Coinbase Unveils Expansion Into Stocks, Stablecoin-as-a-Service, and Prediction Markets

Product update: On Wednesday, Coinbase held its highly anticipated “System Update” event, unveiling a broad slate of new products and services spanning crypto, traditional assets, AI, and stablecoin infrastructure.

• Why it matters: The event marks a major step in Coinbase’s evolution from a pure crypto platform into an “everything exchange” and beyond. By expanding into new asset classes and deepening its crypto-as-a-service offering, Coinbase is positioning itself not just as a consumer front end, but as core infrastructure embedded across the entire crypto value chain.

Stock trading: A central pillar of that expansion is equities. Coinbase announced that users will be able to trade real stocks directly within the app, using USDC as the settlement asset, with 24/7 access on weekdays. Early next year, the exchange also plans to launch stock perpetual futures, giving non-U.S. users synthetic exposure to U.S. equities.

Prediction markets: Stocks were not the only new asset class introduced. Coinbase also officially unveiled its prediction markets product. Similar to the event contracts offered by competitor Robinhood, the product is powered by leading prediction market platform Kalshi.

• Speaking of Robinhood: After the fintech introduced Robinhood Cortex, its AI-powered investing assistant, in March, Coinbase now followed with the launch of its own offering, called Coinbase Advisor.

B2B(2C): Beyond consumer products, Coinbase used the event to highlight its growing focus on infrastructure and services for businesses and institutions.

Tokenization: With Coinbase Tokenize, the company introduced an end-to-end offering covering issuance, custody, compliance, and trading of tokenized assets. The platform is designed to support a wide range of instruments, including equities, private companies, and investment funds. CEO Brian Armstrong framed Coinbase’s advantage as a distribution and trust problem it is uniquely positioned to solve.

• “On one hand, we have millions of retail and institutional investors who hold over $500 billion in assets on our platform. On the other hand, we already work with the world's largest institutions who trust us for custody. We can help get distribution for their products.”

Stablecoin-as-a-service: The most notable announcement of the event was the launch of Coinbase Custom Stablecoins. The offering enables businesses to issue a custom-branded stablecoin backed 1:1 by a configurable mix of USDC and other USD stablecoins, without building their own issuance, redemption, security, or compliance infrastructure. Key features include:

• Mass global distribution: Direct access to Coinbase’s global consumer, business, and institutional user base.
• 1:1 interoperability: Zero-fee swaps between USDC and any Coinbase Custom Stablecoin, providing instant liquidity.
• Built-in revenue model: Issuers earn rewards based on circulating supply, accrued daily and paid out monthly.

What’s next: In the coming months, multiple partners are expected to launch Custom Stablecoins for their customers. Some market observers speculate that cloud giant Cloudflare could be among them, given its existing collaboration with Coinbase on the x402 payments standard for agentic commerce.

Julius Nagel is a General Partner at w3.wave, a Berlin-based liquid token fund. Previously, he was an early contributor at the Ethereum Foundation and later served as an Investment Advisor at Picus Capital, a Munich-based VC firm.

You didn���t need to watch closely over the last year to see that Coinbase is executing a fintech and neobank expansion that puts it in more direct competition with Robinhood than Binance.

What’s notable is that Coinbase is expanding into new user segments without alienating its highly profitable crypto-native base. The trick lies in bifurcating the product: a fintech-first Coinbase app that abstracts away blockchain complexity, and the Base App for crypto-native users. Building Base was a strategically sharp move. Owning the underlying network lets Coinbase capture more value.

Yet Coinbase is much more than its consumer-facing business. It now operates across three distinct markets: retail, institutional, and enterprise. On the enterprise side, Coinbase is building a full-stack crypto-as-a-service platform across custody, staking, brokerage, stablecoins, and tokenization, increasingly resembling an AWS-style infrastructure play for financial institutions.