Author: flowie, ChainCatcher
Yesterday, Coinbase released the largest product update in recent years, once again targeting its strategic goal of "Everything Exchange".
The main focus of the market is the recently popular U.S. stock products, as well as the newly launched AI investment advisory. But perhaps more worth discussing is that the coordinates of competition among cryptocurrency exchanges have changed dramatically; rather than challenging Binance, the more important issue is how to challenge Robinhood, and beyond challenging Robinhood, who can define the form of the next generation of financial accounts.
Coinbase's Ambition
In the middle of last year, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong proposed the concept of Everything Exchange, which many at the time considered a distant vision. Less than a year later, Coinbase has presented an initial form of "Everything Exchange".
If we break down this series of products, there is actually one main line: whatever the user wants to trade should be available on the platform; whatever way users want to trade should be covered as much as possible; and the money should preferably stay with Coinbase.
What everyone sees most intuitively is the expansion of asset classes.
In addition to cryptocurrency, Coinbase has started integrating stock and options trading by acquiring Deribit to enhance its derivatives capabilities; it has launched pre-IPO perpetual contracts allowing users to trade unlisted assets like OpenAI in advance; additionally, prediction markets and short-cycle event trading are also expanding.
This means that Coinbase is officially transitioning from a "crypto exchange" to a "full asset brokerage", directly competing with brokerages like Robinhood, which is also the direction most major cryptocurrency exchanges are currently expanding toward.
But beyond the expansion at the asset level, two changes are easily overlooked. Coinbase is attempting to explore asset trading methods in the era of AI Agents and the form of "super financial accounts".
The newly launched AI investment advisory, Coinbase Advisor, while not directly executing trades for users, can generate personalized multi-asset allocation and hedging suggestions based on user holdings and market data.
In the past year, there have already been many products exploring AI Agent-assisted trading. In the future, just as algorithmic recommendations have changed information distribution and user consumption behaviors, how will AI Agents influence asset distribution and trading behaviors? This remains a question that requires continuous observation.
At the same time, Coinbase's global unified liquidity pool attempts to connect the spot and derivatives systems of the U.S. and international markets, allowing liquidity from different markets to be regrouped; Coinbase One Card has connected with consumer scenarios such as booking.com through stablecoins, and the migration of stock assets attempts to gradually incorporate assets originally scattered among brokerage systems into Coinbase.
It can be seen that Coinbase not only wants to facilitate trading behaviors but is also trying to encompass more financial scenarios such as payment, consumption, and investment, integrating them all towards a comprehensive transformation to "trade everything".
Trading Everything Is the "Destiny" of Trading Platforms
In fact, "trading everything" has already become a new consensus among trading platforms.
For cryptocurrency exchanges, in the past year, mainstream exchanges have expanded into U.S. stocks, precious metals, and other commodities, as well as prediction markets. The competitive focus of cryptocurrency exchanges has also shifted from creating assets to fighting for the distribution rights of quality assets.
In the past, exchanges could influence asset supply indirectly by listing coins, supporting ecosystems, or participating in project growth. Hot assets often emerge from within the cryptocurrency system, giving exchanges an inherent home-field advantage.
However, the decline of altcoin season has effectively ended the era where exchanges serve as both referees and athletes. As the number of quality assets generated internally declines, exchanges are compelled to look externally, whether it’s SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, or stocks, prediction markets, and potentially more real-world assets, the goal is to attract user trading.
In addition to cryptocurrency exchanges, traditional brokerages are also moving towards trading everything. Robinhood has introduced cryptocurrency, prediction markets, and tokenized stocks in addition to stocks; Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange plan to promote tokenized trading; MoMo under Futu has even directly integrated real-time market data for perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid, allowing traditional brokerage users to see on-chain derivative prices.
The common logic behind this is that both cryptocurrency exchanges and traditional brokerages face the same issue: a single asset is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain growth. When user wallets are limited to one, and time is also limited. Those who can provide more assets have the opportunity to retain users on their platforms. Thus, platforms are starting to step out of their own home court and enter each other's territory.
However, this major product update from Coinbase may also provide new competitive dimensions for trading platforms.
On one hand, beyond expanding the distribution of more quality assets, it is also about how to further lower the barriers for user participation and increase distribution efficiency, thereby capturing a larger share of users' wallets.
As mentioned earlier, algorithms have changed the way information is distributed; prediction markets themselves are a typical case of repackaging originally complex options trading, making it more accessible to the average user.
In the future, the integration of AI Agents and Crypto is expected to allow financial products to not merely be passively "provided" to users but to be actively "designed" into forms that are easier to understand and consume, thereby attracting more non-professional users into the market and gaining larger traffic.
On the other hand, competition may also depend on who can facilitate as many financial consumption behaviors as possible on their own platform; beyond investment trading, there are opportunities to extend into real-world payments, consumption, and a series of other behaviors.
The Battle for Entry into the Super APP: What are the Weapons of Cryptocurrency Exchanges?
If everyone is ultimately moving towards trading everything, then what is the advantage of cryptocurrency exchanges?
In the past, this question was easy to answer. There were more wealth effect cryptocurrencies and opportunities in the on-chain ecosystem. But as altcoins recede and stock platforms begin to engage in cryptocurrency, while brokerages start embracing tokenization and prediction markets, this advantage seems less convincing.
Take prediction markets as an example; Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour stated that his real competitors are not Polymarket but traditional financial platforms like CME and Robinhood. This indicates that, compared to products, the capability to distribute is more important.
From this perspective, cryptocurrency exchanges still have several cards to play. First is globalization; compared to traditional brokerages limited by regional constraints, cryptocurrency exchanges naturally have a broader international user base.Secondly, the 7×24 trading culture. The cryptocurrency market has operated around the clock since its inception, and users' acceptance of perpetual contracts, leverage, real-time market data, and high-frequency trading is much higher than that of traditional financial users. Moving forward, on-chain capabilities and the combinability of assets might also be a differentiating advantage.
However, whether these advantages are sufficient to support them in winning the next round of competition remains uncertain. One thing is becoming clearer: rather than just challenging Binance, the stage for cryptocurrency exchanges is expanding.
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