Coinbase has achieved a significant milestone by becoming the first and only full-service prime brokerage in the crypto space. According to John D'Agostino, head of strategy at Coinbase Institutional, the company has successfully assembled a comprehensive suite of services, including trading, custody, financing, derivatives, and cross-margining, into a single stack. This achievement sets Coinbase apart from its rivals, which still rely on piecing together these services from various providers. D'Agostino notes that in traditional markets, such as equities and fixed income, only a handful of firms, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, qualify as full-service prime brokers.
In the crypto industry, Coinbase is the only company that offers all these services natively, making it a prime broker by definition. The company's flagship platform, Coinbase Prime, has 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 rollout of cross-margining between spot and derivatives positions, Coinbase has completed its full-service prime brokerage offering, allowing market makers and institutional traders to reduce capital requirements. The company processes roughly $236 billion in quarterly trading volume and supports over 470 assets across more than 20 blockchains. Beyond trading and custody, Coinbase has a $1 billion lending book and the industry's largest listed derivatives footprint through its Deribit integration. Its staking business spans 10 to 20 tokens at institutional scale, including dedicated products through Coinbase Asset Management.
D'Agostino believes that no other firm is solving all these problems in one place, making Coinbase the go-to platform for institutional investors in the crypto space.