Tl:dr Earlier at the moment, the Wall Road Journal printed an article highlighting client-driven actions, which they appear to confuse with proprietary buying and selling.
In contrast to lots of our rivals, Coinbase doesn’t function a proprietary buying and selling enterprise or act as a market maker. Actually, one of many aggressive strengths of our Institutional Prime platform is our company solely buying and selling mannequin, the place we act solely on behalf of our shoppers. Because of this, our incentives and our shoppers’ incentives are aligned by design.
Coinbase does, sometimes, buy cryptocurrency as principal, together with for our company treasury and operational functions*. We don’t view this as proprietary buying and selling as a result of its objective isn’t for Coinbase to profit from short-term will increase in worth of the cryptocurrency being traded.
Increasing institutional participation in web3 past HODLing
As extra establishments have change into considering investing in crypto, we’re rolling out new options to assist. A technique we intend to serve our institutional shoppers is thru a small newly fashioned staff known as Coinbase Danger Options (CRS).
CRS presents options to stylish institutional buyers who search publicity to the crypto asset class. A few of these buyers are nonetheless getting aware of crypto markets and ask for our help in managing dangers and taking part in protocols. The objective of CRS is to broaden institutional participation in web3 past HODLing.
In doing this, we’re following a effectively trodden path on Wall Road the place monetary companies corporations present shoppers a number of methods to get publicity to new asset lessons and handle sure dangers. We’ve instruments and insurance policies in place that mirror finest practices within the monetary companies trade and are designed to handle conflicts of curiosity.
*In December of 2021 we precisely outlined our funding exercise in digital belongings as a part of our testimony to Congress, which you will discover right here.
