This year, crypto-focused Coinbase wants its platform to be a single place where people can trade many different types of assets in multiple formats, eventually turning into a superapp for investing and finance.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong outlined the crypto exchange’s plans for 2026 in today’s post on X. The main goal of the crypto-focused firm this year is to “grow the everything exchange globally” and scale its stablecoins and payments offering.
By being the “everything exchange”, Coinbase executives mean expanding the crypto platform’s functionality beyond traditional crypto trading to equities (stocks), commodities (like gold, oil, etc.), and even prediction markets (online blockchain-based markets where people place their bets on outcomes of events).
Additionally, trading of various assets is expected to happen in a few popular formats:
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spot trading (buying/selling the asset itself);
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futures (contracts about future prices);
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options (contracts giving the right to buy/sell later).
This way, the global crypto exchange is following the footsteps of numerous fintech firms, which gradually evolve niche solutions into general-purpose financial or investing apps. A broader selection of investing services under a single app roof adds convenience and trading flexibility for the customers, thus boosting their engagement and, potentially, loyalty.
At present, Coinbase already offers the tools for spot buying, selling, and holding a large selection of cryptocurrencies. Futures contracts are already available on major cryptos like BTC and ETH in the U.S. and beyond as well. Last year, Coinbase also acquired Deribit to boost its global crypto derivatives business. Therefore, experts argue that the exchange may introduce expanded futures offerings that include many altcoins and 24/7 perpetual futures trading in more regions on its next evolution stage.
Stock and ETF trading has also been rolled out through Coinbase Capital Markets. However, its availability is yet limited to U.S. customers, promising global expansion in the future. Tokenized stock products (blockchain-based shares) are planned as part of the tokenization push, too. As for the commodities offering, Coinbase has been gradually adding futures on traditional commodities (like oil) and multi-asset index products that mix crypto and equities exposure to its trading services. Although it’s still far from universal standardized commodities trading, this type of assets is an important part of Coinbase’s roadmap.
The company has even recently experimented with a hybrid operations model in the UK, where it launched a new interest‑bearing savings account, testing the waters of incorporating “traditional” bank‑style services within the crypto-native environment. Meanwhile, in Germany, Coinbase partnered with Tink to blend traditional account-to-account payments with blockchain-based finance in a Pay by Bank model.
The “everything exchange” has recently started integrating prediction market access via regulated partners like Kalshi, letting users trade event-based contracts within the Coinbase interface. The feature is not live yet, labelled as “Coming Soon” on the platform’s official webpage. However, judging from the pretty detailed description of the new service and its trading rules, the rollout is quite predetermined and held back merely by settling final technical or legal details.
Finally, Coinbase ambitiously aims to “bring the world on-chain” – move more people and apps from traditional, off-chain financial systems (like banks or Web2 apps) to systems that run directly on blockchains. Therefore, we might expect more updates regarding the firm’s developer tools and services stack, Coinbase’s own blockchain network, Base, and consumer app experience built on it.
