Coinbase at JPMorgan Conference: Crypto-First Strategy and Growth Prospects

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, Coinbase Global Inc. (NASDAQ:COIN) presented at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. The discussion, led by President and COO Emily Choi and CFO Alicia Haas, highlighted Coinbase’s strategic focus on the crypto ecosystem, regulatory developments, and growth opportunities, while acknowledging the challenges faced in a competitive market.

Key Takeaways

• Coinbase is positioning itself as a leader in the crypto space, emphasizing its proprietary technology and infrastructure for the on-chain economy.
• The acquisition of Derabit and entry into the derivatives market are seen as significant growth opportunities.
• Regulatory tailwinds, including potential stablecoin and market structure bills, could benefit Coinbase.
• Institutional adoption and innovation in crypto payments remain central to Coinbase’s future strategy.

Financial Results

• Market Cap: Coinbase’s market cap rose to $65 billion following its inclusion in the S&P 500.
• Custody Products: The company benefits from capital inflows into the ETF market, where it securely stores the underlying crypto for most ETF funds.
• Derivatives: Derabit, recently acquired by Coinbase, holds a 75% market share in global options trading, with $30 billion in open interest and over $1 trillion in trading volume last year.

Operational Updates

• S&P 500 Inclusion: Coinbase was officially added to the S&P 500 index, effective Monday.
• Stablecoins: The number of Monthly Transacting Users (MTUs) holding USDC on Coinbase doubled over two years, with account balances tripling.
• Staking: Despite regulatory challenges, growth in native units staked continues.
• Crypto as a Service (CAS): Over 200 firms currently use Coinbase’s crypto services, with expectations for further growth.

Future Outlook

• Regulatory Tailwinds: Anticipation of stablecoin and market structure bills could provide a favorable regulatory environment.
• Institutional Adoption: Governments and institutions are expected to continue accumulating Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
• Tokenization: Potential for moving value globally in a fast, cost-effective, and accessible manner.
• Derivatives: Opportunities to expand in the derivatives market, which constitutes 75% of global crypto trading volume.
• Payments: Crypto is poised to facilitate faster, cheaper, and global payments.

Q&A Highlights

• Regulatory Landscape: Optimism about crypto-friendly regulations fostering innovation and investment.
• Competitive Environment: Confidence in Coinbase’s ability to maintain a competitive edge.
• Derabit Acquisition: Strategic move to enhance derivatives offerings and international reach.
• Payments: Focus on business use cases and the potential for crypto to revolutionize cross-border and retail payments.
• Future Use Cases: Excitement around decentralized social applications and tokenizing content.

For a detailed account of the conference, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining at this year’s JPMorgan TMC conference for the fireside chat with Coinbase. I’m excited to host Emily Choi, president and chief operating officer, and Alicia Haas, chief financial officer at Coinbase. Coinbase is a $50,000,000,000 crypto market platform that facilitates trading, staking, custody of crypto tokens as well as other broader engagement with the crypto ecosystem. So before we begin, I’m gonna read the safe harbor statement.

I’d like to remind you that during our chat today, Emily and Alicia may make forward looking statements. Actual results may vary materially from today’s statements due to risks, uncertainty and other factors that are described in their SEC filings. Our discussion today may include references to non GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of non GAAP financial measures is available on the company’s latest shareholder letter. So I’ve heard that speech so much, I probably should have had it memorized by this point. But thank you both for for joining us here today.

As a place to begin, let’s talk about the state of the crypto ecosystem. And maybe for Alicia, cryptocurrency markets peaked about six months ago following the reelection of Donald Trump from both a market cap and volume perspective. So, start with a mark to market of where we are in the crypto cycle and what you’re observing from sort of an industry perspective in terms of what’s relevant for Coinbase service and activities.

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Thank you, Ken, and thanks for having us here today. I was sort of giggling with your opener about 50,000,000,000 market cap because we had wonderful news this week about being admitted to the S and P 500 effective Monday. I think we jumped to 65 yesterday.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Yeah. That’s

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: been a big week. And, that sort of dovetails into my comments about a mark to market of where we are. Crypto moves quickly. I have never been good at calling where we are in a cycle. I’ve never been good at saying, today we’re here, next week we’ll be here.

But what we are really good at doing is zooming out and looking at how our company builds through cycles, through events, and we are really great at just putting our heads down and executing. And so, where we are when we look at our platform and what we reported in q one, we’ve seen stable coins really have their moment with product market fit. And when we look over a two year basis, we’ve seen the number of our MTUs that are holding USDC, for example, on our platform double. And, the balances that they are holding in their accounts has tripled. Share grow.

We’ve seen new native eight units staked. And staking is a really important one that we’ve seen growth in native units staked despite many states saying we couldn’t grow staking, despite it being at the time under litigation with the SEC as to whether staking was a permitted product or whether it was a security. We can grow through all of that. So, where we are right now though is the product innovation summer. The clouds have cleared.

We are seeing new capital come into the space. We are seeing focus on product, focus on innovation, focus on utility, and we’re seeing corporates and dollars to our platform. So it feels like a wonderful place to be, but I can’t call the cycle.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Yep. So if we think about the crypto crypto markets, we’ve seen a number of catalysts over the last one, three, five, probably longer ten years. If we think about maybe more recent catalysts, ETFs turned out to be an enormous one last year. The Trump election, you know, late in twenty four has been an enormous catalyst. If we look out into the horizon, maybe Emily for you, what do you see as catalysts for the next step in the build out of the crypto ecosystem and maybe for Coinbase?

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: Sure. Well, one is definitely gonna be regulatory tailwinds. We’ve spent the better part of the last two years working feverishly to elect crypto friendly politicians, and we hope this year that we will get a couple of bills passed, the stable coin bill and the the market structure bill, and I think that will unleash a lot more demand. You mentioned the ETFs. Definitely institutions have been a big story here, but I think they’re gonna be a bigger and bigger story.

I think governments and institutions are gonna continue to accumulate Bitcoin and other crypto for their balance sheets. You know, I run the Ventures portfolio as well at at Coinbase, and I can’t overstate how hampered the whole ecosystem has been by, reg regulation by enforcement over the past couple years. So we’ve had all these developers, builders on the sidelines who haven’t built the way that they wanted to because of of of this situation. And so I think that’s gonna be a major catalyst for new startups and innovation in this space, just the best products. And then I think just generally utility is gonna be a catalyst.

So we’re seeing, you know, incredibly fast payments, instant settlement, programmable money, twenty four seven global, like all the things that that make crypto so unique. So I think all of this gonna be driving more demand in this space.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. And you mentioned did you mention development summer? What was the phrasing you used on that?

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: We call it crypto summers and winters.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. Oh, I got it. Okay. Yeah. Under understood.

We

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: can weather any storm.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: So maybe pressing on the ETF theme, some had thought, Alicia, that ETFs might be competing with Coinbase in the trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it looks like the opposite may have played out. So what is the outlook for crypto ETFs from here and the impact that you think they will have on on Coinbase?

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: ETFs were the storm that raised all ships. I mean, there was a flood of capital that came into the ETF market. We saw over 20,000,000,000 come in even in the first quarter. We are benefiting from that through our custody products as we are securely storing the underlying crypto for the majority of the ETF funds in the market today. I do think that what ETFs provided was a wrapper to spot that enabled more institutional capital to come into this asset class in ways that they couldn’t directly participate in spot.

So I think we’re gonna see the growth of both. People that can participate in spot have and will. We continue to see our volumes grow despite ETF growth, so everything was growing. But I think that you’re gonna see more and more demand for more asset classes, and so today there’s just the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. Those are the biggest spot markets, and so I do think those will continue to dominate in terms of size, but we’re seeing other growth assets within the crypto commodity space that I think will naturally want wrappers to bring more capital into those as well.

So, I think we’ll see growth in ETFs, but I think what we’re seeing Ken is the broad innovation doors continue to open as we talked about, and so this is just demonstrating that more institutional capital wants to come into crypto. This is also demonstrating though that I think you’re gonna see trends of more crypto rails supporting more asset classes. More things will move twenty four seven, more things will move on chain, and I think we’ll just see the general growth of structured products, spot products, security products, currency products, and more and more investors, more and more market participants participating in a broader financial system supported by crypto.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. So a number of Easter eggs in your comments there, and I’m definitely gonna dig into them. So let’s start with legislation. So there continues to be optimism that Trump will sign crypto legislation, ideally stable coin and market structure bills later this year, and that we’ll have and that a more lenient and more rational regulator is definitely intuitively preferable. What have you already seen from your clients sort of in in anticipation of a more thoughtful, more defined regulatory outlook here in The US?

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Well, Emily touched on this with regard to developers. When you can build without fear of enforcement, you build. You start having in conversations with regulators. And so, we’ve seen is engagement with regulators. We’ve seen round tables.

We’ve seen task forces come together. We’ve seen discussion of how we adhere to the best principles of securities law per consumer protection, efficient markets, but do them in a more technically native way on chain that can bright ride the efficiency, the reduction of settlement risk. So we’re engaging in conversations first and foremost, we couldn’t do that before, Our clients couldn’t do that before. We couldn’t dream quite candidly about the technology before, and hope that those dreams come to reality. So, that’s happening.

But then, more tangibly, more capital is moving in. There was, I forget the source of it, but the chart came out last week that the institutional’s were the net buyers of Bitcoin over the last period of time. That is where most of the capital has come into the market. So we’re seeing more corporates, we’re seeing countries, we’re seeing The US set up a strategic Bitcoin reserve, we’re seeing definite demand and buying of this asset class in spot, as well as ETFs. And, I think what we’re also starting to see is a pickup in m and a.

There’s been a very active crypto m and a market that I don’t think we would have seen six months ago or we didn’t see six months ago, where people are now realizing like this trend is moving, I need to think about how to integrate crypto into my products and services.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Emily, what are the base expectations for cryptocurrency and stable coin regulation as we look out to later this year and then maybe going forward? And are there areas that seem more contested and debated than others in terms of where there’s broad based support?

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: Yeah. So first of all, you know, we have been able to operate in, I would argue, like one of the most prohibitive environments that I think virtually any industry has ever operated in. And so I think we know how to navigate through these different moments. It’s interesting. Maybe, like, a week ago, I would have been more optimistic about the stablecoin bill passing sooner rather than later.

And what I think we we’re finding in DC is this perpetual obsession with politicking and special interest groups. And so I want I I really am hopeful that we can move forward and and push through this because one of the things that we learned during these moments is that crypto is truly a bipartisan issue. That’s one of the reasons that we got so involved in policy over the past couple of years. There’s two major pieces of legislation that we contemplate. One is the stablecoin bill, and one is the market structure bill.

And the stablecoin bill is being discussed very actively right now. I think the stablecoin bill is not a stablecoin bill. It’s a dollar dominance bill. It’s about if you wanna keep the dollar the center of activity and dominance in the world, a stablecoin bill is a no brainer. I do think that in terms of what you were asking about kind of special interest groups, there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

Right? And so people try to add on different things, and I think in particular community banks and banks have been talking about the potential disruption of stablecoins to their businesses. We absolutely do not see it that way. We believe that, you know, when you meet the customer where they are, when you offer the products and services that they are looking for, your market will expand, not contract. And so we really hope that all of the different constituencies who are involved in this take heed of that.

The market structure bill, while more complex, I think is a really interesting one because even in the last administration, 71 Democrats voted for a market structure bill, and that was like a huge I mean, it passed the house. You know, we have to redo this and and come up with a better market structure bill this time. But we proved that we can pass something through the house in a bipartisan manner and that it makes a lot of sense. And so the market structure bill is largely oriented around things like CFTC having spot authority. How do you, divide up the world between the CFTC and SEC so there’s not these crazy turf wars, which we saw constantly over the past couple of years?

How do you define what a digital security versus commodity is? Things like the decentralization test. So I think there’s a lot of work to do. I think these are absolute no brainers in terms of moving The US forward in terms of, crypto innovation, and so we are we are relentlessly working on how to get these pushed through.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: So just to to press forward, you mentioned special interest groups. What sort of resistance are you getting from different different special interest groups? Like, for example, you know, the financial system works for the financial services companies like JPMorgan that sort of dominate today. Are you seeing traditional finance really push back against changes in the lobbying efforts? Is that where the special interest sort of comes in?

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: I think I think, like I said, there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and I think that you hear out of certain parties like that in TradFi, you know, on the one hand, they will tell you that stablecoins are not necessarily a better instrument than exists today. And then out of the other side, they’re saying, but it could be highly disruptive to their model, and so I don’t know how to square that.

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: I’m going to offer a spicier take, Ken. I think that sophisticated, well funded companies that have great business models always figure out how to innovate, and always work to disrupt themselves and meet customers where they are and drive forward. And so, there’s companies and financial services companies that I would put in there that are like looking at this new technology, mean like, I see an opportunity here, I figure out how I’m going to transform my business model to meet this next technology generation. There’s a wide spectrum of market participants in this. There are also slower, less technically adapt businesses out there that then look at this as a threat to say, I never can hope to advance, This is going to jeopardize my future.

What do I do? And they’re the loudest voices in the fighting back to protect the status quo and their incumbent status.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Yep. And and how effective can they be? And maybe how long can this resistance remain effective? It looks like congress is pretty crypto friendly. Is this a minor inconvenience or can it be bigger than that?

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Lot of spicy Alicia today. I think that politics is messy. I think that this is all around whose voice is being heard, how consistent the voices of the constituents are being heard, and who they’re talking to. So there’s a lot of votes that we need to get to things passing through Congress, and this is where consumers and businesses who are impacted by this technology need to make their voices count, and so we don’t have special interest groups outweigh the voice constituents and the end consumers who benefit from product innovation.

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: We don’t take anything for granted. Stand With Crypto is in DC this week. That’s our grassroots organization that helps drive crypto innovation in in DC. Brian Armstrong is in DC this week. Like, we we’re all in.

We we’ll we’ll get something as an industry. We just it’s just gonna be it’s gonna be challenging.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. So let’s dream the dream. If if congress snapped its fingers and we got crypto friendly rules and regulations implemented tomorrow, what are the one, two, or three things that Coinbase would immediately expect, change, or pursue?

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: So on the stablecoin front, essentially this idea that a stablecoin is viewed as a cash or cash equivalent is incredibly important, and you can just you can envision a lot of different things. Like the idea that we currently separate a checking and a savings account and all these different things, and we have all these little boxes that we’ve created with the current system. I think a lot of those go away when you have this freer, more transparent system that works. So I I think that’s part of the virtue of a stable coin bill. On the market structure bill, it is it is really about safe harbor rules.

It’s about having sandboxes for the different companies to be able to experiment with with digital technology and for CFTC spot authority, which is incredibly important because there has been a huge turf war over the past couple years between the SEC and CFTC about who owns what, how you define a digital security versus commodity, and having clear rules of the road will allow us and other companies in the space to just operate freely and to be able to ship things more quickly and and with more innovation.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. So favorite topic here, tokenization. Okay. One of your your I think, Alicia, one of your Easter eggs. We’re seeing more assets make their way onto blockchains.

We started with art and music, but it’s evolving into contracts, hard assets, and even more recently, financial assets. So for this audience, maybe, and this is for for both of you. Start by talking about the benefits of tokenization just to sort of set the stage. And then the real question is, tie this back to Coinbase. What is Coinbase’s role in an increasingly tokenized world, and how do shareholders in the audience and humble research analysts, you know, benefit from from tokenization at Coinbase?

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: From tokenization of Coinbase or tokenization? At To Coinbase. At Coinbase.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Yeah.

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Okay. Alright. Tokenization. Putting assets on chain is the same opportunity when we put data online. So, the benefits of putting data online is we move data across the world quickly, cheaply, more data, more access to information.

So, putting value on chain is moving value across the world quickly, cheaply, more accessible. And then, the added benefit is these on chain tokens, they’re programmable, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of programmable money. We have definitely proven, for example, with stablecoins, they are faster, cheaper, global. You can send money peer to peer, business to peer, anywhere around the world, under a penny, under a second, twenty four seven, any country, any country. That is an incredibly powerful rail, and then when you add then this opportunity for programmability on top of it, when you add then the possibility of using these assets in like verified pools, for example, where then it’s an all KYC population, you just start to build infrastructure that really change the nature of how transactions settle in any asset.

One of the stories I like to say, and we are not there yet from a product perspective, so this is in the dreaming phase, but I worked at a bank during the mortgage crisis in the 2020, ’2 thousand and ’8, ’2 thousand and ’9 period. And mortgage servicing rights are like the messiest things in the world. Like, you originate a mortgage, it gets sold and distributed into MBS, and then you sell the servicing rights. The amount of data errors that occurred during that time period were tremendous. And then you think about putting a mortgage or the contract on chain or the rights on chain, and it’s immutable and you can track track every single data, it just transforms how we have data accuracy and transforms back office functions around the world and brings down cost, makes things cheaper, brings more assets in.

Alright. I digressed a little bit. So now Coinbase, what are we doing? We have been deep in building the technology to make this world possible. We built custody.

Safely storing bare instruments is the heart and soul of our company. We store about 12% of the world’s crypto. We have unique capabilities to safely protect customer assets on chain. This is different than holding other instruments, and it’s different than even holding other bare instruments. I mean, gold is a bare instrument.

You lose your diamonds, you lose your gold, you lose the money. You lose your keys, you lose the money, but the other thing you need to be able to do is immediately move those keys into a hot wallet and send them so you can meet this twenty four seven global. So we have unique capabilities of storing assets, which is why we won the custody mandates of so many of these ETF providers. On top of safely storing assets and providing wallet products, we now have built a rail with base, which is a layer two that moves money quickly and easily. We then are putting assets on base, so developers are developing on base.

We have USDC on base, which is the stable coin partnership that we have with Circle, so we now have a stable currency to be able to offer payments through that tech stack. So we’ve been building up the tech stack. These are the tools, these are the instruments that then make this entire ecosystem work. There’s many front end consumer applications that we want to build, many more experiences, and we are slowly building up that stack to be able to offer those, but we can also offer those through partnerships with other businesses that they can build on our tech stack. So that is where Coinbase really comes in, the infrastructure and the bedrock to enable this new on chain economy.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Perfect. Okay. Some entry level investor questions on Coinbase. So one, the competitive environment. So CEO Brian Armstrong seems to be embracing competition every time this comes up.

I think every other conference call, a competitive question comes up. He’s embracing it. We talked about regulation becoming more friendly. It means more financial services firms like JPMorgan, Schwab are announcing that they will be offering something in crypto in the not so distant future. So, Emily, you know, what are your thoughts here?

Is traditional financial services getting into crypto a threat for Coinbase? Is it an opportunity for Coinbase? How should we think about the, you know, puts and takes of a, you know, a broader broader servicing in the crypto ecosystem?

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: Virtually every company I’ve ever worked at before Coinbase, I think there was like a mindset of zero sum games. Like, an MAU that you take from me, I can never have again or or it is it is literally one for one. And then I came to Coinbase and, like, we have a completely different way of of looking at the world. We think that it’s expansive. We think it’s a prosperous world, and that we have a huge opportunity to grow the pie.

And so just to be totally clear, we’re here to win. Like, we are playing to win, and we we feel very confident in that ability to win. The reason we feel so confident is this this week, we turned 13 years old, and we have exclusively been operating in crypto for those thirteen years. We’re not tourists. We’ve we’ve been in this forever, and what that means is that when we look for great talent in the same way that AI companies have very unique talent, we have hired and retained the best crypto talent in the world.

Our our technology stack is incredibly proprietary. It has taken years and years of hard work to get to the place where you have the ability to custody assets in this way to be able to add new blockchains to the platform in the ways that we do. We know for a fact that other companies can’t do this the way we do. And and we often talk to other companies who are saying, this is, like, harder than we thought it was going to be. And so creates an opportunity for us.

Many of the different companies, firms who want to get into crypto in some way want to utilize our services. We already have more than 200 plus firms using our crypto services. We call it crypto as a service or CAS internally. And we expect that to continue to grow as as more and more companies around the world want to offer crypto services but don’t necessarily have the technology chops. We are gonna be there to be able to use that.

So we’re very excited about the future both as a principal as well as a partner to many of the folks in the space.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Yep. I think, this is probably more of a statement than a question. But, when we think about the competitive environment in traditional finance getting more into crypto and Brian and Coinbase really being focused solely on crypto, I feel like the takeaway from this is there’s so many opportunities to continue to grow in just crypto. You don’t need to go the direction that other firms have taken. Is that a fair statement?

Is that is that at least part of

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: We have a wealth of opportunities to chase, and so our focus is crypto. And the only other thing I would note, Ken, is we have seen we have hundreds of banks in The US. We have new crypto startups. We have new fintech startups. There is a big robust market, and the TAM just keeps growing.

So we have plenty of growth opportunities ahead of us.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. I’m gonna skip to the final two topics I think I have time to hit, which is derivatives and then payments. So, Emily, on derivatives. So Coinbase just announced a 2,900,000,000 acquisition of Derabit, a crypto derivative platform. So maybe start by saying or by by talking about what attracted you to Derabit.

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: Sure. So this is the largest crypto acquisition, I believe, in history, And we were attracted to the fact that Derabit is the largest options exchange in the world. This actually plugs a hole for us. So now we are able to offer the whole plethora of spot, futures, derivatives, perps, options on our platform, which is which is fantastic. And then the other thing is we are truly a global company, and, Derabit is an international company, so it helps us expand our international presence.

Just felt like a no brainer for us and we loved also the aspects of its revenue and profitability picture.

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Okay. Can I throw in some stats to just like punch that? 75 market share of global options trading, and they’ve had that through up and down markets. Incredibly sticky. They have 30,000,000,000 of open interest on the platform.

They did over a trillion dollars of trading volume last year, and Emily scored the key point, which is that it’s durable, resilient revenue because people are hedging with options when the market’s good or the market’s bad, and so this provides durability to our revenue that spot trading doesn’t have, And we think that it has this incredibly attractive profile, as as she noted, with strong history of a positive adjusted EBITDA. So it’ll be immediately beneficial to our overall institutional business and growth trajectory, both in derivatives and then internationally.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. So so digging in deeper, what ultimately is the derivative opportunity for Coinbase? So why why have a more robust derivative business? Why purchase the the leading provider? You know, what is it about derivatives that is, you know, such an opportunity for for Coinbase?

So you mentioned international.

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Yeah. Well, we’ve shared this before, but 75% of global crypto trading volume is in derivatives. So we grew up as a spot platform. We started our business as the easiest place to buy and sell Bitcoin, spot. In the last two years, we’ve really made a foray into derivatives because that is a huge opportunity to grow into the 75% of market that we historically didn’t play in.

So as we made this jump into derivatives, what our vision is, as Emily said, we want to bring this all under one platform. Having a platform with spot, futures, and options under one umbrella gives our clients the ability to cross margin across these platforms, gives them the ability to really get the benefit of everyone in one a flywheel of sticky growth. And so putting plugging options in gives us then the trading platform that will just continue to attract and grow traders on our platform.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: And there’s a US versus non US component as well.

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Absolutely. So Derabit is 100% non US. We have derivatives licenses in The US. So the combination of our licenses, their product know how, give us an opportunity with a roadmap to bring the skill sets and experience together to have a path to bringing options to US customers. This is a path.

This isn’t we’re going show up day one with like we offer options in The US when we close this acquisition. But our vision is this combined trading platform for spot futures options to our global customer base, and we will build slowly to that vision over time.

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: And this goes back to the market structure point. Like we’re very excited to work with the new chair of the CFTC on all of these different new offerings. I think there’s gonna be a lot of new things that we can think through, US derivatives, prediction markets, everything that you can imagine. But we need to work with with him and his team on how this is all gonna manifest in The US as well.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Great. Okay. Evolution in payments. And this is for for for both of you. Many believe that payments is a logical significant use case for cryptocurrencies in Coinbase.

And Coinbase is well positioned to really benefit from the evolution of payments. So without talking about Circle or USDC, talk about cryptocurrencies and how they can facilitate things like cross border payments and maybe possibly make their way into retail payments over time.

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Faster, cheaper, global. Those are the three keywords everyone needs to keep in mind. Pennies, seconds. This is the first opportunity that we have to create a global technology where you can send money transparently to any party. We have seen trillions of dollars now move into stable coin volume over the last few years.

The next piece of this now that we have the technology that can do something is to build the user interfaces, build the upfront products and apps to be able to offer this technology to make this payment utility available to businesses, merchants, consumers around the world. We believe that business will be the first beneficiary of this because most of the cost of transactions is borne by businesses not by end consumers at least in The US. And this is an area that we’re continuing to invest more product area to start building products towards business use cases for payments. And then over time we think retail will get there, but we think it’ll be driven first on the business side.

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: Just to tie some of the themes together from before and hit this is I think this is why you’re starting to see companies like Stripe, companies like Meta and others start to get into stable coins. There’s there’s true product market fit. They clearly see what the benefits could be for their customers in terms of cost savings, instant settlement, twenty four seven global. So I think this is why we think of the world as such an expensive place right now with with payments, with stablecoins, with crypto generally.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. The place we ended our chat last year was the question on use cases, and I wanted to end today with this as well. And then for for both of you, what do you see as the use cases that you’re most excited about in the cryptocurrency ecosystem as we look out to ’25 and into ’26? What what excites you and and Coinbase most?

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Well, think we just touched on them. I would say from my CFO seat, we are increasingly paying our vendors with USDC. That is a great use case as we just talked about. I think also continuing to build out our trading platforms where we’re providing first class better trading experiences to our users with new technology, speed, like all of the benefits of this asset class and all under one roof is going to provide a lot of utility and benefit to our traders and to our institutions who trade actively which is a large percent of the revenue opportunity in the market today. And then I’m excited about our Ventures Bets.

I always think it’s exciting to see the dreams that are happening in crypto and I think you’re starting to see a couple of things come together with corporates innovating with wallets and how they will use those for more embedded digital payment activities over time, which I think are really interesting to focus on right now.

Emily Choi, President and Chief Operating Officer, Coinbase: Plus one all that. And I think just on the high beta venture bet side, we think there’s a lot of opportunity in decentralized social or what we call deso. And we’ll be relaunching our wallet app this year, very much in that vein with this idea of, a focus on content, a focus on tokenizing your content, and all the all the cool things that we can do uniquely with crypto and tokenization.

Ken, Host, JPMorgan: Okay. Great. Emily, Alicia, thank you both. Thanks, everybody.

Alicia Haas, Chief Financial Officer, Coinbase: Thank audience.

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