The core takeaway of this article:
1. Perpetual contracts, as on-chain exposures, liberate RWA from custody and issuance challenges:
Don't treat tokenization as the only entry point. A faster and more flexible path is to use perpetual contracts to create synthetic exposures,making almost any off-chain asset perpetual...
2. Exchange competition is shifting from matching to market structure design, with the core objective of protecting market makers and limited partners (LPs) from toxic traffic attacks: It is difficult to directly replicate stronger underlying protection on a general-purpose blockchain. Therefore, a more realistic opportunity is to drive the evolution of market structure through new structures (such as Prop-AMM). 3. After the prediction market enters the mainstream, the next stage of competitive advantage lies in the terminal aggregation layer: The current pain points are fragmented interfaces, weak tools, and fragmented liquidity; Whoever can create a cross-platform trading terminal with odds views, routing, position tracking, arbitrage, etc., is more likely to become the default entry point. 4. The key to the next generation of DeFi is the composability of perpetual markets, which combines trading, lending, and yield to improve capital efficiency: Perpetual contract exchanges have evolved from isolated scenarios to composable markets, allowing users to maintain leveraged positions while still earning interest on their collateral, and simultaneously hedging, earning yield, and leveraging without sacrificing liquidity. 5. For unsecured lending to succeed, it must integrate "on-chain reputation + off-chain data + scalable risk control model" into a unified system: The opportunities are significant, but the real hurdle lies in sustainable risk pricing and bad debt control; once this is achieved, DeFi may be able to directly challenge the traditional banking system in certain dimensions. 6. Privacy becomes a prerequisite for mainstream market adoption, with the goal of reducing exposure under verifiable conditions: The core logic is the existence of genuine demand—institutions and professional traders are unlikely to disclose their strategies on-chain for extended periods, and ordinary users are unwilling to disclose their complete financial history. 7. Trustworthiness and productivity are accelerating simultaneously in the AI era: Human verification + AI proxy development: On the one hand, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between human-origin and AI-generated content, requiring a combination of biometrics, cryptographic signatures, and open standards; On the other hand, The development of smart contracts is about to enter a "Copilot era." AI agents package code generation, auditing, and monitoring modules, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for blockchain and expanding application supply. The following is a compiled full article for your reference. Every year, the forefront of the crypto industry is constantly changing. In 2025, we saw stablecoin infrastructure reshape the payment system, cross-chain proofs compress settlement times that used to take days to extremely short periods, prediction markets cross the chasm and achieve sustained mainstream adoption, and new DEX models create a market where "everything can be traded" on-chain. These breakthroughs pave the way for a new era: a group of ambitious teams working nights and weekends to create the next big opportunity in the crypto world. Comparing the beginning of the year to now, you'll see deeper liquidity, smarter privacy solutions, true interoperability, and on-chain finance tracks that complement AI. Regardless of where the price curve goes, we remain bullish on the future. Below are some of our team's most exciting ideas as we head towards 2026, and our answers to the frequently asked question—"What should I do next?". We believe the next wave of explosive growth companies and protocols will emerge from these tracks. I. RWA Perpetual Contracts: Making Everything Perpetual
With the resurgence of interest in Real-World On-Chain (RWA) assets, investors are seeking new forms of exposure. Perpetual contracts, as the most proven trading product in the crypto space, offer a structurally faster and more flexible path compared to "direct tokenization."Benefiting from recent improvements in decentralized perpetual contract infrastructure, RWA perpetual contracts can provide synthetic price exposure for off-chain assets through perpetual contracts.
We see this sector potentially developing in two directions: First, bringing more "non-mainstream" asset exposures onto the blockchain—because perpetual contracts don't require actual custody of the underlying assets; almost anything can form a market, from private companies to macroeconomic data releases, all potentially becoming perpetual. Second, as crypto and macro markets become increasingly intertwined, a more sophisticated trading community wants to express richer perspectives, not just simply going long on digital assets. This will create demand for on-chain macro asset exposures, allowing traders to hedge or position themselves using tools linked to crude oil, inflation breakeven, credit spreads, volatility, etc. II. Specialized Exchanges and Trading Terminals The rise of perpetual DEXs, application-specific chains, and Rollups highlights the critical importance of market structure design for building sustainable exchanges, especially in protecting market makers from toxic takers. While these new environments can embed protection mechanisms at the underlying level, replicating similar structures on general-purpose public chains often requires significant protocol upgrades, which is very difficult. Therefore, we are increasingly focusing on projects that can accelerate the evolution of on-chain market structures within a broader ecosystem. One emerging model is Prop-AMM on Solana: order book liquidity can only be traded through aggregators, thus isolating LPs from more predatory traffic. This "prop-driven" approach may significantly drive market structure innovation before underlying improvements arrive, and its application may extend beyond the spot market on the Solana chain. III. Trading Terminals in Prediction Markets Prediction markets have become one of the leading consumer-grade crypto applications and have crossed the chasm into mainstream adoption. However, today's prediction markets still face fragmentation issues similar to early DeFi: users need to switch between multiple interfaces, tool capabilities are limited, and liquidity pools are isolated from each other. Prediction market aggregators have also emerged. We expect them to become the dominant "interface layer," consolidating fragmented liquidity scattered across various platforms, totaling over $600 million, and providing a comprehensive, real-time odds overview across platforms. Imagine a trading terminal (similar to Axiom's interactive experience, but geared towards event contracts): offering advanced order types, filtering and charting, multi-platform routing and position tracking, cross-platform arbitrage insights, and other professional tools. IV. Next Generation DeFi 1. Composability of Perpetual Markets Perpetual contracts are evolving from isolated trading venues into composable DeFi markets, opening up new frontiers for capital efficiency. Leading perpetual contract exchanges like Hyperliquid and Lighter are pioneering integrations with lending protocols, allowing users to earn yields on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions. With perpetual DEX monthly trading volume reaching $1.4 trillion and a year-on-year growth of 300%, 2026 may see more protocols expanding the uses of perpetual contracts, allowing traders to hedge, earn yields, and leverage without sacrificing liquidity. 2. Uncollateralized Lending and Credit Credit-based, uncollateralized money markets represent the next frontier of DeFi. 2026 may see groundbreaking models combining on-chain reputation with off-chain data to achieve uncollateralized lending at scale. The market opportunity is enormous: The US alone has approximately $1.3 trillion in revolving uncollateralized credit lines, and crypto can compete for this market segment due to its higher capital efficiency and global accessibility. For those building this sector, the core challenge is designing scalable and sustainable risk management models. If successful, DeFi will become true financial infrastructure, even capable of surpassing the traditional banking system in some dimensions. 3. On-chain Privacy: Blockchain is known for its transparency, but mainstream adoption may be difficult to achieve if users cannot maintain privacy. Institutional and professional retail traders cannot trade with peace of mind if they continuously leak their strategies to competitors; ordinary users also generally do not want their complete financial history to be publicly displayed on the blockchain. We have seen a significant increase in developer investment in privacy, including privacy assets (such as Zcash), privacy-focused DeFi applications (such as private order books and private lending), and dedicated payment chains with privacy as a core mission. Whether built on dedicated privacy networks or superimposed on existing public chains using advanced cryptography (such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), multi-party computation (MPC), and trusted execution environments (TEE), these tools can reduce users' public exposure to malicious actors while maintaining verifiability. V. AI and Robotics 1. Robotics and Humanoid Data Acquisition As AI continues to expand, the market is turning its attention to the next technological frontier and a growing consensus is forming: robots may define the next stage of innovation. While many teams are moving in this direction, a key gap remains in training robots and embodied intelligent systems—available datasets are still limited and fragmented. One of the scarcest areas is refined physical interaction data, such as grasping, pressure, and multi-object manipulation involving deformable materials like fabrics and cables. While these challenges are not limited to the cryptographic field, incentivized data collection models like Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) may provide a feasible framework for the large-scale collection of high-quality physical interaction data, thereby accelerating the development and deployment of advanced robotic systems. 2. Human Proof We are approaching a tipping point: everything you see on any connected digital screen will be decoupled from real human origins and indistinguishable from AI-generated content. We believe that a combination of biometrics, cryptographic signatures, and open-source developer standards will be key to establishing human proof schemes, complementing AI in new human-computer interface models. Worldcoin is at the forefront of identifying and combating this problem. We also hope to support more pathways to collectively address this increasingly complex problem space. 3. Using AI for On-Chain Development and Security Smart contract development is about to usher in its "GitHub Copilot moment." In 2026, AI agents may further lower the barrier to on-chain development: founders without a technical background can launch on-chain businesses within hours (instead of months), while the agent is responsible for smart contract code generation, security auditing, and continuous monitoring. The opportunity lies in building a proxy-based toolchain that makes smart contract development and security and risk management as easy to learn as modern web development, potentially triggering a "Cambrian explosion" in on-chain applications and experiences. Looking ahead to 2026, we are excited about the builders who dare to take big bets and drive the on-chain economy forward. These ideas reflect areas we believe have great potential, but the most exciting projects often come from unexpected places.
Kikyo
Catherine
Weatherly
Anais