Leading Crypto Venture Arm Reveals 2025 Investment Priorities: RWA, DeFi Innovations and AI

Source: DefiPlanet Original Title: Coinbase Ventures Sets Sights on Real-World Assets, DeFi Upgrades and AI Innovations for 2025 Original Link:

Quick Breakdown

• A leading venture capital firm will focus its 2025 investments on real-world assets, next-gen DeFi and AI innovations.
• The firm expects growth in tokenization, prop-AMMs, prediction markets, and privacy-preserving crypto tools.
• AI-driven onchain business tooling and “proof of humanity” solutions are projected to gain traction by 2026.

Investment Focus Areas

The venture arm of a major crypto exchange announced plans to channel fresh capital into real-world asset (RWA) trading, advanced decentralized finance (DeFi) systems and artificial intelligence in the coming year.

In a recent announcement, the firm stated that teams building asset tokenization platforms, specialized exchanges, trading terminals, and agent-driven AI infrastructure will be its top targets. These areas were described as the most promising pipelines for the next wave of breakout crypto companies.

Growing Portfolio and Recent Activity

Since launching in 2018, the venture firm has backed 618 projects and now holds equity in 422 startups. Recent investments include DeFi compliance platforms, payments startups, and prediction market platforms.

Market Trends and Opportunities

Real-World Asset Exposure: Investor commentary noted the rising demand for synthetic exposure to off-chain assets, predicting growth in tools such as perpetual futures contracts built on real-world asset classes. The emergence of proprietary AMMs (prop-AMMs) represents a new exchange architecture designed to shield liquidity providers from exploitation by high-frequency traders and bots.

Prediction Markets: Prediction market aggregators are expected to become a dominant interface for users, consolidating fragmented liquidity and delivering unified event-odds dashboards.

Capital-Efficient DeFi: Potential integrations between perpetual futures platforms and lending protocols could allow users to earn yield on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions, boosting capital efficiency across DeFi.

Unsecured Crypto Credit: The DeFi space is expected to see protocols combining onchain reputation with offchain credit data to enable unsecured lending at scale. The U.S. alone holds $1.3 trillion in revolving unsecured credit lines, a market that crypto could potentially disrupt through superior accessibility and efficiency.

DePIN and AI Infrastructure: Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) could serve as a framework for collecting high-value real-world interaction data, addressing the lack of high-quality training data for robotics and embodied AI.