Coinbase Rising
Camila Russo & Olivia Capozzalo
June 13, 2025
gm, Defiers
Today’s big story:
- Coinbase’s flood of updates are a clear sign it wants to be the crypto-finance super app — but the centralization alarm bells are ringing
Plus:
- Total crypto market cap slides over 5% as violence escalates in the Middle East
- Ondo Finance, Chainlink, and JPMorgan’s blockchain infra test tokenized RWA transfers
- A new report makes the case that ETH is deeply underpriced
- Morpho V2 just launched from the second-largest DeFi lending protocol
- SSV 2.0 and based applications: Decentralized infrastructure for secure, scalable Ethereum staking [SPONSORED]
- How Coinshift is progressing the stablecoin space [SPONSORED]
Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.
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Money is broken. Our financial system is trapped in analog bureaucracy while the rest of the world runs on code. Fintech built nicer interfaces, but institutions and gatekeepers still loom large.
M0 isn’t here to polish old systems with prettier frontends. We believe permissionless stablecoins rewire finance itself, so builders can control their own money. We put programmable money directly into the hands of builders who create, not extract.
We’re back! Here’s what you need to know in web3 today
Coinbase Wants to Eat Crypto — And It’s Working
Coinbase yesterday unveiled a multi-front campaign to become the all-in-one financial app. It will start by dominating the entire crypto stack, and other financial assets will come next. And while you can’t help but cheer on what this giant is achieving, there’s also a nagging voice in the back of my head that says, as crypto continues its fight for global adoption, is it maybe losing itself?
Let’s start with the firehose of updates. Personally, the most interesting was that all tokens on Base are now available for trading on Coinbase, dramatically lowering the barrier for any app building on the Ethereum Layer 2 to reach 100M+ verified users.
In another huge Base-related announcement, the company partnered with Shopify to enable USDC payments, which means starting this month, millions of merchants will be able to accept USDC on Base.
Next, Coinbase is launching CFTC-regulated perpetual futures contracts (aka perps or perpetual swaps) in the U.S., giving domestic traders legal access to the most popular instrument in crypto trading globally.
Then there’s the new Coinbase One Card, a co-branded Amex credit card offering up to 4% cashback in Bitcoin. At the same time, Coinbase launched Coinbase Business, a full-stack platform for crypto-native companies and DAOs, offering up to 4.1% APY on USDC, automated accounting via QuickBooks and Xero, and onboarding in less than two days.
Coinbase Owns the Entire Web3 Stack
What’s the bigger picture? Coinbase is vertically integrating every part of the financial experience, for both retail and businesses, while also owning the rails beneath it. They’re the fiat onramp with the Coinbase exchange, they provide a bridge on-chain with Coinbase Wallet and Base, they own part of the ecosystem’s payments token, USDC, and now, a card to spend crypto too.
They make sure to offer as many assets as possible for their millions of users to trade, and offer infrastructure for crypto businesses to keep their treasuries under their empire… Coinbase wants to touch every step of people’s crypto experience.
This isn’t just about being an exchange anymore. It’s about owning the stack. The same way Apple owns hardware, OS, and App Store, Coinbase is building the financial OS for web3, and it’s doing it faster and more comprehensively than anyone else.
Other Layer 2s should be seriously worried. Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync have spent years building rollup tech and courting developer ecosystems. But Coinbase has something they don’t: millions of users. By defaulting every Coinbase customer to Base, and now giving every Base project a direct path to Coinbase listings, Base becomes the most liquid, most visible, and most integrated Layer 2.
Forget airdrops and sequencer decentralization — distribution wins. If you’re launching a project today and want users, capital, and merchant access, it’s becoming harder to justify building anywhere but Base.
Centralization Risks
But that’s where the alarm bells should start ringing. Because if Coinbase keeps winning, the decentralization that underpins this entire industry starts to erode.
Right now, Coinbase controls the Base sequencer, can blacklist USDC, custodies most institutional funds, runs the biggest retail on-ramps in the U.S., and, as of yesterday, offers the leading crypto futures product as a U.S.-regulated instrument. If Coinbase is hacked, censored, or politically targeted, it’s not just Coinbase that’s affected — it’s crypto’s consumer layer that goes dark.
So here’s the twist: crypto’s greatest success at onboarding users might also be its biggest risk. The goal was to build a system that couldn’t be shut down, co-opted, or captured. But in making things easier, faster, more compliant and integrated, Coinbase is rebuilding a system where one company holds all the keys — the very thing Ethereum, Bitcoin, and DeFi were created to avoid.
It’s onboarding millions, yes. But what we might be left with is web2 in a shinier skin: faster, maybe even safer, but just as dependent on one gatekeeper.
With love,
Cami, founder of The Defiant
📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:
| TICKER | VALUE | 24H | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Bitcoin | $105,912 | -1.49 % |
 | Ethereum | $2,575.15 | -5.93 % |
 | XRP | $2.16 | -3.85 % |
 | BNB | $654.82 | -1.20 % |
 | Solana | $147.93 | -6.43 % |
 MessariPortals | MINDSHARE Rank | MINDSHARE % Change (7d) |
|---|---|---|
 Solana SOL | 6  | 41.55% |
 Avalanche AVAX | 20 | 28.95% |
 TRON TRX | 8  | -19.81% |
| Powered by Messari Portals | ||
This is the news that mattered in the past 24 hrs
- Top crypto markets are moderately in the red, as investors move into risk-off mode, reflecting fears over escalating geopolitical tension in the Middle East, after Israel launched a major attack on Iran last night.
- Ondo Finance, Chainlink, and JPMorgan’s blockchain private blockchain infrastructure arm, Kinexys, successfully transferred and settled tokenized U.S. treasuries on-chain.
- A new report from prominent Ethereum community leaders, including the founders of Etherealize and etherfi, makes the case that ETH is deeply underpriced and could reach $80,000 long-term.
- DeFi’s second-largest lending protocol, Morpho, just launched its V2, aimed at making DeFi more comfortable for enterprises and institutions interested in exploring on-chain finance.
🎬WATCH
In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, our resident NFT expert Vinny spoke with Alex Estorick, EIC of web3 art-focused magazine, Right Click Save, about the evolving landscape of NFTs and digital art.
They discuss the convergence of art and technology, the financialization of culture, and the role of artists in a world where art and finance are increasingly intertwined.
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