Coinbase at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Expansion in Focus

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ:COIN) presented its strategic outlook at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. The discussion, led by CEO Brian Armstrong and CFO Alesia Haas, highlighted both opportunities and challenges, focusing on regulatory developments, revenue diversification, and technological advancements. Despite potential hurdles, Coinbase emphasized its commitment to profitability and its position as a leader in the crypto industry.

Key Takeaways

• Coinbase is focused on regulatory clarity in the U.S., which could expand the crypto market.
• The company is diversifying revenue streams beyond trading fees to include stablecoins, staking, and more.
• Coinbase aims to become an "Everything Exchange," supporting multiple asset classes.
• The acquisition of Deribit is expected to enhance derivatives offerings.
• Coinbase remains committed to being EBITDA positive in all market conditions.

Financial Results

• Crypto derivatives trading reached $1 trillion on Coinbase’s platform in Q2.
• Institutional custody and prime financing hit all-time highs.
• Lending activities exceeded $1 billion in average loans for institutional clients.
• The Deribit acquisition is projected to add $10 million in operating expenses in Q3, after generating $30 million in July transaction revenue.
• Revenue diversification allows for more predictable financial performance.

Operational Updates

• Over 250 institutions are utilizing Coinbase’s infrastructure for various services.
• Retail customers are increasingly engaged in non-trading activities like payments and earning interest.
• DeFi lending has seen $1 billion in Bitcoin pledged as collateral.
• The self-custodial Base App has 1.1 million people on the waitlist.
• The launch of a retail DEX has expanded the number of assets on the platform significantly.

Future Outlook

• Coinbase envisions becoming a leading global exchange for all asset classes, including crypto and tokenized equities.
• The company is working with the SEC to launch tokenized equities, aiming for international expansion and 24/7 trading.
• Infrastructure solutions are being provided to major non-crypto-native companies.
• There is a focus on expanding the lending book through various partnerships and services.
• Despite a heavy investment year, Coinbase is committed to maintaining EBITDA positivity.

Q&A Highlights

• Decentralized exchanges (DEX) are designed to offer access to a wide range of assets with user-friendly experiences.
• 75% of crypto trading volume is in derivatives, with Coinbase being the first U.S.-regulated exchange to offer perpetual futures contracts.
• Lending is facilitated through DeFi protocols, emphasizing the company’s trusted brand.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: All right, let’s get started here. Good morning. For those who don’t know me, I’m James Yaro. I cover brokers, crypto, and investment banks in Goldman Sachs Research. With us, we have Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder of Coinbase, and Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase. Brian founded Coinbase in 2012, and Alesia joined him in 2018. They built one of the key leading crypto exchange and infrastructure businesses. Thanks so much for joining us. Before we get started, I’d like to remind you that during today’s call, the company may make forward-looking statements. Actual results may vary materially from today’s statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in Coinbase’s SEC filings. Our discussion today will also include references to certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the shareholder letter on the company’s investor relations website. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for, GAAP measures. With that passed, let’s start with the big picture one. We’ve seen tremendous regulatory changes this year in Congress, as well as across a variety of regulatory agencies, and we’re still waiting on the Senate to address the Clarity Act. If we get the Clarity Act finalized, is that all we need from a regulatory perspective to see the world adopt crypto more broadly and start to move more on-chain, or do we need other changes in your view?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, thanks for having us. The short answer is yes. If we get the Clarity Act passed, that is a strong foundation for crypto. Just to zoom out and remind everybody, the Genius Act passed earlier this year. This is providing regulatory clarity around stablecoins. The Clarity Act that just got through the House and is now another version of it being debated in the Senate right now is for market structure, which is all the non-stablecoin crypto assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. The combination of these really creates a foundation that we can build this entire industry on. I think it dramatically increases the total addressable market of crypto. It furthers this idea that we’ve been saying for a long time, which is that crypto is going to be eating financial services.

It’s really updating the financial system in all kinds of ways, not just trading, but now payments is the second really big category. We’re also seeing capital formation and these other things coming into picture with tokenized equities, and we can talk about that all in a moment. The regulatory picture could not be better from, say, a year ago, right? It’s not just that we’ve gotten legislation now passed with Genius and hopefully Clarity is making good progress here later this year. It’s also that the U.S. has a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The regulators, like at the SEC that we’re working with, are actually embracing this industry instead of trying to curtail it. We actually have executive orders on a continuous basis coming out that are clarifying these rules. The lack of clarity was being weaponized in the past. It couldn’t be really a better environment.

I think where the U.S. is leading, we’re seeing the rest of the G20 follow. In the past, we saw Europe had MECA legislation. There were, like, Singapore had something interesting. There were pockets of the world that were embracing crypto, where the prior administration, the U.S., was really kind of fighting against it. Now that the U.S. is leaning in, every other G20 country has a little bit of fear of missing out, and they’re trying to race to catch up. It’s really hard to understate the importance of this regulatory clarity siren that we now have in our business. Coinbase is going to be the leader in this as the most trusted brand, but we’re also going to provide the infrastructure to power a lot of the companies and banks and payment service providers and fintechs that are now coming in.

We can talk a little bit about that later, but that’s a big growth area for us.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: Excellent. I do want to touch on all the areas that you’re investing in, but maybe we can just start with a little bit of the core business, the trading business. How do you think about the growth prospects and activity trends of your two key consumer customers, which are institutional and retail traders? How would you characterize the level of risk appetite and perhaps activity levels?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, so both institutions and retail are leaning in right now in crypto, and I’ll give you a couple specific examples. I’d say the risk appetite, it’s always been there to some degree, but I think they’re willing not just to put, say, 1% of their portfolio in crypto now. It’s going to like see 5%, 10%, 20%. It’s an important asset class. It’s part of every diversified portfolio now as regulatory clarity emerges, and in some ways, that really reduces the risk. A couple of specific examples I’ll go through, starting with the institutional side. Crypto derivatives are growing enormously. We saw $1 trillion of crypto derivatives trading on our platform in Q2, a big growth area. We saw all-time highs for custody for institutions. We saw an all-time high for our prime financing business, which is a new area of growth.

We continue to power over 80% of the ETFs in terms of custody. That’s Coinbase powering that infrastructure underneath, which is really great. Lots of adoption on the institutional side. I should mention we now have over 250 institutions that are using Coinbase infrastructure. That’s custody, payments, trading, staking. There’s a bundle of services that they can use and power their business. That’s a big growth area for us. Now on the retail side, we’re similarly seeing a lot of adoption. I’ll give you just one or a couple of stats that maybe paint the picture here. The majority of our retail customers are now doing something other than trading on our platform. Trading was the initial use case. The majority of them are now doing some other type of activity with crypto, whether that’s payments, earning yield and interest on their assets or rewards.

They’re using things like Coinbase Card, where they can get 4% back in Bitcoin rewards on Coinbase Card. They’re doing staking. They’re doing lots of things now. This ties into this theme I mentioned earlier about crypto eating financial services. Retail customers are starting, and some of them are starting to think about Coinbase as their primary financial account, right? A bank replacement. I’ll talk more about this later, but as we hold more crypto than any other company in the world, by quite a large margin. Because we are the most trusted brand, people store their crypto with us. They’re willing to use more and more products. Wherever their assets are stored, they’re more likely to use the products that are connected into those deposits. It makes this really nice retention flywheel. It makes the product very sticky.

One or two other kind of stats on the retail side in terms of adoption. We also are seeing really good adoption of DeFi lending and borrowing on our platform. This is another big use case. We have about $1 billion of Bitcoin now pledged as collateral to borrow money on our platform. Crypto is now updating the borrowing and lending markets. The last thing I’ll say is we launched this retail product on the self-custodial side called the Base App. We have 1.1 million people on the waitlist for this. There’s been a lot of excitement about that product. We’ll talk more about what that is later. These are just some of the stats that help paint the picture of institutional and retail adoption right now.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: Really, really clear there. Maybe just on the competitive backdrop, you talked about capital formation. You alluded to it a second ago. That’s clearly evolving rather fast. We’re seeing companies come public. Maybe you can just set the stage for how you see the competitive landscape today and perhaps how it’s evolved over the past year.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah. OK, so we think crypto is updating all types of financial services. Capital formation could be a lot more efficient, right? When people go to raise money today for an apartment complex or a startup or a small business or anything that they want to go do, that can be high fees. It can be delays. It can be a lot of back and forth with lawyers. It’s a bunch of wire transfers. We are thinking about how we can make this very simple for any of our customers to come in and say they want to raise money. We help them register a crypto security with the SEC. We can then market it to our large user base of customers that are accredited and institutions. Via USD Coin, the money can just arrive into their account, right, for a much lower fee.

We could probably do it at one-tenth of the fee or something like that of how it’s happening in traditional ways. That’s a very exciting idea for a lot of businesses. How can we just make that more efficient? This also, I think, existing public companies are going to get their stocks tokenized and be traded on-chain as well. We can talk about that if you’d like as well, how we’re actively working toward bringing on-chain securities.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: OK. One of the existential questions, not existential, but important questions that I get is around the value of having the exchange and custody under one roof. Maybe you could just talk about how that supports the Coinbase offering versus others.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, we should have Alesia jump in.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: The TradFi person gets to jump into this one?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: OK, great. You know, it’s so funny when you ask that question, James, because we never, as a company, set forth and said we are building a custodian, we are building an exchange. What we really thought about is we are building the next generation of financial products. We are enabling our customers to buy crypto, to store it safely—these are bearer instruments—to transact in numerous ways. What that integration provides is a way to offer simplicity to our customers, speed, and efficiency. The historic separation of these products was really driven by regulatory requirements around risk. That risk just doesn’t exist in crypto, i.e., settlement risk. When you’re settling instantaneously on-chain, you aren’t worried about counterparty risk about, "Brian, are you going to show up with your asset if I want to trade with you?

Let’s create another counterparty in this equation to provide trust." Trust in crypto is just a very different concept when you’re trusting blockchains and math. What we are building is next generation, speed, lower cost, more liquidity. By doing so, we’re providing a better product experience to our customers through creating that integration between custody and exchange.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: I think this is just one more example of how crypto can update the financial system. In some cases, there are middlemen who don’t need to exist. If there’s real-time settlement, maybe you don’t need these middlemen, right? It just makes that faster, cheaper, more efficient, better products for customers.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: Without the risk.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, makes sense. OK, let’s turn to growth. There’s a lot of growth. There’s a lot of stuff going on at Coinbase right now and across the industry. What stuck out to me was what you talked about in the last earnings call around the Everything Exchange. Maybe you could just give us a little more insight, expand a little bit on the vision there. Yeah, we believe that every asset class is coming on-chain and that we have an opportunity to become one of the largest exchanges in the world, not just for crypto, but every asset class. That means crypto, but it also means stocks, prediction markets, commodities, and debt. It means.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: Content coins.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Content coins, yeah. We’ll talk about that in a minute. This is a new category that’s coming out where there’s millions of crypto assets people are going to trade. You know we’ve started this journey already this year where we launched what we call retail DEX, which is decentralized exchange. We went from having a couple hundred assets on our platform to many thousands. This will eventually be millions. It’s basically through our brokerage interface. You can route the trade to, in the past, a centralized exchange, which we still do for many assets. Now we can route it to a decentralized exchange. It’s really kind of grown the number of assets we have on platform. That’s already live today. We also launched perpetual futures in the U.S. We’ll talk more about that. Perpetual futures are a massive category for trading volume.

We just acquired Deribit, which was the leading options trading platform in crypto. We’re adding options into the mix. The two big ones that are on the horizon here are tokenized equities and prediction markets. We think these are also big categories that many people are going to want to trade. There’s product-market fit, I think, for prediction markets now where people are treating it as almost like it’s an asset class you can trade, but it’s also kind of an alternative to the news. You can find out what’s going to happen in the world. We’re actively integrating all of these into our product. We want Coinbase to be a one-stop shop. You can come and trade any asset class in the world. This is what our customers tell us when we talk to them.

They say, "Man, I’d really rather just do all trading on Coinbase because it’s faster and cheaper and more efficient. But I really wish you could add this one more thing." That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to bring all these asset classes on-chain into the Everything Exchange.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: OK, let’s dig in on a couple of those that you just touched on. Maybe just starting with the decentralized exchange. I think, correct me if I’m wrong, the point there is that you’ll be able to have more assets on the platform. Maybe you could expand a little bit on that. Also, maybe just touch a little bit on monetization. Obviously, it’s a little bit different there. Maybe also on the derivative side, just update us on your organic aspirations in derivatives. Maybe we can come back to Deribit on a subsequent question.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, OK, so for the decentralized exchange, I think some people might, if you’re not actively in crypto every day, you might say, "I don’t know. I’ve heard of Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum and Solana, but what other coins are there? Do we really need millions of coins?" I think the thing that’s started to happen is that people are now creating coins for like every post on social media, right? Every song on Spotify, every video on YouTube. You can quickly see a world here where every piece of digital content is a coin in this new world. People are going to have a market for that, and they’re trading it. It’s allowing content creators to have a direct relationship with their audience. This is kind of the frontier of crypto where it’s going. There’s literally, you know, millions of these things coming out every month at this point.

Some of them are small. It’s kind of like the early days of YouTube or the internet, where a lot of them are silly and they don’t make sense. It looks like a toy or some silly cat video or whatever. The best content creators also are coming in, and the top 1% of content is interesting and unique. It’s what is allowing these content creators to have more direct monetization. We are now moving to a model where in the past, every asset that got created had to go through this long, laborious process with a bunch of lawyers to get certified. There was an audit for this and that, and you had to kind of apply to get listed on these centralized exchanges.

We’re now moving to a world where an asset, like let’s say a post comes out from someone on social media, a coin is traded within one second, and it’s live to trade on Coinbase the next second. It’s a little bit more like Google indexing web pages on the internet. There’s just a proliferation of these things happening. Of course, we want to make sure we have appropriate disclosures on all of those. We’re doing a lot of good risk monitoring to make sure some of these that they’re not scams and things like that. We want to make sure we’re protecting customers, giving them the information to make these decisions. We’re quickly moving to a world where there’s going to be millions of these every week. We want our customers to be able to have access to it. That’s the decentralized exchange part.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: I want to stop you just for a second, though. There’s still huge value to our centralized exchange and the assets that we list there. Uniquely on a centralized exchange, we can provide the fiat to crypto on-ramps. There’s lower latency. We have deeper liquidity in some cases. We also can attach other value-added products and services where we can do lending on top of that. We can provide staking. We will continue to add assets also to our centralized exchange when they are of sufficient size, when we see demand, when we see the need for the deep liquidity and the lower latency trading. The decentralized exchange is giving speed to the long tail. There’s going to be a dual strategy of adding assets to our platform. The goal here, quite candidly, is for customers to not really see the difference.

We want these to be very, very easy-to-use experiences, whether you’re doing decentralized. The product itself will just be routing your trade to the appropriate venue for the asset that you’re seeking to have access to.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, that’s exactly right. The amount that you asked about the monetization, it’s really similar across both. From a brokerage point of view, the fee is actually the same, right? Whether it’s routing to the centralized exchange or the decentralized exchange, I think the monetization will be similar. Anything you want to add on that?

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: Just to be very specific, the trading fee is the same for centralized. We also have a spread for decentralized. There is no spread.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Basically, the exchange fee, you keep centralized, and the decentralized, it stays within these DEX. OK, perfect. Sorry, I know I threw a lot at you with that question. Maybe just on the organic derivatives, aspirations across product, geography. Oh.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: On the derivative side, the organic piece?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah. OK, so just to zoom out on the derivative side, you know, 75% of all crypto trading volume is in derivatives, a little bit like in traditional financial services. There’s a majority of trading volume there. 90% of that is, unfortunately, offshore, outside the U.S. That’s a relic of the past regulatory environment that was hostile in the U.S. until recently. That’s now changing. Coinbase is actually the first U.S.-regulated exchange to launch perpetual style futures contracts in the U.S. We launched it just recently. It’s growing very nicely. I mentioned the trillion dollars of volume in Q2, which is a really great start. On the organic adoption side, we’re seeing really strong growth. On the inorganic side, we acquired the number one options platform for crypto, Deribit. We’re now integrating that into the exchange as well. On the exchange, you’ll be able to do spot trading, derivatives, futures.

Every type of trading strategy will be there in one. We believe there’s certain synergies to that. People who are trading futures want to hedge with options. By bringing these all together, it’s every asset class, but it’s also every trading strategy with spot, the futures, derivatives, and options. We’re bringing it all together into this Everything Exchange, which we think will be really powerful. The liquidity begets more liquidity. Coinbase is kind of the only company doing this in a trusted, compliant way. It took off initially offshore. Folks were kind of playing fast and loose with the rules. We did it the right way with regulatory clarity and the right licenses. It’s now coming onshore in the U.S. in a regulated way.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: We’re also adding margin on top. It will provide customers the unique ability to trade cross-margin across all of these asset classes, whether it’s spot, futures, and options. We are building the types of assets underneath, but then the layers of value-added products on top of those asset classes.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: OK, so maybe one more. Is this market, the derivative markets in crypto started with futures. Options have sort of actually lagged. I guess maybe that’s also happening in traditional markets where you’re seeing more retail options, you know, zero DTE, for example, taking off. Maybe you could just talk about why futures came first and your aspirations for options. I imagine that perhaps one of the reasons you would want to have Deribit is because they have an options business, and you could roll that out in the U.S. Is that a potential as well?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, I think perpetual futures was just a better product. It wasn’t allowed initially in the U.S. Traders really latched onto it. It was a true innovation that happened, I think, first in crypto. It got enormous volume overseas. We went and did the legwork in D.C. and with the regulators to get perpetual style contracts approved in the U.S. Now we’re seeing that finally come to the U.S. I think that it was just prohibited from a regulatory point of view. We had to kind of do a lot of education and policy work in the U.S. to get it allowed here.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: It still makes up the majority of global trading, though. Perpetual futures and derivatives is the international market. Options is roughly 3% of the total market. However, it is still a critical add-on product. This is giving us the ability to add on additional product and capability in the spirit of the Everything Exchange. Deribit, as an acquisition specifically, we shared an outlook within our Q2. When we closed the acquisition, it generated about $30 million of transaction revenue in the month of July. We didn’t close it until mid-August, and when you look at our Q3 financials, we’ll only have revenue from mid-August through September. Just to give you an indication of the size and scale that it has the potential for, we’ll see about $10 million of OpEx added within the third quarter. We think this is a very attractive financial platform for us to add.

As Brian said, there’s synergies. There’s adding the ability for cross-margin. We think this really will accelerate our overall growth in derivatives, both outside the U.S., but also eventually in the U.S., because we have ambition to bring options to the U.S. over time.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, it was a very creative acquisition. $30 million of revenue in July and about $10 million of OpEx. That was.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: In the third quarter.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, it was a great addition for that.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: Excellent. OK, let’s turn to all the other areas. You know, we only got through trading thus far. You have so many other things going on. Let’s talk about tokenized equities, the build-up. There are a lot of players who are trying to build up some version of that. Maybe just your thoughts preliminarily on how you might structure your offering. I guess the important question of, do you plan to allow customers to take their assets off your platform, maybe day one and maybe over time? What about on the regulatory side? Do we need from the SEC to have that in the U.S.?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, tokenized equities are really exciting. We’ve been working closely with the SEC task force on this. A number of people are interested in this, but really no one has launched tokenized equities yet. A lot of it is going to come down to execution. Just to share a little bit about why we’re excited about it, there’s a lot of people overseas, especially who want access to the U.S. equities markets. Wealthy people sometimes can get brokerage accounts overseas, but there’s a large segment of the world that wants access to this that doesn’t really have easy access. I think there’s a big international expansion component to it. There’s the ability to launch new types of markets like perpetual futures with tokenized equities. 24/7 trading can become even more common. Fractions of shares, there’s interesting novel governance things that may happen over time.

We don’t know exactly how this will play out. Our hunch is that there’s a large complementary or unmet demand for tokenized equities, similarly to how with stablecoins, people sometimes, a few years back, said, if you tokenize a U.S. dollar, don’t we already have digital payments? What’s the point of it? It turned out stablecoins have become this massive market. We think that something really powerful could happen with tokenized equities as well. We’re in the process of building this now. We’re working with traditional broker-dealers to get it off the ground and have access to trading. We’re also building the ability to mint and burn these tokens that are backed by a share of that stock that we’ll be a custodian of. You asked about whether they would be allowed on and off the platform. Yes, that is the goal.

These should be crypto tokens just like USD Coin or Ethereum or Bitcoin. It’s important that they participate on these open protocols in a global way. We’d like to enable that. That’s a little bit about where this is going and why we’re excited about it. I think that tokenized equities could be a really big category. It’s just one more piece of the Everything Exchange, crypto updating the financial system.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: Great. OK, another thing that I think you’ve been very focused on recently, we’ve seen some announcements around these partnerships. If I were to summarize, it seems like you’re providing various forms of infrastructure solutions to these non-crypto-native companies. Why do these brand-name companies choose Coinbase, in your view? Do you think that if, as they become more acquainted with crypto and the ecosystem, would they eventually bring things in-house or stay with Coinbase?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, so I think they’re choosing Coinbase because we’re the most trusted brand, and we’re storing more crypto than any other company in the world. That’s a really strong signal of trust, cybersecurity. We’ve been having to build this infrastructure ourselves over the last 12, 13 years to power our own products. Just like Amazon did with AWS, we’ve decided to make this infrastructure available to other companies as well, and they’ve really embraced it. I mentioned earlier, we’ve got over 250 institutions that are now integrating or have already actually integrated into this crypto as a service infrastructure that we’ve built. These are companies like PNC Bank, JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock. It’s also fintech companies like PayPal and Stripe. They’re coming to Coinbase when they want crypto custody, trading, payments, staking, financing on-chain.

It’s a one-stop shop where they can have this bundle of different crypto services through one company that is also a public company with a strong balance sheet and is going to be around for the long term. I think we have a right to win many of these deals versus smaller startups. I mean, how is JPMorgan Chase or BlackRock going to sort of bet their custody infrastructure on a small startup, right? They want to work with the largest, most trusted company in crypto. I think we’ve got a real shot to make that the winning infrastructure platform indefinitely. It allows Coinbase to not only, with our first-party products, become the best place for people to go have their primary financial account, but ultimately, to update the financial system, we need thousands of companies all over the world to integrate into this new economy.

That allows Coinbase to play in that value chain for these thousands of companies all over the world.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: OK, one other area, which is just your aspirations in lending. You touched on a few different areas where you’re growing your lending book, whether it’s margin, whether it’s prime brokerage. Maybe you could just talk about your aspirations there. The capital intensity, obviously, is one element of lending. How do you think about that?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Do you want to start on this one?

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: Sure. We do it in two flavors. For our institutional customers, we are lending directly off our balance sheet. Trading on margin, being able to offer what we call trade finance, i.e., giving our institutions the ability to instantly buy crypto, yet have their cash payments settle hours or days later, are all important parts to facilitate trading for our institutional customers. We had over $1 billion of average loans in the second quarter, so we are seeing that scale nicely. In part, we raised additional capital through the Convert this quarter to give more financing capability to our business to continue to grow that. Our ambition is to build that into a two-sided order book, i.e., enable our institutions to opt into lending their own assets and rehypothecate those institutions’ capital for additional institutional lending.

We consider our own corporate balance sheet bootstrapping the growth of the overall institutional financing business. By contrast, going over to the consumer side, what we’re doing there is really leaning into decentralized finance and the protocols that are enabling consumer lending. The wonderful thing that we did last quarter was we partnered with Morpho. Morpho is a decentralized lender on Base, and we have plugged that into our retail app, enabling our retail customers to take the Bitcoin that they had within our platform and lock that into the Morpho smart contract and receive USDC loan proceeds. We are facilitating lending through DeFi. This comes with a number of disclosures. This is not lending on our platform. This comes with risk of the Morpho protocol and lending itself, but these are all secured collateralized loans within their protocol.

Think about, again, our platform is connecting the best of both first-party solutions and third-party solutions and being sort of an introducer to the lending protocols. That’s how we’re growing loans for customers on the retail side.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: That now has about $1 billion of Bitcoin pledged as collateral into that. It just launched earlier this year.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: Earlier this year.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, it’s been growing really fast.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: There are so many other areas of growth. I do want to touch on just a few little areas of the P&L, given this is an investor conference.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: I think the big picture here people should take away is that we have multiple revenue streams now that are coming into clarity, right? Like, it started with trading. We saw the rapid adoption of stablecoins and staking. We’re now seeing financing as a nice line item, right? Custody and Coinbase Card, and like Coinbase, these infrastructure services I mentioned, right? We’re seeing a diversified set of revenue streams that’s really allowing us to be more predictable than just what we would see from trading fees alone.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: Makes sense. OK, so last year’s call, you indicated this will be a heavy investment year. Makes sense with all this growth. You did also do the convertible rules, suggesting that the investment will continue. Maybe just help us think through the longer-term investment spend, how this has changed, given how the opportunities evolved, and beyond just the next quarter.

Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase: We’ve committed to be EBITDA positive in all market environments. When we think about setting our expense goals over the year, we’re looking at what the revenue opportunities are, looking at what our growth opportunities are, and our unique abilities to add product. 2025 did lend itself to be a significant investment year because we saw the regulatory tailwinds that Brian spoke to earlier, because we saw the opportunity for stablecoin growth, because we saw the opportunity for this product expansion as well. We said this on other earnings calls. The playbook that we had for international growth, we saw the countries that we launched in 2023 generating revenue that then covered their direct expense. It gave us confidence to then open up the next cohort of countries and start building the foundation for additional international growth.

All of that fact pattern lent itself to 2025 being a significant investment year. We do not give outlooks on expenses over a long period of time because we’re building our business to be nimble and to be able to adapt and adjust to the market conditions that we find ourselves in. We did take the hard lessons in 2022 and 2023, where scaling too quickly with the volatility of crypto led to some outcomes we would choose to avoid going forward. We’re very thoughtful about building fixed expense versus variable, making sure that we have playbooks to ensure that we can continue with our profitability targets. The other thing I would just say, James, is that while 2025 was a big investment year, Brian shared publicly at the start of the year, we looked at 1,000 heads in the U.S. That is big growth.

Historically, when we’ve taken significant growth, we want to digest it for a while. At this point in time, we wouldn’t see 2026 being at the same level. Although if the markets continue with the nice tailwinds we see, we will continue to grow. Maybe that’s not at that same pace.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: Very clear. OK, there are so many other questions I have, but we only have two minutes. I just want to, Brian, give you the chance to touch on all the things and sum it up. You have a lot of irons in the fire. What do you think investors are underappreciating about the Coinbase opportunities? Anything big that we haven’t touched on?

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Yeah, we didn’t even get a chance to chat about the Base App, which is really setting on the frontier for retail adoption. That’s our self-custodial wallet where we now are introducing all this functionality to make it easier to decentralize social media and messaging third-party apps into one easy-to-use experience. We think that’ll take it from tens of millions of people using self-custodial wallets to hopefully a billion someday. To answer your question, if I zoom out, what’s the big picture I think investors should take away about Coinbase? Number one, we’re seeing regulatory clarity emerge in the U.S. That means it’s going to emerge in the rest of the G20. This dramatically increases the TAM of crypto. I think Coinbase is going to be the leader in that as the most trusted brand.

The second thing I would say is that we now have a diversified set of revenue streams. It’s no longer just primarily a trading business. We have these other revenue streams, which are material, and it allows us to be a more predictable business in how we operate. The third, and maybe the most important, is that we are storing more crypto than any other company in the world. I think assets under custody is actually a really core part of our strategy because we’re the most trusted. People are willing to store their assets with us. What that means is that when it comes time to use crypto for trading, payments, or to get a loan, or to use Coinbase Card or anything, they’re going to use the product where their assets already reside, right?

The more products that we can connect into those deposits, the stickier the product is, the better the user retention, the better our pricing power, right? This is a durable advantage for us over the long term. We have far more crypto under custody than any other company out there in the space. I believe that’s going to be a durable advantage for us.

James Yaro, Analyst, Goldman Sachs Research: Excellent. We’re out of time. Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you so much, Alesia.

Brian Armstrong, Chairman, CEO, and Founder, Coinbase: Thank you.

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