Coinbase Aims to Be the 'Amazon' of Crypto, CEO Says Exchange Wants to List All Legal Crypto Assets

The Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase says that it wants to be “the Amazon of assets” and list every legal crypto asset out there. The company has outlined two major long-term trends affecting its business.

Coinbase Wants to List All Legal Cryptocurrencies

Coinbase revealed its plan during the Q2 2021 earnings call Tuesday. CEO Brian Armstrong explained: “We at Coinbase always think about longer-term cycles of crypto … We’re always looking at the long-term trends.” He described two key trends affecting Coinbase.

“The first one is that we’re continuing to see this trend of people using crypto for more and more things beyond trading,” Armstrong detailed. He added that “For example, we now have 1.7 million users doing staking in crypto, which is a way to earn a yield on your assets.”

The CEO continued, “The second big trend we’re seeing is this idea of Coinbase embracing decentralization,” elaborating:

We want to be the Amazon of assets, list every asset out there in crypto that’s legal. There are thousands of them today. There are eventually going to be millions of them. This is all under the theme of embracing decentralization.

Armstrong emphasized: “We have a very rigorous process we’ve created on the compliance and the legal and cybersecurity evaluation of these assets to make sure they comply with those standards, but once we get comfortable with that, we want to list various assets that meet those listing criteria.”

He further noted: “Bitcoin and ethereum still make up about 50% of our trading volume and the other 50% is the long tail of all the other assets that we support. No single one of those long-tail assets accounts for more than 10% of our trading volume so it’s really starting to become quite a diverse set of assets out there.”

The Coinbase executive mentioned that in the second quarter, his platform listed 22 new coins, including dogecoin (DOGE). He opined:

Our overall approach is we’re agnostic about which assets are going to win, we really just want to support every asset that’s legal for our customers.

In Q2, the company raked in $2 billion and formed partnerships with notable people and companies including Elon Musk, Spacex, and PNC Bank. At the end of June, the company said it wanted to launch an Apple-like app store for cryptocurrencies.