As we approach 2026, the crypto industry is undergoing a profound paradigm shift, moving beyond the past four years of "road-building" focused on infrastructure. OKX Ventures defines this as the dawn of the "Kinetic Finance" era, where the core focus is no longer on network speed, but on the efficiency of on-chain asset flow and capital generation.
To put it bluntly, we believe the future opportunities in Crypto will concentrate on three core transformations:
- Asset Transformation: From "on-chain" to "global settlement." RWA will enable the seamless, 7x24 flow of real-world assets (U.S. bonds, real estate, IP) on-chain, leading to a qualitative change in capital efficiency.
- Agent Transformation: From "Human" to "AI Agent." The main actors in trading will shift from humans to AI. DeFi protocols will become "financial APIs" called by AI, with capital, as if possessing intelligence, actively seeking the world's optimal yields.
- Regulatory Transformation: From "post-event regulation" to "code-level compliance." Privacy and compliance are no longer obstacles but infrastructure embedded in code, paving the final path for the entry of large-scale institutional capital like Wall Street.
We firmly believe that projects capable of using code to solve real-world trust costs and enhance capital efficiency will become the cornerstone of the new era. OKX Ventures' investment logic in infrastructure over the past years has primarily focused on the robustness of underlying protocols and network capacity expansion. We will continue to seek out and support these builders defining the future.
The industry saw numerous major advancements in 2025: For compliant capital access, the approval of spot BTC ETFs opened a path for traditional capital, with cumulative net inflows breaking the $50 billion mark, making crypto assets a standard in global macro hedging; in underlying technology, Ethereum's Pectra upgrade in May and subsequent Fusaka stage progress reduced consensus layer communication load by over 90% and increased network Blob data throughput by 4x, coupled with native account abstraction capabilities removing barriers for hundreds of millions of users' high-frequency interactions; on-chain transaction performance saw a qualitative leap, with high-performance DEXs like Hyperliquid repeatedly setting records of $20 billion in daily trading volume; in asset scaling, RWA achieved a critical breakthrough, with BlackRock's BUIDL fund alone surpassing $2.5 billion by year-end, proving the complete success of the "two-way valve" for on-chain and off-chain liquidity.
In 2025 alone, OKX Ventures participated in investments in dozens of projects, including sectors like RWA, Infra, DeFi, AI, stablecoins, and consumer applications, continuously committed to supporting innovation in the industry.
I. Deep Financialization of RWA
RWA is no longer simply about issuing a "digital receipt" for real-world assets (like houses, bonds). We are entering the RWA 2.0 phase, whose core is turning the blockchain into a global, 7x24-hour settlement center. Imagine, selling an asset used to take two days to settle (T+2); now, using blockchain, instant settlement (T+0) is possible. This isn't just a bit faster; it fundamentally changes the operational efficiency of global capital.
RWA Asset Layering: From On-Chain U.S. Bonds to Synthetic U.S. Stocks and Non-Standard Credit
The U.S. dollar is the most widely accepted global currency, enabling the rapid development of stablecoins USDT and USDC. U.S. stocks are next, hence we see many DEXs and CEXs venturing into U.S. stock tokenization. However, a massive volume of global assets remains non-USD. Assets naturally have a liquidity gap. For instance, U.S. bonds are highly liquid, while real estate and private credit are deeply non-standard assets. The core of RWA 2.0 lies in abandoning the "one-size-fits-all" AMM model and building tailored issuance and trading architectures for different asset tiers. Standardized assets are the easiest category to put on-chain and scale. According to RWA.xyz data, the scale of tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds has exceeded $7.3 billion (a year-on-year increase of over 300%). On-chain U.S. stocks are becoming the second-largest growth area for standardized assets after U.S. bonds, with a current scale of approximately $500 million. Their core value lies in breaking the traditional stock market trading hours (enabling 24/7 trading) and geographical access barriers. This trend suggests that on-chain finance will not only have a "risk-free rate" (U.S. bonds) but also "equity risk assets" (U.S. stocks), thus constructing a complete on-chain investment portfolio. In contrast, non-standard assets like private credit maintain an active loan amount around $8 billion. This huge gap indicates: high-yield non-standard assets are still limited by pricing and circulation challenges. According to BCG predictions, the RWA market size will reach $16 trillion by 2030, and 2026 will be a key inflection point in this growth curve, with on-chain non-stablecoin RWA scale expected to break the $100 billion mark. We believe this is important because it marks RWA's evolution from a niche experiment to a mainstream narrative in a trillion-dollar market. RWA has surpassed the mapping stage and evolved into a layered architecture based on asset liquidity characteristics.
Stablecoins Reshape the Global Settlement Network
Undoubtedly, stablecoins are the killer app of Crypto. They are far more than just trading pairs on exchanges; they are an alternative for cross-border payments, poised to gradually replace the traditional SWIFT system. Traditional cross-border payments typically involve 3-5% fees and a 2-3 day settlement cycle. In contrast, on-chain stablecoin payment fees are below 1% and nearly instantaneous. As of November 2025, the annual settlement volume of on-chain stablecoins has exceeded $12 trillion, officially surpassing Visa's annual settlement volume. The current stablecoin market cap has stabilized above $210 billion, with over 40% of trading volume occurring during non-trading hours (when traditional banks are closed), filling the "liquidity vacuum" in global financial infrastructure. Furthermore, the composability of full asset tokenization is noteworthy: leading DeFi protocols (like Aave, MakerDAO) have completed integration with RWA assets, creating a "Lego effect." Whether it's Treasury bonds (like BUIDL, USDY), real estate, or private credit, successfully using these as underlying collateral in DeFi lending protocols. By the end of 2025, BlackRock's BUIDL fund and Ondo Finance's USDY have been officially integrated into Aave V4 and Sky (formerly MakerDAO) protocols. Approximately 30% of on-chain tokenized Treasury bonds (about $2.2 billion) are being used directly as underlying collateral in lending protocols, rather than sitting idle in wallets. Traditional financial institutions will leverage on-chain T+0 real-time settlement capabilities, improving capital utilization by 2-3 times, completing the substantive migration of backend infrastructure to decentralized ledgers.
OKX Ventures Key Focus Projects
These projects focus on solving the three core obstacles to RWA mass adoption: lack of liquidity, audit opacity, and unsustainable yields.
- Axis builds an on-chain structured finance layer. It introduces a "tranching" mechanism similar to traditional investment banking, packaging assets and dividing them into senior tranches (low risk, low yield) and junior tranches (high risk, high yield). Through an Oracle-less auction and quotation mechanism, Axis enables independent price discovery for non-standard RWA assets on-chain, providing institutional capital with a compliant entry point for fixed-income products.
- Accountable is a trust middleware for RWA. It doesn't just provide simple APIs but integrates auditors, bank APIs, and on-chain data to provide real-time asset reserve proofs. It upgrades traditional "annual/quarterly audits" to "real-time streaming audits." For large RWA issuers seeking regulatory compliance, this is essential infrastructure to eliminate the black-box risk of "fake assets on-chain."
- Verio is a liquidity protocol within the Story ecosystem focused on the financialization of IP assets. It transforms static intellectual property into tradable,抵押的 financial derivatives through programmable IP standards, solving the long-standing problems of non-standard pricing and liquidity fragmentation for IP assets, opening a trillion-dollar intangible asset market for the RWA赛道.
II. Deep Integration of AI and the Crypto World
The AI wave is sweeping the globe. As the most watched technological trend today, its every move profoundly affects all aspects of society. What sparks will AI ignite in the crypto field in the future? We believe AI will have great potential in areas like agency and machine payments.
AI Agent Economy and M2M Payment Network
In multi-agent collaboration networks, different Agents (e.g., data analysts, trade executors, risk control officers) need high-frequency interaction. Blockchain smart contracts provide a permissionless trust foundation and payment rail for this machine-to-machine (M2M) collaboration. This is mainly reflected in three aspects: The AI Payment赛道 has entered an early explosive stage. Google AP2, OpenAI × Stripe ACP, Visa Agentic Commerce, x402—four giants are simultaneously布局代理支付 infrastructure. Google launched the AP2 protocol to standardize Agent payment interfaces; Stripe ACP (Agentic Checkout Protocol) handles over 2 million API calls daily. Visa's Agentic Commerce pilot showed that AI agents autonomously completing e-commerce payments had a success rate of 98.5%, far exceeding traditional automated scripts. M2M payments will also experience rapid growth. VanEck predicts that with the adoption of Web3-native Agent payment protocols like x402, on-chain automated trading volume driven by AI Agents will reach $5 billion daily by 2027, with an expected CAGR of over 120%. Service invocation costs are greatly reduced. Utilizing blockchain micropayments to call Agent services on-demand, compared to the traditional Web2-era API subscription model (SaaS), reduces service invocation costs by 60%, with single interaction costs as low as $0.0001,极大地 reducing economic friction and loss in multi-agent collaboration. When Agent A completes a specific task, Agent B can achieve millisecond-level USDC micropayments via the Lightning Network or Layer 2 protocols,整个过程无需 human intervention, establishing an automated value flow system.
AI and the Verifiable Data Layer
As AI evolves, "world models" like JEPA proposed by deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun and Sora are replacing pure LLMs. Their core need has shifted from text generation to the precise simulation of the physical world's causality (Physics & Causality). AI needs more authentic and reliable data from the real world. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of global AI training data will consist of synthetic data. A lack of real physical feedback in the data闭环 will most likely lead to the "Model Collapse" effect. According to Messari's market analysis, cryptographically verified physical world datasets (Verifiable Real-world Datasets), due to their scarcity and authenticity, are valued at 15 to 20 times that of ordinary web-scraped data. High-fidelity training of world models极度 relies on high-dimensional physical data containing 3D space, depth information, and motion trajectories. Blockchain, through cryptographic signature technology, provides an immutable on-chain proof for every data point collected by sensors, solving the pervasive problems of "data pollution" and "synthetic forgery" in AI training at the source, building a trusted bridge between the physical world and digital models. By Q3 2025, the number of active edge sensor nodes on blockchain networks has exceeded 4.5 million. These nodes provide approximately 20 PB of verifiable physical data daily to various world models, becoming the cornerstone supporting next-generation AI cognition.
zkML and Decentralized Edge Computing: Trusted Edge-Side Inference with Privacy Protection
With the leap in performance of high-performance small parameter models (SLMs) like Llama 3-8B and Phi-3, AI inference computing power is undergoing a paradigm shift from centralized cloud to edge devices (phones, PCs, IoT devices). Market data shows that decentralized edge inference networks built using idle consumer-grade devices (like io.net or Akash) offer H100-level computing power at a cost of approximately $1.49/hour, a 60% to 75% reduction compared to AWS or Nvidia cloud inference services (~$4.00 - $6.50/hour), offering strong economic arbitrage opportunities. Thanks to technological push from projects like Accountable and Modulus Labs, the demand for zkML verification services from on-chain prediction markets, insurance protocols, and high-value asset management saw a 230% quarter-on-quarter growth in Q3 2025, indicating a rigid demand for "trusted inference" in high-value DeFi scenarios. To address the risk of data造假 or model tampering due to untrusted edge devices, zkML (Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning) becomes key trust infrastructure. Emerging protocols like Accountable are building standardized verification layers, allowing nodes to generate mathematical proofs that rigorously verify on-chain that "this inference result was indeed correctly produced by a specific model running on an edge device" without leaking any input data (like medical images or financial private keys), thus achieving a "trustless"闭环 for decentralized computing power.
OKX Ventures Key Focus Projects
- Aspecta: Essentially, it builds a "digital passport" for Multi-Agents. In the future world, AIs will collaborate and trade like humans. But the problem is, how can one AI trust another unfamiliar AI? Aspecta creates a "digital passport" for each AI. By analyzing its past behavior and code history, it gives it a credit score. This allows AIs to build trust and even achieve unsecured lending. In the economic network where Agents call each other's services, Aspecta generates a verifiable credit score for each Agent by parsing on-chain interaction graphs and GitHub code contributions. This is a prerequisite for achieving M2M unsecured lending and trusted collaboration.
- LAB: It is an AI intent compiler in the Web3 space, utilizing the latest multimodal understanding capabilities to transform vague human natural language (e.g., "arbitrage with the lowest risk") into structured on-chain execution instructions. It solves the "last mile"对接 problem between AI technology and complex DeFi protocols, significantly lowering the barrier for non-technical users to use advanced DeFi strategies.
- Hyperion: It is the physical anchor for AI world models, providing verifiable physical world data. It utilizes a decentralized map network to collect geospatial data and combines it with AI inference to provide zero-knowledge proof-verified "location services" for on-chain智能体. This is crucial for RWA asset management and embodied intelligence (robot) scheduling that rely on real physical states.
III. Institutional Adoption: Macro Hedging, Privacy Infrastructure, and Smart Compliance
Crypto assets have completed their transition from "speculative assets" to "global macro hedging tools" in the eyes of institutions. A very clear change is that in the last cycle, retail traders might not pay attention to macro events, whereas in this cycle, failing to watch the Fed, Sino-US tariffs, CPI data, etc., can easily lead to passivity. Compliance is no longer an obstacle but a moat for institutions. The issuance of digital banking licenses will allow seamless interchange between crypto assets and fiat. Three innovative products are currently emerging. First, basis arbitrage and volatility products: institutions are no longer satisfied with passive holding. CME Bitcoin futures open interest repeatedly hits new highs, with institutional long positions significantly increasing. Second, Basis Trade, utilizing the price difference between spot ETFs and futures contracts for risk-free arbitrage, has become a mainstream strategy for hedge funds, with annualized returns稳定在 8%-12%, far exceeding U.S. bond yields. Third, structured notes: these products bundle "BTC spot + Ethereum staking yield," providing institutions with a配置选项 similar to "dividends + appreciation" in traditional finance, without having to touch complex DeFi interactions. Institutional portfolios have expanded from单一的 BTC配置 (as digital gold) to a structured组合 of "BTC + ETH/SOL + DeFi blue chips"—where BTC acts as a store of value, and the staking yield of POS chains is increasingly regarded as the risk-free benchmark rate in the digital economy.
Privacy Renaissance: A Rigid Demand for Institutional Entry
Privacy Renaissance: A Rigid Demand for Institutional Entry As TradFi giants deeply介入 the crypto market in 2026, the double-edged sword effect of transparent ledgers becomes apparent. In a fully public on-chain environment, it is difficult for institutions to execute complex arbitrage strategies or complete large transactions because any exposure of trading intent can lead to serious front-running risks and strategy leakage. This structural矛盾 makes "privacy" a prerequisite for institutional capital going on-chain that cannot be avoided. In this context, the connotation of privacy is being redefined. It is no longer seen as a means to evade regulation but is transforming into a tool for compliant protection of business secrets—neither削弱 regulatory capability nor sacrificing the institution's own strategy security. Specifically, institutional investment and technological focus are migrating towards "programmable privacy." Privacy computing protocols based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and trusted execution environments (TEE) allow institutions to prove their asset solvency and compliance to the outside world without exposing trading strategies and position details, thus striking a balance between transparency and confidentiality. Meanwhile, "compliant privacy pools" similar to the dark pool trading mechanism in traditional financial markets are forming on-chain. These liquidity pools hide transaction details from the public but grant viewing permissions to regulatory nodes, enabling large-scale institutional capital to complete low-impact, high-efficiency trade execution in DeFi, seen as the "last mile" solution for institutional capital entering the on-chain financial system. Privacy is not a negation of the transparent spirit of blockchain but an upgrade for the institutional era. Future on-chain finance will no longer单一维度 pursue "everyone sees everything," but will, under compliance premises, properly hide what should not be seen. This privacy capability is transforming from a边缘需求 to the infrastructure determining whether institutional capital can truly go on-chain.
The Rise of the On-Chain Compliance赛道
In the future, as AI agents大规模接管 on-chain interactions, the traditional financial compliance system faces崩溃 risk. Multiple institutions predict that by 2026, daily on-chain interaction counts will have grown exponentially, with over 45% of transactions initiated by non-human entities. Facing tens of thousands of high-frequency machine transactions per second, the traditional KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering) review model relying on "human wave tactics" may completely fail. Institutions cannot hire enough compliance officers to handle this throughput. Therefore, the focus of compliance is shifting from "post-event accountability" to "code-level blocking." The new generation of compliance architecture requires embedding regulatory rules into smart contracts, achieving millisecond-level automated risk control. This is not only a regulatory requirement but also a prerequisite for the safe entry of institutional capital into DeFi. CipherOwl introduces an AI-driven on-chain audit and compliance layer focused on on-chain forensics and transaction tracking. It uses AI-assisted analytical tools to identify money laundering risks and illicit fund flows, providing necessary security and due diligence tools for institutional investors and regulatory departments. Its SR3 tech stack, through screening, reasoning, reporting, and research, utilizes large language models (LLM) to parse complex on-chain transaction graphs, automatically identifying money laundering risks or sanctioned entities. Furthermore, CipherOwl provides API interfaces, allowing trading agents on Hyperion to query the compliance score of a counterparty address millisecond-level before executing a trade. If the risk is too high, the smart contract will automatically拒绝 interaction. This makes regulatory rules no longer a事后 punishment but code constraints embedded in the transaction process. For Wall Street institutions wishing to enter DeFi in 2026, CipherOwl is an essential compliance middleware.
IV. DeFi Active Intelligent Services and Prediction Markets
The open finance revolution that erupted in 2020 shook the blockchain industry. Its elegant AMM and permissionless特性描绘着 the future potential of Crypto finance.
DeFi 3.0 Active Intelligent Services: Intent-Based Kinetic Finance
We believe DeFi is undergoing a transition from DeFi 1.0 (passive smart contracts) to DeFi 3.0 (active intelligent services). If the core of the 2020 DeFi Summer was "democratization of asset issuance," then the 2026 transformation is led by "active巡游 of capital." The participation logic of institutional capital is evolving from单纯的 RWA to "strategy on-chain," executed by customized institutional-grade Agents for 7*24 programmatic market making and risk control. The market is abandoning the old model of "specified paths." Data shows that the monthly trading volume of CoW Swap, based on the "Solver" model, has常态化突破 $3 billion, proving the overwhelming advantage of intent-centric approaches in liquidity movement. Investment logic is shifting from general-purpose DeFAI terminals to vertical-scenario autonomous agents. Compared to general Chat UIs facing落地瓶颈, vertical Agents深耕 in yield optimization and liquidity management possess complete closed-loop execution capabilities and verifiable cash flow能力,掌握 the underlying pricing power of the agent economy. In terms of investment, we believe the trading paradigm is shifting from "human-machine interaction (H2M)" to "machine-machine interaction (M2M)." Given that AI large models (LLM) cannot directly parse complex Solidity bytecode, the market urgently needs to build a DeFi adapter layer. By introducing standards like MCP (Model Context Protocol), heterogeneous protocols are encapsulated into standardized, semantic "toolkits," enabling AI to call financial services like APIs. Under this architecture, assets evolve into "intelligent packages" that automatically seek yield, and the core metric shifts from TVL (Total Value Locked) to TVV (Total Value Velocity).
Prediction Markets: Global Information Infrastructure in 2026
We believe, in this era of high signal-to-noise ratio information overload, prediction markets are not just gaming platforms but high-resolution, high-timeliness "truth oracles." In October 2025, the compliant platform Kalshi,凭借 its CLOB architecture, with a 60% market share and $850 million in weekly trading volume, overtook Polymarket. Furthermore, market open interest (OI) rebounded to $500-600 million, signaling the entry of long-term non-speculative capital. Investment should focus on projects that can solve the capital utilization problem at the protocol layer: Polymarket's NegRisk mechanism, by automatically converting "NO" shares into mutually exclusive "YES" combinations, improved the capital efficiency of multi-outcome markets by 29 times and contributed 73% of the platform's arbitrage profits; Kalshi's "collateral return" releases the capital占用 of hedging positions. Whoever can make capital turn faster will capture liquidity. Polymarket's strategy of extremely low fees (0-0.01%) to seize liquidity is essentially building a data factory, ultimately selling "sentiment indicators" to institutions through ICE (parent company of NYSE)'s $2 billion investment intent and channels—this data narrative supports its $12 billion valuation. In contrast, Kalshi uses its compliance moat to maintain a high fee of about 1.2% and adopts an "embedded" expansion strategy, converting 400k monthly active users by embedding into Robinhood. Myriad also captured 30k active trading users by embedding into the Decrypt media stream, proving that the embedded model has lower customer acquisition costs than独立 Apps. The legal battle over regulatory归属权 is the biggest variable in this赛道. The core conflict is whether prediction markets are "commodities" under CFTC jurisdiction or "gambling" under state jurisdiction. Kalshi chose the "federal优先" path, holding a CFTC DCM license, attempting to use federal law's exclusive jurisdiction to override state laws, but this also subjects it to legal challenges from at least 8 state gaming commissions. This compliant status, while bringing strong pricing power (e.g., a 1.2% fee premium), also comes with huge legal costs. On the other end, Polymarket chose the "offshore规避" path, using DeFi architecture and geo-blocking to avoid U.S. jurisdiction but constantly facing threats from SEC long-arm jurisdiction and ISP bans in EU countries. OKX Ventures believes future investment opportunities集中在 the following three directions:
- Go long on middleware: Focus on underlying middleware (e.g., Azuro) and specialized oracles (e.g., Pyth, EigenLayer AVS). They are not restricted by a single regulatory jurisdiction and can capture the value generated by all front-end applications, making them the highest risk-reward "infrastructure bets."
- Find embedded traffic入口: The customer acquisition cost for独立 prediction market Apps is extremely high. Focus on projects developing Telegram Bots or modularly embedding prediction markets into news/social platforms*. Such projects can reach users with zero friction and have stronger potential for viral爆发.
- Arbitrage opportunities in vertical赛道: Avoid the通用 political/macro markets where a duopoly has formed, and look for leaders in vertical赛道 like sports and high-frequency crypto assets. The sports赛道 has a huge product gap due to the complexity of parlay functions, and high-frequency crypto prediction is a刚需 for DeFi traders. These two areas尚未出现 absolute rulers.
V. Conclusion
Looking ahead to 2026, we predict the industry's focus will shift from "supply of network capacity" to "release of asset效能." We will no longer仅仅关注 the storage and confirmation capabilities of the ledger but will focus on the velocity, intelligence, and settlement efficiency of on-chain capital flow. We define this as the "Kinetic Finance" era. This is a macro shift from "assets on-chain" to "economy on-chain." Under this new paradigm, traditional financial boundaries are dissolving. OKX Ventures believes that 2026 will be a key inflection point for the crypto industry to shed speculative bubbles and return to value creation. Those projects that can use code to solve real-world trust costs and circulation efficiency will become the cornerstone of the new era. We are firmly optimistic about this transformation and will continue to bet on those foundational projects that can use code to reduce trust costs and enhance capital efficiency. At the singularity of deep integration between the digital and the real, whoever defines the velocity of asset flow and the boundaries of truth will掌握 the pricing power of the new era.
