Coinbase Global, Inc.(COIN)Q2 2026 法說會逐字稿

During today's discussion, we may make forward-looking statements that 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 may include 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.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us live on X today. I am Alesia Jeanne Haas, CFO of Coinbase, and I am here with our cofounder and CEO, Brian Armstrong. We are also joined today by a group of independent and institutional research analysts. We are excited to connect directly with you, our customers, our community, our shareholders to talk about our quarter and answer your questions.

So we are going to take our first question from an independent analyst named Eric Pan. Eric, over to you.

Hey there. Eric Pan from Ericdomics here. Great to see you guys again since the systems update in New York. My question is around CLARITY. As CLARITY is at the one-yard line and now out for the Senate for a vote, prediction markets and Galaxy Research have odds of it passing at roughly 30%, and the August recess is right around the corner. I really want to be optimistic about this, but also imagine a scenario where it does not get passed. So my question is: one, what is going to happen with Coinbase? Are you going to be more careful while kind of being in this limbo between the CFTC and SEC? And two, what happens to everyday consumers if it does not get passed?

Yeah. I will take that one. So, first off, I am pretty optimistic that it will get to a full Senate floor vote. There are a lot of last-minute negotiations happening, which to me is a sign that everyone is invested in getting something over the line. There are thousands and thousands of hours that have been spent by the Senate staff and the senators themselves on getting a really good work product. And like every good negotiation, there are a lot of last-minute details to get right, but having a deadline or a forcing function with this August recess for the Senate is actually a good thing. It tends to get people to the table at the last minute. So there have been lots of phone calls happening this week. Now, of course, there are more steps that would need to happen for it to become law after the Senate floor vote, and you can never say 100% with these things. So anyway, I am optimistic it can get done. By the way, big shout-out to the Stand with Crypto advocates who sent, I think, over a million emails and phone calls to their representatives to help get that through. But your question was about what happens if it does not pass, and I think in that world, it is actually kind of just business as usual for Coinbase for a few reasons. One is that we already do many of the things that would be required by the CLARITY Act as just good best practice. But more importantly, Chair Atkins and Chair Gensler at the SEC and the CFTC respectively have publicly said that they are poised to provide clearer rules whether CLARITY passes or not. I think they have been in a bit of a holding pattern waiting to see what happens with CLARITY. If it does not go through for some reason, then they would come out with their own rules that would allow businesses like Coinbase to continue to operate and have more clarity. So we still think on margin it is better if the CLARITY Act passes. It creates durability through multiple administrations and allows people to make longer-term investments. But it is really the American consumers, as you mentioned, who would lose if CLARITY does not pass. I think Coinbase would be fine.

Thank you.

Alright. We are moving to our next question, and this is going to come from institutional research analyst Owen Lau at Clear Street.

Thank you, Alesia and Brian. Could you please talk about the reason Coinbase is joining Onyx USD? Some people think Onyx USD is a major threat to USDC. Obviously, Onyx USD is not even launched yet, so there are no hard figures to compare. But why does Coinbase participate in a competing stablecoin platform? And in relation to that, does it increase your leverage to negotiate the contract with Circle? I actually saw that it auto-renews on the same terms, but I keep getting this question. Do you need to form partnerships to strengthen your negotiating position? Thanks.

Can I address the partnership with Circle first, Brian, and then we can talk about our platform if that is okay with you?

Yeah. Sure.

So we have already met the conditions for the Circle contract to renew; it will renew on the same terms. I want to remove any ambiguity about that for the market, Owen. So we will continue to work on growing USDC, partnering with Circle, and driving that ecosystem. Now, why Onyx USD, Brian?

Over to you. The short reason is that we are a multi-stablecoin platform. We want to provide stablecoins that all of our customers want to use, and where possible, we want to strike good economic arrangements with them. We have a great partnership with Circle and USDC; from that point of view we arguably have the strongest economics. But we want to strike economic deals with every major stablecoin and support everything. We already support other stablecoins, things like PayPal's PYUSD and USDT (Tether). We are excited about this open USDC consortium, and we will keep investing in that. I think this just creates additional business and revenue opportunities for us to be a multi-stablecoin platform—not to mention FX trading and related activities. Thank you.

Alright. Next question. Brian Jung.

Hey, Brian. Hey, Alesia. It is good to see you guys again. I am really curious about your relationship with retail right now. You had your appearance on Market Bubble, and you announced Cobie was taking over the Base app. I feel like these are some early signals that Coinbase wants to really reconnect with crypto-native users. Can you tell me more about your thoughts on this and what made you take this kind of pivot recently?

We have lots of different groups that like to use Coinbase, and building on top of the Base chain reaches an even broader group. We try to make an effort to connect with all of them. It is a very diverse group of people that use Coinbase. There are the largest G-SIB banks in the world building on our infrastructure. We also have AI agents spinning up wallets on top of our architecture. We have fintechs and payment service providers. We have a huge segment of retail with simple traders and advanced traders. And, of course, there is the crypto-native community you mentioned. That is a very important constituency we connect with. They are more internet-native; sometimes I have to get into the weeds on some of the lingo and the norms, but we have great people on our team to speak to all of these constituencies with more depth than I have. You mentioned Cobie—he is one of the folks who just joined recently, and I think he comes from that community, which is really good. I will continue to go on podcasts that speak to all these different groups, including the crypto-native community.

I appreciate that. Thanks.

Alright. Next question from Kenneth Worthington.

Nice seeing you both, and thank you for letting me participate here. There were a number of departures from your senior leadership team this quarter. Why did so many high-profile leaders leave in a short period of time? What is the strategy with regard to HR, finance, legal, and institutional teams as you bring in new leaders?

You broke up there a little bit, but I think I got the gist and you mentioned strategy. There is nothing changing about the strategy, but one thing I am most proud of at Coinbase is we have a really deep bench of talent and a strong succession planning process. We have had lots of folks who are long-tenured. It is normal for people to turn over at different points. What I am really bullish about is we have amazing talent at the company that has been here a while and is ready to step up into these roles. I think that is a real strength of ours. So yes, I am excited to see what that turns out to be.

Yeah. I want to underscore my excitement about the bench of talent that we have and all of the folks you have been introduced to—Dominique, who will lead our people function; Molly, who will lead our legal function; and Liz. Each of them has been groomed by the outgoing leaders, and I think we are excited for this next generation of talent. These are all individual decisions, so there is nothing from a strategy standpoint to read into these changes.

Alright. Next question. Austin Hankwitz.

Hey, y'all. How's it going? Austin Hankwitz here, cohost of the Rich Habits Podcast and head analyst at GRID Capital. Thanks again so much for letting me tag along. Brian, you all said last quarter that customers do not choose Coinbase because you are the cheapest; they choose you because you are the most trusted. You also said over 90% of agentic stablecoin transaction volume settles on Base, but an AI agent has no brand loyalty. It simply optimizes for cost and latency. So as agents become a larger share of volume, does that trust model transfer to them, or does agentic commerce structurally push Coinbase toward competing on price in a way that maybe the consumer business never had to? Would love to get your take.

I am glad you are thinking about how we are going to serve AI agents as customers, along with humans. I think the short answer is that AI agents are probably going to care about a similar set of things that humans do. Certainly, price is one of those factors, and Base actually delivers sub-cent and sub-one-second settlement, so it is very competitive on cost and latency. But I also think AI agents are going to choose infrastructure that is reliable, safe, liquid, compliant, and has good uptime—just like they might choose AWS or some cloud vendor for other infrastructure. So long story short, I think trust will continue to be important in that world. We are going to roll out the red carpet for AI agents and make sure we are serving them appropriately.

Love it.

Alright. Our next question, Alexander Markgraf from KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Hey, Brian. Hey, Alesia. Thanks for doing this and including me. Coinbase has launched many new products since December 25th. I think product velocity has certainly stepped up. I'm curious to understand how the team is thinking about driving cross-product adoption and specifically bringing new users in through various entry points that are newer products on the platform. It would be helpful to understand the strategy there and if there is any detail on marketing dollar allocation as you think about that approach.

Alright. I will start. Our whole strategy starts with providing safe storage of customer assets and driving assets on platform. We find when customers store with us, they transact with us. So when we design growth marketing, we look to what product is meeting the market need and where we see activity coming from in our retail customer base. Currently, we are seeing a lot of success with growth marketing efforts around markets and crypto trading, and some of the new products we have offered in derivatives as well. We typically see a one-year payback on growth marketing efforts, but recently we have outperformed this benchmark. We also see early signals that customers engaging with new products— for example, prediction markets—are driving incremental spot trading volume. So we are not seeing cannibalization. These early days indicate incremental trading as we cross-sell and have more customers adopt more products on our platform.

Just to underscore that: asset accumulation is a core part of the strategy. When customers trust us—we have among the most trusted brands in crypto and store crypto more than any other company—if they are willing to store their assets with us, then whenever they come back for the one product they are using today, we have a chance to put something in front of them and over time they can adopt additional products. It tends to be good for user retention: the more products they use and the more assets they store with us, the better. We have various incentives to encourage that. For instance, you can get a higher rate on the Coinbase One card the more assets you store with us. We look at tiers like that to incentivize people to store more assets with us over time.

Alright. Now we are going to go back to the top. Eric Pan, question number two.

Sure. Thank you. So Coinbase continues to diversify and decouple your revenue streams: Bitcoin-related transactions used to comprise more than half the company's revenue, and now they are around 12% of the business. What other revenue verticals are you focusing on? I know you are making a big push on agentic commerce, so we would love to hear more about that along with other verticals.

Yeah. Thanks for noticing that. We are diversifying revenue both on the trading-fee side and on subscription and services with non-trading fees. On the trading-fee side, we are seeing good adoption of prediction markets and perpetual futures, and we are seeing our overall trading volume share grow. We added stock trading. There are various things on the horizon, like stock options trading. The diversity of revenue on trading fees specifically will continue to increase. Bitcoin will come back in a big way too—these assets go through cycles. At any given time in trading, something is up and something is down. That's part of the 'everything exchange' strategy: you have to have all the products available so you have the inventory when something trends. On the non-trading fee side with subscriptions and services, we have seen good growth over the past years as well, which makes the business more predictable. Alesia, anything to add?

One thing I wanted to share that maybe people overlook is that we saw an all-time high in paid Coinbase One subscribers this quarter. That is especially notable during a down market: we saw crypto trading volumes down but growth in Coinbase One memberships. That speaks to the value of the subscription product—these tend to be our most deeply engaged customers who try the most products and services we offer. So that is another important growth vector: we can drive membership and engagement through our platform with the subscription product.

Thank you.

You also asked about agentic finance. I think it is still very early days on that. I would say Coinbase has an early lead from an agentic finance point of view. We are seeing the majority of transactions happening with USDC and Base and X402, and the Coinbase developer platform has been a great resource for people. It is still quite early, so we don't have specific numbers or forecasts to share right now.

Sounds good. I just want to say I really love the fact you guys are building the rails. When the $450 trillion global asset market moves on-chain and the rails get rebuilt, Coinbase is well positioned to capitalize because you own the plumbing. I really love that. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. Building for the future here.

Alright. Owen Lau from Clear Street, back to you.

Thank you, Alesia. Last month, Coinbase started to offer pre-IPO perpetual futures for non-U.S. traders to gain access to private companies. The first was SpaceX. Could you talk about the next steps and the pipeline you are building? When should we expect to see more private companies, and do you have a timeline for when this product can be offered to U.S. customers? Thanks a lot.

The early traction is definitely encouraging on the pre-IPO perps, and there is a lot of customer demand for it. In terms of U.S. access, that is on the roadmap and I will keep pushing on that. I think it is important to get people access to these kinds of things that they historically could not get access to; it's a good part of democratizing the financial system. We will keep pushing on U.S. approval.

Thanks a lot.

Alright. Brian Jung, back over to you.

Yeah. Thanks, guys. So, Brian, I am particularly interested in the evolving competitive landscape in crypto, especially with Robinhood. They announced they were expanding deeper into crypto and recently launched their own L2. How do you view them as a competitor, and particularly how do you view them in relation to the whole Base ecosystem?

We are seeing lots of companies launch their own chains, which is normal in a growing market: initially you get fragmentation and then, over time, consolidation. We saw this historically in automobiles, trains, and other industries. In crypto, we saw a similar dynamic with stablecoins—there was a period where many companies launched stablecoins, but USDC and Tether's market share did not materially shrink over the last year. That suggests a network effect for stablecoins: customers who send and receive between platforms tend to stick with stablecoins they know, to avoid conversion fees. I expect something similar with blockchains. Stripe and Robinhood have launched chains; some are more special-purpose while the largest blockchains, like Ethereum and Solana, are more general-purpose. An interesting question is when consolidation will start. Base has been doing really well as the largest L2 on Ethereum: it is the most liquid market for crypto spot trading and a leader in stablecoin volume—I think it did about $32 billion in the last 12 months of stablecoin transfer volume. It is also a leader in agentic finance: payments like those happening with X402 are occurring predominantly on Base. I am very excited about Base; it is an incredible innovation. There is a path to decentralize it over time, which we have discussed publicly. We want many companies to be able to build on it as neutral infrastructure, and we have been making progress through stages of decentralization. We have about a two-year head start, I would say. We will continue to invest in Base, make sure everyone can build on top of it, and more companies will likely launch their own chains. The question is how and when consolidation happens and whether there will be M&A-like activity among blockchains. We have seen small examples before; who knows, we may need to become specialists in that area.

I love it. Thank you.

Alright. Kenneth Worthington from JPMorgan.

Hi. The relationship with Hyperliquid seems to demonstrate that if a third party has enough USDC, it can leverage that position into commanding a majority of the USDC economics. How do you continue to invest in the USDC network, bring in new participants, and still protect the longer-term economics as the network strengthens?

Maybe I will start with this one, Kenneth. Anybody is welcome to come to Coinbase and become a customer, hold USDC on our platform, and participate in rewards. We want to welcome institutional customers, and if you are a Coinbase One retail member, you are also welcome to earn rewards on your USDC by participating in our products and services. We did not view Hyperliquid any differently in that way. They are an important market player in the perpetual futures ecosystem, and we believe this partnership will drive broader network effects for USDC by deeply embedding it with an important participant that has significant market-maker activity. With stablecoins and underlying protocols, liquidity network effects are critically important, and bringing USD deeply into this ecosystem further drives USDC growth and adoption globally. That was our strategy. We think this is the right long-term approach for stablecoins, and we are happy to share economics to drive this network effect.

Just to underscore that: we are going to keep investing in USDC to grow it. It is already number one if you look at stablecoin transaction volume, which is great; it is the leading regulated stablecoin in the world. The only area it hasn't achieved number one is when you compare market cap or assets under management across both regulated and unregulated stablecoins, where Tether remains larger. I do think it is important for us to continue sharing economics to help USDC reach number one across all categories, not just two out of three. There are disproportionate gains to being number one in the market, so we will keep working on that.

Absolutely.

Alright.

Austin Hankwitz, over to you. Hey, Alesia. You already alluded to this earlier, but I want to linger on Coinbase One passing a million subscribers. You said new all-time highs and that members trade more and generate higher revenue per user. But members do get zero-fee trading, and you have noted that you can still capture a spread that accrues to retail transaction revenue. As more volume shifts under the Coinbase One umbrella, is revenue per dollar traded higher or lower for a Coinbase One member than a nonmember? Should investors read this growth in Coinbase One as accretive or as take-rate compression?

Great question. I will give an unsatisfying but honest answer: on average Coinbase One subscribers trade more and have higher unit economics, although there are edge cases. The revenue does not all accrue to trading revenue because Coinbase One users also stake and use the Coinbase One credit card, so we earn revenue in multiple ways from the membership. What we see is an accretive relationship because it drives engagement across the product stack. Overall, this should be net economically positive for us. We also see better retention and engagement rates among members. You will see revenue shift through the P&L if we see broad adoption and a shift from a la carte users to Coinbase One subscribers.

That makes a ton of sense to me. Thank you so much for walking me through that.

Alright. Next, we have Alexander Markgraf. Alexander, we are not able to hear you. If you want to try something with your mic... Alright. We will give him a minute. And if we lose him, then we will have ended the call for this quarter. Give him two more seconds. Alright. Well, that wraps up our Q2 2026 earnings call on X. Thank you all for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you next quarter. Thanks, y'all.