Coinbase taps Sensible founders to expand consumer-focused DeFi

Coinbase, in its seventh acquisition this year, is acquiring the founders of Sensible to address a critical deficit in its arsenal: the consumer UX expertise required to seamlessly weave complex DeFi into its main platform.

In an announcement on September 9, the exchange confirmed it has acqui-hired Jacob Frantz and Zak Salmon, the co-founders of the yield-earning platform Sensible. The startup, founded in 2022 and initially backed by Coinbase’s own venture arm and Dragonfly, will wind down operations in October.

Frantz and Salmon will lead key product teams focused on Coinbase’s onchain consumer strategy, directly tackling the challenge of simplifying decentralized finance for its vast user base. The move is the latest in an aggressive acquisition spree throughout 2025, which has seen the exchange absorb teams from Deribit, Spindl, and Iron Fish.

Bridging the gap between ambition and user experience

The acquisition of Jacob Frantz and Zak Salmon brings more than technical skill to Coinbase; it adds deep experience in designing DeFi products for everyday users. Sensible specialized in yield-generating crypto applications that combined staking rewards and decentralized finance protocols into intuitive interfaces.

At Coinbase, the pair will lead teams dedicated to the company’s on-chain consumer strategy, a critical component of its broader ambition to become an “everything exchange,” where users can trade, borrow, stake, and spend all assets in one unified platform.

In their official announcement, Frantz and Salmon framed the move not as an exit, but as an acceleration of their original mission. They expressed a clear alignment with Coinbase’s scale and resources, suggesting that operating within the larger platform offers a more direct route to achieving their goal of making crypto usable.

Prior to founding Sensible, Frantz and Salmon experimented with tools for creators to monetize work and applications for crypto power-users to coordinate on trades. However, they pivoted to Sensible upon identifying a convergence of technological readiness and a shift in consumer sentiment away from speculative trading toward long term asset growth.