Coinbase executed a comprehensive expansion of its trading platform throughout 2025, scaling its spot, derivatives, and global infrastructure to evolve from a crypto exchange into a full-scale financial marketplace. The strategy focused on aggressive growth across multiple product lines and geographic regions.
In the United States, Coinbase's derivatives arm made a significant shift by moving futures trading to a 24/7 model, introducing perpetual-style futures that operate around the clock. This change helped bridge a structural gap with offshore platforms. Liquidity grew substantially, with open interest in U.S. futures surpassing $1 billion mid-year. The exchange also launched innovative products like a hybrid equity-crypto index future, blending large-cap tech stocks with digital assets.
A key milestone was the acquisition of options platform Deribit, which instantly gave Coinbase a dominant position in the crypto options market. Following the acquisition, options open interest climbed above $60 billion, and monthly trading volumes reached record levels. The integration also advanced Coinbase's strategy around the USDC stablecoin, with the rollout of USDC-based rewards and new linear options products.
Globally, Coinbase's international exchange aggressively scaled its perpetual futures offerings, nearly doubling the number of available contracts and increasing leverage limits. This push helped aggregate open interest across Coinbase's derivatives venues reach a peak near $5 billion in Q4 2025. The company broadened collateral options to improve margin efficiency for traders.
Spot markets were not left behind, expanding to over 350 tradable assets. Infrastructure upgrades, including a new matching engine and cross-margin functionality, improved execution speed and allowed for more efficient capital deployment across spot and futures positions.
Looking ahead to 2026, Coinbase is focusing on deeper integration to create a unified, multi-asset trading platform. The roadmap includes new index products, expanded equity-linked instruments, and further use of stablecoins like USDC as core trading infrastructure, signaling a long-term strategy to blend crypto innovation with traditional finance structures.
