Coinbase ushers in the era of the "All-in-One Exchange": integrating stocks, DEX, and prediction markets, aiming to become a financial super app

Author: Techub Hotspot Highlights

Author: Yangz, Techub News

“The future of finance is on Coinbase. All in one app,” Coinbase announced at today’s System Update presentation, setting a new course for its future through 2026 and beyond.

As an industry leader with a market capitalization exceeding $65 billion and owning the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the U.S., Coinbase has no intention of resting within its current boundaries. It is launching its most aggressive and disruptive product expansion in 13 years: breaking down traditional barriers in the financial world by integrating crypto assets, stocks, derivatives, on-chain ecosystems, and prediction markets into a seamless application experience. From partnering with Kalshi to launch prediction markets, to integrating Jupiter for seamless Solana DEX trading; from launching zero-commission stock trading to tailoring stablecoins for enterprises—these initiatives are not isolated product updates but are tightly aligned with a core strategy: building an “omni-exchange” that transcends cryptocurrencies.

Looking further ahead, the depth of this strategy becomes even clearer. From regulatory approval in India for its minority stake in CoinDCX, to joining the U.S. “Tech Force” initiative to participate in the national fintech agenda; from launching the next-generation open protocol x402 V2 connecting AI and payments, to collaborating with traditional financial giants like Standard Chartered to explore institutional digital asset services—Coinbase’s year-end layout sketches a clear strategic path: using cryptocurrency as a foundation, extending in all directions, weaving a financial network that covers retail and institutional, centralized and decentralized services.

This major year-end announcement undoubtedly sets the tone and marks the beginning for Coinbase’s 2026 and longer-term future. A larger, more complex, and more ambitious Coinbase is emerging.

Six Pillars of Business, Building the “Omni-Exchange” Foundation

Coinbase’s expansion represents a systematic overhaul of its financial product matrix. Its six core business areas target different markets and user needs, jointly forming a solid foundation for the “omni-exchange.”

Stock Trading: Opening the Door to Traditional Financial Markets

As a key part of this strategic expansion, Coinbase, through its FINRA-regulated subsidiary Coinbase Capital Markets Corp., officially offers U.S. stock trading services to American users. Additionally, a company spokesperson explicitly stated: “Zero-commission stock trading will become a permanent service of Coinbase.” While specific profit models for this aggressive pricing strategy have not yet been disclosed, it is clear that the goal is to rapidly gain market share and break the commission barriers of traditional brokers.

The breakthrough is not only in pricing but also in integrated experience—users will be able to buy and sell stocks using USD or USDC within the same Coinbase account, achieving true management of both crypto and traditional financial assets. More notably, Coinbase plans to extend trading hours to five days a week, 24 hours a day for certain stocks, challenging traditional trading models and paving the way for a 24/7 digital asset trading ecosystem. The company plans to add “thousands” of stocks in the coming months, greatly expanding investment options. Beyond spot trading, Coinbase is also working on deeper product innovations, such as laying the groundwork for stock-linked perpetual futures, enabling users outside the U.S. to gain continuous exposure to U.S. stocks via more capital-efficient derivatives. This product is expected to expand coverage early next year, at which point Coinbase will offer a complete product line from spot to derivatives.

Furthermore, Coinbase explicitly positions this service as a strategic bridge to “asset tokenization.” The company announced plans to launch a dedicated “Coinbase Tokenize” platform in 2026, supporting on-chain issuance and management of real-world assets like stocks. Today’s stock trading functionality is a key infrastructure laying the groundwork for tomorrow’s blockchain-based global programmable asset markets, reflecting Coinbase’s long-term evolution from a traditional financial access point to a future asset issuance platform.

Prediction Markets: Exploring Event-Driven Finance

While embracing traditional assets, Coinbase is also venturing into cutting-edge fields—prediction markets. By partnering with Kalshi, a leading platform regulated by the CFTC, Coinbase introduces event contract trading, a niche yet promising market, into its mainstream app. It also integrates these alternative investments with users’ crypto, stock, and cash balances within a single interface, enabling diversified portfolio management. Choosing to partner with licensed Kalshi rather than directly integrating decentralized protocols highlights Coinbase’s cautious approach to compliance when expanding into new financial activities, aiming to establish legitimate and trustworthy markets for such sensitive financial activities.

Starting with Solana, Embracing High-Activity Public Chains

As one of the world’s largest centralized exchanges, Coinbase recognizes that traditional token listing processes are often less agile than DEXs in capturing explosive growth of new tokens. To address this, it has adopted a strategic move: directly integrating Jupiter, the largest DEX aggregator in the Solana ecosystem, transforming its platform from a closed asset list provider into an open ecosystem liquidity aggregator. Users can trade newly launched tokens on Solana seamlessly without leaving the app or managing complex wallets. All cross-DEX routing and price discovery are handled by Jupiter in the background. This clever move encapsulates the rich tail assets and liquidity of DeFi into a smooth centralized platform experience. More importantly, it marks a shift in Coinbase’s product philosophy from “deciding what you can trade” to “helping you trade everything.” Coinbase plans to extend this integration model to other high-growth blockchain networks, potentially creating a new paradigm where Coinbase as a unified front-end aggregates liquidity across multiple public chains.

Custom Stablecoins: Developing Enterprise-Level Financial Services

In the core sector of stablecoins, Coinbase is launching a “custom stablecoin” service aimed at enterprise markets. This service allows corporate clients to use USDC as reserves to issue and customize their own branded stablecoins flexibly. This move positions Coinbase in direct competition with established issuers like Paxos and Anchorage, opening a new high-margin “financial-as-a-service” business line targeting institutions. More strategically, this service also strengthens the stablecoin ecosystem: using USDC as reserves will reinforce USDC’s role as a “base currency” within the stablecoin system. By attracting more enterprises to issue USDC-backed custom stablecoins, Coinbase expands USDC’s application scenarios and market share, building a stablecoin ecosystem centered around itself and creating a dual benefit of business growth and ecosystem reinforcement.

According to Coinbase, early partners exploring this product include Flipcash, Solflare, and R2.

Simplifying Derivatives Trading: Promoting Leverage Tools

Coinbase is redesigning its derivatives trading interface—originally aimed at professional users within Coinbase Advanced—to be accessible to all U.S. traders. According to a Coinbase spokesperson, the new interface simulates an intuitive spot trading experience, significantly lowering the cognitive and operational barriers for leverage products, enabling a broader retail audience to participate conveniently in derivatives trading.

This strategic shift reflects Coinbase’s keen insight into market demand. In an environment where spot market volatility may narrow, providing easy-to-use leverage products meets user needs for capital efficiency and diverse strategies, while also seeking new revenue streams. Democratizing professional financial tools not only enhances user engagement and platform activity but also opens a new competitive path for crypto-native derivatives in a market traditionally dominated by conventional brokers.

Comprehensive Support: AI Assistants, Developer Platforms, and Business Services

Coinbase’s expansion is not only about product diversification but also a comprehensive upgrade of its platform infrastructure. As it broadens tradable asset classes, the company is building a multi-layered support system covering individual investors, developers, and enterprise clients, providing full-spectrum service to realize its “omni-exchange” vision.

For individual users, the AI assistant “Coinbase Advisor” can offer personalized asset allocation advice and investment strategy analysis based on user holdings and real-time market data, democratizing traditionally high-net-worth-only advisory services at scale. Meanwhile, the Base App, a “universal on-chain app” for ordinary users, has exited beta and launched in over 140 countries worldwide. On the developer ecosystem side, the upgraded developer platform offers a complete API suite covering custody, payments, trading, and stablecoins. Companies like Deel, Papaya, Routable, and dLocal are already using Coinbase’s payment API. In enterprise services, “Coinbase Business” now provides comprehensive crypto-native financial solutions for compliant companies in the U.S. and Singapore, including global payments, digital asset management, USDC yield, and financial automation. Notably, Coinbase states that enterprise clients will be able to access trading features fully synchronized with retail platforms, including stocks, derivatives, and all other new asset classes.

These three support layers form an integrated whole, transforming Coinbase from a simple trading execution platform into a comprehensive financial infrastructure integrating investment management, ecosystem innovation, and institutional services. This shift not only enhances platform user retention and commercial value but also establishes a complete business cycle from individual to enterprise, from application to ecosystem.

Summary

Coinbase’s major expansion of its product matrix marks a critical step in its transformation from a professional crypto exchange into a comprehensive “omni-exchange.” By integrating stocks, derivatives, on-chain assets, and prediction markets with traditional finance, and building a multi-layered support system including AI assistants, developer platforms, and enterprise services, Coinbase is creating a truly integrated platform that merges traditional finance with the crypto ecosystem.

Of course, this strategic shift has received mixed industry feedback. Advocates of decentralization express concerns that it deviates from the original spirit of crypto. Some industry observers note that the boundaries of fintech services are increasingly blurring—“Coinbase is turning into Robinhood, and Robinhood is becoming more like Coinbase.”

Essentially, Coinbase is blurring the line between centralized and decentralized finance. It encapsulates DeFi liquidity into a smooth centralized experience, connects traditional assets within a compliant framework, and lowers on-chain participation barriers through the Base App. This “centralized experience with decentralized innovation” approach reflects a trend toward integration in fintech development.

As Coinbase declared at the launch event—“The future of finance is on Coinbase. All in one app”—this statement is both a declaration of its ambitions and an apt depiction of the broader trend toward integrated and unified financial services in the digital age. Whether Coinbase can successfully realize this grand vision remains to be seen, but undoubtedly, it has set a new benchmark worth industry attention and reflection.