Phase 4 of The Coinbase Secret Master Plan

Originally published on Paragraph.

Moving Our Business Onchain

So excited for more and more of Coinbase’s existing and new users, assets, and products to come onchain via Base.

Onchain innovation is literally happening across the entire company right now – Base may be the most visible, but every single team at Coinbase is thinking about how to improve consumer, developer, business, and institutional experiences by using onchain rails – and the speed at which this is happening is only accelerating week over week.

Disrupting Ourselves but Growing the Pie

Brian Armstrong shared Coinbase’s four phase Secret Master Plan back in 2016, and today Coinbase is transitioning from phase 3 (100M people) to phase 4 (1B people) – we are deliberately disrupting our own successful exchange business by going all-in onchain, such as storing more corporate and customer USDC balances on Base, bringing more Base DeFi products to Coinbase users, onboarding more Coinbase users to Base, launching more major wrapped assets, tokenizing more asset types, integrating native DEX support, and more.

Coinbase and Base will bring the power of onchain to 1B people to create an open financial system for the world, and we will use our lessons to hopefully help more Fortune 500 companies like PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, J.P. Morgan, Samsung, Chase, etc. build products onchain.

Once in a Generation Company

Working at Coinbase feels so much like a high-slope startup that sometimes it’s easy to forget that we are a publicly traded company in the S&P 500, pushing head first into doing things onchain.

There were and there will continue to be skeptics, but our approach will remain the same – to tune out the noise, focus on the tech, and think long term – innovation is non-consensus, and I believe that this period of Coinbase aggressively moving onchain and proactively disrupting our core business is going to be looked back on as one of the greatest corporate strategic moves in history.