Coinbase Ventures, the investment division of the leading cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, has announced a major strategic shift in its investment priorities for the coming year. The firm intends to concentrate its efforts on real-world asset tokenization, decentralized finance innovation, and supporting the advancement of artificial intelligence infrastructure throughout the digital ecosystem.
In a blog post detailed by the company, Coinbase Ventures is eager to finance the developers of specialized exchanges, advanced trading terminals, newly-originated DeFi protocols, and state-of-the-art agentic AI systems. The company declared that these areas offer the strongest possibilities for explosive growth and the creation of the next big thing in the industry.
Source: X
Since their inception in 2018, Coinbase Ventures has been recognized as one of the most vigorous investors in the crypto sector with a total of 618 investments and a portfolio of 422 startups, as per PitchBook. The last investment was made on November 18 in 0xbow, a DeFi compliance platform that is developed to tackle regulatory challenges for decentralized markets.
Earlier this year, the company has also committed to payment infrastructure carriers Zynk and ZAR and has invested in a funding round of prediction markets platform Kalshi in October. These transactions emphasize Coinbase Ventures’ consistent behavior of supporting the industry’s most advanced solutions at the intersection of financial infrastructure, compliance, and highly efficient trading models.
Kinji Steimetz of Coinbase Ventures shared a number of insights on X, among which figuring out that perpetual futures contracts represent one of the most significant ways to achieve synthetic exposure for real-world assets was the most important. He argued that such instruments might radically change the offchain market access by simply creating crypto-native versions of traditional financial exposure.
Steimetz on the other hand, pointed to the growth prop-AMMs, essentially proprietary automated market makers, as a source of new exchange methods that aim at stopping liquidity providers from being on the losing side due to bots or advanced trading systems. He referred to these models as a vital transition in shielding market participants and the decentralized execution quality improving layer.
Investor Jonathan King envisaged that aggregators of prediction markets will shortly be the main industry interfaces by folding around $600 million of liquidity spread into different places. He pointed to the urgency of the platforms that unify in providing the real-time probabilities of the events across various venues of trading, hence, transparency and capital allocation getting better.
Coinbase Ventures investor Ethan Oak emphasized the immense potential by just one example of a combination between perpetual futures exchanges and lending protocols, the effect being that traders can earn yields on their collateral while still holding leveraged positions. Such an arrangement, in his opinion, would be the one to unlock different levels of capital that can be used more efficiently across the whole DeFi ecosystem.He also mentioned that a lot of developers are increasingly active to create privacy coins and tools, adopting technologies like Zcash.
On the other hand, King saw that DeFi protocols integrating onchain reputation systems with offchain data could be the solution that would open unsecured lending to the masses, with the US market of $1.3 trillion in revolving credit as a target.
Besides that, Coinbase Ventures noticed potential AI-led changes as well, for instance, the requirement for decentralized physical infrastructure networks that can deliver high-quality training data for robots. Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures, named “proof-of-humanity” systems as the main development area next year when the need for verification of human-made content in an AI-dominated environment will be skyrocketing.
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