Update (Dec. 18, 2:40 am UTC): This article has been updated with more information and Coinbase’s stock price.
Coinbase is launching stock trading and prediction markets as the crypto exchange looks beyond digital assets to chase its ambition of creating an “everything app.”
Coinbase head of consumer and business products, Max Branzburg, announced at the company’s year-end conference that “stock trading is now available on Coinbase.”
“This is a major milestone in our plan to enable 24/7 trading of stocks and ETFs from anywhere in the world, powered by crypto,” he said.
Branzburg also said that Coinbase has launched prediction markets in partnership with Kalshi, which will begin its rollout today and later come to the US.
Last month, tech researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered that Coinbase was developing a prediction markets platform, which indicated it would be backed by Kalshi.
Coinbase is also set to offer 24/7 perpetuals early next year, which will allow users to bet on crypto and stocks gaining or dropping with up to 50 times leverage.
Branzburg said that the new product lineup is part of Coinbase’s “everything exchange.” The company started to lay the groundwork for a wider set of offerings in July, rebranding its wallet app as an “everything app” that added apps, social networks and chat features.
The changes were expected as Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Coinbase would launch prediction markets and stock trading, which Brian Huang, CEO of the Coinbase-backed portfolio manager Glider, said were the predictable “big announcements.”
Related: Crypto’s ‘super app’ race is on as industry enters aggregation era: Report
“Coinbase is starting to look a lot more like Robinhood,” Huang said in an emailed statement to Cointelegraph. “Why isn’t Coinbase embracing being more onchain? That would be the real differentiator for them.
”Why not build onchain stocks? Instead, we have the same offering as Robinhood,” he added. “I can only imagine it’s coming soon.”
Shares in Coinbase closed trading on Wednesday down over 3.3%, but saw a slight 1.5% comeback after-hours to $247.85.
Huang said it “begs the question” why Coinbase’s market value is hovering under $66 billion, while rival Robinhood is worth over $104 billion.
“Coinbase has a huge leg up when assets truly begin to become tokenized, even Robinhood admits that,” he said. “Coinbase is undervalued here. It will close the gap to Robinhood.”
Magazine: Can Robinhood or Kraken’s tokenized stocks ever be truly decentralized?
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-stock-trading-prediction-markets-in-everything-app-push?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound
