[Company Representative] (Coinbase): Our discussion today includes forward-looking statements which may vary materially from our actual results. Please refer to our SEC filings and earnings presentation for information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ. In addition, our discussion today includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the earnings presentation on our investor relations website.
Alesia Haas: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us live on X. I am Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase, and I am here with our Co-Founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong, and a few independent and institutional research analysts. If you have not already, please head over to our IR website to watch the videos we posted of Brian and I discussing our quarterly results. But in this session right now, we are excited to directly connect with you, our customers, our community, our shareholders, and we want to talk about our quarter and answer questions. Just as a friendly reminder, we are not going to answer any questions on when XYZ token.
Alesia Haas: We have a robust asset listing process that we follow, and we are not going to talk about any customer support cases. But besides from those simple ground rules, it is open question time. First up, I would like to introduce Andrew.
Andrew Jeffrey: Thank you very much, Alesia and Brian. It is a pleasure to be here. Appreciate the opportunity. I thought maybe I would start with a big-picture macro question, and I think you touched on it in the quarterly results. It does feel like crypto sentiment has shifted, and we have seen Bitcoin rally a lot off of its lows, but it still trades like a risk asset. Even after market today with tech trading off, do you feel like the case for Bitcoin ownership broadly has evolved? It does seem to me like Base is certainly making the case that Bitcoin can be really the global digital collateral in DeFi marketplaces. But can you maybe just comment on how you think sort of the raison d'être may have shifted?
Alesia Haas: Before you answer, Brian, I just wanted to apologize, Andrew, I should have given you a more robust introduction. With us, folks, is Andrew Jeffrey, who is an institutional research analyst with William Blair. With that, Brian, over to you. What is the BTC value proposition today in 2026?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. So I think it is evolving. You are right. It is obviously still a store of value. We are super bullish on Bitcoin. I think we just purchased our 18,000th Bitcoin, actually, on Coinbase balance sheet. Alesia Haas has a Bitcoin pillow.
Alesia Haas: Happy birthday.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. It is Bitcoin's birthday coming up, too. Then I think what you are getting at is correct, which is now that you can use Bitcoin as collateral, it actually improves liquidity for trading, right? So, that is improving DEX trading, for instance, with Bitcoin. A lot of our customers who were early in Bitcoin, they do not want to ever sell their Bitcoin, but they do want to use it as collateral. Base, for instance, has done really well recently by growing its financing product. So you can use that Bitcoin collateral, get financing, go and do more trading. It is pretty synergistic, and I think that is definitely a big trend that is happening right now.
Brian Armstrong: Then just broadly, I would say in this cycle that we are in, it is always difficult to call these things exactly, but we are seeing volumes rebounding and more institutions coming and onboarding.
Brian Armstrong: I think it is an exciting road ahead for Bitcoin.
Alesia Haas: Yeah. I would just comment that we saw significant ETF inflows into Bitcoin specifically this quarter as people recognized that the price has stabilized. Bitcoin is still a critical asset to us, but we are beyond Bitcoin, and people can now trade a lot of things. We have seen volatility come down in Bitcoin with the institutional adoption of this as an asset class. I think that that is providing it to be an important diversification in a lot of people's investment portfolios.
Andrew Jeffrey: Thank you. Mine included. I guess I am not vain enough to have introduced myself. I probably should promote myself better. I actually think the comment on diversification, Tina, your business in particular, is really a good segue. Terrific sequential growth in Prediction Markets revenue. One of the questions we get a lot is trends in consumer transaction revenue and take rate. I am sure you hear this a lot, too. Could you help us parse a little bit how much. It certainly looks like Prediction Markets cushioned consumer transaction revenue in the quarter. Can you help us unpack that a little bit, and tell us maybe how we can think about that going forward?
Alesia Haas: Absolutely. Prediction Markets is one of our fastest-growing new revenue products. We just launched it in February this year, and during Q3, it crossed $200 million of annualized run rate revenue. What is great about that is this is a market where overall spot crypto trading was actually down. We saw overall crypto spot trading volume down 10% quarter over quarter. The growth in Prediction Markets offsets the decline in overall spot trading, and we delivered flat revenue quarter over quarter. The mix shifts considerably, and when we look at the mix of our overall revenue, it is really interesting to look at this quarter. Predictions plus derivatives, so those two combined, were about 25% of our total transaction revenue. If I look at then our total revenue, subscription services was roughly 49% of total net revenues.
Alesia Haas: We are seeing the investments that we have made over the past few years to really diversify our revenue really come to our benefit as I love what Brian says, there is always a market somewhere. People are shifting their trading behavior to the asset that is most interesting and most excited in the markets they want to trade in. What we saw right now in this quarter, a lot of that was around predictions. I also want to share with you, this is not cannibalizing our spot trading. What we are seeing is this is all incremental, and when we look at our trading profiles, people are still continuing to trade spot, just maybe at a lesser level than they did in past quarters, and they are putting incremental dollars to trade in Prediction Markets and derivatives. Really, these are additive to our product offering right now.
Andrew Jeffrey: Which really goes a long way, I think, toward debunking the idea that Bitcoin's the tail that wags the dog, although I think that still seems to inform stock prices, at least in the short term. There is a ton to talk about. I did want to spend a little time on stablecoins, moving away from transaction. Could you just elaborate for us a bit on your Circle relationship? To me, it seems very much like a co-opetition situation. Both companies, whereas USDC is still primary to your stablecoin efforts, it does seem like both companies are building similar stablecoin movement infrastructure. Can you talk about perhaps where your efforts overlap with Circle's and where your efforts are distinct?
Alesia Haas: Brian, do you want me to start here, and then you can add on?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, go for it.
Alesia Haas: Well, we are proud to be a co-founder of USDC, and we are very committed to growing USDC, and we also want to support other high-quality regulated stablecoins. You saw that we also partnered, as an example, with OUSD. We also have PYUSD on our platform. We will be supporting our customers in whatever asset they want to trade and whatever asset they want to transact with in crypto. We think about ourselves asset agnostic that way. Because of our commercial relationship with Circle, where we have a strong economic interest to grow USDC, we are active in supporting this overall USDC ecosystem. Coinbase focuses on distribution, the customer relationships, the infrastructure, and really deeply integrating USDC and opportunities to use stablecoins in transaction flows within our products. This means that we are using this collateral with our derivatives exchange, as an example.
Alesia Haas: This means that we are looking to put USDC on Base to really augment our payments with our Base developer product. As a result, we have seen all-time highs in USDC use on our platform. So we capture about 50% of the overall economics. We hold about 30% of total USDC in circulation as assets on our platform, and we have seen the total assets on our platform grow for five sequential quarters, or it has just been growing. More than that now. It has just been significantly growing on our platform for now many, many quarters. Where we compete is we are both building stablecoin payment infrastructure, so we will compete in some areas, but we are both incentivized to grow total USDC market cap and deeply embedded in the overall network of stablecoin usage around the world.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, I guess I would just add that we really enjoy our partnership with Circle. There are many times where we work together on certain efforts. You are right that we are both building infrastructure. It is going to take a lot of work from lots of companies to go update the financial system, so I think that that is great what they are doing, and we are going to keep doing our piece of it as well. Overall, what we want to see is just stablecoins be a larger and larger percentage of global GDP for payments in everywhere, used in every country of the world. So, we are going to keep working with them on that.
Alesia Haas: All right. Let us go to our next guest. We have Jon Ma from Artemis with us. Jon, over to you.
Jon Ma: Hey, Alesia.
Alesia Haas: Thank you, Drew, for your questions, too.
Jon Ma: Happy early 18th birthday for Bitcoin. That is very exciting.
Alesia Haas: I hope someone out there is going to have a Halloween Bitcoin costume on Saturday.
Jon Ma: Yeah.
Alesia Haas: I will start looking for that on social.
Jon Ma: That is my Halloween outfit. Thanks for the idea, Alesia. I am really excited to talk about Coinbase for Agents and getting your thoughts. One of our engineers, Crystal, she built onbase.dev. She was a big Base developer. We recently integrated Coinbase MCP trading agents into Artemis, and she said of all the brokerages she worked with, it was the easiest. My question is: what could go right for Coinbase for Agents? It is the only MCP that includes x402, Prediction Markets, equities, and crypto. What could go right from here?
Brian Armstrong: Well, thanks for using our MCP. We launched this product called Coinbase for Agents a little while back, and it is basically an easy way to connect any third-party agent to your Coinbase account. We really want to make Coinbase the most AI-enabled financial account out there for trading and payments and borrowing. We have been putting a lot of work into that MCP API, and honestly, it has been really exciting. The agentic trading volume is growing something like 20% week-over-week right now, which is just shocking. These numbers.
Jon Ma: Wow.
Alesia Haas: Early days.
Jon Ma: Early days.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. The numbers in this grand scheme of things are still relatively small compared to our other trading volume, but to me, it is a clear indication of where things are going, and I am just incredibly excited about the TAM for what the agentic economy could be. You asked what could go right.
Brian Armstrong: I think probably like you, we are seeing this trend and thinking, okay, there is going to be more and more agents in the economy getting work done on our behalf.
Brian Armstrong: They are going to have to pay for things, goods and services, to get work done or go shopping for us. In a business context, they are going to have to pay for vendors and services to not get stuck at these paywalls. Just like you would give an expense account to an employee or a budget to a certain team. This is very clear to us that they are going to need their own financial infrastructure, and they are going to do it for trading, too. It is not just payments. What does this mean? They are going to need to have accounts with good controls and permissions
Brian Armstrong: to make sure you are managing their spending and all that. I think that it is hard to imagine a world where there is not more AI agents than humans at some point in this economy. So the agentic economy is going to be massive, and I think it is just one of these opportunities where frankly, we see the legacy players being a little bit hesitant about this and saying, "I do not know. This is scary. What if these rogue agents do something unexpected? We are not going to let any of these things touch our accounts." I kind of feel the opposite. It is an opportunity. If we can lean in and build this in a very safe and trusted way, which is what Coinbase is known for, using these frontier technologies, AI and crypto, which by the way, they go really well together.
Brian Armstrong: That is just a huge opportunity for us to capture more and more market share as the most AI-enabled financial account. We are all in on this. It is what I wake up thinking about a lot these days.
Jon Ma: Hmm. Yeah, Brian, it gets me really excited because right before the earnings call, I was using the Coinbase MCP to sell some Polkadot. I bought some ServiceNow, a stock. I sold down some USDC to buy another stock, and it was the only product where everything is all in one place. Something I would be curious about is Coinbase is already number one in crypto market share for spot in the US. How do we go from here to number one across all assets, Everything Exchange? Because this does feel very unique. Maybe there is a world where every retail, every user just uses Coinbase for all their different assets because it is the only place where their agent could access all these different assets in one place.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. I think you are right. It gets to what Alesia was saying earlier about diversification. A lot of these new bets that we made as part of the Everything Exchange investment over the past year have really started to bear fruit now, Prediction Markets, derivatives. Because historically, we have been overweight on spot crypto trading, which was down quarter-over-quarter. I do not think that this is widely understood yet.
Brian Armstrong: The facts on the ground are actually looking a lot better than it is showing up maybe in the overall numbers, which are more flattish. Yeah, it makes sense to me that if you have an account where you could do all these things in one place, trading, payments, lending, because many of these are synergistic. You might want to have a margin account to do more trading, or as a business, you might want to do FX trading as you are receiving payments. We believe that all of these things are going to need to work in one account. We did this with crypto. We can now do it with AI. I think this could be a massive source of new demand for our products. Yeah, that is definitely a very exciting moment.
Brian Armstrong: I will tell you one other fun anecdote, which is, in Coinbase for Agents, initially, we were going around talking to customers and just saying, "Hey, what would you like to see in it?" building some of those features. One of the engineers on our team, they put an endpoint into the Coinbase MCP that is like a feedback endpoint.
Jon Ma: Oh, wow.
Brian Armstrong: Now all day long, as agents are using it, the agents are actually sending us feedback.
Jon Ma: Wow.
Brian Armstrong: Hundreds of messages are just coming into Slack every day that are different things that they want to see, a lot of those get turned into PRs, now they are live back in production a day later. So it is starting to get to that kind of recursive self-improvement type feeling. Since that pattern was so successful, we are going to think about putting some of that for our internal APIs as well, just so that because we are using lots of agents internally as well. So, yeah, every API needs to be agentified, so to speak.
Jon Ma: Yeah. Brian, I think folks were wondering. I think Jesse mentioned that you and Jesse were shipping 44 PRs over a day, and maybe you were responding to the agents that were giving feedback about the agent MCP.
Brian Armstrong: That has been part of it. Yeah. I have definitely been getting excited to go back and write some code. It is really the agents writing most of it. But starting my career as an engineer, you get a little rusty in the code, the more CEO stuff you do. But yeah, it is definitely a fun moment. I think we are living through this kind of golden age, and AI is changing lots of things, but it is now starting to really change financial services, and that has been the biggest opportunity for us. And the level of productivity, I think code quality can actually go up as the velocity goes up. We are seeing that as well on the cyber front and the number of bugs and incidents, and reliability can get better. So it is massively up-leveling our internal systems, and then we can go build this infrastructure and provide it for all of our customers.
Brian Armstrong: To me, this is the future of financial services. I feel like we want to bring frontier technologies like crypto and AI to financial services, and I think we are the best company in the world that is set up to do that.
Jon Ma: Love that.
Alesia Haas: Well, thank you, Jon, for these questions.
Brian Armstrong: Thank you.
Alesia Haas: And thank you for feedback on the products as well. We love it when people give us feedback. Next up, we would like to introduce Lorenzo Valente from ARK Invest and hand it over to you, Dan. Some questions, Lorenzo.
Lorenzo Valente: Hi, Alesia. Hey, Brian. Thanks for taking these questions. Excited to do this. Maybe I will start with just a question on security and custody in general. There is growing concern out there that AI could discover new algos that break cryptography and ECDSA in general. How does that change the security and custody setup? Are you accelerating the post-quantum roadmap? Just a good question in terms of custody and security in general, how you guys are thinking about that.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, sure. Okay. I think there is really two separate things to look at. One is the AI, the trends that we are seeing of them coming out with new math proofs and in security things. Then there is the quantum question. These are actually pretty different. I think that when it comes to ECDSA and this elliptic curve cryptography, I am actually not too worried about AI creating a risk there. There has been something like a 40-year track record, actually, of people attempting new algorithms to try to make this easier to break, and they have basically made zero progress. It requires this brute forcing of a 256-bit number. It is not one of these problems that I do not think AI is going to be able to chip away at it. Quantum is a different story.
Brian Armstrong: I think quantum requires a new type of computer to be built and actually to do it at scale, not just like a theoretical one with a couple of qubits. I think that is more of a matter of when, not if. I think eventually a big enough quantum computer will get made that starts to make this stuff a real issue. The quantum one, I think, is the more serious one to look at here. To get ready for this, we are doing a handful of things. One is we have begun to work to upgrade our custody to be post-quantum. That is important. Of course, we also need the blockchains themselves to be upgraded and to be quantum resistant. I know lots of the different blockchains are all working on this. Some of them have published their roadmap.
Brian Armstrong: One thing that we have been participating as best we can on the Bitcoin side, there is an advisory council for Bitcoin around post-quantum that had a really good meeting that we attended a few months ago at Stanford with Dan Boneh was leading that along with a number of other folks. That was a really great conversation that just got a lot of the people together in the room. I know that the community has put out some of these Bitcoin improvement proposals like BIP-360 and there are others. My hope is that the Bitcoin community will essentially find a path over the coming couple of quarters to start to coalesce around some of these proposals that are out there. That one, I think, it is not imminent. I do not think it is going to happen imminently.
Brian Armstrong: I do think it is always good to be proactive and start to get ahead of these things.
Alesia Haas: I just wanted to add on and share that in 2022, we acquired a team of some of the foremost cryptography experts. This is a space both on the quantum and on the AI side that we are monitoring very carefully internally and being really vigilant in investing resources to harden both our own ecosystem as well as work in partnership with the community, as Brian shared.
Lorenzo Valente: Perfect. Thanks. Shifting to the tokenized stocks on Base. I know it is still very early, obviously. Is the Base sequencer fee the main revenue driver going forward, or are you looking at other monetization plans? Just to add to that, we are seeing just a lot of different equities tokenized by several exchanges. How do you see that fragmentation going forward, and how do you think about that?
Alesia Haas: Great question, Lorenzo. Yes, sequencer fees are the most direct monetization point for tokenized equities today. Our main opportunity then is the utility of the assets once they are tokenized. As we kind of expand out and build this network and build liquidity, we can explore different ways to monetize. But network effect is key. Liquidity is key. That is the answer to your question on we are seeing a lot of places tokenize equities. We see a lot of stablecoins. But it is easy actually to tokenize something, and I do not mean that the wrong way. But getting the tokenized asset is not the complicated part. Building depth of liquidity, building network effect, that is the hard part. We are really proud that we are one of the firms with partnership with Circle that has really built that with the USDC ecosystem as an example.
Alesia Haas: We feel like we have the skills, we have the tools to build liquid deep markets around these tokenized equities, and that is what we are doing. We have already seen $3 billion, for example, tokenized on Base in tokenized equity trading volume since launch of that product for our non-US customers. We are just getting started here, but the key is building network effect. I do think that what we will see then over time is things will coalesce, and you will see more and more market share gained by the best pricing and the best network effect and liquidity offered in these exchanges.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. Only thing I will add to that is that we took the time to really do this in a thoughtful way, which means that these tokenized equities that we put out, they are real-deal securities. You can get the upside from dividends. We are implementing voting rights, things like that. There are other things out there in the market that are more like synthetics or derivatives that give you exposure to it, but we thought it was important to do it in a way that it is a real security, it can be redeemed for the underlying asset, et cetera. I think just as the largest custodian in crypto, the most trusted brand in crypto, this is actually something that we are uniquely good at and have a right to win. Yeah, I am excited about tokenized equities. Thanks.
Alesia Haas: All right. Thanks, Lorenzo Valente. We are going to go to our last analyst today, and I would like to introduce Ansem, who is the host of Market Bubble, to ask us some of your questions.
Ansem Thomas: Hey, how you guys doing? Thanks for having me on.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. Thanks for being here.
Ansem Thomas: Yeah, so it is cool. Actually, I bought my first Bitcoin on Coinbase back in 2017, so this is crazy for me. I know you guys are trying to verticalize a lot of the stack as a financial application from spot trading, Prediction Markets, stablecoin interest, and also institutional trading, but there are also a lot of other companies that are trying to do the same thing. How do you guys differentiate in those plans from your competitors?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. It is a great question. I do think you are right. There are more and more people coming together around this Everything Exchange idea. I think it depends which competitor you are talking about, right? There is going to be some folks that I think they are not going to lean into this kind of frontier technology, whether it is crypto or AI or perps and Prediction Markets. Some of the more traditional players are probably not going to have all of these on one platform with a good, let us say, agentic trading interface. I think if you look at some of the more tech-forward ones, it depends. I think on the surface, they might look similar, but Coinbase is trying to do something a little different than I think the others, which is we are not trying to just bring a bunch of people to Wall Street or something.
Brian Armstrong: We are trying to make a new decentralized financial system that does not need Wall Street, right? It can reach the billions of people that the old system did not really serve. So I think there is going to be strengths and weaknesses of each of the players, including us. I think that some of the areas where we are going to be a little stronger are on the crypto infrastructure side, because that more is in line with our mission, right? Things like Base have just a really large developer and on-chain ecosystem around it. We co-founded USDC. We created the x402 protocol for agentic commerce. We have really good decentralized exchange integrations. I would say one other advantage that Coinbase has is we actually serve, not just consumers, but we also serve institutions. We have a developer infrastructure, a product that we sell.
Brian Armstrong: I think it is a little easier to run a business that has just one customer, but it is actually a lot more powerful if you can build the right platform to serve multiple customer types, which we have been investing in that platform for a number of years now. I think it is really starting to give us leverage and to amortize. We build something once in an excellent way. We can now launch it across multiple customer segments, and we can actually bring all of these customers to, let us say, a new asset or a market on our exchange, and it is retail, it is institutional, it is businesses, it is developers from third parties are now all plugging into that. So those are some of the things we are focused on.
Brian Armstrong: Actually, if I could put in one more real quick, I would say that still the majority of financial services is running on the traditional financial system. It is probably 90% to 95%, it depends how you estimate it. All fintech companies combined are probably, say, 5% to 10% of the financial services revenue, which is a massive percentage of GDP. The real opportunity, I think, is for the tech-enabled fintechs to keep growing and capture that other 90% or 95% of the market and create net new demand from these new categories like agentic finance. That is really our opportunity, and we are going to do our best to compete, but we are also going to create new markets and go capture share from TradFi.
Ansem Thomas: Awesome. I definitely love the points about the decentralized financial system. I know you guys recently acquired Deribit, with your focus more on the institutional investor side of things. How have you seen the growth of that product, the perpetual futures and the options, and how has your plans with that shifted with the recent shift in more of a positive regulatory environment in the US?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. So we acquired Deribit, which was the largest crypto options trading platform out there, and we have made really good progress now integrating it into our existing products. So, we have got now this unified regulated global exchange that crosses every perps, options, futures. We are making Deribit now available to both US and ex-US, so I think we are one of the only companies that can unify the global liquidity. Historically, this was fragmented across all the offshore stuff, non-US, and then in the US had a different world. We are now unifying much of this. It has been a huge benefit for us acquiring Deribit. We have said publicly we are going to actually relaunch our advanced trader platform under the Coinbase Pro brand. So Coinbase Pro is coming back and you are right, the regulatory front has gotten a lot better as well. I think we are seeing really tailwinds from that.
Brian Armstrong: Not just with the GENIUS Act that became law, but the SEC and CFTC have been very forward-thinking and collaborative between the two agencies to get more of this stuff available in the US because they want to see the US win, and so do we.
Ansem Thomas: Yeah. As far as the Coinbase Pro product, I actually used to use when it was GDAX back in the day, so it is going to be fun.
Brian Armstrong: Oh, yeah.
Ansem Thomas: That comeback.
Brian Armstrong: Nice.
Ansem Thomas: I know you guys have focused a lot on the regulatory stuff in DC, but I feel like you guys have not done as much on the consumer retail marketing side. I know it seems like a lot of the exchanges that did focus heavily on that turned out to be not having the best practices behind the scenes. I am curious if you guys have plans to do more marketing along that front to target a different consumer or different customer segment.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. I know this perception is out there sometimes that we are almost more focused on DC than on traders or something like that. I think in the wake of Sam Bankman-Fried blowing up and FTX, I remember there was this really critical moment where I felt like I had to go represent the industry there because nobody else was doing it. In many ways, I feel like that helped the crypto industry and people forget it could have gone really poorly under Gensler. The industry could have effectively been banned in the US, and we had to sue him and push back, and we won that case. There is another version of history that looks a lot worse. So in many ways, I am glad that we did that. This does not mean it is not a zero-sum game.
Brian Armstrong: We can go build products, we can go talk to our customers, and help push the regulatory ball forward. So, I will still be in DC periodically, but more and more of my focus now is shifting to really just talking to our customers, improving our products. That is going to be my focus much more in 2027. Yeah, I think I would leave it at that.
Alesia Haas: Well, that is a perfect place to end. We are going to focus on our customers. Thank you all for joining us for our Q&A for our Q3 2026 earnings. If you have not already, please go check out our presentation that Brian and I posted to our IR website where we discuss our quarterly results. We will see you next quarter. Thank you all.
Brian Armstrong: Thanks, y'all.
