hey, it’s Marc.

Coinbase is going full stack.

It has acquired Echo, a fast-growing onchain capital formation platform, for $375 million. Echo enables early-stage crypto projects to raise funds directly from their communities through both private and public token sales. Its flagship product, Sonar, allows self-hosted public launches that are fully onchain, transparent, and community-aligned. Since launch, Echo has facilitated over 300 deals and helped projects raise more than $200 million, all onchain.

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This acquisition builds on Coinbase’s existing infrastructure playbook. Earlier this year, Coinbase acquired Liquifi, a cap table and token issuance platform. Together, these acquisitions give Coinbase a vertically integrated stack, from token creation (Liquifi) to fundraising (Echo) to secondary trading (Coinbase exchange/Base), tightly coupled with custody, compliance, and stablecoin rails.

• See “Cobies” (Echo founder) note
• See Brian Armstrong’s note

“The next wave of growth won’t come from speculative trading — it will come from tokenizing financial markets and making capital formation more global and efficient.”

— Alesia Haas, CFO, Coinbase

Why it matters

1. A bet on regulatory change

The Echo deal is Coinbase’s most explicit bet yet on the return of public token sales. Coinbase is positioning itself ahead of a potential regulatory shift that would legalize public token sales for U.S. retail, either via a market structure bill from Congress or a safe harbor framework from the SEC. In such a scenario, the market for regulated token issuance could resemble a modern, decentralized IPO market, similar to how we saw with ICO’s 8 years ago.

Coinbase wants to be the infrastructure provider for that future, offering a compliant launchpad that captures both the supply side (issuers) and demand side (retail capital) of a potentially massive new asset class.

2. Strengthens platform economics and reduces cyclicality

Coinbase’s core business is still dominated by retail trading fees, which account for more than 61% of revenue and remain tightly correlated to crypto market cycles. While Coinbase has recently benefited from rising crypto prices, Morningstar continues to flag the firm’s heavy exposure to trading volatility and assigns no formal economic moat.

By moving upstream into token issuance and enabling founders to raise directly from communities, Coinbase is creating a new, more predictable revenue stream. Primary issuance and cap table management could provide steadier economics than trading, especially if regulation drives new institutional entrants into the token fundraising space.

3. Reinforces Coinbase’s role as the trusted U.S. platform

Echo further extends Coinbase’s differentiation on compliance and trust — the two variables that matter most in a regulatory transition. While offshore competitors may move faster, Coinbase has prioritized legal alignment and now owns a full-stack path from token creation (Liquifi), to fundraising (Echo/Sonar), to trading and custody (Coinbase/Base).

If public token sales are legalized, institutional allocators and founders will seek U.S.-based platforms that meet regulatory requirements and offer end-to-end tooling. This deal positions Coinbase as the compliant infrastructure partner of choice.

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Our Take

Coinbase is not betting on another ICO boom — it’s betting on a regulated path to onchain public capital markets. If rules change, the race won’t be about hype, but infrastructure. Echo is Coinbase’s answer: a compliant launchpad, fully integrated into a trusted platform, with custody, liquidity, and regulatory cover already built in. It’s a logical extension of the firm’s multi-year strategy to reduce dependence on transactional trading and build more durable infrastructure revenue.

At $338, Coinbase trades at ~1.36x the average analyst fair value estimate of ~$247 (Morningstar, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bernstein) and ~8.2x1 forward revenue. This valuation is aggressive relative to incumbent exchanges, but investors are clearly pricing in upside from Coinbase’s transformation into a full-stack financial infrastructure provider. The Echo acquisition adds asymmetric upside to that thesis: if U.S. regulators greenlight public token offerings, Coinbase won’t just facilitate trading, it will own the issuance layer too.

Still, this vision is far from guaranteed. Robinhood is winning distribution among retail traders. Stripe and Meta are outpacing Coinbase among merchants and everyday consumers on stablecoin. The bet now is on the integrated stack winning out — custody, issuance, liquidity, stablecoins, and Bas. As Emilie Choi noted in the latest earnings call:

“We expect a growing share of our revenue to come from infrastructure — custody, stablecoins, Base, and soon tokenized equities. That’s where the durable, long-term value lies.”

The bottom line: Echo is Coinbase’s strategic bet on becoming the NYSE, Nasdaq, and AngelList of the onchain economy, all in one. If compliant token launches become standard, Coinbase could dominate both the demand and supply side of a generational shift in capital markets.

Today’s Market Signals

• Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller says cryptocurrency is “woven into the fabric of the payment and financial system.” Link
• Aave and Maple are establishing a strategic partnership that brings institutional assets to the largest onchain lending market. Link
• Ripple-backed Evernorth Holdings signed a SPAC deal to list on Nasdaq as it targets over $1 billion to create the “largest public XRP treasury.” Link
• Gold is down more than 2% to $4,085 as capital rotates back into risk.

That’s all for today’s CEO Briefing.

That’s all for now.

Take care,

Marc