Coinbase was originally known as a U.S.-listed crypto exchange but has since pivoted to wanting to become an “everything exchange” by adding equities, derivatives and prediction markets.

Emilie Choi, president and chief operating officer, and Alesia Haas, chief financial officer at Coinbase, spoke at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference in New York on 20 May 2026.

Trading is Coinbase’s biggest driver of profit and loss with the firm having the biggest market share in spot crypto at 8.6%, according to J.P. Morgan. Haas explained that Coinbase decided to pivot beyond spot crypto trading to become an “ everything exchange” as customers want to trade other assets, and the firm wanted to diversify revenues to become less dependent on crypto prices.

“We made a huge push over a very short period of time to enable things like equities and prediction markets,” added Haas. “In the first quarter of this year crypto wasn’t the biggest thing in the world in terms of volumes and trading, but prediction markets were big and commodities were big, and this enabled us to have that buffer.”

New products that went live in the first quarter of this year have started to make a dent in the overall P&L as existing customers engaged in the broader product suite and new customers joined Coinbase, according to Choi.

In December last year Coinbase agreed to acquire The Clearing Company, a prediction markets company, and began rolling out access to these markets. Coinbase’s prediction markets achieved $100m of annualized revenue in March this year, their second month of operation, according to Choi.

“Prediction markets is a huge phenomenon, and in some cases I think they are going to be a more popular activity than spot trading,” she said.

There are other prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, but Choi argued that Coinbase’s “right to win” is the bundle. The firm was crypto first, but has become a bundle where customers can access any asset at any given time. Choi added: “We offer ease of use and we think that it is a great value proposition for them.”

Haas highlighted that Coinbase is the largest crypto custodian and holds over 12% of the world’s crypto. As customers already store assets at Coinbase, being able to offer more assets to trade creates engagement and incremental value. She said: “I think we have the long-term right to win as you can take a bet on global politics on one platform and express that in equities, prediction markets, futures or crypto.”

Derivatives expansion

Retail derivatives for the first quarter rose to $200m of annualized revenue. There were also increases in trading volumes of commodity futures including silver, gold and gold in response to the global macro environment.

“By diversifying tradable assets, we give retail customers something to trade in all market conditions, and we definitely saw that in the first quarter,” added Choi. “This will create more resiliency in our trading revenue over time as these products mature and we engage more customers.”

Derivatives trading volumes are typically between three and four time the volume of crypto spot trading, so Choi said they are a very important piece of the market for Coinbase. In 2025 Coinbase acquired Dubai-based Deribit for $2.9bn. Choi described Deribit as the “undisputed” leader in crypto options globally, and said the venue should be fully technically integrated by the end of this year. Coinbase would like to offer Deribit in the U.S., which is subject to CFTC approval.

“Deribit is a great tent pole for us in addition to our spot position,” added Choi. “The goal is to make sure that we have one platform for futures, derivatives, spot, options and so on across crypto.”

This will create a global pool of liquidity to allow cross-margining across portfolios and financing. Deribit has a cross-margin engine that Coinbase is integrating across its liquidity pool.

In May 2025, Coinbase Derivatives said in a statement that it had become the first U.S. derivatives exchange regulated by the CFTC to offer 24/7 trading for margined futures contracts with the initial launch of nano and institutional-sized bitcoin and ethereum futures.

“You  can expect to see more of that in general,” said Choi. “We definitely want to go aggressively with derivatives across the whole globe.”

Crypto derivatives is a competitive and concentrated market. Choi argued that Coinbase has an advantage because it is regulated and has a “brand of trust”, which will attract customers.

Haas argued that Coinbase can marry its retail customer base and institutional products to create deep liquid markets. She said: “As we continue to expand internationally, away from our deep bench of U.S. customers, we believe that there’s no reason why we won’t be able to build contracts and bring customers to our trusted platform to build liquidity.”

The growth of the derivatives platform is a key near-term focus, according to Haas, and where the firm expects to see a lot of growth this year. She added: “It’s been one of the biggest drivers of our market share growth and we anticipate that will continue.”

Stablecoins

Coinbase has one of the biggest fee wallets in stablecoins, according to J.P. Morgan, and helped build out USDC, Circle’s stablecoin, into the second largest stablecoin through its distribution. Choi said Coinbase is the largest distributor of USDC, holding $19bn on its platform.

“At any given time, we extract about 50% of the economics of USDC, and we also enable the trading and custody of other stablecoins on our platform,” she added. “We are very bullish on stablecoins.”

Stablecoins, as digital dollars, are one part of the end-to-end platform being designed by Coinbase. The Base blockchain enables fast, cheap global transactions to settle onchain and Coinbase plans to issue a Base taken in the future. Separately from the blockchain, the Base mobile app is a digital wallet for clients who want to self custody their assets which Coinbase expects to drive international customer growth. APIs help with enterprise integrations and Coinbase has developed a market for agentic commerce.

Choi said: “We have all the pieces of an end-to-end offering, and we think that is a very powerful position.”

Haas emphasised that USDC is not just a payment story, but is also a collateral story and a trading pair underlining many Coinbase products and services. In May this year Coinbase said in a statement that it is expanding support for onchain markets by becoming the official treasury deployer of USDC on Hyperliquid, an onchain trading network. USDC has been the leading stablecoin on Hyperliquid since its launch in 2023 and has seen rapid growth within the ecosystem.

“We think this is a big growth vector” added Haas. “Liquidity begets liquidity so doing these types of deals selectively helps propagate the network effects and expansion of USDC.”

Agentic AI

Coinbase’s x402 protocol enables agentic commerce and processed more than 100 million payments over the last three months with partners including Google, Shopify and Amazon.

Haas said AI agents will outnumber humans and agents will be transacting in new ways, so Coinbase is building the stack for this business, and is starting to be the leader in ushering in an era of agentic commerce.

Tokenization

In order to unlock the potential of tokenization, Choi said the passage of the Clarity Act for digital asset market structure is critical. The proposed bill has been approved by the U.S. Senate banking committee, but still needs to be passed by the full Senate and House, before being signed by the President.

She highlighted that when the Genius Act for stablecoins was passed last year it unlocked a wave pod innovation, and she expects that the Clarity Act would have the same impact. Choi added: “We we think the Clarity Act would opens up the whole wave of onchain financial assets, including tokenized equities.”