Written by: Charlie Little Sun
This article represents personal views and does not constitute any financial investment advice. Readers are advised to comply with local laws and regulations.
I originally didn't plan to write another piece before the end of the year, but there were too many highlights in Coinbase's "System Update" conference yesterday, so I hesitated and decided to put pen to paper once more.
This year, I wrote about Robinhood vs Coinbase: Differentiated Competition, Creating Wall Street for the Next Generation and also discussed in depth on a friend's podcast E55. Robinhood vs Coinbase, In the New Wave of Coin-Stock Integration, Who Will Be the Next Generation of Fintech Winners? ft. Charlie. Both are the most favored financial apps among Gen-Z, but this battle is becoming more complex.
The conference announced a series of new product features: stocks, prediction markets, perpetual contracts, directly integrating long-tail assets from Base and Solana into the DEX entry of the main Coinbase app, payment and collection solutions for enterprises, AI investment advisors, along with the Base App—packaged as a global on-chain "everything app," where content is tokenizable and tradable, becoming a new platform for creators.
Beneath the surface of this "all-in-one" approach, there is a deeper sentiment: this update from Coinbase is not just about piling on features, but about reinforcing its role as a "distribution layer"—transforming itself into something more like a one-stop compliant financial product through more distribution channels, allowing tokenized finance to occur within its interface, even if the underlying chains, assets, or exchanges are not all native to Coinbase.
Finance may seem like a technological battle, but in reality, it is more about distribution. Technology and products are certainly key, but profits usually belong to the user mindset and stickiness created by positioning—when you decide to buy, sell, borrow, or pay, you don't want to switch apps.
Retail Side: Intentionally Blurring the Lines with Robinhood
Coinbase's slogan is straightforward: "Everything Exchange." The most tangible action is integrating U.S. stock trading into the main app, placing crypto and stocks in the same account view, allowing users to buy stocks directly with USD or USDC, complemented by a typical (Robinhood-inspired) retail-friendly narrative of "zero commission, 24/5."
Functionally, this is aligning more closely with Robinhood. Stocks, as the largest financial asset class in the retail market, are a battleground, and becoming the top-of-mind product for end customers is essential.
Moreover, Coinbase is not just adding stocks; it is also incorporating another type of asset that is closer to "attention assets"—the trending prediction markets. In the initial phase of prediction markets, all market traffic will come from Kalshi. It is not about (temporarily) building everything in-house, but rather embedding a compliant, mature backend first, firmly holding the front door.
This is a typical approach of Western fintech—Stripe/Adyen also started with payment gateways, which is a path already validated by Robinhood.
Prediction Markets: Kalshi is Not Just a Feature, but a "Compliance Distribution Weapon"
Prediction markets have seen explosive growth this year, with common comparisons made between Polymarket and Kalshi. On the surface, it appears to be a battle of products and liquidity pools, but from a distribution perspective, Kalshi's differentiated competition lies in its easier integration into large platforms.
Kalshi emphasizes that it operates as a contract market under CFTC regulation. In contrast, Polymarket faces challenges in the U.S. due to compliance issues; the closer it gets to the highest quality customer base (existing KYC users on large platforms), the more difficult distribution becomes.
Thus, Kalshi's distribution advantage becomes tangible: Coinbase does not need to rely on prediction markets to win the "liquidity" metric from day one; it needs to make prediction markets a habitual pathway, embedded within an app that already holds user balances and has completed KYC.
To put it more plainly, like Robinhood, Coinbase wants to capture users' peak moments. Sports, elections, data, policies, climate, cultural hotspots—these are events that can be socially disseminated and are the easiest to convert attention into trading actions.
It is dangerously addictive, but precisely because it is dangerous, it becomes a strong distribution avenue.
Additionally, there is a second-order effect that is often overlooked: prediction markets not only bring trading but also data. They are closer to "quantifiable emotions" than social media, capturing narrative turning points faster than news, and are more easily productized by AI into actionable user steps.
Therefore, when you simultaneously place an AI Advisor in the app, this data becomes not just traffic but actionable intention input.
Chains and Assets: Beyond Base, Gaining More Trust
Coinbase has tasted success with its bet on Base over the past two years, and it will continue down this path. However, a key stance in this update is bringing Solana into the same distribution flow for discovering and trading long-tail assets through the DEX entry.
On the surface, this is an upgrade in experience: no need to switch wallets or navigate complex cross-chain paths. On a deeper level, it is responding to two pressures.
The first is "perception." "Will Coinbase always favor its own chain?" This is a trust constraint. If you want to be an Everything Exchange, you cannot let users feel that you are pushing your own products, even if it is just a suspicion. Multi-chain aggregation is a way to suppress this doubt.
The second is "capture." It allows the flow of attention from long-tail assets and meme economies in another leading ecosystem to Coinbase's own ecosystem, completing transactions and cross-selling within its own fee, risk control, and distribution systems. It is not about "Coinbase becoming DeFi," but rather "Coinbase turning DeFi into its own underlying supply," still following a distribution entry logic.
The third is "proactivity." If Ethereum and Solana continue to compete for the narrative space of "the chain preferred by Wall Street," Coinbase is simultaneously incorporating both sides into its distribution front, essentially enhancing its strategic position as a "neutral entry"—regardless of which chain ultimately wins, it hopes to remain undefeated.
B2B: The Ambition of Stripe + Brex, a Year of Transformation
From a broader retail perspective, Coinbase Business is increasingly positioned as a "one-stop corporate financial service": providing a complete set of solutions for startups and SMEs, including accounts, payments, collections, USDC earnings, compliance infrastructure, and entering mature corporate financial service markets like the U.S. and Singapore.
Over the past year, the transformation and evolution from Coinbase Commerce to Coinbase Business have been impressive.
Using "Stripe + Brex" as a comparison is helpful—not to say Coinbase will replace them, but it is benchmarking against more comprehensive B2B fintech services.
Stripe's strength lies in "acquiring and orchestration." Brex's strength is in "spending and fund management." What Coinbase is building is a set of crypto-native corporate services: stablecoin settlement, global payments, USDC fund management, and the ability to hold assets, send and receive payments, and potentially more tools in the same account.
What makes it more powerful is not just the surface-level SaaS services of Coinbase Business, but the underlying modular CDP (Coinbase Developer Platform)—and it suggests that Coinbase wants to expand its customers to "all apps."
Coinbase summarizes the capabilities of the CDP into four pillars: custody, payments, trading, and stablecoins. Translated, this means: any app can build wallets, payments, and trading on Coinbase's underlying capabilities.
And x402 seems more like its continued bet on the new narrative of agentic commerce: it wants to sit just below the application economy, not just be a part of the crypto economy.
Stripe made money during the era of e-commerce migration to APIs. Coinbase is betting on a new era: as payments, wallets, and trading migrate to stablecoin tracks and on-chain, money will also flow along similar paths to infrastructure providers.
Identity and Attention: The Base App is the Answer to the "Post-SocialFi" Era
Coinbase states that the Base App is now available in over 140 countries and describes it as an on-chain everything app: social, trading, payments, distribution, and monetization mixed together, with content being tokenizable and tradable.
The monetization stack of web2 has centralized value, often leaving creators feeling like they are just receiving a salary, with platform fees and inflation eroding purchasing power.
The narrative of the Base App aligns with the web3 vision that a16z has been advocating: if your work, influence, and community relationships exist as on-chain native assets in your wallet, it could allow creators to directly reap the benefits of future appreciation, rather than just receiving a small portion of platform-distributed income that barely keeps up with inflation and currency overproduction.
However, the challenges are very real: the SocialFi initiatives promoted by a16z based on web3 principles have not performed well, with flagship projects like Farcaster converging towards a "wallet-first" direction—because pure social interactions do not compound, while wallet and asset loops do.
In this context, the intention of the Base App becomes clear: Coinbase is not trying to create a better Instagram/TikTok, but rather stating that wallets are the new accounts, information flows are the new asset discovery mechanisms, and the social layer is subordinate to the financial layer, driven by asset-led distribution logic.
AI Advisor: It is Both Glue and Risk Amplifier
Coinbase Advisor transforms natural language intentions into investment portfolios and execution paths, emphasizing that it is non-autonomous—orders will not be placed automatically without user confirmation.
This is almost an inevitable direction of development: when you cram stocks, crypto, perpetuals, prediction markets, and lending into one app, you must reduce decision fatigue and enhance discovery mechanisms, using AI to assist in information gathering, analysis, and decision-making. You cannot expect ordinary users to act as their own CIOs, macro researchers, and risk officers every day. From a strategic perspective, it is competing for the "intention layer."
However, this could also be the area where backlash is most likely to occur in the future: when an app simultaneously contains stocks, perpetuals, prediction markets, social trading, and AI suggestions, it will be judged by regulators and the public based on the "worst outcomes," rather than being rewarded for the "smoothest experience." Phrases like "AI made me…" are naturally suited to become talking points for future negative press.
Coinbase can use a compliance framework to mitigate risks as much as possible, but reputational risk still exists and will amplify as the distribution surface expands.
So, what is Coinbase becoming?
Putting these pieces together, Coinbase resembles a construction of three interlocking moats.
The first moat is the consumer main screen: multi-asset trading + high-frequency attention loops (prediction markets) + long-tail asset discovery (DEX aggregation, seamless cross-chain investment).
The second moat is the enterprise/developer base: wallets, stablecoin payments, trading APIs, allowing other apps to build financial capabilities on top of it, while x402 attempts to write itself into the next generation of default payment standard protocols.
The third moat is identity: the Base App merges wallets, information flows, and ownership into a distribution layer, creating a closed loop of "content—transaction—revenue."
In this framework, comparing only to Robinhood is correct but far from sufficient. Robinhood is merely a retail distribution machine, while Coinbase aims to be: retail distribution + commercial distribution + wallet/identity distribution.
The ambition is great, but the constraints are also clear: regulation and trust.
This battle ultimately does not depend on whether Coinbase can deliver the features, but on whether it can maintain the coherence of the experience under regulatory pressure—avoiding being forced into a fragmented array of non-compounding tabs. As long as it can preserve the consistency of the "main screen," this distribution layer will begin to self-reinforce.
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