Share this article

Coinbase, With 9K Institutions Already Enlisted, Launches ‘Prime’ Out of Beta

The prime brokerage offering could further cement the exchange as a leading force in institutional crypto adoption.

Updated May 11, 2023, 7:04 p.m. Published Sep 20, 2021, 1:16 p.m.

Attendees line up for the Coinbase ferris wheel during the 2021 Made In America music festival in Philadelphia. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Roc Nation)

Coinbase said Monday it’s opening its prime brokerage to all institutional investors.

The line of trading tools for professional investment firms already boasts a roster of 9,000 institutions, including hedge funds and family offices, according to data shared during Coinbase’s most recent earnings call.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW

Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto for Advisors Newsletter today. See all newsletters

By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy.

Coinbase has long been assumed to be a bastion of retail crypto action but the launch of Prime should further cement the publicly traded exchange as a leading force in institutional crypto adoption. The company’s most recent shareholder letter said institutional trading accounted for 69% of Coinbase’s $462 billion in second-quarter trading volume.

In a blog post Monday, Greg Tusar, Coinbase’s vice president of institutional products, pointed to clients Meitu, MicroStrategy and One River as using the exchange’s “comprehensive platform to execute some of the largest trades in the industry.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, PNC Bank, SpaceX, Tesla, Third Point LLC and WisdomTree Investments were also singled out as clients in a shareholder letter last month.

Coinbase’s prime brokerage offering stems from the exchange’s acquisition of Tagomi in May 2020.

Here’s a hype video explaining how Prime works:

Coinbase Institutional Investors

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.