Coinbase has achieved a significant milestone by becoming the only full-service prime brokerage in the cryptocurrency industry. According to John D'Agostino, head of strategy at Coinbase Institutional, a prime broker must offer a range of services including trading, custody, financing, derivatives, and cross-margining. In the crypto space, staking is an additional essential component.
D'Agostino noted that only a handful of firms in traditional markets, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, qualify as full-service prime brokers. In the crypto industry, Coinbase is the only company that provides all these services natively. Its institutional platform, Coinbase Prime, offers a bundled suite of services, allowing hedge funds and asset managers to trade, store, and finance digital assets under one roof. The platform holds over $350 billion in assets under custody and serves as a custodian for more than 80% of U.S.
bitcoin and ether ETF assets. With the recent introduction of cross-margining between spot and derivatives positions, Coinbase has completed its full-service prime brokerage offering. The company's institutional platform processes approximately $236 billion in quarterly trading volume and supports over 470 assets across more than 20 blockchains.
Beyond trading and custody, Coinbase operates a $1 billion lending book and has the largest listed derivatives footprint in the industry through its Deribit integration. Its staking business spans 10 to 20 tokens at institutional scale. D'Agostino believes that no other firm is currently able to provide all these services in one place, making Coinbase the only full-service prime broker in the crypto industry.