Coinbase Launches Tokenized Stocks on Base | Jesse Pollak

The stock market is coming onchain. Jesse Pollak joins David to unpack Coinbase Tokenized Stocks, a new push to bring one-to-one equities onto Base with 24/7 trading, dividends, governance rights and permissionless onchain composability. They explore what happens when stocks plug directly into DeFi, why borrowing and lending may matter more than trading itself, how neobanks could evolve into global brokerages, and Jesse’s bigger vision for Base as the financial backend for stocks, payments, credit and local currencies around the world. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near-pod 🔑BITKEY | GET 10% OFF USE CODE: BANKLESS | #bitkeypartner https://bankless.cc/bitkey 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS CONTENT MCP https://www.bankless.com/premium --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Coinbase Brings Tokenized Stocks to Base 5:17 Permissionless Stocks and the First Assets Going Live 10:11 Plugging Stocks Into Base DeFi 17:52 From Tokenized Stocks to Neo Brokerages 23:32 Crypto as a Global Financial System 27:20 What Builders Can Create With Onchain Stocks 32:04 Bringing Every Currency Onchain 42:47 Jesse’s Role at Base and the Everything Exchange 49:50 Tokenized Stocks Beyond Base --- RESOURCES Jesse Pollak https://x.com/jessepollak --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Coinbase tokenized stocks, that's a pretty big announcement. Jesse, welcome back to the podcast.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Tell me about this announcement. You guys are putting stocks on base and what are the details?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think, we think the whole world is going to move on chain and we're building base to be the blockchain for global finance. And so when you look at the world's assets, one of the biggest asset classes in the world is stocks, equities. And that's what we're doing. We're taking those stocks and equities, we're tokenizing them, we're putting them on base. That makes them 24/7, 365, it makes them globally available and it makes them instant, fast, cheap to do anything with. And I think, you know, the first thing that people are going to start doing is trading. You know, now you can trade in any app, anywhere, but I think that that's really just the beginning. What comes next is people are going to be building borrowing lending experiences around them. They're going to be building ways for people to build yield, they're going to be, you know, issuing meme coins paired with them.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  We're basically just plugging this massive asset class into the programmable economy that is base and making it so that the world's innovators can now basically build anything with equities. And so I'm super fired up about it and I think we're going to see a lot of adoption and innovation coming along.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  The product's name is Coinbase Tokenized Stocks, pretty straightforward. So there's a token on base, there's a share of a company somewhere. Just legally speaking, because we need to, you know, brush our teeth, make our bed, do our homework, get kind of the basics out of the way. How are these two things connected, like legally speaking? What's the legal structure here?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, one of the things that we've really focused on is making it so that these are real one-to-one stocks. And so every tokenized stock has a one-to-one representation that users have a direct claim on. We've done this in collaboration with Abu Dhabi and Alpaca and we think it's the best model for tokenizing equities. We think that this is going to lead to them being more widely adopted, more trusted by consumers and institutions and just give better properties to the people who actually hold them. And so this, I would say, is the Coinbase way of doing things. You know, I was talking with someone and they said, I feel like Coinbase is the Navy. Sometimes we move a little bit slow because you have to get boats around the world to get there, but we're always going to come.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  And when we come, we're going to come in force and we're going to be the people that people can always count on to bring the best version, the most trusted version to market. And so that's what we've done with these tokenized stocks. Super excited to see what people build around them and how that trust leads to more adoption and growth.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  What about all the nuances of owning a share of a company? So there's like governance rights, investor rights, there's dividends. How are the nuances handled around these, around these things?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So on this, you're going to have dividends, you're going to have a direct claim to those. You're going to have governance rights. So these are going to, again, be one-to-one with US stocks. And I think that that is, yeah, that's what we focused on unlocking with this. And I think, again, it's going to be a real differentiator for the product and the market.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  So say I own a dividend paying stock, how do I actually receive the dividend? Does it get, like, USDC gets sent to my wallet or mechanically, how does this work?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so these are, they're set up to be rebasing. And so that basically means that when the dividend comes, it'll basically get credited to the stock token and the balance will increase basically of how much of the stock it holds. And then there's a multiplier directly in the token so that if you're kind of a builder who's building a brokerage on top of it, you can show users, hey, you know, you just got this kind of increment that came in and show the like direct one-to-one share, but also the value that your user is having from the dividend.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Okay, cool. So that's, that's a slight difference than like your traditional brokerage where your traditional brokerage would show you like, ah, 75 cents from this dividend from, you know, this quarter or whatever. What you guys do is you just take the cash dividends, you buy the Coinbase tokenized stocks and that gets allocated. Everyone's balances get allocated upwards just a little bit.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's basically a thing that lets us make these things more composable in the rest of DeFi. If you're just paying out these dividends on top of them, you could imagine there being like a fair amount of complexity with, okay, these are being held as collateral in this asset, like how's that actually work? Versus if you do this rebasing model, it unlocks a lot more composability across borrowing and lending and yield generation. And so that's what we've opted in for. I think that over time, we're going to see a lot of kind of iteration and experimentation here. And we're pretty open-minded on saying, hey, as we have more of these stocks coming on chain and people want to hold them in different form factors, we're going to keep innovating on the way people can hold them.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  I mean, ultimately, I think this is one of the really powerful things with tokenization in general is when you're tokenizing an asset, you're bringing into this like almost infinitely innovating environment where we don't really even know what people are going to build on top of the tokenized stocks that we launch. But we know that they now have a Turing complete, globally available supercomputer that they can build any financial application with them. And that, I think, is just going to be something where I expect a lot more is going to come than, you know, even what we can anticipate today.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Do I need to do any KYC or get my address whitelisted to hold these tokenized stocks? Or are these freely permissionless, publicly available, just like a normal token that I would have come to expect?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Freely permissionless, publicly available, no KYC in there. They're restricted from US folks trading them at the interface layer. So, you know, folks are going to be applying their own kind of whitelisting, or not whitelisting, geofencing and kind of adapting experiences for US users there. But on the blockchain, on base, they're going to be fully open, you can build anything with them, they're not restricted. They're not trading in certain pools, they're going to be available on Aerodrome and every other DEX. Really excited to be basically making this permissionless asset available to everyone. And we've had, we've had a great partnership with the folks in Abu Dhabi who have really leaned in with us to figure out how do we do this in a compliant and trusted way?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  While also making this the most powerful, like programmable primitive to go into this new economy that we possibly can. And so it's been cool to get to work with them and just like see how forward-thinking and like kind of leaning into this on-chain innovation that government's been. And in particular, the ADGM that's been kind of leading the financial innovation in the country.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  What stocks are going to get tokenized first? So of all the stocks, there's a lot of stocks out there. I'm sure there's a lot of stocks that base users don't really care about. I'm sure there are a lot of stocks that a lot of base users do care about. How are you guys going about deciding which to do first?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're starting with the ones that we see the most demand for from retail folks. And so I think the first four that are rolling out are Nvidia, Meta, Apple and Google. And then we have another eight that are rolling out and then a few days after that. And then we'll keep scaling that up until there's thousands over the next little while. And so the goal is to give people the ability to trade anything they want, wherever they want. And, you know, if base is the blockchain for global finance, I think the way you make a chain successful in that world is by bringing every asset into that ecosystem and then trying the most powerful tools for developers and for traders to trade those assets, to get leverage on those assets and to build new financial products on top of them.

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• 10:18Speaker 00

  And so you guys, the DeFi ecosystem is not starting from day one with tokenized stocks. How are you guys leveraging what already exists on base to help kind of like accelerate the growth of the Coinbase tokenized stock ecosystem?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, just on basis DeFi ecosystem, uh, you know, if you look at over the last two years, bases, the, the, the DeFi ecosystem that has grown through the bear market, I think we're up like something like 30 or 40%. Uh, where most of crypto ecosystems are down in terms of total value locked in DeFi. Um, on financing, which is something we look at really closely where it's people building lend products, earn products and borrow products. Basis now the second largest on-chain ecosystem in the world after Ethereum, we just passed Solana. Um, and that's mostly being driven by people who are earning yield on their dollars. Uh, and then people who are borrowing dollars against their crypto. Uh, this is Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. Coinbase has done a great integration of that where you can get a one tap loan.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  And then that's kind of led to a ton of other businesses plugging into that same liquidity to offer that same one tap loan experience for crypto majors. The thing we're really excited about with stocks is that we can just plug in all of that DeFi ecosystem, uh, to unlock them. So on the trading side, um, these are going live with the deepest liquidity in Aerodrome. Aerodrome's been incredible liquidity hub on base for the last three years since the beginning. Um, they're now the place where the most Bitcoin, uh, trades on chain in terms of spot. Um, I expect that to happen, uh, you know, and them to grow pretty quickly on the, the stock side as well. And then on the lending and borrowing side, uh, you know, Morpho has grown huge on base, um, Ave as well.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  They're both going to be bringing borrowing and lending products and a bunch of other folks around them as well. And I think because we already have super deep USDC liquidity that's looking for, um, yield. Um, and that's kind of aggregated a bunch of demand. When we have, um, these new stocks coming in, that means that folks who are borrowing against them are going to get low rates. Um, and then we're basically be able to see this kind of flywheel that's developed around borrowing and lending and DeFi and base grow faster and faster. And so I think the, the way I think about this is right now we've grown to, I think be like about $5 billion of, of, uh, DeFi on base. Um, with only crypto assets. And now we're bringing the largest asset class in the world. And I think it, it's just getting started. Like we're going to get to 10 and then 20 and then 50 and then a hundred billion.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Uh, and then I think much beyond that in the years ahead.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  The landscape of tokenized stocks is a pretty like competitive landscape. And I wouldn't say any one product has really captured a lead here. It's liquidity has been pretty fragmented. No one's really become a breakaway winner here. Uh, so there's just been difficulty, I think, with incentivizing trading volume, growing TVL. The two for tokenized stocks, everything is up and to the right, but it's just not at the same pace. That I think a lot of crypto natives are used to seeing things go up and to the right when it comes to crypto native stuff. Uh, so what, is there a, a strategy or a plan or incentives or anything to help kind of like juice? The growth of the Coinbase tokenized stock ecosystem?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, first off, I'd say like, I think crypto, uh, tokenized stocks are growing pretty quickly. Like if you just look at the data, it's like we have way more that there, than there were a year ago. We have way more volume. Um, and I think if you compare it to stable coins, um, you know, it took four years for us to go from, you know, USDC and tether issued. To them really starting to be real material parts of the conversation. I think we're now like six months in with tokenized stocks essentially, and, um, they're growing pretty quickly and people are trading them all around the world. And I think that that's just going to accelerate. So I think we're starting from a pretty good, um, base. In terms of how we're thinking about it, our focus is on making them really useful in the base economy and in the crypto economy more broadly.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  And so I, I don't think that, um, just like raw incentives are trying to drive, um, like pure trading volume is, is ultimately what's going to win here. It's how do you deliver product experiences, whether that's for consumers who now have more access to this new asset class? Because previously they're unbrokered, four billion unbrokered people in the world who now actually have access to equities.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Uh, or they're more useful so that, um, you know, folks who maybe previously held equities in a brokerage, but, um, weren't able to actually do really useful things with them because that was maybe only available to people who have more net worth. Or, um, only available to people who had access to a certain financial product can now do a lot more. So that's going to be borrowing against their portfolios that they have more flexibility. It's going to be doing yield generation, uh, with things like covered call selling, uh, with lending out so that folks can, um, uh, kind of, you know, do, do the covered calls or whatever other yield generation strategy they want to do. Um, I think that that is, um, going to be just like a huge unlock where you basically take a bunch of, um, financial tools

• 15:08Speaker 01

  that have previously only been available to a small subset of the population, even if the population have access to stocks and bring them to everyone. And so I'd say that's the big focus for us is basically making it so that, uh, these, these assets just become more useful because they're, they're built on chain. That's the whole consumer side. I think we'll see the same thing play out on the business and enterprise side as well. Um, where you basically are going to see all kinds of, um, new fund management strategies that open up because these things are programmable and liquid 24/7, 365. Um, I, I think we're going to see, um, new kinds of, uh, ways that businesses manage their treasuries. Uh, because they are, um, actually able to access a lot more assets just out of the box.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  You know, we have business banking, uh, partners like Slash who have been adding, uh, stable coins to their products. And now because they're already kind of like wallets behind the scenes, it's easy to add Bitcoin. It's easy to add equities. And, you know, if you're an AI company and you're super indexed to, uh, Nvidia and you're using Nvidia products, like are you more likely to want to hold some of your treasury in Nvidia? I think that's going to be potentially a lot more possible because all of this is going to be operating in one financial platform where all these pieces just kind of fit together. And so for us, again, the focus is really not just like bring the asset, not just like drive trading on that asset. Although of course we want those things, it's about make the asset useful in new ways, uh, by bringing new use cases and by bringing it to new audiences.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Let's talk about the specific structures that already exist on DeFi that are a part of this, um, build out of this, this product out of Coinbase. You mentioned Aerodrome. Is there like a special role that Aerodrome has with this particular announcement? I know base and Coinbase has worked with Aerodrome plenty in the past. Is there something new here or are you guys just continuing to do the things you always have done in the past, which is simply use Aerodrome for liquidity?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  We're continuing to just kind of deepen the relationship with Aerodrome. Um, they're, uh, building liquidity for all of these stocks out of the gate. Um, they're kind of like a really important liquidity hub on base. Uh, and so we're just leaning in there. Um, I'm excited to see some of the stuff that they're, uh, planning to pioneer around this. You know, when you're building the AMM, um, and you're doing stocks where, you know, the, the price, um, for the most part is going to be, uh, moving within kind of trading windows where they traded in the biggest volumes in the traditional equities market, that kind of presents some problems. Um, for, okay, now you have this liquidity sitting in AMM. How do you manage that? I think the Aerodrome team has some really good ideas for how they're going to make that profitable for LPs.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Still liquid and, and kind of good, uh, price execution for consumers who are going into those books. And so, um, yeah, it's really just about like deepening the relationship with them, um, helping, uh, kind of leverage the platform they've built to build, you know, the deepest liquidity around stocks anywhere on chain.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  How does the rollout of this product work? Are you guys simply just going to mint tokens and people buy them? How does, how does the, how does day one happen?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So at the beginning, um, uh, the minting and burning is going to be, um, kind of like a smaller subset of folks who can do that. So there's kind of folks who are, uh, able to mint and burn, we're onboarding them, uh, getting them ready to do that. And then they're providing liquidity into the broader ecosystem. And as there's more demand in the ecosystem, they're going to be able to bring more liquidity in. I think that the goal over time is to make it so anyone can come in and mint and burn these things. So if you're a consumer and you are transferring your stocks to Coinbase or another brokerage, you can then immediately just tokenize them. Uh, and that, uh, you know, can tokenize them in your existing centralized exchange account. Or, or it can tokenize them and send them off platform. So you can start to do whatever you want with them. I think that that's going to be a huge unlock. At the end of the day, like giving people that ability to, um, uh,

• 18:48Speaker 01

  have self custody and control of their assets, uh, and do what they want with them. Instead of being, um, within the gates of their existing traditional brokerage, that's probably pretty limited in terms of what they can actually do. I think that that's going to be this kind of freedom moment for these, and, um, that's what we're working towards.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Is there any role that Coinbase.com or the Coinbase app plays? Like, will I be able to buy tokenized stocks? I can already buy stocks on Coinbase. Can I buy the tokenized stocks on Coinbase.com? And why would I do that if I can buy the normal stocks?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  So to start in the US, you know, it's just going to continue to be a stocks experience because, you know, these stocks are focused on non-US customers. But outside of the US, this is going to be a really powerful tool for opening up new markets for Coinbase. Where basically it's expensive and slow to integrate the legacy equity system into a product, particularly when you're doing that in a bunch of different regions that have different kind of service providers, regulations around restricting in terms of what you can actually do. And so when you put these tokenized versions of stocks on a single platform, where Coinbase has kind of best-in-class integration into Base, that means that you kind of just start to turn them on in a bunch of different regions.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Now you can be like, oh, we're turning on stocks in 20 regions, in 50 regions, in 100 regions. That can kind of grow the top of funnel for Coinbase in terms of how many people they can offer stocks to and how good a financial experience they can offer them. But then also can grow the liquidity on Base because you have more and more retail flow that's able to tokenize those assets and trade those assets. And so that's really what we're working towards is, you know, first for Coinbase, but then for any brokerage that wants to, making it so that you can seamlessly tokenize stocks that you have, or you can seamlessly offer tokenized stocks to your new customers who are looking to trade things. And when we're actually out in the market today, talking to customers, I'd say one of the biggest things that we're seeing in terms of a shape of customers, there's all

• 20:46Speaker 01

  of these neo-banks that are cropping up around the world, where they're using crypto as rails to offer dollar-stable coin savings, a card that people can spend anywhere. And I think we've historically called those things neo-banks, but the transition and transformation we're starting to see is that they're actually transforming into like neo-brokerages or neo-superfinancial apps, where when you build on crypto rails, it's not just the dollar-stable coins and the card you get access to, you also are going to get access to every stock in the world, and you're going to get access to be able to trade perpetuals, and you're going to get access to be able to do really complicated, you know, covered call sellings or other yield strategies. You're going to be able to borrow against them with a portfolio-backed loan, and you're basically going to have a best-in-class financial product suite that can plug into

• 21:31Speaker 01

  your neo-bank and provide that service to your customers. And so that's what we want Base to be the best at. We want to be that backend, so that if you are a financial product, you can integrate one platform, and you can get access to every single financial product with best execution at the lowest cost in a way that just delivers better financial experiences to your customers. We've made a huge amount of progress on that over the last three years, but I think this stocks unlock around tokenization is really going to be the big next step.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  I do think the neo-brokerage word is going to be the word of the rest of this year in 2026. Like neo-banks, neo-banks were already huge, and now we're just doing it all over again.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is, this is what I've been hearing, is I've been talking to all these neo-banks, and they're like, oh, wow, we're so excited to add stocks. And, you know, in their experiments with adding stocks thus far, they're seeing that it's monetizing really well for them, because now people are trading in their brokerage, and they're not just monetizing flow, they're actually monetizing trading. And it's driving a lot of demand, where folks, particularly in regions that are, you know, don't have super deep integrations with the United States financial system, they want to buy US equities. And if you can offer them US equities at a really low price point, that just goes alongside all the other financial services you're offering, that's a huge attractor for new customers coming in onboard. And so maybe I just make a call out, if you are a neo-bank and you want to become a neo-brokerage,

• 22:55Speaker 01

  there's no better place to do that than Base. And you should hit me up on Twitter, I'm Jesse Pollak. We'd love to work with you, we'd love to help you get the best-in-class savings with dollars, spending with a card, access to stocks and every other financial asset. And then I think really importantly, access to credit and borrowing and lending, so that your customers can take all those assets that they build and get access to cash flexibility from that balance. We find that that whole combination of being able to save, spend, invest, and then borrow is just this huge, huge unlock that delivers people so much more economic freedom when they're using a financial product that has all of it.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  Something you said that I want to drill down into a little bit more is the complexity that Coinbase has about having to do compliance in all these other jurisdictions. You know, Brazil has like rules around financial regulation, France, EU has financial regulation.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Coinbase, I'm sure, is still going to do all of those hoops and hurdles because it's worth it. But in addition to that, it seems like there's this new jurisdiction that is forming, which is the tokenized stocks jurisdiction. And that might be just as good for the consumers of all of those legal jurisdictions, if not better. And the complexity of Coinbase is so much more simple because, A, the jurisdiction of tokenized stocks is everywhere. It's just the whole rest of the world, it's everywhere outside of the US. So in terms of legal complexity, it seems much more manageable and palatable and scalable as an exercise than having to go and do trench warfare of legal compliance after legal compliance after legal compliance in all these different jurisdictions.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is the global jurisdiction of crypto, which is that we're building a global financial system. And that's what blockchains enabled from the beginning with Bitcoin. Ethereum brought programmability of that financial system, so you could build financial products. And now we're basically tokenizing all of the assets and making them available in that financial system. But I think the point that you're making is spot on, which is basically when you are building on that global financial system, it massively reduces the complexity in terms of what you need to be thinking about as a new product. And that doesn't mean you don't need to still think about compliance in all the regions that you're operating on, but particularly from a technology perspective and an underlying kind of like infrastructure perspective, you now just have one stack.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  And it's a super simple stack that like you can write to with like a single API to do a trade or to get a, you know, borrow or lend or, you know, do a payment. And that stack is available everywhere globally 24/7, 365, and you can build a product on that financial stack. And then at the UI layer, you can say, oh, maybe parts of this product don't need, I need to turn them off because it's the United States, or I need to go and talk to the regulator here and make it. But that compares to the former world where, when you want to build a financial product, you were like, okay, now I need to go get like a banking rail in this country or a bank account in this country, so that I can have a balance that a user can hold in this country, and then I need to replicate that like 100 times. And the reality is, you couldn't do it, it's impossible.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Like, why do we have so few banks that span more than one jurisdiction? It's because of that, because it's so impossible. But I think with crypto, you now have a global decentralized banking rail that you can do anything with, and that is just going to be this huge unlock for innovation.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Does the nature of the Coinbase tokenized stocks product change in off-hours trading? And so at 4:30 or whenever the stock market closes, I don't even know, actually, or the weekend, when the trad markets are off, does the nature of the product on-chain change in any particular way?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  No, the, I mean, the product is still the product, it's still going to be the tokenized one-to-one version of the stock. You know, you're going to have different liquidity dynamics, right? Where when you have really deep liquidity that's, you know, kind of running into, in the kind of US equities trading markets, you're going to have an easier time doing this mint and burn, you're going to have an easier time kind of setting a price point if you're an institution that's managing that. But I expect that basically we're going to start to see price discovery move on-chain into these tokenized stocks markets. I think we're already kind of seeing this with other venues like Hyperliquid, and I expect that that's going to happen on Base as well, as we build deeper and deeper liquidity. And so, yeah, the product doesn't change, we're just, you know, building the price ourselves instead of looking to an external reference.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  So you're excited for builders to get their hands on the stocks? You're excited for people to build neo-brokerages? What else are you excited to see people build using this, this new part of the tech stack?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was joking with someone that, like, inside me, there are two pairings. There's the like, people who are going to do like really cool real-world asset-type products on top of these tokenized stocks. I also think we're going to see the long-term, I mean, the long-tail, like, meme, super creative, kind of just pure on-chain possible innovation folks doing things with tokenized stocks. And so I said this in another podcast the other day, which is that I feel like Base is a barbell in terms of where we're focused right now. On one side, we basically see that we have massive product-market fit for trading, financing, which includes earned products and payments, where basically like every financial business

• 28:13Speaker 01

  in the world is starting to realize, oh, we can just plug in this technology and we can let our customers trade more assets at cheaper costs, we can unlock new kinds of financing, borrowing, lending experiences that give them more yield or let them have access to capital, and we can then do global payments that just work on these, you know, stablecoin rails that we've built. And that is a huge focus for us, where we're basically building a, almost like up-market enterprise sales motion on the Base side, where it's just like, find those customers, work with partners like the Coinbase developer platform and Privy and others to make sure that they have the right package of offerings, and then just get them on-chain. And then on the other side of the spectrum, we have, you know, the crypto innovators, which are still here.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  You know, like, one thing I feel like we have bet on and really been right about with Base is that there are builders all around the world. World who are basically using crypto and base as a, you know, innovation platform where they're building new businesses. A lot of times they're building one person businesses that are kind of uniquely newly enabled by AI. And then they're using crypto as the rails to innovate new products. And so whether that's folks launching new meme coins that pair with stock tokens that can do kind of cool community building around them. Or it's folks building NFT projects that distribute stock tokens. Or it's folks innovating on the borrow and lend and yield generation things that we're going to see at the beginning that are probably going to be pretty standard.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  And then turning in them into, you know, higher risk, but higher reward versions, uh, turning them into versions where you can do that in a collective way. Or you can vouch for other people and get access to more credit. Like that space of builders who are innovating on top of these rails in a long tail way. That we can't really anticipate what will come out of it. We're also super excited about and super investing in. And my sense is that, you know, the, the, the process that will happen is you'll see continued adoption of the kind of head of that market. Where you just have big businesses that are integrating these rails to power trading, uh, financing and payments. And then you'll see continued innovation at the long tail, where you have the long tail of builders, building new kinds of products.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  And then over time, because that big kind of business world has integrated the rails, the in, the innovation will kind of move upstream. So the things that the long tail builders build that maybe seem a little crazy at the beginning, uh, and maybe don't have as much distribution at the beginning. Because we've done a good, a bunch of work, building distribution through these rails at the, the top. We'll make it up there and we'll get more distribution, we'll see more growth and we'll lead to more adoption, economic freedom. And, and ultimately like revenue generating for these businesses and the users who use them.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  One thing about the introduction of this product and really this era for crypto and blockchains is that like now we have the building blocks that we've always wanted to play with. Like this is what we've talked about, like this is what we've imagined doing. We have highly scalable blockchains. We have tokenized real world assets. They pay dividends, they have governance, governance rights, they're fully permissionless. And now it's really just, it's on us, like there, we, we are the only things in our own way. It's our limit is our own imagination. And so I think it's a pretty cool era to be in crypto now.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  It's epic. Yeah. And this is, this is something I said to my team today, I said, we have all the pieces, now we just have to put them together. And like, that hasn't always been the case. Like three years ago, when we started base, that definitely wasn't the case. Like we didn't, stable coins were really just starting to mature. We definitely didn't have tokenized stocks. Uh, you know, things were still a little slow and clunky. And now we have incredible wallet experiences, incredible stable coins, including not just dollar stable coins. But I think base has like 25 currencies from around the world now that are available. So you can build localized experiences and do FX on chain. And then we're seeing this whole wave of tokenized assets come that are making it, you know, so we have the whole world's money that we can start to play with. It's a pretty special time. It's a special time to be in crypto.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely a special time. I know you just said that you have all the pieces, but what is left blocking you by, that the crypto ecosystem needs to like supply? Like we either need to build it or something, something needs to happen. What, what, what do you wake up and you're like, man, I really wish I had access to this or something? Anything that comes to mind?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I, I am still pretty focused on this whole, like, how do we get all of the world's currencies on chain?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  We're up to like 22, 23, I think. You know, there's a lot more out there, although you get into the longer tail. But even in the 22 that we have live, there's still a lot more adoption and infrastructure building that we need to do around them. You know, if you look at the history of dollar stable coins, um, it took like three or four years for us to kind of get them going from when we started them. And a big part of that was basically building all this DeFi infrastructure on top of them. So that you could actually do interesting things with your money and with stable coins. When you launch a, you know, Argentinean peso stablecoin or Nigerian naira, um, you have to build the distribution, but then you also have to do that. Financial infrastructure build as well. And the cool thing is that because a lot of the financial infrastructure is built for dollars, you can now re kind of apply it, but you still have to do the work.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  And so a lot of what we're doing is basically helping those issuers in all these different countries, kind of get that infrastructure deployed, get liquidity into it. And then find the distributors who are going to distribute their stablecoin and get adoption of it. You know, if you're a, a neo bank who's trying to expand globally, the really cool thing about having non-dollar stablecoins is you can basically offer the equivalent of like a cash balance in any country. But again, it's on one set of rails, uh, so that you don't have to go have a local bank account there. You can just say, hey, when I'm in Nigeria, default the stablecoin to the Nigerian naira. And now every user that comes on board has a localized experience. And not only do they have a localized experience, but one of the big problems you have with neo banks globally is that in order for people to fund their neo banks.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  You generally have to use like a crypto on ramp and they're pretty expensive, uh, if you're doing dollars. And so maybe you'd pay like 1% or 2% to fund a neo bank. That's like not really viable for most consumers. Like what you really want is you want it so I can deposit money into this account and it's one to one. And because we now have these local stablecoin issuers in all of these countries, those issuers are actually helping provide one to one on ramps into their stablecoins. And so now that same neo bank that was offering a customized kind of localized naira experience in Nigeria also has access to a one-to-one naira on ramp in that country. So the experience literally can be sign up for this neo bank, uh, fund your wallet one-to-one.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  So you don't even know it's crypto, you're just getting a new form of digital naira. And then plug that into this entire global economy of stocks and dollars and bonds and, and literally anything you can imagine. But now available to the person who just signed up on the street in Nigeria. I think that is going to be a huge, huge unlock for basically bringing on board this next wave of consumers who aren't going to put up with, oh, like, yes, I may want dollars, but I don't want my entire life to be denominated in dollars. And what's that ETH thing? Like, you know, like that's confusing to me, you know? Maybe I want to invest in it, uh, because ETH is money, but I'm, I don't want to just have to have ETH at the beginning.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I just want to use naira or I want to use the Argentinean peso or I want to use whatever currency in whatever country I live in. And so, yeah, I think that's one big one that we're focused on. And I'm proud to say that base has the biggest FX markets on chain today, um, because we've done a lot of work there over the last three years and we have a lot more work to do. I'd say another one is, again, it's a lot of putting these pieces together. Where we now have all the assets and I think we have some of the financial primitives, but I don't think we've fully kind of brought them together to make it so this just works. So this is a lot of the work that I'm actually doing right now with Coinbase team and, uh, the, the folks, uh, kind of who are building wallets is like, okay. Now that you have dollar stablecoins and you have all of the equities, how do we also give you, um, uh, like a portfolio line of credit infrastructure?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  So you can have all of those assets sit in your portfolio and then you can borrow 30% against it or 40% against it. And it just works out of the box. Like that's a huge kind of, um, piece of infrastructure that's basically there, but helping people do that work of stitching it together and making it seamless from a consumer experience. That's another big focus on us. And then I'd say there's a lot of just going and getting the customers. You know, we're seeing a ton of demand and adoption on base right now for earned products, uh, which we really see as an entry point. Where, um, you know, uh, folks who have cash balances, uh, maybe in dollars or other currencies are coming to us and saying, hey, we want to help our customers earn, you know, a little bit more than the base sofa rate. Um, you know, like we want to get 4% or 5%.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  We can basically say, great, we have sufficiently liquid markets to deliver that. And it's going to be low risk because these are kind of like instantly liquidating loans. Um, and we can make it so that your customers are earning more yield, uh, and in a global way, uh, anywhere in the world, uh, powered by the base economy. That's kind of built out this whole financing infrastructure. And so, um, a lot of the selling that we're doing right now is get folks in with earn and then show them, hey, it's not just earning, that's great. You can also borrow and you can also add equities and you can also add all these other currencies. And you can do commodities and options and perps. And all of those pieces are just going to run on one piece of infrastructure that's super simple for you to build with. And so that kind of landing and expanding and then driving more adoption of crypto is the third big thing that we're focused on.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  Super comprehensive answer, Jesse. Yeah, there's, there, there's a lot left to build in this space. And I think in that there was, there's a call for startups, a call for product, which is, uh, uh, long tail fiat currency on ramps into, into crypto. I think it's like, that is probably a huge missing piece.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Long tail fiat currency issuers in particular, um, who come build with us on base. And the, the cool thing, just to connect up the dots is the, the powerful thing about issuing the local currency is just like the dollar stablecoin issuers can monetize the float via the yield. If you issue a local currency, you can also monetize the float. And so that means you can give away the on ramps. And so in the United States, Circle and Coinbase give away the on-ramps. They make it so you can on-ramp one-to-one on Coinbase or other platforms because they then monetize the dollars sitting in float. But you don't have that in other countries unless you have that local stablecoin. But once you get the local stablecoin, you basically unlock this pipeline that you can then say, hey, every new financial product that wants to launch in this country,

• 38:39Speaker 01

  we're going to give you a one-to-one on-ramp. And that's going to be positive for our business because then we're going to monetize the float. And so I really see this like as kind of infrastructure groundwork that we have to lay if we want to bring the rest of the world on chain. Because otherwise, you just can't get the economics to work for consumers to bring their money into this new environment.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, incredibly important, incredibly important. Is this, do you see that problem being solved today? Or is there a lack of builders solving that problem?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  It's, you know, it's, it's, it's slowly but surely being solved. You know, like I said, I think we have like 22 or 23 currencies. You know, we're seeing a lot of adoption in Europe, in Brazil, in Nigeria. But it's still small numbers, you know, like I think there's something like $200 million of non-dollar stablecoins on, on base. You know, we're doing volume on that, but it's not massive, massive. And so I'm always looking for more folks to bring more currencies so we can go from 22 to 100. And then also for more folks to build on top of those currencies so that, yeah, like, it might not make sense for the biggest lending protocols on chain to go and focus their effort on making the lending markets for Naira in Nigeria work really well on chain.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  But it's going to make sense for someone. And if you're a Nigerian builder, that's a huge opportunity. Because I can tell you, over the next decade, Nigeria will come on chain and it will be denominated in Naira because countries aren't just going to totally cede their sovereign currencies because they're super powerful tools for all the things that they want to do. And builders who lean into that and say, hey, we're going to make lending for Naira with US stocks? Huge, like that's a huge opportunity. And then replicate that across Argentina and Brazil and Turkey and all of these other markets that are the largest crypto adopter markets in the world, but have only really done it with dollars thus far. I think that there's massive, massive opportunity for builders to basically just make their mark.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  And in making their mark, also transform their local economy so that it works better. Because when you bring the crypto rails to the local economy, you're going to make it more efficient. You're going to connect it to the rest of the world and the global economy, which is going to bring in more capital, going to create more innovation and give more economic freedom to all the people that are a part of your country. And so that to me is just like, I don't know, it's something I'm very passionate about personally. And I just think there's so much opportunity for us to really deliver on, at least the mission that I've been working towards, which is increasing economic freedom by helping every country in the world upgrade their own economy using this new technology that we have.

• 41:11Speaker 00

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• 41:56Speaker 00

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• 41:59Speaker 02

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• 42:42Speaker 02

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• 42:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, there's something about this conversation and the tokenized stocks product and really the new brokerage conversation is like, oh, this feels, this feels like the main quest line of crypto. Like this is always like, this, this is it. This is like, this is kind of the whole entire idea. Yeah, we're finally doing it. So it feels very refreshing and very, very exciting. I can feel your energy. Jesse, before I let you go, thanks for coming on and telling me about, telling me about Coinbase Tokenized Stocks. There's been like a shift up at Base lately. What is your perch these days? What is the domain of Jesse? Like, what are you thinking about? What are you in charge of? What is your, what is your domain at Coinbase these days?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, you know, a founder and leader of the chain. So anything on the chain, I'm leading. I'm working with the products and engineering teams that are shipping upgrades. We're on a super fast upgrade cycle now with Base and that we're on our own stack. We're shipping native account abstraction in the next release, you know, stablecoin, payments for gas, a bunch of scaling improvements, better B20 tokens. And so that's a big part of it, the go-to-market, all the marketing, all the BD, all the sales that we're building out. And then of course, the community, you know, like I'm back on Twitter and, you know, helping do everything I can to make it so that from the base trenches to the biggest customers in the world, Base is the place for builders who are building this financial future.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  And so that's my world. The thing that I handed off was the Base app. I handed that to Kobe. I think as we kind of shifted the focus of the Base app at the beginning of the year towards trading, and really not just trading on Base, but trading everywhere, it became clear that having me do both of those things wasn't going to lead to me really being able to focus on growing the chain. And we think the opportunity for the chain is to build the blockchain for global finance, to build a global economy that increases innovation, creativity and freedom. And I think I basically got to the point where I was like, okay, I want to focus on that. And luckily, nine months ago, a year ago, I championed the acquisition of Echo and bringing Kobe into Coinbase.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Because I saw him as someone who was not just a leader in crypto, but thinking about capital formation in innovative ways, a trader who I think understood other traders in the economy. And having that and having Echo be a part of our business, I think is just hugely important. And so that led to him coming in. He has now been leading actually the tokenized stocks work. So he's leading now from the Coinbase side. And I think when we were thinking about, okay, the Base app focused on trading, where do we, where do we kind of transition it, transitioning it to him? So that he could actually lead trading across all of Coinbase, across the consumer product, across the Base app, and then also in the tokenization component,

• 45:37Speaker 01

  which is really bridging that off-chain world of things like equities and bringing them on to Base. And so him and I work every day together. I'm like constantly in his DMs. He's in mine and we're basically just trying to figure out how to like, you know, we're both a little bit renegade in our own ways. He's a different kind of renegade than me, but we're like, how do we bring that renegade energy to this, this massive company to make it so that it is the place where people are, you know, building their financial futures on the consumer side, where they're adopting these new technologies from a developer platform side and Coinbase developer platform. And then of course, where the underlying economy is actually running from a base side. And so it's super fun to get to work with him on that.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  What about the, the technical roadmap of the base chain? And also the technical roadmap as it relates to of the Ethereum Layer One and the whole like blob space arc? Is there anything left to talk about there? Or does that quest line feel somewhat like finished, like in a solid place, solid equilibrium? And you can think about things higher up the tech stack?

• 46:41Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like the blob stuff is just kind of cranking away. Like we, there's more scaling headroom that we can increase on Ethereum. We're a happy Ethereum customer, paying for blob space every single day. We would love more blob space. I think our demand is growing and I think Ethereum will want to meet that so that we can pay more. And I'm sure there's going to be tweaks that we can do to make it so that that market works more effectively alongside all the other different pieces of market that Ethereum is offering. But yeah, I think that that's cooking and we're going to keep leaning in with Ethereum to grow it. In terms of the technology stack for Base, it's really about like, how do we make Base the best place for finance? And when you look at that, it's trading, it's financing, it's payments. And I think we're seeing in the, in the market that there's actually more work that we can do

• 47:26Speaker 01

  to make it so that Base is better serving those use cases. If you think about Ethereum, you know, I was, I was like, you know, I think a Vitalik tweet the other day, or you know, maybe a couple of months ago, where he was like, you know, Ethereum isn't just for trading. Base is for trading. Like, let me be 100% clear. Like, if you're building trading use cases, we want you to build them on Base. Because it's going to be fast, it's going to be cheap. And we're going to give you the best special purpose infrastructure that makes it so that you can tokenize assets better than anywhere else, and so you can trade assets better than anywhere else. And the same thing is going to be true for financing, because we think trading and financing are deeply interlinked. And then also payments, because at the end of the day, we think that trading, payments and finance are all part of this vision of building the everything exchange,

• 48:11Speaker 01

  where you're not just talking about trading assets, but you're talking about exchanging value. And that value can be in the form of trading an equity, or it can be in the form of doing a payment for goods and service, or it can be in the form of getting a loan or giving credit to someone else. But that exchange of value, that is one of the most important and oldest human things that we do. All the way back from marketplaces that we used to like walk to when, when, you know, it's thousands of years ago. But now we have a global marketplace that's running on a world computer that is going to make it so that every single time we exchange value, it's happening in the most efficient, the, the, the highest leverage

• 48:53Speaker 01

  and the way that delivers the most value back to the people who are actually bringing the value to the table. And so when we're focusing on the roadmap for Base, that's what we're focused on. We're focused on how do we make Base a better exchange that can enable better trading, better payments, better financing and bring all this together to make a more global economy that increases innovation, creativity and freedom. And, and we love Ethereum and we're so glad that Ethereum is complimentary to us in doing different things. We think it's good that Ethereum is saying, hey, we're going to be the world computer. Maybe trading isn't our highest priority because that means, okay, great. Base is going to complement that. We can be the exchange of Ethereum. We can be the exchange of the world with Ethereum a part of it. And I think that kind of difference has been cool to get to flesh out

• 49:38Speaker 01

  and start to more formalize over the last six to nine months as we've taken a little bit more control of our own roadmap and really started investing in the core underlying technology innovation that could lead to that better exchange offering.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  One last question before I let you go. Will Coinbase Tokenized Stocks, are you guys going to try and push those down into the Ethereum Layer One? Or are you just going to, that's just going to be an organic phenomenon? Or is that going to be like an active effort to try and claim real estate for tokenized stocks on the Ethereum Layer One?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  I think that Coinbase is going to bring tokenized stocks to more places than just Base.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  You know, I can't speak on specific timelines or other networks, but I think the, the goal with Coinbase has always been to be like a platform that works across all of that, with Base sitting at the middle, serving as kind of a hub, but ultimately connecting in all of the different chains. And so, yeah, I think that they're going to keep expanding that offering.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Cool. Jesse, thanks for coming on the show today.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, but that is why we are here. The institutions have landed, so we are going even further west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.