Shan Aggarwal on Coinbase's expansion into tokenized assets and its ambition to become a full-stack financial institution

Summary

Shan Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer at Coinbase, lays out a two-part ambition: expand the assets Coinbase supports and deepen its derivatives infrastructure. The through-line is a bet that all assets will eventually be tokenized and traded on-chain — and that Coinbase wants to be the platform sitting in the middle of that transition.

The 'everything exchange'

Coinbase has announced what it calls an "everything exchange," broadening beyond crypto to support equities, prediction markets, and direct DEX trading through the Coinbase app. Aggarwal frames this as the blurring of on-chain and off-chain finance rather than a discrete product launch.

The regulatory unlock matters here. Aggarwal says Coinbase explored issuing a tokenized version of its own stock simultaneously with its 2021 Nasdaq direct listing — where holders could freely redeem between the on-chain and exchange-listed versions — but ran into regulatory blockers. The 2025 policy environment has reopened that conversation, with active discussions underway about whether tokenized public stocks need to live within a broker-dealer or national securities exchange structure.

Deribit acquisition

The most concrete near-term move is the acquisition of Deribit, just closed. Deribit holds roughly 80% market share in crypto options and has maintained that position across multiple crypto cycles over eight years. Aggarwal's case for the deal is straightforward: crypto derivatives markets are orders of magnitude larger than spot, and Coinbase's roots were entirely in spot and fiat on-ramps. Deribit fills that gap and hands Coinbase market leadership in options.

The operational logic is cross-margin efficiency. With spot, options, and futures consolidated on one platform, a user holding $1 or one crypto asset with Coinbase can get margin across all three product types. For institutional traders moving size, that is a meaningfully better capital allocation.

Stablecoins

On the stablecoin question — specifically what the use case is for a domestic American user — Aggarwal is candid that most of the real-world value today is cross-border. His clearest example is the Stripe partnership, where USDC on Base powers payments through remote.com, letting US founders and small companies pay international freelancers immediately rather than waiting up to ten days for a wire to settle.

For users outside the US, the demand is less about programmability and more about dollar access. Aggarwal points to Argentina as a case where people organically found their way to stablecoins as a store of value, alongside gold and US real estate, precisely because accessing actual dollars is difficult. Coinbase co-founded USDC in 2018 as a tokenized dollar; the infrastructure has been in place for seven years, even if mainstream awareness of the use case is recent.

The broader positioning Coinbase is executing is a full-stack financial institution — custody, spot, derivatives, stablecoins, and eventually tokenized equities — rather than a crypto-specific exchange. The Deribit deal is the most concrete signal of how far along that build is.