Coinbase Global Q2 2025 Earnings Report

Coinbase Global EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $0.12
• Consensus EPS: $0.91
• Beat/Miss: Missed by -$0.79
• One Year Ago EPS: $0.14

Coinbase Global Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $1.50 billion
• Expected Revenue: $1.68 billion
• Beat/Miss: Missed by -$180.74 million
• YoY Revenue Growth: +3.30%

Coinbase Global Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q2 2025
• Date: 7/31/2025
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, July 31, 2025
• Conference Call Time: 5:30PM ET

Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN) provides financial infrastructure and technology for the crypto economy in the United States and internationally. The company offers the primary financial account in the crypto economy for consumers; and a marketplace with a pool of liquidity for transacting in crypto assets for institutions. It also provides technology and services that enable developers to build crypto products and securely accept crypto assets as payment. The company was founded in 2012 and is based in Wilmington, Delaware.

Coinbase Global Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Strong Q2 results: Total revenue was $1.5 billion with $512 million positive adjusted EBITDA and net income of $1.4 billion, plus $9.3 billion in USD resources.
• Positive Sentiment: Everything Exchange progress: Listing exceeded 300 spot crypto assets, integrating decentralized exchanges, launched 24/7 perpetual futures & options, and acquired Derivat to expand derivatives offerings.
• Positive Sentiment: Accelerating payments utility: Rolled out stablecoin payment APIs with partners like Shopify, leveraging USDC and Base for faster, cheaper global payments.
• Positive Sentiment: Expanding institutional services: Over 240 businesses use Coinbase’s crypto-as-a-service, including BlackRock, PNC, Stripe, and PayPal, covering custody, trading, and payments.
• Negative Sentiment: Trading volume headwinds: Q2 trading volume fell ~40% due to lower crypto volatility and fee changes on stable pairs, alongside a $307 million data breach expense impacting GAAP results.

Presentation

[Operator]

Good afternoon. My name is Kate, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Coinbase Second Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session.

[Operator]

Thank you. Anil Gupta, Vice President, Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Coinbase second quarter twenty twenty five earnings call. Joining me on today's call are Brian Armstrong, Co Founder and CEO Emily Choi, President and COO Alicia Haas, CFO and Paul Graywald, Chief Legal Officer. I hope you've all had the opportunity to read our shareholder letter, which was published earlier today on our Investor Relations website. During today's call, we may make forward looking statements, which may vary materially from actual results. Information concerning risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Our discussion today will also include certain non GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the shareholder letter on our Investor Relations website. Non GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, GAAP measures. We'll start today's call with opening comments from Brian and Alicia and then take questions from retail shareholders and our research analysts. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian for opening comments.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Thanks, Anil. It was another great quarter for Coinbase, and we continue to ship innovative products, drive strong financial performance and advance regulatory clarity for the industry. Total revenue came in at $1,500,000,000 with positive adjusted EBITDA of $512,000,000 And we now have 9,300,000,000 in total USD resources with $1,800,000,000 in our growing crypto investment portfolio fueled by weekly Bitcoin purchases. I wanna give a quick refresher on why we're here and what we're building toward. Our mission is to increase economic freedom for everyone, everywhere.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Crypto is eating financial services, and our goal is to be the number one financial services platform in the world across custody, trading, payments, staking, borrowing and lending and more. Our focus this year is to drive growth in our core businesses, trading and stablecoin payments, and I want to share three key areas that we made progress toward those objectives this quarter. First, on trading. We've always believed that every asset class will move on chain. The customers, technology, and regulatory environment are now finally ready for it.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

People want to invest capital across all asset types from stocks to commodities to real estate to crypto, including meme coins and the long tail of assets. And even how startups raise money and all capital formation is gonna be rebuilt on chain where markets are cheaper, faster, global, and open to everyone. So we've been making investments in this area for some time, and our goal is to build what we're calling the everything exchange. Every asset you wanna trade in a one stop shop, all on crypto rails. This means to start, we're enabling access to millions of spot crypto assets.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

This is the number one thing our customers want from us. And in q two, we hit over 300 total assets listed on our exchange. Next week, we'll be rolling out the next chapter of our asset addition strategy by integrating decentralized exchanges right into the Coinbase app, which will eventually enable access to millions of tokens. Next, it means offering the most global and compliant suite of perpetual futures and options to meet the needs of advanced traders. And we now have a comprehensive derivatives product suite.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

We recently launched 20 fourseven trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum contracts. And we launched perpetual style futures in The United States, which hit an all time high in trading volume this week. Finally, we announced our acquisition of Derivat, the world's leading crypto options exchange with over $30,000,000,000 of open interest. And now we're currently working toward launching tokenized equities to meet the moment in this new regulatory environment. We've always said we're updating the system and building the bridge to bring equities onto Cryptorails is the next phase of our strategy.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

We may integrate with traditional brokers as a stepping stone towards this vision to provide liquidity, but we believe tokenized equities are more efficient with global coverage, 20 fourseven trading, instant settlement and the ability to offer perpetual futures. The total addressable market for this is massive. Capturing just 3% of equities trading would double the current crypto market. Over time, we'll bring all asset classes on chain, including prediction markets, real world assets, and more. And we're building on the frontier, committed to doing this in a compliant and trusted way, which we've done for many years while making it easily accessible to everyone.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

So that's the Everything Exchange. Next, let's touch on how we're accelerating crypto utility with our full stack payment solutions. We see payments as the next big use case in crypto and believe that the majority of all payments in the economy will eventually run on stablecoin rails because they are faster, cheaper, and global. Passage of the Genius Act will fuel further innovation and adoption of stablecoins, and we are uniquely positioned because we have both the broadest distribution base for USDC and the best rewards program for customers. We're one of the only companies with a vertically integrated payment stack.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

This includes USDC, the largest regulated dollar stablecoin, Base, the most popular Layer two solution on Ethereum, consumer applications and wallets with millions of retail users, and payment APIs to power businesses and developers. Together, these offer a faster, cheaper, and more global payment solution. In q two, we announced our Stablecoin payment APIs, which enable businesses, merchants, and developers to easily accept and pay in Stablecoins with partners like Shopify already live in MarketNow. Finally, I'd like to spotlight how we are leveraging our deep experience in building crypto infrastructure to power the next wave of businesses coming into this space. We now have over two forty businesses using our crypto as a service capabilities to power their custody, trading, and payments needs, including BlackRock, PNC, Stripe, and PayPal.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

We power over 80% of the custody for crypto ETF issuers, and we're a trusted partner to over 150 government agencies and institutions to help manage and safeguard crypto assets with regulated and secure solutions. As the most trusted name in crypto with the longest track record of success, we are the natural partner for any company or government entering this crypto space. So in closing, with regulatory clarity finally emerging, we believe crypto rails are poised to power an increasing share of global GDP and update every aspect of the financial system. And Coinbase is the company best positioned to capitalize on this trend. I'll now turn it over to Alicia.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Thanks, Brian. Good afternoon, everyone. We have long said that crypto is not linear on a quarter to quarter basis, and q two was no exception. Amid lower volatility and non Bitcoin price headwinds, we were focused on execution. Our business grew stronger as we grew native units across the board in USDC, staking, and custody.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

We saw all time highs in derivatives trading volume, quarterly base transaction volume, prime financing average loan balances. And further, we are encouraged by the positive reception for our new products, like Coinbase Card, the Base app, US perpetual futures, and Coinbase business. Total revenue was $1,500,000,000 Net income was $1,400,000,000 Adjusted EBITDA was $512,000,000 and adjusted net income was 33,000,000. Let's dive into these results. As typical, all comparisons I'll share are on a quarter over quarter basis unless I note otherwise.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Let's start with the market backdrop. Crypto asset volatility declined 16% despite the average crypto price market cap being roughly flat. We saw shifting macro conditions, including trade policy considerations and recession concerns impact risk assets broadly, and crypto assets were no exception. We saw a divergence between Bitcoin and everything else as the average Bitcoin price in the quarter was up 6%, whereas non Bitcoin asset market cap declined 11%. In the second quarter, The US and global spot markets declined 3231% respectively.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Our total trading volume declined 40%. In March, we made an intentional price change to our stable pairs in our advanced product. This was in our control, and we made a decision to focus on revenue over trading volume. Historically, stable pair trading was a largely zero fee product for us. When you exclude the impact of the lower stable pair volume, our total trading volume was more similar to the overall spot markets.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Our consumer spot trading volume was 43,000,000,000, down 45%, and consumer trading revenue was $650,000,000, down 41%. In the quarter, we saw consumer spot volume shift towards simple as opposed to advanced given the lower volatility environment. Institutional spot trading volume was a $194,000,000,000, down 38%. Institutional transaction revenue was $61,000,000, also down 38%. In the last quarter, I mentioned that we expected 30 to $40,000,000 of impact in our q two institutional transaction revenue due to increased investments in incentives and rebates programs that we intended to drive liquidity and market share in our derivatives products.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

We did make this q two investment. However, this ex what ended up being recorded as a transaction expense due to the incentive program's design and the client activity mix. Now turning to subscriptions and services revenues of 656,000,000. As I mentioned earlier, across the board, we saw native unit balance growth, including average USDC in our products, growth in staking native units, and custody assets. We also saw all time high loan balances in prime financing.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

However, underlying asset prices, specifically in Ethereum and Solana, and protocol reward rates headwinds offset this growth quarter over quarter. Our total operating expenses were $1,500,000,000. Without the previously disclosed May data theft incident and the associated $307,000,000 expense that we recorded in the quarter, our total operating expenses would have declined 9% alongside the softer market conditions. We ended the quarter with just under 4,300 full time employees, which was up 8%. I would like to draw your attention to some specific events that materially impacted our GAAP profitability results this quarter.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

First, a $307,000,000 expense from the data theft incident I just mentioned. Second, a $1,500,000,000 unrealized gain on our strategic investments. Our strategic investments include our investment in Circle, which is now public. Going forward, this line will fluctuate in line with their stock price. Third, a $362,000,000 gain from the ongoing fair value remeasurements of our crypto investment portfolio.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Net income was $1,400,000,000 and includes the impact of those three items I just mentioned. Adjusted EBITDA was $512,000,000 and excludes those three items I just mentioned. Adjusted net income was $33,000,000, and we have updated our calculation to adjust net income for all gains and losses on both crypto and strategic investments. We believe that adjusted EBITDA and net in adjusted net income, while no substitute for GAAP measures, are very useful metrics to assess the recurring operating business results, excluding gains and losses from the investment portfolios. Additional detail can be found in our shareholder letter.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Now let's turn to our q three outlook. Q three is off to a strong start with higher asset prices and higher volatility. July transaction revenue is approximately $360,000,000. We expect our q three subscription and services revenue to be within the range of 665 to $745,000,000 or up approximately 8% quarter over quarter at the midpoint, driven by higher average crypto prices and stablecoin revenues. On the expense side, we expect technology and development and general and administrative expenses to be between $808,150,000,000 dollars.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Opportunities for growth have expanded substantially with increased regulatory clarity. We are leaning into this opportunity with headcount growth. We do expect higher q three headcount growth than we saw in q two. And we are directing this growth into the product areas Brian mentioned earlier. We expect our q three sales and marketing to be in the range of a 190 to $290,000,000. With that, let's go to questions.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Great. So we received a few different questions on tokenization. How does Coinbase plan to implement tokenized securities and compete for market share as demand increases? How can Coinbase ensure risk management compared to traditional finance and tokenized securities? Is there a time line for stock tokenization or real world assets? Brian?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yes. So first off, we are very excited about tokenized securities, much in the same way that getting a digital dollar. You know, we have a dollar in a bank account, and you can mint a token. It's it's one to one back. I think early on, people, were wondering what those would be used for.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

You know? Hey. Can't you already send dollars to each other? Right? And so in much the same way, crypto has an opportunity to update the financial system here in the securities world.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And we we don't know exactly how it'll all play out, but there are interesting opportunities around getting more global, distribution of creating some of these securities. There's a there's high demand for US assets in many places in the world where people can't easily open a brokerage account. We think that, new types of markets like perpetual futures around these securities could be interesting in a in a tokenized securities world. Obviously, real time settlement, twenty four seven trading, fractional shares. You know, there could be novel forms of, voting and governance that happen on chain.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

It's it's really hard to say where this will go, but we think that, ultimately, these assets tokenized on chain is gonna unlock a lot of value. And, you know, in terms of how we get there, there's there's a lot of steps. I mean, we will probably have to integrate with a traditional, broker. It matters how you custody the underlying assets. It matters, you know, for customers that wanna trade with margin or in some of these products.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Risk management becomes very important, which is the question asked about. But that's what we do best. Right? A lot of this comes down to, can you hire the right people with the right expertise from, different areas of tech and finance to come together and produce these systems? And I think that's what Coinbase has done best over the last twelve or so years is we build products that are the most trusted, most compliant, and that they're easy to use for everyone.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

They don't have to understand that it's on chain. They don't even have to care that it's on chain. They just want to be able to trade these assets and get exposure to them and build the best product. And so that's what we're gonna do. We're working hard on it.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

It's gonna you know, we'll keep you updated over the coming quarters as we make progress. But, yeah, that's the plan for now.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Thanks, Brian. Next question. What's the projected growth in terms of revenue as well as usage for the base app? What's being done to push for a massive adoption of blockchain based ID on base for the general public so that Coinbase will compete more may with more mainstream tech companies like TikTok and Meta. Brian?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. So I'm very, yeah, I'm very excited about Base. This is our attempt to really build on the frontier with crypto utility where there's lots of these, building blocks have come together over the last, really, ten years. Some of them we helped build. Others, the rest of the industry really helped build.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And these are things like, a decentralized identity that uses a standard called ENS. You can have a trusted stablecoin like USDC. We now have a scalable blockchain with BASE. There's decentralized messaging protocols, ways for people to build applications, and decentralized social media pro protocols. So this is kind of a super app, that we've put out there.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

It's in beta. There's actually 700,000 people on the wait list already. And so there's been a ton of demand for it and excitement about it. I think people are the most excited about this idea that as a content creator, whether, you know, you produce a podcast or art or video like YouTube, or just text like on x, people can put out this content and earn directly from their audience. That's a big deal.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

It kind of changes the traditional business model of the Internet that was more ad based because now the Internet has a native money layer. And so, you know, our goal is to get eventually a billion people on chain. I think self custodial wallets, like like, based on these new applications that we're building on top of it can really help us achieve that goal, but it's gonna be a long journey. And, you know, block blockchain based IDs like, like, a base name, whichever user who signs up gets a free base name using the EMS protocol. They they control that name.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

They can put all the data and information associated with it. It's not controlled by a a big tech company. And so that is a new model that I think a lot of consumers out there are interested in and content creators as well.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Okay. And then final question, what are Coinbase's strategic goals behind the partnership with PNC Bank, and are there other plans to partner with other banks in the future? Brian?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. Well, the overall goal is really just expanding the market. There's a lot of companies coming into crypto now, and many of them, don't wanna have to try to go build a lot of this themselves. It's it's really difficult and complicated to store these private keys in a secure distributed way to integrate with the different blockchains that are out there to trade and and do payments and financing on chain. So what they're doing is they're coming to Coinbase, and we've been doing this for a

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And so a long time ago, we decided to expose the services we built internally for our own products, making making them available to third parties as as infrastructure, a lot like what Amazon did with AWS. So we call this, crypto as a service or CAS. We have about 240 institutions now or companies that are utilizing these Coinbase rails in various ways today. And we just recently announced PNC. It's been great working with them, but there's a lot of others that we're building as well.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

You know, JPMorgan, we've made announcements around that. EToro, Revolut, Webull. There's a lot more in the pipeline. So, you know, if you're a bank or a broker or a fintech company or a payment service provider or a web two company or really anybody, I think, eventually, the most of the Fortune 500 will integrate crypto in some way just like they all use the Internet. And so, for those that are out there trying to think about how to do that, you know, give us a call.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

You can basically just Google Coinbase crypto as a service and find our offering.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Alright. So, Kate, let's switch gears and take our first question from the line, please. Kate, let's take our first question, please. Operator, are you there?

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

While we're waiting for the operator to join, Brian, maybe I could ask you another question.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Sounds good. Let's do it.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Brian, I think that probably our investors are really curious about Stablecoins and our payment stack, given the Clarity Act, given the number of new market participants. Share with me who we think the target customers are, how we think we will differentiate in the market, and are we looking to disrupt Western Union? Are we looking to disrupt Visa? Are we looking to disrupt the bank? Like, how do you wanna think about our product stat going against other payment products in the market?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. Well, payments is a big category. Right? There's merchant payments. There's ecommerce.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

There's peer to peer payments. One of the biggest areas that we're focused on first is really around b two b payments. A lot of this is cross border. We think that actually cross border payments is about a $40,000,000,000,000 opportunity. B two b is 75% of that.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And, you know, stablecoins have already started to see some adoption here in product market fit. There's about I'd say there's about $100,000,000,000 of stablecoin volume now, annually, up from about zero two years ago. So it's growing very quickly. And and so we as we go to market, we're we're kind of really relying on this full stack that we've put together. Again, I I sort of mentioned this in my opening comments, but we have Base, which is the most popular layer two solution.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

You can now do fast like, under one second, under 1¢ anywhere in the world payments on Base. It's really it's really performant. We have USCC as with our, you know, renew or partnership with Circle, which is the most trusted regulated US stablecoin. And then we also have these payment APIs we've built for businesses and developers, and we have consumers as well with a lot of crypto in their wallet that they wanna go spend, in the Coinbase app, the now the Base app, even with Coinbase Card, these things we've put out. So think we're really one of the only company in the world that has this kind of full stack that we're putting together to try to, ignite this.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And so lots of companies have been reaching out and asking about how they can, make their b two b payments better and faster and cheaper and more global. So yeah. And we announced announced some of these already with Shopify and others, but there there'll be there'll be more coming in the pipeline. It's it's really a a big area of growth and focus for us right now.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Alright. Thanks, Brian. So we're having a little bit of a technical issue. I would ask analysts who wanted to ask a question to please just email us directly, and we'll read them on your behalf. The first one I'll read is from Ken Worthington at JPMorgan who wants to dig into the payments dig into payments and the role Coinbase sees for itself in payments over time.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

There were two big announcements in the quarter, Shopify and, Commerce. Are you looking to build an alternative network to Visa and Mastercard that ultimately is open to all, or are you looking to create use cases for Coinbase customers such as the Coinbase credit card as an example? Does it make sense to have both, but ultimately, which is your focus? Is the monetization feature for payments transaction fees or USCC payments from Circle, or is Coinbase ultimately in a position to be able to collect both?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

I'm sorry.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Oh, no. It's a great follow on to Alicia's question, actually, and I you know, she asked part of this as well that I didn't fully answer. But, yeah. I think so, look. Coinbase is not really competing with Visa and Mastercard.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

We actually partner with them in many ways on our the cards that we put out there. But I do think that decentralized protocols are competing with them. Right? I think that, you know, an open standard is actually more efficient and fair. It's kind of like, you know, the Internet. Right? Anybody can build on top of it. It drove a lot of prices down. It democratized how information moved around the world, there were fewer gatekeepers. And so I do think that, and Visa and Mastercard are you know, they're on top of this as well. They're looking they're very involved in stablecoins and, and crypto at this point with different innovative projects that they're working on, some with us, some with others. So I think that the the best companies will adapt to this change, but it's absolutely a massive change that is coming.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And, you know, we want to attack this from both sides. We wanna have a bunch of consumers that have crypto to spend, and they want they want better rewards. We have a bunch of merchants and businesses who wanna accept payments and not have to pay such high fees. And so for instance, with the Shopify deal, since they were saving the, you know, two or 300 basis points, the merchants typically have to pay, there was a discussion about, well, how do we divide that up? Right?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And so the merchants in that case decided to give 1% cash back rewards to customers who came in and shopped at their store with USDC. So I think that, this just makes the market more efficient. Every company is gonna have to adapt to it. Coinbase is building great infrastructure for others, but we're also building first party products on top. Emily, did you wanna add something as well?

[Emilie Choi, President & COO at Coinbase Global]

No. Great point. And I I I only other point was that stablecoins might replace some of these networks, but but those those companies also have nodes, and they can monetize the nodes. And so I think I think there's gonna be ample areas for companies to evolve over time if they embrace the digital assets future.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

All right. I think our technical issue might have been fixed. So operator, let's take our next question, please.

[Operator]

Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

[Owen Lau, Executive Director at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.]

Hi. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. I do wanna follow-up on the base app question. Earlier today,

[Emilie Choi, President & COO at Coinbase Global]

the Anil, maybe you should ask the questions again.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. Do you wanna go back to email?

[Owen Lau, Executive Director at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.]

Oh, can you hear me? Sorry.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

We can hear the question. Owen, please continue.

[Owen Lau, Executive Director at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.]

Okay. So earlier today, the SEC chair announced the launch of Project Crypto, which allows the innovation with super app with a single license. Could you please talk about that potential license? Why they send a super app in The US? And why you think BaseApp can do it? Thanks.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Yes. So the question for those who may or may not been able to hear was earlier today, Chair Atkins at the SEC announced a single license. Why do we think that license could be attractive in The US? Why have we not seen that before? Paul, maybe you can talk a little bit about Chair Atkins' announcement today and what we think the opportunity is.

[Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer & Secretary at Coinbase Global]

Sure. Well, just to take a step back, I think Cherry Atkins speech was remarkable for for many reasons. I just encourage everyone listening to read it and to understand that we have a very different environment not only at the SEC but across US federal government in ways that were largely unimaginable just a short while ago. On the issue of of of licensure, I think, you know, the advantages for, many companies, not just Coinbase, are fairly straightforward. First and foremost, a single license obviously limits the compliance costs and operational costs associated with a a myriad of licenses, particularly in terms of supervisor examinations, and and oversight that come with a a portfolio of licenses or otherwise be required.

[Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer & Secretary at Coinbase Global]

But I think the the second reason is is is also worth noting why we why we see, you know, great great reason for hope and what Cherry Atkins rolled out and announced. There is a commitment to follow-up and follow through through formal rulemaking and other official activity at this at the SEC, the commitments and the vision that was set forth by the president's working group in the most recent report. And so I think that between the specific benefits of the license itself and the tone and tenor that was set by the by the chairman's remarks, we see we see great reason for optimism and hope, and we think this will continue going forward as the SEC continues to implement through the crypto project and the crypto task force of president Trump's and chair chairman Iken's vision.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Thanks, Paul. So I'll I'll read the next question, which comes from Devin Ryan over at JMP Citizens Citizens JMP. Brian, the everything exchange as more assets are tokenized is obviously a massive concept. When you think about the addressable market of assets that will trade today and potentially opening up new types of assets that aren't currently liquid, Can you help us think through a bit more? Do you see Coinbase both as a liquidity hub and as a brokerage in transacting in these assets?

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Maybe you can play a role in helping product manufacturers tokenize. There will be custody lending, etcetera. Can you talk about the areas where you think Coinbase will participate in the revenue streams? And can you give us any sense of timing in terms of when you hope to be up and running with tokenized equities? Thanks.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. So thanks for the interest on the Everything Exchange. It's it's definitely an exciting vision we're moving toward. And I think that Coinbase can operate in a couple different pieces of this stack. So one of it is really owning, you know, the brokerage front end relationship, the direct relationship with the customers coming into trade.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Right? Whether that's simple retail traders, advanced traders, institutions, in Coinbase Prime, or even folks just connecting in via API and creating via third party interfaces. We also operate centralized exchanges themselves. Right? And, there's some of these trades are gonna be happening on centralized exchanges.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Some of them are gonna be happening on decentralized exchanges. And I think the customer actually doesn't really need to know or care which one is happening on underneath. They just kinda want their order routed to the best place. So we have investments in some decentralized exchanges. We have centralized exchanges that we operate as well.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

So those another piece of the stack. And then we are getting a lot of your question alluded to this. We're getting a lot of companies reaching out to us now and saying, Premise, we we'd love your help in doing a primary offering, right, or helping helping raise money. It could be for an investment fund. It could be for a real estate project.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

It could be for a tech startup. It could be for a film they wanna produce. I mean, there's a lot of inbound interest right now. And so working with the SEC, crypto task force and this new permissive regulatory environment that we're in, I think there is an opportunity for for us to go and help, clients form capital and, raise money, right, and do this in a crypto native way that's that's more efficient. So we're looking into all of those.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

In terms of time line, you know, we're working hard at this. We wanna do it the right way, the trusted way. I you know, nobody has really launched tokenized securities yet. There's, there's a lot of work to do it the right way, but that's kind of what we're known for. And so we're working hard on it.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

We'll keep you updated on the coming quarters as we make progress.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Alright. Next question is from John Tadaro at Needham. So drilling more into the USDC, specifically, USDC on the Coinbase platform, where do you see potential upside beyond retail and institutional holdings of USDC on the platform? Do you see banks, neobanks, remittance company integrations, and would those count as USDC on on the Coinbase platform?

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Maybe I'll start with this one. So we monetize USDC through both balances on our platform, but we also benefit by USDC out in the ecosystem. We shared in our shareholder letter a waterfall that gives the illustrative breakdown of revenue and our participation in the USDC revenue. The goal of bringing more distribution partners, enabling banks, neobanks, remittance companies, fintechs, corporates, is that it grows overall USDC adoption. It creates interoperability, and it drives overall network effect.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

And we are we and Circle are both incentivized to bring more partners on. Some of those balances will be on our platform, and then we'll monetize those directly. But more USDC drives also the possibility of more off platform USDC in which we also benefit and get 50% of that revenue. We want everyone to be able to participate economically in this, and so we do have rewards programs that we offer for companies that participate through our platform. And we think that's an attractive way to grow more distribution partners is to be able to share in the economics.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. I think I'll just add that we believe stablecoins have a network effect. So sometimes people are just holding a dollar balance on in, let's say, their own brokerage account or something like that, and they wanna earn rewards. That's great. But as payments have now started to really take off, payments are truly a network effect business.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Right? It's it's better if the sender and the recipient both want to use the same stablecoin and actually the same underlying payment rail, whether it's base, you know, in this case, or something else. And so, you know, it's always it's always been kind of hypothetically possible to do an instant exchange under, like, an FX type transaction. And but the in practice, the user interface is more complicated. Customers don't wanna pay the small FX fee.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

You know? And so we actually think that there is a network effect, and we'll see more consolidation. And USDC is the largest regulated stablecoin for dollars. Dollars are the majority of all the stablecoins are backed by by dollars now. So and it's sharing economics with partners who are coming into the space.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And so we think that USDC has a good chance to win that network effect.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Next question is from Ben Budish at Barclays. Can you talk more about the payments monetization model? Is this just about proliferating stablecoins? Or are there other transaction based fees like on base? Are there subscription fees, etcetera?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. So, in part, is it does help with our stablecoin business today in terms of on platform, USDTP balances that we earn the revenue from. So that is good. But I think payments will also monetize directly. And you know, it can do that in a few ways.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Businesses are used to paying high fees, frankly, to to complete these payments. And so we could come in vastly lower and I think still have a very, a very good business model there. Also, any of these transactions that take place on base, there is a small sequencer fee that we'll that'll earn for that. And in the future, really, base is decentralizing. So any any partner who wants to run a base validator would earn sequencer fees on that as well.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

So, yeah, I think payment business models have easily been pretty easy to monetize over time. The difference here is I think the cost of these payments should really come down by an order of magnitude or so, maybe two maybe two orders of magnitude, and payments should get a lot lower friction in the economy.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Next question is from Alex Markraff at KeyBanc. There's been some key bank partnerships, PNC and JPMorgan. How do how do we think about the economics and the revenue generation here? Can you discuss a bit about which party ultimately controls the user experience and the scope of Coinbase services, access the accessibility of that? And then just any thoughts on timing of ramp for these types of services? Thanks.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Well, I can touch on the user experience, and then I don't know if, Alicia, you I don't think there's anything we shared directly on the monetization here to break it out. But in terms of the user experience, this fully in the customer's hands, in, you know, in this case, PNC or JPMorgan. So we're intending this to be an entirely white labeled solution. It's truly infrastructure. It's kinda like they're using AWS, to build in the cloud.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

That's a great subscription revenue business for us, but we're not trying to inject the Coinbase brand into any of their products. And so, yeah, they'll fully control the user experience in that case. We control it on our own platform, of course. But, yeah, these are exciting opportunities. I think there's more and more we can do with these partners over time because it it really is a one stop shop.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Right? Like, in many cases, they may come in and say, alright. We just wanna do payouts to, developers or content creators around the world, and we say, great. We can offer you that. And then, you know, a few months later, they'll say, well, we we ask we also want custody.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Can you create these wallets for our users? Can you allow them to earn rewards on their USDC balances? Can you allow them to create other hold hold other types of crypto? And so we really wanna make this a one stop shop, solution. This crypto is a service product, that we're offering out there, and they can choose whatever pieces they want, Lego pieces off the buffet menu to mix metaphors, just like AWS or something like that, and craft it to their needs.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Alicia, did you wanna say anything about monetization on those?

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

The only thing I'll add is that you'll see these monetized mostly through our existing products. And so we expect over time, as these integrations are established, that could lead to more trading volume in our institutional business. It could lead to more assets under custody. And so there won't be a unique line item that you'll see in our p and l. It'll be growth in existing line items.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

We'll take the next question from James Yarrow at Goldman Sachs. Could you help us think about the interest bearing dynamics within stablecoins? The Genius Act is not permitted, but rewards appear permitted. How do you think about the evolution of yield on stablecoins? And then do you expect users to prefer products like tokenized money mark money funds instead of stablecoins or perhaps switching between the two?

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

I'll start. So the rewards program that we offer for Coinbase holders who use USDC on our platform is integrated for the value that customer brings to our platform. When users hold USDC, we see that they tend to trade more. We see them engage with other products and services. So the programs that we offer are similar to marketing programs or loyalty programs for engagement and use of all of our products and services.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

When we then talk about how does a stablecoin differ from a tokenized money market or a tokenized deposit account, I do believe over time that if the utility is equal, users will will not be as tied to what the nature of the asset is. What they want is utility. They want the network effect. They want to find the asset that most merchants will accept and that most of the payment parties that which they engage with will accept. And that is why we are so focused, as Brian has mentioned in his previous con comments, of driving adoption of USDC, driving network effect, bringing on more distribution partners to provide the highest level of utility for our users.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. Just to, reinforce that. In in the Genius Act, there is a prohibition by the issuer of stablecoins on paying interest and yield. First, we are not the issuer. And second, we don't pay interest and yield.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

We pay rewards, as Alicia mentioned. And so, long story short is we can we plan to continue to pay rewards to our customers, which are very competitive. We think it's a it's a differentiated product, and it's a major reason that people come and store their their funds with with Coinbase.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Next question is from Patrick Molley at Piper Sandler. Can you discuss the economics behind adding decentralized exchanges to the platform? How will you monetize this, and what's the risk that adding these linkages will cannibalize your own retail exchange volumes?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. I can touch on that. And then, you know, anybody feel free to jump in. I so the first way that we monetize is just like on a centralized exchange. You know, the the brokerage layer, if you wanna call it that, has a fee, a trading fee.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And I I expect those to be similar, if not even a little higher sometimes, you know, in terms of monetization. And then the actual order, instead of being routed to an centralized exchange, is, in this case, routed to a decentralized exchange. You know, in some cases, we have investments in some of those decentralized exchanges. As the name would suggest, they are not owned by any one company. So it's not like we actually would not want to own the entire thing.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

It would not be decentralized in that case. So in some cases, we have investments, in these decentralized exchanges. Yeah. And then if the decentralized exchange is running on base, we may earn a sequencer fee for that as well. But I'd say the majority of the monetization, you know, is probably at the brokerage layer for that. So, yeah. Alicia, anything you wanna add?

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

No. I think that's exactly right.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Our next question is from Bo Pei at US Tiger. You launched the broadest suite of CFTC regulated crypto perpetuals in The US. What does the early traction look like, and when do you expect this business to become a material revenue contributor?

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. Well,

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Bo, why don't I start, Brian? You can add on.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Go ahead.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Yeah.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

We are really excited by our derivatives road map. And you are right. Just in the last two weeks, we launched US perpetual futures perpetual style futures, I should say, to our retail users, the first of its kind offering to The US customers. And zooming out, what's important to remember here is that derivatives trading are 75% of the overall market, and we see more than 90% of that offshore. So bringing this product to The US is a real innovation.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

We also paired that with twenty four seven markets with Bitcoin and Ethereum contracts. We are in the earliest of days with these products, but I think it's important to note that we've seen volumes double week over week. We've seen really good early momentum. Our goal here is to drive market share, drive liquidity, drive engagement. So we are not focused in the near term on monetization and margin.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

We are focused on driving liquidity, open interest, and volume. So in coming quarters, as we gain traction, we'll speak more about this in terms of a revenue driver for our business.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

Yeah. I mean, just to underscore it, I think perpetual futures are incredibly exciting. They've been the vast majority of all trading volume in crypto offshore until we launched this in The US really a week or two ago. And that obviously took a ton of hard work, just on the technology side, but on the regulatory side, the policy side, getting the right approvals in place. And that's kinda what we do best is, I think, try to marry these different skill sets around understanding the cryptography and the policy environment and bringing these together to get work done.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

And I think it's really starting to work, in The US. We've I think we saw one over a 100 over 1,000,000,000,000 in derivatives volume in q two, for instance. And then we hit an all time high of open interest as well as well of a billion dollars. So really great progress on that front.

[Anil Gupta, VP, IR at Coinbase Global]

Alright. Our final question we'll take from Pete Christiansen at Citi. Getting customer service right has been a challenge for fast growing fintechs in the past. In light of data breach in light of the data breach incident this quarter, how is Coinbase now thinking about its customer service strategy? And to what degree do you believe Coinbase efforts can help drive improvements in user satisfaction levels?

[Emilie Choi, President & COO at Coinbase Global]

I can start, Alicia and Brian can jump in. Specifically, I think as you're asking related to the data breach, I think one of the things we've learned is that the BPO strategy is something that we have to make sure we have our arms around as the world gets more and more complicated with hacks, very sophisticated hacking. And so as such, we have to think about bringing a lot of this machinery in house. We are focused on automating as much as we can and moving this world into one of AI and automation and at the same time figuring out how to maintain CSAT scores. So one of the one of the biggest areas of improvement I think we have to do is on the social and chat side of this.

[Emilie Choi, President & COO at Coinbase Global]

I think we actually do a really good job in terms of response times. The inquiries tend to be quite complex, which is why we're in that that early stage of making sure the automation actually produces a delightful result for the user. But I'd say the big takeaway I would have from the data breach was how can we make sure that we have quality checks, make sure that there's somebody, ensuring that the CX agents aren't able to be approached in a way that they were with the BPOs. Alicia, anything to add on that?

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

No. I would say that we are hardening our systems. We are making large investments in our platform to continue to be driving value to our customers in terms of security of their data and their assets.

[Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Coinbase Global]

So Well, the only thing I'll add too is we did just open an office in Charlotte, North Carolina to expand our onshore customer support facilities, which was great. And, we also put out a $25,000,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest of these threat actors. So that's been a great experience kinda working with law enforcement, which will hopefully produce some results in this case and a deterrent for future cases.

[Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global]

Alright. Well, I just wanna thank everybody for bearing with us with our technical issues that we had this evening. So thank you so much. I also want to share that Brian and I will be on x on Friday at 10:00 Pacific. So please join us for additional q and a on that call, and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter.

Participants

Executives

• Anil Gupta, VP, IR
• Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board
• Emilie Choi, President & COO
• Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer & Secretary

Analysts

• Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase Global
• Owen Lau, Executive Director at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.