Brian Armstrong, co-founder and chief executive of Coinbase, compared the way the company is using its “deep” experience in building crypto infrastructure to power the next wave of businesses coming into this space to Amazon expanding cloud infrastructure though AWS. Coinbase provides crypto-as-a-service, or CaaS, to financial institutions in order to expand the crypto ecosystem, which is a separate platform from the retail business.

“A long time ago we decided to expose the services we built internally for our own products, making them available to third parties as infrastructure, a lot like Amazon did with AWS,” said Armstrong on Coinbase’s second quarter 2025 earnings call on 31 July.

Many financial institutions have ambitions to enter the crypto business but do not want to have to build their own infrastructure. For example, Armstrong highlighted that it is difficult and complicated to store private keys in a secure distributed way, to integrate with different blockchains, to trade crypto and to make payments. Using Coinbase allows them to come to market much faster.

Brian Foster, head of crypto-as-a-service at Coinbase, told Markets Media that the firm has been building infrastructure for years but decided to unify and expand its infrastructure and markets platform and rebrand the platform as CaaS this year.

“It’s time to get noisier as the market is coming back and the regulatory change this year has accelerated the entrance of financial institutions,” said Foster. “It was a good moment for us to do a rebrand and help explain some of the  products we are launching.”

For example, Coinbase can offer banks secure, regulated, and scalable digital asset products for retail, wealth, and institutional clients, as well as custody, crypto brokerage, trade finance, fiat to crypto on- and off-ramps, secured lending, stablecoins, staking and tokenization. In addition, CaaS can offer crypto infrastructure  for brokers and exchanges and can offer global payments through stablecoins and real-time settlement infrastructure.

“We have started to organize these features and make them work better in a single platform for clients,” said Foster.

He continued that Coinbase wanted to work in a consultative bilateral partnership with financial institutions.

“We are here to play for the away team and efficiently help them build a great product experience for their clients,” Foster added. “The mission of this platform is to help build the next 1,000 Coinbases.”

There could be a perceived issue of other financial firms viewing Coinbase’s institutional businesses, such as prime brokerage, as competition, and not wanting to use the crypto firm. However, Foster argued that in traditional finance Morgan Stanley’s asset management business could be a client of JP Morgan’s prime brokerage, despite the two banks being competitors. In addition the clients may use infrastructure built  by Coinbase, but they remain facing their customers, in ownership of the relationships and all the associated data.

“This is a very scalable model,” added Foster. “For example, it allows for millions of users for a retail application, and it also critically allows those financial institutions to retain ownership of their clients.”

Coinbase works with all types of clients, including some who need to integrate legacy infrastructure with crypto rail. The firm then deploys its solutions architecture team to help with that process, who Foster described as “Seal Team Six” for building crypto products.

“They have done hundreds of these and know where all the bodies are buried,” said Foster. “Our job is to create hundreds of other crypto firms who are building brokers and payment capabilities that have their own end-users.”

He argued that Coinbase is differentiated from the handful of other firms who provide crypto infrastructure to financial institutions due toits broad product portfolio and the depth of its partnerships.

Partnerships

Armstrong said the firm has more than 240 businesses using its crypto-as-a-service platform to power their custody, trading, and payments needs.

Over 240 clients use our Crypto-as-a-Service infrastructure to power their crypto strategies now (e.g. Blackrock, PNC, Stripe, PayPal).

(learn more at the link in follow on post) https://t.co/Qcq08s93Gm

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) August 2, 2025

On 22 July 2025 PNC Bank said in a statement that it was partnering with Coinbase to expand access to digital asset solutions to the bank’s clients and to institutional investors. PNC will also provide select banking services to Coinbase.

William Demchak, chairman and chief executive of PNC, said in a statement: “Partnering with Coinbase accelerates our ability to bring innovative, crypto financial solutions to our clients.”

This year U.S bank regulators including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC),  the Federal Reserve and the OCC clarified that supervised institutions could engage in permissible crypto-related activities without needing special approval. JPMorgan Chase customers will be able to connect their bank accounts to Coinbase wallets from 2026.

Webull Pay is also using the CaaS platform for institutional-grade custody, advanced trading, USDC stablecoin and staking access.

In addition, Coinbase provides more than 80% of the custody for crypto ETF issuers.  The platform is integrated with Aladdin, the technology platform of BlackRock, which enables clients, including the asset manager’s iShares crypto ETFs, to support the entire crypto transaction lifecycle.

Foster described the BlackRock partnership as “huge” as Coinbase worked on the relationship for many years. He said: “The Aladdin integration is very similar to the work we are doing with the other financial institutions.”

Growth

The majority of clients are initially interested in stablecoins, according to Foster. Stablecoins maintain a fixed peg to other assets, which could be a fiat currency, such as the U.S. dollar.

Other recurring themes are tokenized deposits for banks, tokenized money market funds and providing access to crypto as a financial asset class for clients, alongside equities, bonds and real estate.

“Real world asset tokenization is exciting but a little bit slower moving,” said Foster. “That is an enormous market opportunity that is really starting to gain steam.”

In addition Coinbase is providing the CaaS platform outside the U.S. and Foster continued that the firm is “super active” in Brazil. In June this year Coinbase  secured its Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) licence in Luxembourg, enabling the firm to offer its full suite of crypto products to all 27 European Union member states.

“We want to help financial institutions of all shapes and sizes build the best possible crypto products,” said Foster. “That will make it easy for this market to grow and for them to meet their own client demand.”

Market is worried about Coinbase's cyclical revenue in a highly competitive market of attracting net new deposits and trading volume instead of focusing on what it should be focusing on, Coinbase's new Crypto-as-a-Service offering while the SEC just said they want to move the…

— David (@EffortCapital) August 4, 2025

David Rodriguez, head of advisory at Blockworks, said on X: “Coinbase will be critical infrastructure for the 21st century and will generate sticky, recurring revenue that will dwarf retail trading revenue.”

Coinbase is crypto’s everything company.

– SaaS
– Wallet
– Layer 2
– Trading
– Staking
– Custody
– Payments
– Stablecoins
– Venture Capital
– Bitcoin Treasury
– Ethereum Treasury
– Asset Management

— Ryan Rasmussen (@RasterlyRock) August 4, 2025