Coinbase Institutional has made its call for next year. In a new 2026 Crypto Market Outlook published on December 19, the firm singles out three arenas it believes will dominate crypto in 2026: perpetual futures, prediction markets and stablecoins tied to payments.
The framing shifts attention away from narrative trades and back toward market plumbing. Bitcoin traded around $87,800 on December 28 while Ether hovered near $2,940, both roughly flat on the day, yet Coinbase is telling clients the real action sits in derivatives, event markets and dollar rails rather than spot price fireworks.
Perpetual futures become the main arena
In the section literally titled “The Next Big Thing,” Coinbase highlights the “composability of crypto derivatives” and describes perpetual futures as moving from a side product to a core DeFi primitive connected to lending, collateral and hedging. That is a notable shift in tone from past cycles where exchanges sold perps as leveraged casino tools for retail flow.
The report lands as data backs the call. Crypto derivatives trading hit almost $85.7 trillion in 2025, or about $265 billion per day, according to CoinGlass figures cited by Cointelegraph. Binance alone cleared roughly $25.1 trillion of that volume, close to 30% of the market, while CME cemented its role on the institutional side of Bitcoin futures. The upshot is simple. Price discovery now lives in perps and options books, not on spot tickers.
Coinbase leans into that reality. The outlook argues that as more retail money trades U.S. equities around the clock, equity perpetuals on crypto venues will attract a new generation of traders who want 24/7 access and margin efficiency without waiting for traditional brokers to catch up. That would pull yet more liquidity into the perp complex and deepen the link between crypto infrastructure and legacy risk markets.
Prediction markets turn into infrastructure
The second pillar in Coinbase’s hierarchy is prediction markets. The report expects volumes to broaden in 2026 and flags the rise of aggregators that sit on top of fragmented venues and route order flow into the best priced contracts. That is not a theoretical idea anymore. On the ground, regulated platform Kalshi and crypto native rival Polymarket already pushed 2025 sector volume into tens of billions of dollars.
A December analysis on Forbes, based on Keyrock and Dune data, put combined 2025 prediction market volume at around $44 billion across Kalshi, Polymarket and smaller venues, with activity skewed toward politics, macro and sports rather than pure degen wagers. Kalshi recently logged weekly turnover above $500 million and captured more than 60% of global volume, according to stats reported by CoinDesk.
Coinbase’s thesis fits that trajectory. If tax rules tilt some U.S. flow away from traditional betting into CFTC style event contracts, liquidity likely concentrates in a handful of regulated and on chain venues plus the aggregators that sit above them. That changes how traders hedge political, macro and even protocol specific risk. It also creates a new source of persistent on chain open interest that behaves more like options exposure than spot holdings.
Stablecoins and payments stay in control
The third sector, and arguably the most mature, is stablecoins linked to payments and settlement. Coinbase writes that stablecoins already sit at the top of crypto use cases and then backs that with a hard number. Its model expects the stablecoin market to reach around $1.2 trillion in total value by the end of 2028, up from the low hundreds of billions today.
“Stablecoins have cemented their position as the number one use case in the crypto ecosystem,” Coinbase wrote in the outlook.
Live data supports the direction of travel. Real time trackers such as Stablecoin.com show aggregate stablecoin value near $280 billion, with Tether and USDC controlling more than 90% of the float. The market briefly crossed $300 billion in October, according to DeFiLlama data cited by multiple outlets, before cooling as broader crypto prices pulled back. CoinDesk’s November stablecoin report still measured total value above $300 billion and recorded monthly on chain volumes near $1.5 trillion.
Regulation now pushes in the same direction. The U.S. Senate already passed a federal stablecoin bill in June that requires fully backed reserves and monthly disclosure, Reuters reported, while Treasury and JPMorgan research both describe paths where stablecoins help drive trillions of dollars of extra demand for short term U.S. debt. Coinbase’s 70 page outlook leans on that policy momentum and frames stablecoins as a payment and settlement rail that sits inside, not outside, dollar finance.
Those rails now touch almost every part of crypto trading. Market makers quote perps in dollar tokens. On chain lenders accept them as base collateral. Cross border payroll, remittances and off exchange settlement all ride on top of them. Coinbase’s message to institutional clients lands cleanly. If you model 2026 around where liquidity, fees and regulatory attention concentrate, you end up in the same three places its outlook highlights: perpetual futures, prediction markets and stablecoin powered payments.
