The LSE Directory / Crypto exchanges
Coinbase is a Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange and financial infrastructure company that lets individuals and institutions buy, sell, store, and transact in digital assets. The consumer-facing platform, the Coinbase app and Coinbase.com, covers spot trading, staking, and a self-custody wallet, while Coinbase Prime serves hedge funds and other institutions with combined execution, financing, and custody in one platform. Coinbase Custody Trust Company, a New York State chartered limited purpose trust company regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services, acts as a qualified custodian under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940; its custody operations carry SOC 1 Type II and SOC 2 Type II audits performed by Deloitte & Touche. The company positions itself against offshore and less regulated exchanges by operating as a US-listed public company subject to SEC reporting, with a state-chartered trust company handling custody, a stance it markets toward institutions and compliance-sensitive customers. It also extends beyond trading into blockchain infrastructure: Base, an Ethereum layer-2 network Coinbase launched in August 2023 built on the OP Stack in collaboration with Optimism, targets developers building on-chain applications and is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Coinbase was also a co-founder, alongside Circle, of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin, giving it a direct stake in stablecoin settlement infrastructure rather than trading fees alone. Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a former Airbnb engineer, and Fred Ehrsam, a former Goldman Sachs trader. It went public on April 14, 2021 via a direct listing on Nasdaq under the ticker COIN. In May 2025, S&P Dow Jones Indices added Coinbase to the S&P 500, replacing Discover Financial Services and making it the first digital-asset-native company in the index. That same month Coinbase agreed to acquire derivatives exchange Deribit for approximately $2.9 billion in cash and stock, a deal that closed in August 2025 and was, at the time, the largest acquisition in the cryptocurrency industry's history. For full year 2024, Coinbase reported revenue of $6.56 billion and net income of $2.58 billion. In May 2025 the company disclosed a data breach affecting fewer than 1% of monthly transacting users and committed up to $400 million toward customer reimbursement and security remediation. In its first quarter 2026 results, Coinbase reported $1.4 billion in net revenue and $294 billion in customer assets on platform, its twelfth consecutive quarter of net asset inflows despite a crypto market capitalization decline of more than 20% quarter over quarter; the company said it reached an all-time high 8.6% share of global crypto trading volume in the period. Coinbase's own public messaging describes a strategic push toward what it calls an everything exchange, a single platform spanning crypto, equities, derivatives, and prediction markets, though at the time of this research most of that expanded scope remained a stated direction rather than a fully built out product line.
