Eric Peters, chief executive of Coinbase Asset Management, said  one of the big plays for the group is crypto-as-a-service, or CaaS, the business which supplies infrastructure services.

Peters, who is also the founder and chief investment officer of One River Digital Asset Management, spoke in an interview with Bankless, which covers internet money and internet finance.

Coinbase Asset Management is an institutional digital asset manager and SEC-registered investment adviser operating as an independent business and wholly owned subsidiary of Coinbase. Hedge fund One River was founded in January 2021 and acquired by Coinbase in March 2023. There are information barriers between the asset manager and Coinbase’s exchange business according to Peters.

He said: “Coinbase acquired One River and left me running both firms. The industrial logic is that we all agree that traditional finance (TradFi) and crypto are going to converge and it is useful to have someone in my seat who can speak both languages.”

Peters argued that the biggest opportunity for the asset management business is providing yield to investors who own crypto. He said the firm has been developing “secure and interesting” ways to help clients holding stablecoins or who are sitting on bitcoin earn an incremental yield in. Bitcoin. that can be 3%, 5%, 8% or even higher, depending on their risk tolerance.

“We are developing products so they don’t have to leave the crypto economy and can earn substantial yields,” he added.

In addition, some of the industrial logic of bringing a fund manager into Coinbase is that the group could eventually provide asset management services to its retail and high net worth customers.

Infrastructure

One River Digital Asset Management first entered crypto as a macro trade but then dove into the underlying technology. However, the firm did not believe that the decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that had been built at the time would scale into bigger markets. Therefore, the strategy came to build out the ability to issue digitally native securities that would be regulatory compliant, in a project called OneBridge to integrate crypto and traditional finance (TradFi).

“One of the things that was exciting for me to sell OneRiver Digital to Coinbase is that it was  building financial infrastructure,” said Peters. “I thought we would have a much higher probability of seeing the light of day and scaling across the industry if we were part of the 800-pound gorilla and that’s starting to play out.”

For example, in Abu Dhabi Coinbase has provided the infrastructure for the  issuance of 200 discount notes under regulatory supervision.

Peters said that one of the big plays for Coinbase is crypto-as-a-service, or CaaS, which supplies infrastructure services.

Brian Armstrong, co-founder and chief executive of Coinbase, has 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. Armstrong said on Coinbase’s second quarter 2025 earnings call that the firm has more than 240 businesses using its crypto-as-a-service platform to power their custody, trading, and payments needs.

“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,” Armstrong added.

Institutional interest

Jay Clayton, the former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is on Coinbase’s global advisory council, and told Peters that Wall Street has been suspicious of crypto because it is the first financial innovation that started on Main Street.

Peters believes tradaFi has become more interested in blockchain because firms have accepted that these new technologies will make financial transactions faster, cheaper, more secure and more transparent if they get adopted at scale.

“Everyone has a vested stake in that,” he added. “Some of the reasons that we have had large financial crises have been because transactions haven’t been able to happen fast enough and because there’s been a lack of transparency.”

The entrance of BlackRock, led by chairman and chief executive Larry Fink, entrance into crypto was a “big deal” according to Peters.

“Fink rightly saw this technology as something that could potentially disrupt the ETF industry and made the fateful decision to just lean into it,” said Peters.

He also credited other luminaries in traditional finance with similar views including Ray Dalio, former chief executive of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, and hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, who founded Tudor Investment Corporation.

Peters said: “I do not think institutions are here in size at all yet.”

He defined institutions as large pension plans, endowments, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. Peters believes that these large pools of capital are not thinking about crypto as money, but have become more interested in the underlying infrastructure. As a result, TradFi firms see Coinbase and Circle, the stablecoin issuer that has gone public, as infrastructure plays.

“That’s one of the reasons that you see something like a Circle IPO go absolutely bananas,” Peters added.

Peters described stablecoins as a “killer app,” especially since the passing of the GENIUS Act in the U.S. The legislation provides a federal framework for stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a stable asset such as the U.S. dollar.

Stablecoins can be used as digital money to make payments and settle transactions onchain, rather than having to revert to traditional payment rails. As a result securities such as bonds and stocks will be able to be issued in digitally native form onchain, according to Peters, without needing a parallel traditional security as the necessary regulatory disclosures can be incorporated in smart contracts.

“We don’t need to have the old kind of database system with a token attached to it,” he said. “The infrastructure that we have been working on for four years allows the digitally native issuance of these TradFi investments and I think that’s going to be built on the ethereum blockchain.”

Peters argued that Coinbase will be a leader in bringing securities issuance onchain once regulatory issues are cleared.

“The GENIUS Act was the first most important step in providing traditional finance with foundational currency clarity,” he said. “Now we can start plugging everything else into it.

$9bn trade

In July this year Galaxy Digital, the digital asset and data center infrastructure firm, said in a statement that it had completed the sale of more than 80,000 bitcoibm then valued at more than $9bn, for an investor. Galaxy said this was one of the largest notional bitcoin transactions in the history of crypto.

Peters said the market has evolved to allow really large trades to be executed without dramatically moving prices. He added: “I think the depth and liquidity of this market now is pretty remarkable.”

He did the whole execution working with the Coinbase team around the clock using all the firm’s latest algos.

“That took us five days to do 24-7 without moving the market,” he added. “Now you could do that trade in a heartbeat. You could do an over the counter trade and really not move the market materially.”