1. RWA Perpetual Contracts: The Perpetualization of Everything

As Real World Assets (RWA) regain significant market attention, investors are actively seeking novel exposure avenues. Perpetual contracts, as the crypto domain’s most mature trading product, offer a faster and more flexible participation pathway compared to underlying RWA assets. Thanks to recent improvements in Perpetual DEX infrastructure, RWA perpetual contracts now facilitate exposure to off-chain assets through this innovative derivative structure.

We observe RWA perpetual contracts evolving in two primary directions:

• Bringing Alternative Assets On-chain: Since perpetual contracts don’t require holding the underlying asset, markets can form around virtually any target, driving the “perpetualization” of everything from private equity to economic data.
• Macro Asset Exposure: As crypto and macro markets become increasingly intertwined, sophisticated trading groups are no longer content with simply longing crypto assets. They seek richer investment products. This demand has spurred the need for on-chain exposure to macro assets, enabling traders to hedge or take positions using instruments linked to crude oil, inflation-protected profits and losses, credit spreads, and volatility.

— Kinji Steimetz

2. Specialized Trading Products & New Trading Terminals

Self-Custodial AMMs

The rise of perpetual DEXs, application-specific chains, and Rollups has underscored the critical role of product structural design in building robust perpetual exchanges, particularly in safeguarding market makers from malicious arbitrageurs. While these emerging products can embed such protection mechanisms at the foundational layer, replicating similar structures on general-purpose blockchains remains challenging without significant protocol upgrades.

Consequently, we are increasingly focusing on innovative projects centered around on-chain market structures. The emergence of self-custodial Automated Market Maker (AMM) models on Solana is a prime example; their dormant liquidity can only be executed via aggregators, thereby protecting Liquidity Providers (LPs) from adverse actions. This self-custodial paradigm could substantially drive market structure innovation before foundational layer improvements, with potential applications extending beyond Solana’s spot markets.

— Kinji Steimetz

Prediction Market Trading Terminals

Prediction markets have become one of the leading consumer applications, successfully bridging the crypto divide and achieving mainstream adoption. However, the current landscape still suffers from early DeFi fragmentation issues, requiring users to navigate multiple interfaces, utilize limited tools, and contend with siloed liquidity pools.

Against this backdrop, prediction market aggregators are emerging, and we anticipate they will become the primary interaction layer, integrating over $600 million in fragmented liquidity and offering a unified interface for real-time event probabilities across platforms. Imagine future trading terminals (akin to the Axiom user experience, but specialized for event contracts) equipped with professional tools: advanced order types, filtering and charting functionalities, multi-platform path optimization, position tracking, and cross-market arbitrage insights.

— Venture Partner Jonathan King

3. Next-Gen DeFi Protocols

Composability in Perpetual Markets

Perpetual contract platforms are evolving from isolated exchanges into composable DeFi markets, pushing capital efficiency to new frontiers. Leading perpetual contract DEXs like Hyperliquid and Lighter are pioneering integration with lending protocols, enabling users to earn yield on their collateralized assets while maintaining leveraged positions.

With perpetual contract DEXs achieving a monthly trading volume of $1.4 trillion and an annual growth rate of 300%, by 2026, DeFi protocols are poised to expand their perpetual contract functionalities, allowing traders to simultaneously achieve hedging, yield generation, and leverage without sacrificing liquidity.

— Ethan Oak

Uncollateralized Credit

Lending markets based on uncollateralized credit are set to become the next frontier in DeFi. 2026 may witness breakthrough models that achieve large-scale uncollateralized credit by fusing on-chain reputation with off-chain data. The market opportunity here is immense: the United States alone has $1.3 trillion in revolving uncollateralized credit lines, a market DeFi can capture through superior capital efficiency and global accessibility.

The current challenge for entrepreneurs lies in designing scalable and sustainable risk models. If successful, uncollateralized credit will evolve DeFi into a new financial infrastructure capable of truly competing with traditional banking.

— Venture Partner Jonathan King

On-chain Privacy

While blockchains are celebrated for their transparency, mainstream adoption remains elusive without robust user privacy safeguards. Institutional investors and professional retail traders cannot sustain operations if their strategies are consistently exposed to adversaries. Furthermore, general users are often reluctant to have their entire transaction history openly viewable on-chain. We are currently seeing significant developer effort focused on privacy-preserving assets (such as Zcash) and DeFi applications (like private order books and lending protocols), alongside blockchains specifically designed for payments with privacy as their cornerstone.

Whether these solutions are built on dedicated privacy networks or utilize advanced cryptographic techniques like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC), and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) deployed on existing public chains, they all aim to effectively reduce users’ exposure to malicious actors while maintaining blockchain verifiability.

— Ethan Oak

4. AI & Robotics

Robotics & Embodied Data Collection

As artificial intelligence continues its rapid advancement, market attention is shifting towards the next technological frontier, with a growing consensus that robotics could catalyze the next wave of innovation. While numerous teams are progressing in this direction, a critical data gap persists in the training of robots and embodied AI systems: existing datasets are not only limited but also highly fragmented.

Specifically, there is a scarcity of data involving nuanced physical interactions, such as grasping force, pressure values, or multi-object manipulation data for deformable items like fabrics and cables. While this challenge isn’t exclusive to the crypto domain, the incentivized data collection model offered by Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs) could provide a viable framework for scaling the acquisition of high-quality physical interaction data, thereby accelerating the development and deployment of advanced robotic systems.

— Kinji Steimetz

Proof of Humanity

With the continuous development of artificial intelligence, we are approaching a tipping point where it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish between human-created and AI-generated content on digital screens. We believe that combining biometric technologies, cryptographic signatures, and open-source developer standards is crucial for building “Proof of Humanity” solutions. These will complement artificial intelligence within new human-computer interaction paradigms.

Worldcoin has been at the forefront of anticipating and addressing this challenge. We look forward to supporting a variety of solutions that collectively tackle this increasingly complex problem space.

— Hoolie Tejwani

AI-Powered On-chain Development

Smart contract development is on the cusp of its “GitHub Copilot moment.” 2026 is poised to witness AI agents further lowering the barrier to entry for on-chain development: non-technical entrepreneurs could launch on-chain businesses in hours, not months, with AI agents handling smart contract code generation, security audits, and continuous monitoring.

The true opportunity lies in the ecosystem of AI agent tools, which will make smart contract development and security risk management as accessible as modern web development. This promises to unleash a Cambrian explosion of on-chain applications and experiences.

Note: The “GitHub Copilot moment” refers to a transformative experience in software development where AI assistance significantly streamlines coding, making it faster and more accessible.

— Venture Partner Jonathan King