Tokenization: The Next Era of Corporate Finance - Bitcoin for Corporations 2026 (02/25/2026)

Nice shoes.

A little bit. Okay. I started at JPMorgan way back when in 1994 as an exotics and interest rate derivative trader. I stayed there for 10 years, moved to London, started running global businesses at a pretty young age, went into credit and kind of all things new. So equity, derivatives, structured products, everything esoteric. Went to Barclays in 2003 and spent the next 17 years there. And I was fortunate over time to, for 13 years in a row, I was asked to run another business, another business. So it began in fixed income, converts, asset backs, high yield, private, public, prime finance, FX, rates, emerging markets, equities, converts. Eventually, at the end of my 17-year tenure, I was in the executive committee for markets, responsible for all of fixed income and equities. If there's one thing that ties together with that experience, I was always, I spent my career bringing new things to institutional investors and then running the flow businesses at scale.

And so the opportunity to join Coinbase to build an institutional business from scratch six years ago was kind of like an epic moment where, through boom and bust in banking, I learned a lot. I learned more in the bust and in the post-financial crisis than I did in the boom. And so I was fortunate to have a partnership with Greg Tusar, who complements my skill set, which is deep in fixed income and also equities, but he's got the HFT background, and together we started and built the institutional business. Today it represents 500 people at Coinbase of our circa 4,500 people. We're somewhere between, you know, 20 to 30% of revenue. The institutional assets under custody, the institutional assets are bigger and have been for many years. So about 55% of the overall business is the institutional business. So we've scaled from a very modest beginning to a pretty, pretty epic position that we're in now. We have three things, if I can. So the Coinbase institutional business has three big pillars. Pillar one is actually the institutional business operates all of our exchanges. So we were your first exchange and custody client. We were on the US spot exchange. So most people who don't know Coinbase think we're an exchange or a retail exchange. The retail consumer is the biggest client of the US spot exchange. We have a CFTC-regulated futures exchange on which we have now perps, and we do things beyond just Bitcoin. So we've got other contracts including things like oil and gold. We have a Bermudian-regulated international swap exchange. So our big splash into the derivative space came about two years ago, and now we're circa fourth in overall global derivative share. So we've got a myriad of contracts listed there. And then, a year ago, a little more now, we bought Deribit. And Deribit, for those of you that aren't familiar, is the world's largest options exchange, operated out of a combination of Dubai and Amsterdam. And so those are the four exchanges. We've integrated that now. We have, we think, the biggest and most complete institutional platform, ranging from everything from spot to perps, dated futures, to staking, to options. So that's pillar one, exchanges. Pillar two is the prime platform. The prime platform, for those of you in the room that are institutions, should know all about it. It's the same platform that powers our 90% market share in ETFs. It's the same platform that we offer to our high-net-worth clients that are on the platform. And so that platform is the place where you can buy, sell, store, finance, stake, do all the things that you need to do. What's really interesting about that, and this will be a segue into the next part of the conversation, but that platform, over the years, we've begun to offer that, the infrastructure that we built, as a service. So crypto as a service, we'll come back to this later, but we've actually started a third product group at Coinbase. At the very top, we have institutions, we have consumer, and then dev, it's called internally. Externally, I call it crypto as a service. And that's where we've accumulated all these banking partnerships. So that's where PayPal, Revolut, SoFi, PNC, JPMorgan, Citibank are using that platform to power their entry into the space. And the last pillar, the third pillar, is asset management. So maybe four or five years ago, we helped set up a gentleman called Eric Peters and One River at the time. And he filled that business with, I see a few people here, with, I would say, predominantly traders, people that came from places like Two Sigma, the leading hedge funds, but were also, you know, mathematicians, academics that came from great places. And that business offered institutional offerings for high net worth and pensions. We bought the full business now, I think, two years ago, rebranded it Coinbase Asset Management, and that is our asset management business. That business manages third-party capital. So high net worths, pensions, UK pensions, so on and so forth, and manages billions of dollars. So pillar one, exchanges; pillar two, the prime business; pillar three, asset management. Sorry, that was a long intro.

You said briefly.

Oh, it's super brief.

So, at the time you came in, we had custody as the foundational. It's the number one thing and will always be the number one thing. So we had that. We were operating at scale, not quite the scale we operate now, but you did exhaustive due diligence on the custody platform. The second thing that we built was the smarter routing platform, and we don't do any market making. You know that, we went through it. Why is that good or bad? I think it's fantastic that we just do agency trading. So we take all of Phong's order flow. We present it in the marketplace. We hide its footprint in markets, and we're able to use it through a host of algorithms and different types of orders in the marketplace. It's really important because I don't principal trade against Phong's flow. So those are the two big pieces. We were adding on other things like staking for those that hold non-Bitcoin-related assets. But then we had this event a couple years ago where, you know, FTX happened, and at that moment in time, it was a pivotal moment for the industry because it was fraud at a massive scale. We didn't lose a dollar. We spotted it. We withdrew our financing businesses. Other businesses, unfortunately, other people did, but it was an important moment. And at the time, the value proposition to trade in crypto was really just the investment proposition. You know, buy Bitcoin, buy other assets, be part of the technological disruption, but we didn't have a full complement of other things. We didn't have international derivatives, which is where the lion's share of all the trading happens. We didn't have perps in the US. We didn't, at that time, have futures, just dated futures, normal futures. So we made a couple acquisitions to help fuel the growth. And what's emerged from that now, there's a good quote that came from John Collison from Stripe. He said it could be a crypto winter. I don't believe that's true now, but it's a stablecoin spring. And so what's happened is that with the passage of the Genius Act, it's the most important thing that's ever happened in crypto from an institutional perspective. That's the moment where crypto came into the mainstream. You were in the mainstream. You know, you were the first act at scale that brought Bitcoin as an investment. The second big act was ETFs. BlackRock's biggest ever ETF, phenomenal, beyond their wildest dreams at the time. That became true. And then Genius Act. Why is Genius Act so important? It's because at this moment, all the banks, I just came from Davos. We announced that five of the largest 20 banks in the world have chosen to partner with Coinbase, just like they did in ETFs. But the thing that's driving their participation is the stablecoin use case, stablecoins and international payments. For a long time, they've debated, is it better, faster, cheaper? It is. But did everyone see Jamie Dimon on CNBC two days ago where he clearly said that JPMorgan's always believed in blockchain and he's scaling all in. He's a visionary, and I compliment his views entirely, and I mean that sincerely.

We're feeling it because we announced partnerships with them. They demonstrated the market in December of this past year, announced that we did a trade with them. I'm not going to say too much about non-Bitcoin, but we did do tokenization with Galaxy issuing debt. Coinbase Treasury bought, Coinbase Treasury custodied. We also facilitated that with USDC, and it was done on the Solana blockchain. So that was really the, no one's really kind of quite light bulb on that moment. That's the big thing that JPMorgan signaled to the marketplace, that everything's going tokenized, everything's being disrupted. And Jamie said it best where he said it's obvious, it's better, faster, cheaper. I liked his quote to say, you know, still they're enormous. They did 16 trillion in payments on, you know, on a Tuesday. So he said the system works, but this works better. And so that's the thing that's changed. So now you've got the investment case of owning Bitcoin, the investment case of being long this whole portfolio of assets, and then you have the utility that we've talked about for a long time is coming true in the form of stablecoin and payments. So now those use cases, like in this moment, we're like, oh, we'll talk about Bitcoin, Bitcoin price, and what's changed. What's not changed, and especially since Davos and having all these attestations and partnership announcements, what's not changed is actually the institutional adoption of the technology. So that's going to drive us through whatever price dip we're going through now. And it's a tremendous moment for the industry. Market structure is going to happen. Brian's been in DC this past week. We have amazing engagement. We did the right thing as a firm. Brian did the right thing as a leader and bravely withheld his support until we got into a better place. We don't have to deep dive on it, but it's super important. But even if we get a change to administration, which will happen, from my standpoint, I've been in financial markets for 30 years. What big thing has happened in regulation that's been really repealed? And you know, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube once you're operating at scale. You have millions of people, whether you're aligned to Democrats, Republicans, or whatever, invested in the space. The banks are doing it. Everyone's in the space. You're not going to have a technology that's a better technology to facilitate these things. We're not going to go back.

It's bigger. Yeah, it's our business. So I love it, and I'm embracing it, and I'm pushing it forward. It took me almost four years to get the PayPal deal done where we listed PYPL and we gave it great status, and I'm a real advocate of actually having a comp. I want to be a marketplace. I don't want to pick winners. So we can skew things a little bit in the favor of USDC as we should as a firm, but I want to see competition when it gets to banks and everyone. I remember I had a Goldman Prime sort of thing in London. They said the same thing to me. What do you think? And I didn't blink. I said, I think it's awesome. And it's awesome because if you think of Amazon, AWS, you think about Coinbase Institutional as an infrastructure layer. Do I think there's going to be 200 banks that build what we have? No, I don't. And I think that they're going to continue to hire us and they're going to continue to use our infrastructure. And you're going to see Coinbase as the major infrastructure provider to the entire stack. And so it's definitely an expansion of the ecosystem, and it's going to benefit us tremendously.

Well, I just want to say you almost made it to 15 minutes without Stretch. It was a prediction market, I'm sure, somewhere out there on the amount of time. I didn't bet on it myself, but so my big picture on Stretch, I think it's worthwhile to just zoom out for a second and talk about your entry into the space because what you did then is what you're doing now. So when I remember, because we went live through it together, but when I was looking at the charter of what MicroStrategy at the time could and couldn't do in its treasury, and honestly nervous and a little anxious as you were putting a big bet into the treasury, if I'm not sure all of you remember, but there was a massive amount of the right type of disclosure that came from MicroStrategy, and they amended the treasury investment policy, but it wasn't like hidden in a bunch of things. It was advertised, you know, is put out there and saying, this is what we're doing. We're buying a lot of Bitcoin. The other thing you did is you gave everyone an off-ramp. So I remember that you said if you don't want it, you can opt out. And you gave investors a chance to actually tender their stock.