Coinbase is folding regulated prediction markets into its “everything exchange” vision, using The Clearing Company to clear on‑chain event contracts beside crypto and stocks.

“We want to build the everything exchange with Coinbase, meaning that we want to bring under one regulated umbrella all of the asset classes that you can imagine and offer this to both our retail customers and our institutional customers.”

Coinbase leading the way to become an ‘Everything Exchange’

That umbrella now stretches beyond spot crypto into derivatives, options, tokenized stocks and equities, token sales and, crucially, event‑based contracts that let users trade on future outcomes. “We have this whole breadth of different products that we’re bringing into one umbrella, which is Coinbase,” he said. “Our goal is to push this to as many users as possible across the world, and the reaction has been pretty tremendous so far.”

Coinbase’s debut in prediction markets was deliberately conservative. The initial launch in the U.S. leaned on Kalshi, the CFTC‑regulated event‑contract venue, giving the product an immediate regulatory backbone but also clear constraints on geography and design.

“The first iteration of the product is available in the US and in a couple of regions, but for instance, it’s not available in Europe because of lack of regulatory clarity,” Prost‑Boucle said. That version effectively pipes Kalshi’s markets into the Coinbase interface, letting users trade small‑ticket contracts on elections, sports, macro data and other real‑world events while staying inside a U.S. event‑contract framework.

The second phase is more aggressive. In December, Coinbase agreed to acquire The Clearing Company, a specialist prediction‑market clearing startup with roots in the existing event‑contract ecosystem.

Prost‑Boucle referred to it in the interview as “a company called The Clearing House,” but the strategic intent is clear. “The goal is for us to bring these capacities internally so that we can develop this product on chain and we can develop with the DNA that we have to bring all asset classes on chain,” he said. In effect, Coinbase is moving from renting regulated rails to owning the clearing and risk stack, and then pushing more of the lifecycle on‑chain while staying within the event‑contract perimeter. That stands in contrast to crypto‑native venues such as Polymarket, which prioritizes unconstrained on‑chain liquidity first and only later began to grapple with regulatory structure.

Prediction markets dominate conversation at ETHGlobal

If prediction markets are to sit alongside crypto, derivatives and tokenized stocks in a single app, collateral efficiency will determine whether users actually route meaningful size through Coinbase. Here, Prost‑Boucle says institutional desks are already applying pressure. “That’s also something that institutional clients have been pushing for,” he noted when asked about cross‑margining prediction markets with other Coinbase products. “We’re currently doing cross‑margining for our perpetual futures product, and that’s something that our institutional clients have been craving,” he added, pointing to demand for “always‑on exposure possibilities, weekend hedging, all of this that perpetual futures have as internal features.” The logical goal is to have a single collateral pool backing BTC perpetuals, tokenized equity and a portfolio of geopolitical or macro event contracts, rather than trapping capital in isolated silos across venues. “At the moment we’re working on this product,” he said of cross‑margining, “but I think that’s a good vision for us in the longer term—to have cross‑margining across the different asset classes, I guess.”

The main structural obstacle to that vision is Europe. “Prediction markets in the EU are pretty difficult to apprehend because there’s no unified regulatory framework,” Prost‑Boucle said. “It all depends on what you have as an underlying asset.” He draws a sharp line that mirrors emerging legal commentary: a contract on the future price of Bitcoin is treated as a financial derivative under MiFID, while a contract on an election or football match is pushed into gambling. “If the contract lies on a financial underlying asset, that would be regulated by MiFID,” he explained. “But all of the other classes, where currently all of the volumes are—on politics, on sports, this would be regulated under gambling laws in Europe.”

That split leaves most of today’s on‑chain volume—heavily skewed toward politics and sports—in regulatory limbo from the perspective of a regulated exchange. Any operator that wants to offer political or sports markets across the bloc has to navigate a patchwork of national gambling regimes, each with its own licensing, consumer rules and, in some cases, state monopolies. “It means you would have to go for every single European gambling law, because there is no unified regulatory framework,” Prost‑Boucle said. “These laws are pretty national, they’re quite country‑specific and they’re quite hard to get.” Despite that, he is not writing off the region. “I guess we’re still hopeful that at some point we’re going to have regulatory clarity on prediction markets and a better structure in Europe that enables this type of contract to flourish as well,” he said.

Beyond trading revenues, Coinbase clearly sees prediction markets as an information layer that competes with polling, research, and even traditional media. Prost‑Boucle points to cases in the U.S. where broadcasters are already embedding live market odds, such as CNBC, CNN, the Dow Jones and other media recently integrating Polymarket odds into the ‘traditional’ newscycle.

That, in turn, brings the problem of truth into focus. Once markets start pricing geopolitics, conflicts, and leadership changes, disputes over what actually happened can become payout disputes. That means oracles used to resolve contracts may be facing increasing scrutiny from not only bettors, but also regulators.

Prost‑Boucle argues that most of the damage begins with poor contract design. “It’s crucial when you enter a contract to look at what the event criteria are,” he said. “Obviously you want to diversify sources of truth and have kind of fixed criteria to make sure there is no ambiguity when an event like this happens,” he added. Asked whether AI agents could help by aggregating across outlets and delivering a consolidated verdict, he is open but cautious. “Potentially, AI could be helping with sorting out across different sources‑of‑truth venues and making sure that we have a consolidated view and a fixed view that is not biased by any specific media or even a group of people,” he said.

For now, Coinbase’s approach is less about chasing the wildest version of prediction markets and more about proving they can live inside the same rule‑set as everything else on the platform: keep them in a regulated perimeter, pull clearing and risk in‑house via The Clearing Company, and wire the whole thing into a broader multi‑asset venue where collateral actually earns its keep across products. As Brian Armstrong has put it in other contexts, Coinbase wants to be “the most trusted bridge” into the crypto economy, and in that frame, everything else—from MiFID hair‑splitting in Brussels to the next generation of AI‑driven oracles—is just another set of constraints to engineer around, not a reason to sit out a market.

CoinShares, a European-based digital asset manager, is slated to make its US public markets debut today following the completion of a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger, highlighting the crypto industry’s deepening ties with public markets.

The company announced Wednesday that it had finalized a previously announced business combination with Vine Hill Capital Investment Corp., resulting in the formation of a new holding entity, CoinShares PLC. The combined company begins trading on the Nasdaq on Wednesday under the ticker symbol CSHR.

The transaction, first unveiled in September, values CoinShares at approximately $1.2 billion and includes a $50 million capital commitment from institutional investors.

Although the Nasdaq debut marks CoinShares’ entry into US public markets, the company was already publicly traded in Europe prior to the listing.

A US listing aims to attract institutional capital, wider analyst coverage and increased visibility, while positioning CoinShares to expand its footprint in the world’s largest financial market. The move also comes as the regulatory backdrop for digital assets in the United States continues to evolve.

CoinShares manages more than $6 billion in assets and is one of Europe’s largest crypto-focused investment firms. It is best known for its crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs), which are listed on European exchanges.

A tougher backdrop for crypto stocks

The backdrop for digital asset companies has shifted dramatically since September, when CoinShares’ SPAC deal was first announced. 

The exchange-traded fund issuer’s CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF (WGMI) is down more than 22% in the last six months, Yahoo Finance data shows.

The crypto market has since lost more than half its value, following a broad correction in digital asset prices, declining trading volumes and the fallout from the Oct. 10 crypto liquidation event that triggered widespread deleveraging, alongside a more volatile environment for capital raising and investors.

Crypto-linked equities have been among the hardest hit. Companies such as Coinbase, Gemini and Figure Technologies are down sharply this year, while Circle has bucked the trend amid continued growth in stablecoins.

However, analysts at Bernstein don’t expect the downturn to persist. In a recent note, they said crypto-related stocks could be nearing a bottom heading into first-quarter earnings, which are widely expected to reflect weak performance.

Related: Circle plunged on CLARITY Act fears, but fundamentals unchanged — Bernstein