Buy Crypto- Markets
Futures- Spot
- Copy Trade
- Earn
- More
2026年 Coinbase will focus on which key tracks?
Original Article Title: Coinbase Ventures: Ideas we are excited for in 2026
Original Source: Coinbase Ventures Team
Original Translation: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
TL;DR
In the spirit of open collaboration, we are sharing the team's most anticipated concepts in asset tokenization, professional trading platforms and terminals, next-gen DeFi, and AI + robotics. We are actively seeking suitable teams to invest in these categories. If you are building in these areas, we are eager to engage.
Preparing for 2026
The forefront of the crypto space evolves every year. In 2025, we witnessed the reshaping of stablecoin infrastructure in the payment sector, cross-chain proof compressing settlement times from days to instant, the prediction market breakthrough gaining mainstream adoption, and new DEX models enabling "everything on-chain transactions." These achievements have opened up new exploration space for ambitious teams working tirelessly to build the next major breakthrough in the crypto space. Contrasting the current market conditions with the beginning of the year, you'll find deeper liquidity, smarter privacy, more real interoperability, and on-chain "rails" complementing AI. Regardless of how price charts fluctuate, we remain confident in the future's development.
Below are the concepts our team is most excited about entering 2026, answering a frequently asked question: "What should I build next?" We believe the following categories will be where the next significant breakthrough company or protocol emerges, which are also the areas we are actively seeking to invest in.
RWA Perpetual Contract—Perpetual Contractualization of Everything
This Section's Author: Kinji Steimetz (@kinjisteimetz)
With on-chain real-world assets (RWA) sparking interest once again, investors are seeking new forms of risk exposure, and perpetual contracts—the crypto space's most battle-tested trading product—provide a structurally faster and more flexible path than tokenization. Thanks to recent improvements in perpetual contract DEX infrastructure, RWAs can offer synthetic investment opportunities for off-chain assets through perpetual contracts.
We see this category evolving in two main directions. First is the introduction of investment opportunities in unique assets onto the chain, where perpetual contracts do not require holding the underlying asset, allowing the market to form around almost anything, enabling the "perpetualization of everything" from private company equity to economic data releases; second is as the crypto space increasingly intertwines with macro markets, a more sophisticated group of traders is seeking to express broader views beyond just being long digital assets, which will drive demand for on-chain macro asset investment opportunities, allowing traders to hedge or position themselves using tools pegged to oil, inflation breakevens, credit spreads, volatility, and more.
Professional Trading Platforms and Trading Terminals
· Alternative Prop AMM
Section Author: Kinji Steimetz (@kinjisteimetz)
The rise of perpetual contract DEXes, application-specific chains, and Rollups has highlighted the importance of market structure design in building sustainable trading platforms, particularly in safeguarding liquidity providers from malicious order flow. While these newer environments can embed such protection mechanisms directly at the base layer, replicating similar structures on a general chain (such as the Ethereum mainnet) remains highly challenging unless significant protocol upgrades are undertaken.
We are increasingly focusing on projects that can accelerate on-chain market structure development in a broader ecosystem. An emerging model is Prop-AMMs on Solana, where in this pattern, static resting liquidity can only be executed via an aggregator, completely isolating LPs from predatory order flow. This "proprietary-driven" approach holds the promise of significantly driving market structure innovation until improvements at the base layer arrive, and its potential applications go far beyond Solana's spot markets.
· Prediction Market Trading Terminals
Section Author: Jonathan King (@jonathankingvc)
Prediction markets have become one of the most mainstream consumer-facing crypto apps, truly bridging the gap from the crypto-native market to mainstream adoption. However, current prediction markets are facing similar early DeFi fragmentation woes—users need to juggle multiple interfaces, tools are limited, and liquidity pools are segregated. Prediction market aggregators are emerging, and we expect them to become the dominant interface layer, integrating over $600 million in liquidity currently spread across platforms, providing users with a unified view of real-time event odds across platforms.
You can imagine a trading terminal like this (the user interface is similar to Axiom, but specifically designed for smart contract events): equipped with professional-grade tools, including advanced order types, filters/charts, multi-platform smart routing, position tracking, cross-platform arbitrage insights, and more.
Next Generation of DeFi
· Composability in the Perpetual Contract Market
Author of this section: Ethan Oak (@0xNoroc)
Perpetual futures are evolving from isolated trading venues into a composable DeFi market, opening up a whole new frontier of capital efficiency. Major perpetual contract trading platforms like Hyperliquid and Lighter are at the forefront of integrating with lending protocols, allowing users to earn collateral yield while maintaining leveraged positions.
With perpetual contract DEX monthly trading volumes reaching $14 trillion and growing at a rate of 300% per year, by 2026, we may witness protocols extending the utility of perpetual futures, enabling traders to hedge, earn yield, and leverage simultaneously without sacrificing liquidity.
· Collateral-Free Loans / Credit
Author of this section: Jonathan King (@jonathankingvc)
The collateral-free credit-based lending market is the next frontier of DeFi, with potentially groundbreaking models emerging by 2026 that combine on-chain reputation with off-chain data to unlock massive collateral-free lending.
The market opportunity is enormous, with the U.S. alone having a $13 trillion revolving collateral-free credit limit, and the crypto market is well-positioned to capture this slice of the pie through increased capital efficiency and global accessibility. For builders in this space, the challenge lies in designing scalable, sustainable risk models. Once successful, DeFi will truly become an infrastructure that can comprehensively surpass the traditional banking system.
· On-Chain Privacy
Author of this section: Ethan Oak (@0xNoroc)
Blockchain is known for its transparency, but if users cannot maintain their privacy, widespread mainstream adoption may never be achieved. Institutions and professional traders cannot feasibly conduct transactions when their strategies are continuously exposed to competitors, and regular users also do not want their entire financial history visible to the world on the chain.
We see developers' efforts increasingly focused on privacy-preserving assets (such as Zcash) and DeFi applications (e.g., private order books, lending/borrowing, etc.) as well as privacy-focused blockchains designed specifically for payments. Whether based on networks built for privacy or through advanced cryptography on existing public chains (ZKPs, FHE, MPC, TEE, etc.), these tools allow blockchain to maintain verifiability while significantly reducing users' exposure to malicious actors.
AI and Robotics
· Robotics Technology and Biorobotics Data Collection
Section Author: Kinji Steimetz (@kinjisteimetz)
As AI continues to advance, the market is looking towards the next technological frontier, with an increasing consensus that robotics technology may define the next wave of innovation. While many teams are moving in this direction, a critical gap remains in training robots and embodied AI systems, namely that available datasets are still limited and fragmented.
Most notably lacking is fine-grained physical interaction data, such as grip strength, pressure sensing, multi-object manipulation (especially deformable materials like fabrics, wires, etc.). Although this challenge extends beyond the purview of the crypto industry, incentivized data collection models like DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) offer a viable path to large-scale collection of high-quality physical interaction data, potentially accelerating the development and deployment of advanced robotic systems.
· Human Identity Verification
Section Author: Hoolie Tejwani (@HoolieG)
We are approaching a tipping point where everything you see on your internet screen will be increasingly indistinguishable from whether it originates from a human or AI.
We believe that combining biometric technology, cryptographic signatures, and open-source developer standards is crucial to establishing a "proof of humanity" solution, which will be essential in the new human-AI interaction paradigm. Worldcoin (our portfolio company) has been at the forefront of anticipating and addressing this issue. We are very supportive of multiple solutions coming together to tackle this increasingly complex challenge.
· AI for On-chain Development and Security
Section Author: Jonathan King (@jonathankingvc)
Smart contract development is about to have its 'GitHub Copilot' moment. In 2026, we are likely to see an AI Agent further lower the barrier to entry for on-chain development—non-technical founders could go live with an on-chain business in hours instead of months, with the Agent responsible for generating smart contract code, conducting security audits, and providing ongoing monitoring.
The opportunity lies in Agent tools, which can make smart contract development and security/risk management as accessible as modern web development, triggering a 'Cambrian explosion' of on-chain applications and experiences.
Opportunities Always Arise Unexpectedly
Looking ahead to 2026, we are excited for the builders who dare to boldly experiment and drive the on-chain economy forward. While the directions mentioned above represent areas with significant potential we have seen, the most exciting projects often come from the most unexpected places.
If you are deeply involved in any of the above areas or are exploring something entirely new, feel free to reach out to the team members mentioned above through a direct message—we are very excited to engage with you and learn about the future you are building.
You may also like
1 billion DOTs were minted out of thin air, but the hacker only made 230,000 dollars
After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, when will the war end?
Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
Parse Noise's newly launched Beta version, how to "on-chain" this heat?
Is Lobster a Thing of the Past? Unpacking the Hermes Agent Tools that Supercharge Your Throughput to 100x
Declare War on AI? The Doomsday Narrative Behind Ultraman's Residence in Flames
Crypto VCs Are Dead? The Market Extinction Cycle Has Begun
Claude's Journey to Foolishness in Diagrams: The Cost of Thriftiness, or How API Bill Increased 100-Fold
Edge Land Regress: A Rehash Around Maritime Power, Energy, and the Dollar
Arthur Hayes Latest Interview: How Should Retail Investors Navigate the Iran Conflict?
Just now, Sam Altman was attacked again, this time by gunfire
Straits Blockade, Stablecoin Recap | Rewire News Morning Edition
From High Expectations to Controversial Turnaround, Genius Airdrop Triggers Community Backlash
The Xiaomi electric vehicle factory in Beijing's Daxing district has become the new Jerusalem for the American elite
Lean Harness, Fat Skill: The Real Source of 100x AI Productivity
Ultraman is not afraid of his mansion being attacked; he has a fortress.
US-Iran Negotiations Collapse, Bitcoin Faces Battle to Defend $70,000 Level
Reflections and Confusions of a Crypto VC
1 billion DOTs were minted out of thin air, but the hacker only made 230,000 dollars
After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, when will the war end?
Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
App