Brian Armstrong, chief executive officer of Coinbase Global Inc., speaks during the Messari Mainnet summit in New York, on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Coinbase is making its biggest push yet to reposition itself as a mainstream trading and financial platform, moving beyond crypto and into the broader retail investing stack as competitors show there’s real money in always-on engagement products.
The digital asset exchange announced Wednesday that it’s rolling out a major slate of new products designed to turn Coinbase into a one-stop financial app, expanding into stocks, more advanced trading, and prediction markets, while doubling down on its on-chain ecosystem and new tools for businesses, developers, and automated financial guidance.
While many of these offerings have been telegraphed for months, Coinbase says the products are now built, and ready to go.
CEO Brian Armstrong is looking to make his platform the place to trade everything.
That includes stocks, a streamlined futures and perpetuals experience, and prediction markets through Kalshi, alongside a tokenization roadmap aimed at eventually bringing more traditional assets on-chain, including equities.
The area of prediction markets, in particular, is quickly getting crowded.
DraftKings has moved to buy its own exchange, FanDuel is teaming up with CME, and Polymarket is entering the U.S. through a newly approved venue. Robinhood, meanwhile, is putting LedgerX at the center of its regulated push.
The defining rivalry in the space remains Kalshi versus Polymarket, regulated rails versus crypto-native liquidity.
Armstrong said the category’s appeal isn’t just trading, but its insight into sentiment, and what people think will happen next on any given topic.
“If you look at things like economic indicators … or elections, people are using prediction markets to try to figure out what is going to happen next month,” Armstrong told CNBC. “Maybe1% of people use it as an asset class to trade, and 99% of people are using it as a way to figure out what’s going to happen — almost like a competitor to traditional media or maybe even entertainment.”
In the company’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts in October, Armstrong showed just how easily prediction market wagers can be manipulated, rattling off several words that were being bet on.
“I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call,” Armstrong said. “And I just want to add here the words bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain, staking and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call.”
Robinhood underscored that shift this week by expanding prediction markets into sports-style contracts that resemble parlays and prop bets, and by touting the category as its fastest-growing business by revenue.
Coinbase is now bringing the same kind of outcome trading into its own ecosystem, but as a part of a much wider bet that the next-generation brokerage is a single app that blends traditional assets, derivatives, and on-chain rails.
Coinbase is pairing the trading expansion with a tokenization roadmap that signals where it wants the platform to go next, bringing more traditional assets on-chain, including equities.
The company is launching Coinbase Tokenize, an institutional stack intended to support real-world asset tokenization.
Armstrong framed the expansion as a bridge to something bigger.
Trading stocks, he said, is “a good first step,” but the real goal is tokenized equities. If Coinbase can get tokenized equity live, he said, it could “democratize access for people over the world,” and unlock new market structure in the U.S., including more robust, professional futures markets tied to equities.
“So this is the starting point,” he said.
The announcement also extends Coinbase’s push to become a provider of on-chain liquidity — not just a venue for listed tokens.
For businesses and developers, Coinbase is widening its platform story beyond retail trading. The company said Coinbase Business is becoming available to eligible customers in the U.S. and Singapore, and it’s rolling out an expanded API suite spanning custody, payments, trading, and stablecoins.
Armstrong’s broader thesis is that crypto isn’t a niche category, it’s an upgrade cycle for the financial system itself.
“Crypto is updating all financial services,” he said, suggesting that every major asset class will move on-chain over time, from prediction markets and equities to commodities, and eventually real-world assets like real estate.
Even the largest asset managers, he said, are signaling they want to migrate funds on-chain, positioning Coinbase as a central platform for that transition.
Coinbase is also introducing “custom stablecoins” for companies that want branded stablecoin rails, and spotlighting x402, a payments standard the company says is meant to make stablecoin payments easier to attach to web requests — including for automated commerce and agent-driven transactions.
The strategic throughline is retention and diversification.
Coinbase already owns a large crypto-native audience, and it wants that customer to stay on its platform for every asset class, even when crypto volumes cool and transaction revenue compresses.
WATCH: What to know about Robinhood’s new prediction market features
