Gate Ventures has outlined five emerging investment verticals that the venture capital firm believes will shape the next phase of blockchain development in 2026.

The December 8 report from the venture arm of cryptocurrency exchange Gate positions 2026 as a critical year when Web3 infrastructure may finally intersect with the fastest-growing sectors of the global economy, creating what the firm describes as “one of the strongest asymmetric investment environments since the beginning of the crypto industry”.

(1) Information Aggregators: A Whole New Sector

Gate Ventures identifies a new class of information aggregators as critical infrastructure for Web3 markets. As activity spreads across data-heavy platforms like Polymarket, Hyperliquid, and Kalshi, the challenge has shifted from accessing data to interpreting fragmented signals across prediction markets, governance feeds, and trading flows.

These aggregators synthesize disparate event data, standardize odds and sentiment, and combine on-chain activity with social context to deliver actionable intelligence. The rise of autonomous AI agents only serves to amplify the increasing importance of this vertical.

The firm compares this upcoming infrastructure to what Bloomberg ultimately achieved for traditional financial markets.

Block319 concurs with Gate Ventures in that information aggregation could become a highly promising investment vertical within the blockchain industry. Very few products have truly achieved product-market-fit and usage beyond incentive programs, and those that have rely disproportionately on external, real-world data-provisioning.

(2) Borderless Payments and Onchain Settlement

Gate Ventures’ second vertical addresses limitations in existing fintech infrastructure. While neobanks did improve the user experience, they remain constrained by older systems including ACH, SWIFT, and other unfit pieces of legacy infrastructure.

Blockchain networks now enable continuous, borderless value transfer at scale. Stablecoins function as global settlement assets, while decentralized liquidity layers and smart-contract routers provide programmable foreign exchange between currencies such as USDC and stablecoin representations of the Japanese yen.

Ultimately, the platforms and organizations that bring these novel advantages to the world at scale stand to benefit massively from the inevitable overhaul of legacy systems, defended by executives and industry leaders whose opinions will fade to nothing over the next two decades.

“As an open, permissionless system, it becomes a universal settlement layer bridging real-world commerce with on-chain economies, not a replication of neobanks, but the payment and FX infrastructure fintech could never deliver.”

(3) Robotics Infrastructure

It’s no secret that companies like 1X, Skild, and Unitree have made rapid advances in the world of robotics. But Gate Ventures has identified a critical gap in the necessary infrastructure:

“As robots shift from scripted machines to autonomous embodied agents, a critical gap emerges: different models and manufacturers cannot communicate or coordinate through a shared, neutral layer. This creates demand for an open, cross-device operating layer — something Web3 can provide.”, reads Gate Ventures’ report.

Blockchain technology addresses this through on-chain identities that enable robots to identify themselves without vendor control, smart-contract registries for publishing capabilities, and tamper-proof logs providing verifiable accountability.

Beyond coordination, autonomous robots require machine-native financial infrastructure to pay for power, data, and compute resources. Traditional finance proves incompatible with robotic systems that cannot open accounts or pass know-your-customer checks.

Web3 technology provides robots with direct economic agency through wallets and global micropayments without intermediaries. Standards like x402 enable automated service payments, while smart contracts add escrow, conditional payments, and reputation systems, creating a programmable financial layer purpose-built for machine-to-machine commerce.

“Crypto becomes not an optional add-on, but the only viable settlement infrastructure for autonomous robotic ecosystems.”

(4) Institutional DeFi & ‘Meta-Yield’ Products

As centralized/decentralized finance infrastructure matures, Gate Ventures foresees trading, lending, and yield generation converging into unified risk platforms. 

“Next-generation venues integrate perps with lending markets and vaults so that collateral can generate income while backing leveraged positions, and a shared margin system across spot, perps, and options makes these platforms functionally resemble a 24/7 multi-asset prime broker.”

The firm, however, points out that onchain returns remained spread across a plethora of key platforms and primitives. Gate Ventures believes that these scattered elements can be treated as ‘Atoms’ and packaged into ‘Meta-Yield Products’...

“Aggregated strategies can pool market-structure income (funding, basis, MEV, FX spreads), stack base yields with hedging and arbitrage layers, and use prediction markets and AI agents as allocation signals — turning fragmented sources into structured, transparent on-chain fixed-income products”

Block319 identifies this as perhaps the most ambitious of Gate Ventures’ forecasts, but also the most promising in terms of potential return. This is, in no small part, due to its intuitive appeal to the swathe of traditional institutions finally allocating serious attention and resources to the blockchain sector.

(5) Crypto Mining x Energy Provision

The final vertical addresses the intersection of energy supply and artificial intelligence computing demand. According to the International Energy Agency, global data center electricity consumption is projected to more than double from 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 to 945 TWh by 2030.

Developing new power supplies faces obstacles including complex grid-connection procedures and lengthy construction cycles. All the while, cryptocurrency mining companies possess abundant energy reserves and have developed efficient cost-management models over the past decade.

These miners typically hold existing power-supply permits, long-term contracts for low-cost electricity, and established infrastructure including substations and cooling systems. 

The result? - Switching equipment from crypto mining to AI computing workloads is technically straightforward.

Already several major mining firms including IREN Limited, Core Scientific, and Hut 8 have expanded into high-performance computing and AI cloud services. 

Gate Ventures notes that most operations are in North America, suggesting miners in Asia-Pacific, Central Asia, and the Middle East hold substantial growth potential as they pursue similar transitions.

Summary: Blockchain Solving Real Problems

The five investment verticals identified by Gate Ventures share a common strategic thread: 

They position blockchain technology as critical infrastructure for the AI-driven economy. 

Each vertical addresses a fundamental coordination problem that traditional centralized systems struggle to solve efficiently, and that blockchain is perfectly suited to solve. 

• Real-time information aggregators create unified intelligence layers from fragmented data. 
• Borderless payment systems eliminate friction in cross-border value transfer. 
• Machine-native financial rails enable autonomous economic activity. 
• Meta-yield platforms consolidate scattered returns. 
• Crypto miners repurpose energy infrastructure for AI compute demand.

The unifying theme is blockchain's structural advantages in liquidity provision, computational coordination, and settlement finality. Gate Ventures' strategy focuses on intersection points where blockchain provides unique solutions to emerging problems, particularly those related to autonomous systems and computational resource allocation.

What is particularly worth noting is that all of Gate Ventures’ key verticals move away from historical common practice amongst crypto-native VCs.

The old practice of deploying into token-focused companies, then exiting amidst airdrop and token-launch fervour is at an end, being replaced by a return to real companies with real revenue. 

Gate Ventures has so far positioned itself well to take advantage of this transition. 

Sources

• Gate Ventures (on Medium): Gate Ventures Vision 2026: Five Frontier Forces Reshaping the Global Flow of Value, Compute, and Intelligence
• International Energy Agency: Energy Demand from AI
• The Block: Bitcoin miner IREN secures more multi-year cloud contracts, including NVIDIA GPU deployments
• Coinbase: Welcome to x402

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