Break through the boundaries of encryption! Coinbase (COIN.US) adds stock and predictive market trading, and completely transforms a “one-stop” financial superapplication

The Zhitong Finance App notes that Coinbase (COIN.US) is undertaking its largest transformation effort to date, repositioning itself as a mainstream trading and financial platform, transcending the cryptocurrency category and entering a wider field of retail investment. Previously, competitors have proven that continuous online engagement products can bring significant benefits.

The digital asset exchange announced on Wednesday that it is launching a series of major new products aimed at making Coinbase a “one-stop financial app.” Its business will expand to stocks, more advanced trading tools, and prediction markets, while doubling down on its on-chain ecosystem and providing new tools for businesses, developers, and automated financial guidance.

Although many of these products were announced in previous months, Coinbase says they are now developed and ready to go.

CEO Brian Armstrong is trying to turn his platform into a place where “everything” can be traded.

This includes stocks, a streamlined futures and perpetual contract experience, and predictive markets connected through Kalshi. Additionally, the company has developed a tokenization roadmap aimed at eventually bringing more traditional assets, including stocks, onto the chain.

The forecasting market, in particular, is rapidly becoming crowded.

DraftKings has moved to acquire its own exchange, FanDuel is partnering with CME, and Polymarket is entering the US market through a newly approved venue. Meanwhile, Robinhood is putting LedgerX at the center of its compliance push.

The core competition in this field remains Kalshi's battle against Polymarket — a duel between “regulated channels” and “cryptographic native liquidity.”

Armstrong said the appeal of this category is not only trading, but also its insight into emotions and people's views on the subsequent development of any given topic.

Armstrong said, “If you look at economic indicators... or elections, people are using predictive markets to try to figure out what will happen next month.” “Maybe only 1% of people trade it as an asset class, while 99% use it as a way to understand where things are going — it's almost like traditional media, and maybe even competitors in the entertainment industry.”

On the company's third-quarter earnings call with analysts in October, Armstrong showed how easy it is to predict how easy it is to manipulate market bets. He casually mentioned a few words that are being bet on.

“I'm a little distracted because I've been watching the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on the next earnings call,” Armstrong said. “I just wanted to add the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we mention them before the call ends.”

Robinhood highlighted this shift this week by expanding the prediction market to sports-style contracts similar to “collusion” and “fun betting” in sports betting, and claimed that the business is the fastest growing segment in its revenue.

Coinbase is now introducing similar outcome trading into its own ecosystem, but this is part of its larger bet: the next generation of brokerage will be a single application integrating traditional assets, derivatives, and on-chain channels.

While expanding its trading business, Coinbase is also cooperating with a tokenization roadmap, which indicates where it wants the platform to go in the future: bring more traditional assets, including stocks, to the chain.

The company is launching Coinbase Tokenize, an institutional-grade technology stack designed to support real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.

Armstrong described this expansion as a bridge to larger goals.

He said trading stocks was a “good first step,” but the real goal was to tokenize stocks. He said that if Coinbase can launch tokenized stocks, it can “give people around the world democratized access opportunities” and unlock a new US market structure, including a stronger, more specialized futures market linked to stocks.

“So this is just a starting point,” he said.

The announcement also extends Coinbase's efforts to become an on-chain liquidity provider — not just a marketplace for tokens.

For businesses and developers, Coinbase is broadening its platform narrative beyond retail transactions. The company said Coinbase Business is being opened to eligible customers in the US and Singapore and is launching an extended API suite covering escrow, payments, trading, and stablecoins.

Armstrong's core argument is that cryptocurrencies are not a category, but rather an upgrade cycle for the financial system itself.

“Cryptocurrency is updating all financial services,” he said. He hinted that every major asset class will move on-chain over time, from predictive markets and stocks to commodities and eventually even real-world assets such as real estate.

He said that even the biggest asset managers are sending signals that they want to move capital on-chain, which places Coinbase as a central platform in this transformation process.

Additionally, Coinbase also launched “custom stablecoins” for companies that want to have a branded stablecoin channel, with a focus on x402. The company says it's a payment standard designed to make stablecoin payments easier to attach to web requests — including for automating commerce and agent-driven transactions.

The main lines of this strategy are “retention” and “diversification.”

Coinbase already has a huge crypto-native audience, and it wants these customers to stay on its platform in every asset class, even as cryptocurrency trading volumes cool down and transaction revenues shrink.