Coinbase (COIN) has entered its next era — one that’s expanding beyond crypto trading.
“We’re absolutely a crypto firm. What [investors] should think of us as, we’re just building better financial services with crypto,” Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said on Yahoo Finance’s Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast (video above; listen in below).
We caught up with Armstrong at his Systems Update event in New York City.
The company laid out the most ambitious product expansion in its history. Coinbase announced it is evolving from a crypto exchange into a unified platform combining crypto, traditional stocks and ETFs, prediction markets, perpetual futures, tokenized assets, and payments — all accessible from a single account.
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The headline product was Coinbase Advisor, one of the world’s first SEC-registered AI investment advisers. It can issue explicit buy and sell recommendations, analyze a user’s portfolio history, and execute trades around the clock. Coinbase also revealed tokenized equities that are 1:1 backed 1:1 by the underlying stock.
Wall Street embraced the new product barrage.
“We continue to think Coinbase is creating a leading digital assets platform with real world utility, and now it is further enhancing it by adding access to TradFi investment tools,” BTIG analyst Andrew Harte said in a note.
Analysts are broadly bullish on Coinbase, with roughly two-thirds of recent ratings carrying a Buy or Overweight designation, according to Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace.
Harte reiterated his Buy rating on Coinbase.
The latest innovations come at a welcome time for Coinbase investors.
Coinbase stock has been under significant pressure after first quarter sales missed analyst estimates and fell 31% year over year. Crypto trading volumes dropped 28% quarter over quarter, and spot trading volumes declined 37%.
Besides this, a public battle has reignited between JPMorgan (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon and Armstrong, which began at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year.
Dimon recently appeared on Fox Business and called Brian Armstrong “full of sh*t” over his multimillion-dollar lobbying push for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. The bill would establish a regulatory framework for crypto and, most critically, allow platforms like Coinbase to offer yield-like rewards on stablecoin holdings.
Dimon argues this lets crypto firms effectively compete with banks for deposits without being subject to the same FDIC, AML, and capital requirement rules that traditional banks must follow.
“We’ll fight it, and if we lose, we lose, we’ll live — but it will be fought,” Dimon said of the bill, which is headed for a full Senate vote. “No one’s gonna bow down to this guy or that company,” he added.
A spokesperson for Dimon at JPMorgan didn’t return Yahoo Finance’s request for comment on Armstrong’s remarks (see below).
Here are several key excerpts from our chat with Armstrong.
On the war of words with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon
“I would love for that [meeting with him] to happen. My door is open whenever he is. But I don’t think it’s necessary to get actually the bill. At this point, the Senate has sort of told both of us, ‘We’re going forward in this direction, and you guys had to make a compromise. It hurt for both sides, but this is what we came up with.’ And then hopefully it’ll be on the president’s desk in the next few months.”
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong speaks at the Stand with Crypto rally on March 4, 2024, in Los Angeles. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) · Jason Armond via Getty Images On his call that bitcoin has bottomed
“Well, nobody knows for sure on these things. But I think if you look at the past trends and just, you know, fear and greed indexes, if you just look at the past trends in bitcoin, I think we bottomed at $60K or so. A lot of things could drive growth of bitcoin here. I think market structure, legislation passing, I think some of these AI companies going public, because they’ve been soaking up a lot of the risk capital. So once these companies get public and the unlocks happen, like I think you’ll start to see capital move back around.”
On AI agents and investing
“Now there’s this new layer happening with this agentic economy where we are increasingly relying on AI agents to get work done on our behalf. So they need to go buy goods and services. They need to hire teams of agents. That requires new financial infrastructure. So all of these trends mean that financial services are getting updated by crypto. And we are the best company in the world to do that because we store more crypto than anyone else.”
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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