Coinbase at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Moves in Crypto

On Tuesday, 10 June 2025, Coinbase Global Inc. (NASDAQ:COIN) presented its strategic vision at the Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference 2025. The discussion, led by Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, highlighted Coinbase’s regulatory advancements, institutional growth, and the strategic acquisition of Derabit, while also addressing challenges in the competitive crypto landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Coinbase is enhancing its regulatory engagement, particularly with the SEC and CFTC, under the new administration.
• The acquisition of Derabit positions Coinbase as a leader in crypto options, with plans for international expansion.
• Coinbase Prime is expanding its institutional services, supporting over 200 banks and fintech partners.
• Stablecoins, especially USDC, play a crucial role in Coinbase’s strategy for payments and collateral in DeFi.
• Coinbase aims to compete with CME in the U.S. futures market, focusing on large contracts and perpetual futures.

Regulatory Landscape

Coinbase is experiencing a positive shift in regulatory engagement, particularly with the SEC and CFTC. The SEC’s interest in tokenizing securities and potential no-action relief for blockchain applications marks a significant development. Coinbase is also advocating for the repeal of SAB 121 to support bank participation in crypto custody.

Institutional Business & Coinbase Prime

Coinbase Prime continues to grow, offering integrated trading, custody, and custodial staking services. With over 200 institutional clients, including Webull and BlackRock’s Aladdin platform, Coinbase is enhancing its infrastructure to support the expanding ETF ecosystem. The focus is on broadening asset manager portfolios with new assets and staking options.

Derabit Acquisition

The acquisition of Derabit, the largest options provider in crypto, is a strategic move to expand Coinbase’s product portfolio and international presence. Derabit’s dominance in options trading, with over $35 billion in open interest, complements Coinbase’s offerings in futures and spot markets. The integration aims for a unified platform with cross-margin capabilities.

Derivative Offerings

Coinbase is strengthening its derivatives market with offerings on the Coinbase Derivatives Exchange and the International Exchange. The focus is on retail and active traders, with plans to introduce perpetual futures in the U.S. The international market, based in Bermuda, holds a 5-10% share in perpetual futures, catering to both retail and institutional clients.

Impact of Stablecoins

Stablecoins, particularly USDC, are central to Coinbase’s payments strategy. They are used extensively in DeFi and as collateral on Coinbase’s international exchange. With over $8 billion in assets held in on-chain wallets, stablecoins are a key enabler in the crypto payments ecosystem.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference 2025:

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Ready. Ready. Alright, we’re going to go in and get started here. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Note that taking of photographs and the use of recording devices is not allowed.

If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. All right, with that out of the way, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for staying with us here on day one of Morgan Stanley’s Financials Conference. I’m Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst covering brokers, asset managers and exchanges for Morgan Stanley Research. And for our next session, it’s my pleasure to welcome Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management at Coinbase.

With, $330,000,000,000 of assets on the platform as of the first quarter, Coinbase is a crypto platform that facilitates trading, staking and custody of crypto tokens as well as provides broader services across the crypto ecosystem. Welcome. Thank you, Greg. Thanks for having me today, Greg. And I know you guys have asked me to, read this disclaimer here, safe harbor statement, so please bear with me.

Before we get started, I’d like to remind you that during today’s chat, Greg may make forward looking statements. Actual results may vary materially from today’s statements due to risks, uncertainties and other factors as described in the SEC filings. Our discussion today may include references to non GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of non GAAP measures is available on the company’s latest shareholder letter. All right, mouthful. With that out of the way.

With that out of the way, now we can actually start talking about things. And as we were sort of talking about just as we were walking up here on stage just around the regulatory environment, you were mentioning you’re spending a bunch of time in DC. So maybe just setting the stage here with the regulatory backdrop, arguably doing business as a crypto firm has not been easy over the past couple of years, but seemingly we’re moving into a more favorable backdrop today with supportive new administration. So from your perspective, how are the conversations with regulators today versus a year ago? And maybe you can share with us some of the color, anything you might be able to provide on those Sure.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Yeah, happy to. Thanks again for having me.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: A Welcome back I should say. Thank you.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: At the agency level from a regulatory perspective, it’s really been night and day different, especially at the SEC as we were saying. The advent of the crypto task force has meant there’s a lot of engagement now with industry and I’m actually quite excited about what’s possible in the world of tokenization of securities and

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: a lot

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: of changes that could be brought to traditional financial infrastructure and plumbing and even rethinking the things like what is a transfer agent? What’s the role of DeFi in exchanges and so And so we’ve had several meetings with the crypto task force. We’ve engaged at the staff level. And while this will take time to play through, dialogue has been terrific. And I think that tone from the top from the White House certainly has had an impact.

But it was nice to hear Chairman Atkins yesterday even talking about DeFi and the right to self custody and the importance of that in crypto ecosystem, etcetera. So, and that’s on the SEC side. On the CFTC side, there had been engagement before but now I would say it’s accelerating. So as you might have seen, we announced 20 fourseven trading for U. S.

Listed futures which was the time in the history of futures in the country that had a product that trades 20 fourseven and that happened with a lot of staff level and commissioner level engagement, but it was able to go much faster under the new administration I would say. And I think that will also enable something on the future side we’re excited about, which is the idea of bringing a perpetual futures contract into The U. S, which we think we’ll be launching sometime in the second half of this year.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. And that’s something we’ll come back and talk a little bit about. Maybe just continue on the regulatory theme. Question here is what’s the unlock that is anticipated from regulatory clarity on the horizon here and how would you sort of characterize the short versus medium term wins versus any sort of longer term aspirations that you have? I think on

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: the SEC side, it’s clearly around the idea of tokenizing the securities world. And that will manifest in a lot of different ways, tokenizing traditional assets, new ways for existing asset managers to distribute tokenized funds directly to retail clients, the idea of mobilizing collateral and being able to settle OTC transactions and all those sorts of things. I think those are relatively near term opportunities. And what’s become clear is that the crypto task force would really like to begin experimenting and granting no action relief potentially long before the two bills as you know are making their way through Congress. The Genius Act for stable coins and the Clarity Act for market structure.

But even in advance of that, I think the SEC would like to see some forward movement on these things. So I think those are the sort of near to medium term opportunities.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: When you mentioned sort of the task force open to no action relief

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: experimentation, anything you could sort of share around how you anticipate that playing out? I think that it will manifest in a bunch of different ways. Number one, the role of blockchains themselves as a storing the source of truth for books and records who owns what. Now this is a major change I think for the SEC to recognize potentially the chain as effectively the role of the transfer agent. That would be one thing that could happen.

The role of DEXs in a forward market structure, the role of self custody in holding and transferring securities. These are things where I expect to see some guidance at a minimum, if not no action.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Okay. And having more regulatory clarity could bring a lot more people to the party? Yes. How do you win with additional competition potentially entering this space? And how are you thinking through sort of the pros and cons and moving pieces around that?

That’s a good question.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: We’re excited and advocated in many ways for competition opening up. So I think about SAB 121, for example, we were strong advocates for repealing that. It’s our point of view that banks can participate in the custody of crypto that, that will be good for the overall ecosystem in the space. Coinbase continues strategically to differentiate itself by being exclusively focused on crypto and really, really, really understanding every chain and every asset at a very molecular level. And our goal therefore is to empower other firms that want to come into the space by providing them the sort of infrastructure that we built ourselves.

So something we call crypto as a service, which we now provide over 200 banks and brokers and fintechs who use the things I talk about when we get to talking about Coinbase Prime, that’s trading, that’s custody, that’s staking, etc. Providing those as an infrastructure play to other banks and brokers is how I think we’ll participate in the broadening of the services to other firms. So we announced recently a deal with Webull for example. We think of our partnership with BlackRock’s Aladdin platform as an example of this. Revolut, those kinds of firms are our partners in that way.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. Maybe just diving into the institutional business that you oversee and just give us a bit of an overview of your offerings today for institutional clients and how the business has evolved over the years and what are some of the key pillars of growth as you look forward? Sure. So there are two main parts of

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: the institutional business. There’s what we call Coinbase Prime, which is think of it as the brokerage parts of the business. It’s trading, so multi venue smart routing the same way, the same sorts of algorithms and things you’d use to buy securities we have in crypto. So that’s what’s enabled us to participate in some of the larger largest purchases of Bitcoin for example. Married together with custody, some of the largest custodian in the space.

We’re a DFS regulated custodian and have been added for twelve years together with custodial staking, financing. So we’ll talk about in a minute where we built a prime brokerage offering. We’ve also built a trade financing offering together with an on chain wallet solution. So as funds move from trading sort of in a centralized way to being able to trade on chain or transact on chain or participate in DeFi pools and so

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: you can do all of

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: those things from one platform. So we think that’s one of the most unique things about Coinbase is we find we have competitors in custody or we have a competitor who’s good at trading. But having brought those all together in one place so that when a fund buys an asset rather than having to copy destinations and things like that to transfer it into custody. It’s all integrated and so that’s better from an operational perspective. That’s all in the Coinbase Prime side.

We also have what we call markets where we operate our spot market. We have The US futures market. We have the perpetual futures market for non US customers. And now we announced the acquisition of Derabit to add options initially for non US customers as well. And so we think of running Prime which whose job is to find the best price across markets and markets where we build sort of the exchange inside if you will, that’s both for the institutional business and for the retail business as well.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. And we’ll come back on some of those different product areas you mentioned. Over the past couple of years, the markets have digested a number of bad actors, some regulatory developments, crypto winter and now bull run along with the introduction of ETFs along the way. So what’s different this time around versus the last big run up that we had and to that end what are you observing in terms of institutional behavior and use cases this time?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: That’s a good question. I think the presence of some of the largest asset managers in the space now with ETF products as you mentioned. That have gathered well north of 120,000,000,000 of assets in a very short period of time is one of the biggest differences. I think now the pace at which banks are engaging in the world of tokenization for example is here to stay. I think that on the asset management side the idea of tokenizing funds and distributing them through new channels and so I sense that these are not the sorts of things that come and go with cycles.

These are a real sea change. And I think there’s a tremendous amount of interest in banks in tokenizing collateral and making the settlement of OTC transactions and things like that much more straightforward. I think the presence of that community gives this a longer staying power than the cycles we’ve seen in the past.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. Maybe just turning to your most recent announcement, the acquisition of Derabit last month, a non U. S. Derivative exchange. Can you just give us a little bit of the backstory here on the transaction?

What attracted you to this platform? Why did they pursue a sale? Why did they sell at this moment? And talk about your vision and roadmap here.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Sure. We’re very excited about Derabit. They are the largest options provider in crypto. They have north of 35,000,000,000 in open interest, which actually makes them the largest in open interest across all derivative platforms in crypto. They had been a founder led company and I think founders had decided they wanted to sell and exit.

And for us it was quite opportunistic for a number of reasons. Number one, options rounds out the product portfolio nicely. I mentioned different futures and spot that we have options was a gap for us. It’s part of an international expansion for us. So they have large presences in Europe and in Dubai.

And so for us this gives a real presence for building product outside The US for the active trader, which we think helps our institutional business quite a bit. It’s also a very profitable business and what we find is that the options trading has a sort of lower beta if you will to overall volumes than many of our other transactional businesses. And so it really helps the profile of our revenue on the institutional side. And maybe lastly, but most importantly, as we assemble that whole portfolio together, futures, spot, I mentioned prime financing, etcetera. What Derabit has is the ability to cross margin across all of those things.

And that’s going to be a real game changer I think. The ability to trade in each of those different pools in a very capital efficient way, I think is going to set us apart and that’s probably what I’m most excited about.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: So cross market across your futures and the options, but you probably need to bring it all together. Correct. Maybe just talk about how you sort of envision that playing out?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: So we’re in the midst of coming up with our integration plans. The North Star is a cohesive single set of matching engines that and a single cross margin ability amongst them.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Okay. And on the back of that acquisition, maybe talk about your expansion efforts there. Is there plans to bring Darebit to The U. S, leverage the platform as you think about scaling internationally? And what might make sense here as you approach that?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Yeah, good question. So I think initially our plan is to scale internationally primarily. So this was built, for outside The U. S. But I do think coming to The U.

S. Represents a big opportunity and one that we’ll need to work with the CFTC to navigate. There’s a variety of different ways that could happen over time. But we’re at the very beginning stages of that conversation I would say. Great.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: And with derivatives and focus, can we talk about your product set today of derivative offerings that you have? What’s available to each customer set? And how does the sort of consumer demand compared to what you’re seeing on the institutional side in terms of demand for these derivative products?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: So I’ll start in The U. S. Today, operate a derivatives exchange, a DCM designated contract market called Coinbase Derivatives Exchange. It lists crypto futures as well as some non crypto futures. We’re also an FCM, so we’re both the broker and the exchange.

We clear our products at Nodal Clear. And our focus today has really been on the retail trader, the active trader who I think have enjoyed for the time the ability to have margin products together with spot in the active trading application inside of our retail product and the ability to short for example. This is something you haven’t been able to do historically. And so our nano products have been incredibly populated. We have over 100,000 on boarded users and that’s been our focus to date.

I think in the coming year, we’re going to focus on our larger contracts that would compete more directly with the CME 5 bitcoin contract And that’s going to be a focus for us in The U. S. Going forward. We have something we call the international exchange, which is perpetual futures, which today is based in Bermuda. We’re somewhere between 510% market share on any given day.

We just crossed 1,000,000,000 open interest and so that’s growing fast. And that’s available to our retail users outside The U. S. And to our institutional users outside The U. S.

And so that’s been one of our biggest focuses derivatives overall both U. S. And non U. S. And that’s the offering today.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. And with that, why don’t we talk about the ecosystem, the competitive landscape for derivatives today? Just curious to get your take on futures, options, ETFs, how you see this derivative complex evolving from here? What are some of the biggest opportunities as you look out?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: It really is a good question. It really is a U. S. And a non U. S.

World. And so in The U. S. It’s primarily CME. And they’ve garnered a lot of activity on the back of IBET and basis trading in IBET.

And I think now that we have 20 fourseven and we’re building cross margin functionality, which we’ll be launching in Q3, we think our ability to compete for some of that basis trading and therefore gain in the larger contracts later this year, That’s something we’re excited about. Outside The U. S, the big three or four that we focus on are Binance, Bibet, OKX, etcetera. As I mentioned, we’ve gained a lot of share over the course of the last year. And there it’s about adding more products, it’s about adding more financing options.

But this is where the options piece really comes to play. And the one thing that I would add about Darebit, today they’re about 75% to 80% share in options trading. And the thing about options is may already know is it’s very sticky and it’s hard to unpack your options portfolio once it’s in one place. And I think that’s what’s led to their ability to build and retain that level of market share over the course time. And so we now have the ability to take that and use it in a variety of ways to build more perpetuals volume leveraging what we have with Derabit as an asset

So when you’re trading options and you need to hedge your Greeks and that sort of thing, our ability to bring all that volume together is in one place our biggest opportunity there.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: And so you don’t have futures sorry, you don’t have options today. We don’t have options today. Where is that on the roadmap now with DeraVet you get it internationally? How easy is it to sort of say to bring that liquidity pool over to The U. S.

And

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: That is a work in progress for us, I do tell So we’ll have to engage the CFTC who would be the gatekeeper for that and have more to share later this year.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: With multiple crypto ETFs now starting up over the past year or so, You guys have taken on a custodial role here for a vast majority of these assets. So what is Cloinbase doing to support the ETF world and the ecosystem and the players there? We were proud to be the primary partner for most

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: of the ETF issuers. I think almost the vast majority with the exception of one that self custody. And I think that goes back to what I said before, the ability to trade, finance and custody all in one place was what set us apart and I think won us a lot of those mandates. And in particular the financing opportunity is because you’re trading on a day and settling the next day and so there’s the opportunity to provide bridge trade financing over the settlement cycle. The biggest focus now is helping those asset managers broaden their portfolio.

Adding staking for example to the Ethereum ETFs is probably the next big unlock there in addition to moving down and introducing new assets. Those are some of the things around the corner.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: And with banks now being able to hold crypto assets on the balance sheet, I guess, does Coinbase stay competitive as a custodian to these assets? And what sort of challenges or opportunities do you see from the institutional standpoint?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Yes, it’s a good question. So we’re we have our eye on lots of competitors that are coming into the space. I mentioned crypto as a service before. That’s probably the primary way is actually empowering them and turning it into an opportunity for us to build infrastructure. The other way I would say is many are coming into the space to custody one or two assets.

And Coinbase today really is a broad based crypto company. And that’s really what sets us apart for the venture firm or for the firm that wants to custody just about anything. There aren’t that many custodians that have that breadth. We do see banks sort of focusing on the top two or three assets, for example. But there again, that’s an opportunity for us to provide the balance of those as a service to those banks.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Okay. Why don’t we shift and talk about USDC for you guys on the institutional side. Talk about what you’re seeing from the institutional client set in terms of the usage of USDC, particularly as they are looking to gain rewards for holding that? What are you seeing on this part of the business?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: I think opportunities over the last year have been one, some of the exchanges that have derivatives that want to have derivatives listed against USDC in addition to Tether, which they have today in order to be able to garner some of the rewards and the economics that we share. And so that’s led to some of the market cap growth that we’ve seen over the last twelve months. And the is some of the DeFi pools that use USDC as collateral have become some of our largest on chain wallet customers. So today we hold over $8,000,000,000 in assets in our on chain wallet. Most of that I would say is USDC and most of it is in smart contracts from borrowing and lending platforms that need a place on chain to be able to participate in DeFi but also to be able to garner rewards.

So those two things have been the biggest opportunities for us.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. Well, think we’ll have some time to take some audience questions in just a moment. But maybe just shifting to a little bit more about your perspective on things over time, right, through the arc of your career, right? You’ve seen equities, you’ve seen other asset classes go through on a different transitions, transformations, just given your varied roles over the years. With that perspective, I guess, does the relative maturity of crypto as an asset class compared to what you have seen in other more traditional asset classes?

How do you see the crypto market structure evolving from here? And what lessons should we take away?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Yes, it’s a good question. So yes, I grew up in the world of equities over thirty years ago and had the good fortune of watching that transform into a highly efficient electronic marketplace. And I think crypto is actually quite efficient today. So in fact, if you looked at Bitcoin and how Bitcoin trades, it’s just as efficient as any of the top S and P stocks in terms of market impact, liquidity, so on and so So in some ways the crypto market is already quite mature in that way. But in other ways I would say there’s still room for and part of the reason that motivated our desire to bring all of these markets together under one roof is the lesson is that scale always wins.

Scale with a single matching engine that’s fast with all the liquidity in one place and importantly the ability to sort of finance these things, the scale player wins. And our goal is to be the scale player in crypto.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: I wanted to come back on the derivative side. You did mention perpetuals. I wanted to ask around how that product looks overseas and compares versus the derivatives that we see in The U. S. And as you think about ultimately trying to bring perpetuals to The U.

S, what might that look like?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Yes, it’s a good question. So perpetuals, as you likely know are one of the most the most popular product in crypto. And they’re similar in some ways to contract for differences. They don’t settle physically into the underlier. They reset interest rates every day in order to keep the price of the derivative and the price of spot close to one another.

And they don’t have an expiry. And so as a user of them you don’t have to worry about rolling them. You don’t have to worry about some of the things you do with dated futures. So we’ve worked with the CFTC to replicate a lot of those features of that and think that we have a product design that we’re now close to implementing and we’ll have a date to share shortly. But it will be in the part of the year.

And we think that product particularly for the retail side of our business will be very popular for exactly the same reasons it’s popular outside The U. S. It will be a long dated future that has daily interest rate resets that mimic the PERP offshore.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: And by long dated would it be more than a year? Five to ten years. Five to ten. Okay. Quite long duration.

Okay. Interesting. Well, we’ll stay tuned on that.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Yes.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Any questions in the room? Yes, right over here. There we go.

Unidentified speaker: I’m curious your reaction to the Circle IPO. I think it’s like a thirty year market cap now and obviously you guys are inextricably linked. What do you think the market is getting excited about from a stablecoin perspective? And how do you think you’re kind of best positioned to capitalize on that?

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: That’s a good question.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: I think there’s a tremendous amount of excitement about stablecoins writ large. And I think the idea of having a pure play on stablecoins clearly has been well received. Circle had been great partners to Coinbase. And so from our point of view nothing really changes materially. We’re quite excited about USDC as well as a number of other stablecoins.

So we have support for quite a few on our platform. But we see it overall as just another sign that along with others coming to market that crypto is sort of coming to its own. And so we’re quite excited about it for that reason.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: There was a question up here. Can you talk a little

Unidentified speaker: about the evolution of the safety of custody? Now that we’re moving to banks, you guys are preeminent obviously. But it behooves you to share your technology so there’s no no other accidents, I guess, or whatever you want to frame it. But I’m just sort of curious, as we do scale into these numbers, how do you think about the custody, the security around it, both physical and, I guess, digital custody or whatever.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Great question. How does that evolve too? Thanks. Excellent question. And Coinbase at the end of the day, and foremost, is a cryptographic security company.

And we’re now on our generation of key management for cold storage for our custodial products. It’s a never ending thing. We actually open sourced the actual multi party computation library that we use and we wrote ourselves for precisely the reason that you said. But we believe that the principles are pretty straightforward but need to be really well executed. Geographic diversity, people diversity, when thinking about how and where to store private key material in a truly air gapped and offline way, which we do today, is the safest form of storing private key material.

But then also being able to do it, so we’ve invested a lot. What we heard from customers is cold storage is great, but when I want my assets back, I want them back in very short order. Like I want to be able to send it someplace within fifteen or twenty minutes. And so we’ve now gotten to the point where we can have the best of true cold storage custody, which is where the vast majority of institutional assets are stored and the ability to send and receive assets in near real time. But it is a constant investment,

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: I would say. Other questions in the room? If not, I’m going to keep going, but I’ll come back to you guys. Maybe you can give us a little bit of a flavor of the types of institutional customers that you have today. How penetrated would you say you are relative to the opportunity set?

And where are you having some of most traction versus least?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: That’s a good question. So I think sometimes in crypto when people say institutional, you have to really sort of drill down a little bit. Because for some in crypto, institution means market maker, proprietary trading group, etcetera. Coinbase institutional means that and corporate clients that are holding crypto on balance sheet, asset managers that are issuing ETFs, hedge funds that are actively trading a variety of different strategies, family offices, banks and brokers. So it’s a very diverse set of customers in a broad surface area.

And I would say of those probably the most nascent still is the allocator, the pension in the endowment space which is coming into crypto but still early days I would say.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: So you said the most nascent with endowment and pension?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Yes, just generally asset allocators. Got it. Okay.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: I want to come back on derivative side. We were talking about perpetuals bringing that to The U. S. You have some futures already here. You mentioned CME as a competitor.

Just curious how you view your products differing from others, whether it’s CME, others in the marketplace.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: That’s a good question. So I think and foremost now, the fact that they’re 20 fourseven and you can trade on Saturday and Sunday because spot is moving around on those days and that’s one of the differences. Having both the FCM and the DCM means we’re also able to cross margin between spot and those futures products as well, which I think will be quite a differentiator for us over time. And I think that we’re beginning to really broaden the number and nature of contracts that we’re listing as well. And I also think our perpetual contract itself will be quite differentiated.

Perpetuals plus 20 fourseven, I think will be the biggest point of differentiation amongst all of those.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Any questions in the room? One in the back.

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: The development of stablecoin, how does that impact your prospects going forward or your business strategy? Good question. So stablecoins, I think have been one of the biggest enablers. So for example, on our international exchange today, USDC is the only form of collateral that we currently accept. And it’s really sort of empowered a lot of things.

It’s meant that you can move collateral around in real time in the derivative space. And so I think stablecoins for the trading use cases I think are critical. One thing I think you’re really going to hear Coinbase start to talk a lot about is how we’re participating in the payments ecosystem over the course of the next few quarters, months and quarters. And so growing payments is a huge focus for the company and stablecoins are sort of critical to that.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. Final question, just wrapping up here. What would you say are some of the biggest priorities for the institutional business at Coinbase this year in 2025 and as you’re thinking about operating the business through cycles as well?

Greg Tussar, Vice President of Product Management, Coinbase: Yes, good question. So derivatives has been and remains probably our biggest focus, Closing and integrating Derivent is a big focus for us. Getting these perpetual contracts over the line and winning listed CME share is important for us. So those are probably the biggest derivatives focuses. And then continuing to grow our custodial products, we’re the largest by far today.

But and then the I would say is this crypto as a service. The idea that as more people enter the space that we’re building the infrastructure play to be able to empower them is probably the biggest opportunity for us.

Mike Cyphrys, Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. I’m afraid I’ll leave it there. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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