Coinbase has achieved a milestone in the crypto industry by becoming the only full-service prime broker, offering a comprehensive suite of services including trading, custody, financing, derivatives, and cross-margining. According to John D'Agostino, head of strategy at Coinbase Institutional, the company has assembled these services into a single stack, making it a one-stop-shop for institutional clients.
This is significant because, in traditional finance, only a handful of firms, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, are considered full-service prime brokers. In crypto, Coinbase is the only company that provides all these services natively, without requiring clients to piece them together from different providers. The company's flagship platform, Coinbase Prime, holds over $350 billion in assets under custody and serves as 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 suite of services, allowing market makers and institutional traders to reduce capital requirements. The company's institutional platform processes roughly $236 billion in quarterly trading volume and supports over 470 assets across 20-plus blockchains. Beyond trading and custody, Coinbase also runs a $1 billion lending book and has the industry's largest listed derivatives footprint through its Deribit integration. Its staking business spans 10 to 20 tokens at institutional scale.
According to D'Agostino, no other firm is solving all these problems in one place, making Coinbase a unique player in the crypto industry.