Coinbase Comes for All of Finance

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, December 18, and today, we are talking about Coinbase launching stock trading. Before we get into that, however, if you're enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you wanna dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find the link in the show notes or go to bit.ly/breakdownpod. Well, friends, Coinbase is finishing the year off with a bang, announcing the launch of stock trading. Head of consumer and business product, Max Bransberg, announced the new feature at Coinbase's end of year conference on Wednesday, stating, this is a major milestone in our plan to enable twenty four seven trading of stocks and ETFs from anywhere in the world powered by crypto. For the moment, the product won't use tokenized stocks. However, select stocks will be available for extended hours trading. Tokenization is on the roadmap for next year with an in house platform called Coinbase Tokenize. Stock trading is commission free, and Coinbase says they'll be adding thousands of additional stocks and ETFs to fill out the offering over the coming months. The market will be available to US users, and traders can fund their trades in either US dollars or USDC, all from their regular Coinbase account. TJR gave one of the prevailing takes writing, Coinbase turned into Robinhood and Robinhood turned into Coinbase. More accurately, both exchanges are in a competition to become an everything exchange, which is Coinbase's declared strategy moving forward. To that end, Wednesday's announcement featured a ton of other markets coming to the platform. Coinbase also added prediction markets powered by Kalshi. On chain Solana trading is now also available through a Jupyter integration in the Coinbase app. That integration means Solana tokens are available immediately on launch going around the listing process. In addition, Coinbase announced the launch of custom stablecoins, allowing companies to issue their own branded stablecoins. Coinbase said the stablecoins will be backed one to one through a flexible mix of USDC and other USD stablecoins. This feature is part of a broader push to expand their payments, trading, and custody, with their developer platform getting a major upgrade to enable more white label partnerships. Another big shift is moving derivatives trading from Coinbase Advanced into the basic app with a new simplified interface. Coinbase said the plan was to allow users to trade with less upfront capital and a more beginner friendly interface that, quote, makes it easier than ever to start trading futures in perpetual futures. Coinbase also introduced Coinbase Advisor, an AI powered financial advisor built directly into their main app. It can help users with portfolio construction and offer personalized recommendations based on market data. This is the biggest overhaul for Coinbase's product line in their thirteen …