USDH

Emily

James

Amazon started by selling books. Then it sold everything, and along the way it rebuilt the infrastructure that the rest of retail now runs on.
That is the lens James Heckman, CEO of Roundtable, put to <a href="https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/tags/coinbase" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Coinbase</a> in a conversation on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a company that started by letting people buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum, proved it could be trusted with custody, and is now expanding into nearly every corner of finance.
<blockquote>
 "You kind of feel like you're the Amazon of banking right now. And I'd love for you to react to that statement. Am I missing something?" asked&nbsp;Heckman.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/markets/rtb-debuts-on-nasdaq-ai-defi-media-platform-roundtable-to-trade-as-rtb" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Related: RTB Debuts on Nasdaq: AI/DeFi Media Platform “Roundtable” to Trade as RTB</a>
<h2 id="the-traders-left-but-the-plumbing-stayed-the-same">The traders left, but the plumbing stayed the same</h2>
<a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">John D'Agostino's</a> argument is that the people who once packed the exchange floor moved on to hedge funds and bank trading desks decades ago, but the technology underneath them barely changed.
"We saw over the last 20 or 30 years a lifting of all the bodies on this floor and moving to different technology platforms. The thing was, though, that the underlying layer, the layer that connected all of them, the tech layer, kind of stayed the same. The technology that they use to trade value, settle stocks, make payments, that hasn't changed in 30 years." said&nbsp;<a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">D'Agostino.</a>
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That, he said, is the opening Coinbase and blockchains are built for: replacing the back-end ledgers that record who owns what and move money between institutions, systems largely designed decades ago.
<blockquote>
 "People left the floor, but the tech stack stayed the same. Now what we're seeing is the tech stack catching up to that evolution and shifting from financial ledgers that were built 50 years ago to financial ledgers that are built in the last 10 years that are faster, cheaper, and more stable."
</blockquote>
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<h2 id="boring-on-purpose-hyper-growth-at-the-same-time">Boring on purpose, hyper-growth at the same time</h2>
Heckman pushed the metaphor further, casting Coinbase as a fortress: the largest regulated custodian, deep relationships with banks and regulators, a proven marketplace, and a balance sheet full of cash.&nbsp;
A custodian is the regulated entity that holds an asset on a client's behalf and is responsible for keeping it safe, the crypto equivalent of the vault behind a bank.
<a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">D'Agostino</a> said the hard part is being two companies at once.
"It's very, very tough to lead an organization where you have to be the stable, safe, I'll even say boring provider. Boring is good in some ways. But you also have to be a hyper-growth, innovative company. And that's challenging." noted&nbsp;<a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">D'Agostino</a>.
He credited Coinbase's leadership, CEO Brian Armstrong, finance chief Alesia Haas, and operating chief Emily Choi, with holding that balance, and framed the split this way:
"Our foundational moat is we are the safest place to buy and store your crypto. And then the hyper-growth is coming from our pushing into securitize everything, being the everything app."
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<h2 id="where-the-growth-is-coming-from">Where the growth is coming from</h2>
The "everything app" is not just a slogan. <a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">D'Agostino</a> pointed to several businesses Coinbase is pushing into at once.
The biggest is derivatives. In 2025, Coinbase <a href="https://www.coinbase.com/blog/deribit-joins-coinbase-unlocking-the-future-of-global-crypto-derivatives" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">bought Deribit for $2.9 billion</a>, the largest acquisition in crypto's history, in a cash-and-stock deal that closed that August. Deribit, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Dubai, is the world's leading crypto options exchange. Derivatives are contracts whose value is tied to an underlying asset, and the market for them dwarfs simple buying and selling of coins.
<a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Follow John D'Agostino on X here.</a>
"We made one of the largest crypto acquisitions ever in Deribit last year, which makes us a market leader in the derivatives space, which is orders of magnitude larger than the spot listed space."&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/markets/coinbases-jesse-pollak-explains-what-investors-are-missing-onchain-with-base" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Related: Coinbase's Jesse Pollak explains what investors are missing onchain with Base</a>
The second is tokenization, putting real-world assets like stocks, bonds, and funds onto blockchain rails as digital tokens that can trade and settle around the clock.
"We are deep, deep into securitized tokens, security tokens. So that is a $15 trillion market that will be launching quite soon."
Coinbase has started with tokenized equities and is widening the net, <a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">D'Agostino</a> said.
"I don't know if we've tokenized a REIT yet, but that's included in the security tokenization mandate, which we started with 20 or so stocks and is expanding rapidly, both in the US and offshore."added&nbsp;<a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">D'Agostino</a>.
<h2 id="the-defi-and-stablecoin-bet">The DeFi and stablecoin bet</h2>
The third growth area is decentralized finance, or DeFi, financial services that run on public blockchains through software rather than through banks or brokers. Coinbase's clearest move here is its deal with Hyperliquid, the fast-growing on-chain derivatives exchange.
In May 2026, Coinbase <a href="https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-and-hyperliquid-aligning-markets-on-hyperliquid-to-usdc" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">became the official USDC treasury deployer on Hyperliquid</a>, making Circle's USDC the platform's primary dollar stablecoin as Hyperliquid's own USDH token is wound down. A stablecoin is a token pegged to a currency like the dollar. Under the agreement, Hyperliquid captures the bulk of the yield earned on the roughly $5 billion of USDC sitting on its platform, money it uses to buy back its native HYPE token, while Coinbase deepens USDC's reach across on-chain markets.
"Our announcement of using USDC as the treasury, Coinbase being the treasury deployer for Hyperliquid, is an example of how we're facilitating decentralized financial transactions." noted&nbsp;<a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">D'Agostino</a>.
Taken together, derivatives, tokenized securities, DeFi, and stablecoins, the strategy lines up with how <a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">D'Agostino</a> has described Coinbase elsewhere: as crypto's first <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/04/21/coinbase-s-john-d-agostino-says-exchange-stands-alone-as-crypto-s-full-service-prime-broker" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">full-service prime broker</a>, a single firm offering trading, custody, financing, and derivatives under one roof. That is the part of the Amazon comparison Coinbase seems happy to accept: prove the core, then sell everything next to it.
<a href="https://x.com/johnjdagostino" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Follow John D'Agostino on X here.</a>

Coinbase's D'Agostino reveals the plan to put all of finance on one app

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TheStreet Roundtable

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