry change every year. In 2025, we witnessed:

1. Stablecoins are reshaping the global payment landscape;

2. Cross-chain technology reduces settlement times from several days to mere seconds;

3. Predicting market trends that break through niche circles and gain mainstream recognition;

4. New DEX infrastructure makes it possible for "everything to be traded on the blockchain".

These breakthroughs have paved the way for a new generation of entrepreneurs, with countless teams working tirelessly day and night to build the next milestone in the crypto world. Compared to the industry situation at the beginning of the year, on-chain liquidity is now deeper, privacy protection is more intelligent, cross-chain interoperability is commonplace, and blockchain and artificial intelligence are complementing each other. Regardless of daily price fluctuations, we remain confident in the future prospects.

1. RWA Perpetual Contracts: The Trend Towards Perpetuality for Everything

As RWA regains market attention, investors are seeking new risk exposures. Perpetual contracts, as the most mature trading product in the crypto space, offer a faster and more flexible entry path compared to RWA's underlying assets. Thanks to recent improvements to the Perp DEX infrastructure, RWA perpetual contracts create risk exposure to off-chain assets. We observe that RWA perpetual contracts are evolving in two directions: First, introducing alternative assets on-chain. Since perpetual contracts do not require holding underlying assets, the market can drive the "perpetualization" of almost everything, from private equity to economic data, around virtually any asset. Second, as cryptocurrencies become increasingly intertwined with macro markets, more sophisticated traders are no longer satisfied with simply going long on crypto assets but are seeking a wider range of investment products. This has created a demand for exposure to macro assets on-chain, enabling traders to hedge or establish positions using tools such as those linked to crude oil, inflation hedging, credit spreads, and volatility. —Kinji Steimetz

2. Specialized trading products and new trading terminals

Self-operated AMM

The rise of perpetual DEXs, application-specific chains (ASICs), and rollups highlights the crucial role of product structural design in building sustainable exchanges, particularly in protecting market makers from malicious arbitrageurs. These emerging products can embed such protection mechanisms at the base layer, but replicating similar structures on general-purpose blockchains remains challenging without significant protocol upgrades. Therefore, we are increasingly focused on innovative projects that concentrate on on-chain market structures. The self-operated AMM model emerging on Solana is one such example, where dormant liquidity can only be executed through aggregators, thus protecting LPs from malicious attacks. This self-operated model may substantially drive market structure innovation before base layer improvements are made and has the potential to expand beyond Solana's spot market. —Kinj Steimetz

Prediction Market Trading Terminal

Prediction markets have become one of the leading consumer applications, successfully bridging the crypto divide and achieving mainstream adoption. However, current prediction markets still suffer from the fragmentation issues inherent in early DeFi, such as users having to navigate between multiple interfaces, using limited tools, and dealing with fragmented liquidity pools. Against this backdrop, prediction market aggregators have emerged. We expect aggregators to become the primary interaction layer, consolidating over $600 million in fragmented liquidity and providing a unified interface for real-time event probabilities across platforms. Imagine future trading terminals (similar to the Axiom user experience, but dedicated to event contracts) equipped with specialized tools: advanced order types, filtering and charting functions, multi-platform path optimization, position tracking, cross-market arbitrage insights, and more. — Jonathan King, Venture Capitalist

3. Next-generation DeFi protocols

Composability of the Perpetual Contract Market

Perpetual contract platforms are evolving from isolated exchanges into composable DeFi markets, pushing capital efficiency to new frontiers. Major perpetual contract DEXs like Hyperliquid and Lighter are pioneering integrations with lending protocols, allowing users to earn yields by staking assets while maintaining leveraged positions. With perpetual contract DEX monthly trading volume reaching $1.4 trillion and an annual growth rate of 300%, DeFi protocols are poised to expand perpetual contract functionality by 2026, enabling traders to achieve the triple goals of hedging, yield generation, and leverage while maintaining liquidity. —Ethan Oak

Unsecured credit

The lending market based on unsecured credit will become the next frontier of DeFi, with a potential breakthrough model emerging in 2026. This model will enable large-scale unsecured lending by integrating on-chain reputation with off-chain data. The market opportunity is enormous: the US alone has $1.3 trillion in revolving unsecured credit, and DeFi can capture this market through superior capital efficiency and global accessibility. The current challenge for entrepreneurs is designing scalable and sustainable risk models. If unsecured lending succeeds, it will allow DeFi to evolve into a new type of financial infrastructure that can truly compete with traditional banks. — Jonathan King, venture capitalist

On-chain privacy

Blockchain is renowned for its transparency, but without guaranteed user privacy, it will struggle to achieve mainstream adoption. If institutional investors and professional retail investors continuously leak their strategies to their counterparts, transactions will ultimately cease. Furthermore, ordinary users are generally unwilling to expose their complete transaction history on the blockchain for public scrutiny. Currently, we see developers focusing heavily on privacy-preserving assets (such as Zcash) and DeFi applications (such as private order books and lending protocols), with some blockchains specifically designed for payments making privacy a core principle. Whether these solutions are built on specific privacy networks or deployed on existing public chains using advanced cryptographic technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), secure multi-party computation (MPC), and trusted execution environments (TEEs), they all effectively reduce the risk of users being exposed to malicious actors while maintaining the verifiability of the blockchain. — Ethan Oak

4. AI and Robotics

Robotics and Bionic Data Collection

As artificial intelligence continues to advance, the market is turning its attention to the next technological frontier, with a growing consensus that robotics may become the next wave of innovation. While many teams are moving in this direction, a critical data gap remains in the training of robots and embodied AI systems: existing datasets are not only limited but also fragmented. Data involving subtle physical interactions is particularly scarce, such as grasping force, pressure values, or multi-object manipulation data involving deformable objects like fabric and cables. While this challenge extends beyond cryptography, borrowing from DePIN's incentive-based data collection model may provide a feasible framework for the large-scale acquisition of high-quality physical interaction data, thereby accelerating the development and deployment of advanced robotic systems. — Kinj Steimetz

Human proof

As artificial intelligence advances, we are approaching a tipping point: content displayed on internet digital screens will increasingly be indistinguishable between human creation and AI generation. We believe that combining biometrics, cryptographic signatures, and open-source developer standards is crucial for building "human proof" solutions, which will complement AI in new human-computer interaction models. Worldcoin has been at the forefront of anticipating and addressing this challenge. We look forward to supporting multiple solutions to collectively tackle this increasingly complex problem area. — Hoolie Tejwani

AI-driven on-chain development

The smart contract development industry is about to witness its "GitHub Copilot moment." 2026 may see AI agents further lower the barrier to on-chain development: entrepreneurs without technical backgrounds can launch on-chain businesses within hours rather than months, with the agent handling smart contract code generation, security auditing, and continuous monitoring. The real opportunity lies in the agent tool ecosystem, which will make smart contract development and security risk management as convenient as building a modern webpage, potentially triggering a Cambrian explosion in on-chain applications and experiences. — Jonathan King, Venture Capitalist

Note: "GitHub Copilot moment" is a popular metaphor in the developer community that describes a specific, surprising experience.

Looking ahead to 2026, we are thrilled by the vibrant energy of entrepreneurs boldly exploring and driving the development of the on-chain economy. While the aforementioned directions showcase promising sectors, the most amazing projects often emerge from unexpected fields. Let's look forward to it together.