Coinbase's 2026 ambitions: An all-encompassing exchange, an all-encompassing distribution layer

Charlie, the author of this article, previously served as Vice President at the cryptocurrency unicorn Strike (participated in El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law and was responsible for Bitcoin and stablecoin payment operations in Latin America), macro analyst at the trillion-dollar fund Franklin Templeton, and an early member of the global payments giant Adyen in North America. He currently acts as a strategic advisor on cryptocurrency for multiple publicly listed companies, startups, and investment institutions.

I originally didn’t plan to write another article before the end of the year, but yesterday’s “System Update” presentation by Coinbase had too many highlights. After some hesitation, I decided to put pen to paper once more.

This year, I wrote about Robinhood vs Coinbase: Differentiated Competition, Building the Next Generation of Wall Street, and also discussed in depth on a friend’s podcast E55. Robinhood vs Coinbase, the Wave of Integration in the Crypto and Stock Markets—Who Will Be the Next Generation Fintech Winner? ft. Charlie. Both are favorite financial apps among Gen-Z, but this battle is becoming more complex.

The presentation announced a series of new product features: stocks, prediction markets, perpetual contracts, integrating on-chain long-tail assets from Base and Solana directly into Coinbase’s main app DEX portal, enterprise payments and collections, AI investment advisors, plus the Base App—packaged as a global on-chain “everything app,” with content tokenization and tradability, becoming a new platform for creators.

Beneath the surface of this “all-in-one” approach, there’s a deeper insight: Coinbase’s update isn’t just about stacking features but about strengthening its role as a “distribution layer”—using more entry points to transform itself into a more comprehensive compliant financial product platform, enabling tokenized finance to occur within its interface, even if the underlying chains, assets, or exchanges are not native to Coinbase.

Finance appears to be a technology battle, but in reality, it’s more a distribution war. Technology and products are crucial, but profits usually belong to those who secure user mindshare and stickiness—when you want to buy, sell, borrow, or pay, you don’t want to switch apps.

Retail: Intentionally Blurring the Line with Robinhood

Coinbase’s slogan is straightforward: “Everything Exchange.” The most tangible move is to include US stock trading in the main app, allowing users to view crypto and stocks in the same account, buy stocks directly with USD or USDC, and adopt a retail-friendly narrative of “zero commissions, 24/5” (a Robinhood-inspired approach).

Functionally, this aligns Coinbase more closely with Robinhood. Stocks, as the largest asset class in retail markets, are a key battleground to become the primary product in users’ minds.

Moreover, Coinbase isn’t just adding stocks; it’s also adding another type of “attention asset”—the hot prediction markets this year. During the launch phase, all market traffic will come from Kalshi. Instead of building everything in-house (temporarily), Coinbase embeds a compliant, mature backend, keeping the front door firmly in its control.

This is typical of Western fintech strategies—Stripe and Adyen also started as payment gateways, a proven path Robinhood has validated.

Prediction Markets: Kalshi as a “Compliance Distribution Weapon”

Prediction markets have exploded this year, with common comparisons between Polymarket and Kalshi. On the surface, it’s a product and liquidity pool competition, but from a distribution perspective, Kalshi’s differentiation lies in its easier embedding into large platforms(embedded).

Kalshi emphasizes that it is a contract market regulated by the CFTC. In contrast, Polymarket faces compliance issues in the US; the closer it gets to high-quality clients (large platform KYC users), the harder distribution becomes.

Thus, Kalshi’s distribution advantage truly materializes: Coinbase doesn’t need to win liquidity on day one; it needs to turn prediction markets into a habitual channel embedded within an app that already manages user balances and has completed KYC.

More plainly, like Robinhood, Coinbase aims to dominate users’ attention moments. Sports, elections, data, policy, climate, cultural hot topics—these are events that can be socially propagated and are easiest to convert attention into trading actions.

This is dangerously addictive, but precisely because of its danger, it offers strong distribution potential.

Additionally, there’s a second-order effect often overlooked: prediction markets generate data. They are closer to “quantifiable sentiment” than social media, faster at capturing narrative inflection points than news, and easier to productize with AI for user actions.

Therefore, when you place an AI Advisor alongside, these data are not just traffic—they become actionable intent inputs(actionable intention).

Chains and Assets: Beyond Base, Gaining More Trust

Coinbase’s bet on Base has paid off, and it will continue along this path. However, a key move in this update is integrating Solana into the same discovery and trading long-tail asset distribution flow via the DEX portal.

On the surface, this is an experience upgrade: no wallet switching, no complex cross-chain paths. Deeper down, it responds to two pressures.

First is “perception”: “Will Coinbase always favor its own chains?” This is a trust constraint. If you want to be an Everything Exchange, you can’t let users feel you’re pushing your own tokens—just suspicion is enough. Multi-chain aggregation is a way to mitigate this doubt.

Second is “capture”: channel the attention of long-tail assets and meme economy from other ecosystems into Coinbase’s ecosystem, completing transactions within its fee, risk control, and distribution systems, and cross-selling. It’s not about Coinbase becoming DeFi, but about Coinbase turning DeFi into its underlying supply—another distribution entry point.

Third is “aggressiveness”: if Ethereum and Solana continue to compete for the narrative of “Wall Street’s preferred chain,” Coinbase’s strategy of incorporating both enhances its position as a “neutral entry”—regardless of which chain wins, it aims to remain invincible.

B2B: The Ambition of Stripe + Brex, a Year of Transformation

From a retail perspective, Coinbase Business is increasingly like a “one-stop enterprise financial service”: offering accounts, payments, collections, USDC yield, compliance infrastructure, and more, targeting startups and SMEs, starting from mature markets like the US and Singapore.

Over the past year, the evolution from Coinbase Commerce to Coinbase Business has been remarkable.

Using “Stripe + Brex” as an analogy helps—it’s not that Coinbase will replace them, but that it aims to match a more comprehensive, full-stack B2B fintech service.

Stripe excels at “acquiring and orchestrating (orchestration).” Brex’s strength is “spending and fund management.” Coinbase is building a set of crypto-native enterprise services: stablecoin settlement, global payments, USDC fund management, and in the same account, assets, receipts, and potentially more tools in the future.

What makes it more powerful isn’t just the SaaS-like services of Coinbase Business but the underlying modular Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP)—which hints that Coinbase wants to expand its customer base into “all apps.”

Coinbase summarizes the four pillars of CDP as: custody, payments, trading, stablecoins. Translated, any app can grow wallets, payments, and trading capabilities on Coinbase’s foundational infrastructure.

X402 is more like a continued bet on the new narrative of agentic commerce: aiming to sit beneath the application economy, not just as part of the crypto economy.

Stripe profited from the shift to API-driven e-commerce. Coinbase is betting on a new era: as payments, wallets, and trading migrate onto stablecoin and on-chain rails, money will flow along similar paths to infrastructure providers.

Identity and Attention: Base App as the Answer in the “Post-SocialFi” Era

Coinbase states that Base App is available in over 140 countries and describes it as an on-chain everything app: social, trading, payments, distribution, and monetization all intertwined, with content tokenizable and tradable.

Web2 monetization stacks have centralized value, with creators often earning wages that are eroded by platform fees and inflation.

The narrative of Base App aligns with a16z’s long-standing advocacy of web3: if your work, influence, and community relationships exist as on-chain native assets in wallets, creators can directly earn future appreciation rather than just a small slice of platform distribution, which is often inflationary and wage-like.

However, the reality is tough: a16z’s SocialFi projects based on web3 principles haven’t performed well; iconic projects like Farcaster are converging toward “wallet-first” models—because pure social doesn’t compound, wallets and asset loops do.

In this context, the clear intent of Base App is: Coinbase isn’t just building a better Instagram/TikTok; it’s saying: wallets are the new accounts, information flows are the new asset discovery mechanisms, and social layers are subordinate to finance, driven by asset-based distribution logic.

AI Advisor: The Glue and the Risk Amplifier

Coinbase Advisor converts natural language intents into portfolios and execution paths, emphasizing that it is non-autonomous—no automatic orders without user confirmation.

This is almost an inevitable development: when you pack stocks, crypto, perpetuals, prediction markets, and lending into one app, decision fatigue must be reduced, and discovery mechanisms enhanced, using AI to assist with information gathering, analysis, and decision-making. Ordinary users can’t be expected to act as CIOs, macro analysts, or risk officers daily. Strategically, it’s about capturing the “intent layer.”

But this could also be where the most backlash occurs: an app with stocks, perpetuals, prediction markets, social trading, and AI suggestions will be judged by regulators and the public based on the “worst outcomes,” not the “smoothest experience.” Phrases like “AI made me…” are naturally prone to become tools for future media criticism.

Coinbase can use compliant frameworks to mitigate risks, but reputational risk remains, and it will grow as distribution expands.

So, what is Coinbase becoming?

Piecing it all together, Coinbase is more like stacking three interconnected moats.

The first is the consumer main screen: multi-asset trading + high-frequency attention loop (prediction markets) + long-tail asset discovery (DEX aggregation, seamless cross-chain investing).

The second is the enterprise/developer foundation: wallets, stablecoin payments, trading APIs, enabling other apps to grow financial capabilities on top, with x402 trying to embed itself into the next-generation standard protocols for payments.

The third is identity: Base App combines wallets, information flows, and ownership into a distribution layer, creating a closed loop of “content—trading—revenue.”

Within this framework, comparing only to Robinhood is accurate but far from sufficient. Robinhood is just a retail distribution machine, while Coinbase aspires to be: retail distribution + business distribution + wallet/identity distribution.

The ambition is huge, but constraints are clear: regulation and trust.

The ultimate test isn’t whether Coinbase can develop features but whether it can maintain a seamless experience under regulatory pressure—avoiding fragmentation into a bunch of disjointed tabs. As long as it preserves the consistency of the “main screen,” this distribution layer will begin to reinforce itself.