Hey, folks. We're at Coinbase's State of Crypto's summit, and joining me is Max Brandsberg, who's the VP of Product at Coinbase. Max, great to see you, Thanks for having me. So Max, tell us bit about yourself and what you do at coinbase.
So I lead our consumer and business products at Coinbase. I've been at coinbase for about seven years, which you can imagine. Over that time at Coinbase, I've done a whole lot of different things. I actually joined to start our corporate development and ventures team, initially doing M and A and investments we did. We've now done over five hundred investments out of our Coinbase Ventures team. But most of the time I've been at Coinbase, I've been leading
our product teams in consumer and business products. That includes our main Coinbase app, our Coinbase Advanced platform, Coinbase for Business, our payments efforts, our stable coin efforts, and everything facing individuals and businesses.
That's amazing. Seven years in crypto, seven years at Coinbase. I was an early coinbas users has seeing the company grow and mature, and obviously you having a big hand in getting the product up to par with kind of matching trad fi, getting the proper on rams for adoption. So tell us what are some of the latest features that you guys have rolled out.
Yeah, well, over that time, we've made a lot of progress. When I started working on the product, I think we had four assets listed for trading and we were available in a handful of countries. So over the last several years we've accelerated asset listings dramatically. We now have hundreds of assets available for trading. We've expanded countries dramatically, so we have people trading in over one hundred countries around
the world. Recently, we've been investing heavily in our advanced platform that's Coinbase Advance, which you can access directly in the main Coinbase app, and within that advanced platform you can trade spot and futures. In the US, you can trade CFGC regulated futures of crypto and non crypto futures as well. And then outside the US, we have international Exchange where you can trade Purpse, and we've continued to
expand listings for Purpse now have dozens of listings. People can trade perps on that platform with the sort of leverage and position limits that they're looking for.
That's amazing. So many products now I'm a user of the advance feature and tested it all out and it works really great. You know, as far as with on chain tools, would Base and much more, Can you tell us a bit about what you're working on there and when we may see some of these things that may be coming.
Yeah, there's so much happening on chain. It's one of the most exciting things I think happening in our space is just the pace of development on chain, and a lot of this has really picked up since the introduction of Layer two networks and fast Layer one networks, but Base is really leading the charge with Layer two networks, and so with Base with smart contract wallets, which are making it easier to interact with on chain protocols, and with some of the things we've done with stable coins,
you can now have really excellent, fully fleshed out on chain experiences. So there's a lot happening there. One of the things I'm really excited about that we've done with coinbase products is we recently launch a crypto backed loan product on Coinbase. So within the main Coinbase app, using Morpho under the Hood, which is a lending protocol on Base, you can borrow up to one million dollars of USDC
backed by bitcoin, all within the Coinbase app itself. You don't need to apply for a loan or go through an approval process or wait for it to settle. It's just right there, and then you can use that USDC to earn up to four and a half percent yield on the Coinbase platform, or you can withdraw it, use it to pay down a mortgage, buy a car, whatever you may need, all without selling that bitcoin. So that's
been a really powerful product. We just launched it a few months ago and already we have more than three hundred million dollars in loans outstanding. We're seeing a lot of value in that. So it's a good example of where on chain finance and the development and open permission list protocols combined with the Coinbase app, the safety, the trust, the distribution is really combined to create something very special.
That's amazing Max the fact and I will be using that product, by the way. To be transparent, I've talked to my wife, like I have some bitcoin and I'm like, should I cash it out and pay taxes or borrow against it? And we're leaning towards borrowing and to do some like upgrades at a house and things like that. So that's amazing. And to your point, you can borrow us DC, you can cash it out or just leave it on the platform to earn yield.
That's right. That's right. And now coinbase is offering up to four and a half percent yields on the platform, which is six times the national average savings account yield in the US of point six percent. So just holding USDC on the platform itself is tremendously valuable. And USDC on coinbase is a really incredible product. It's one to one backed, it has market leading yields, You can instantly trade with it, pay with it, do anything else with it.
So the the combination of being able to borrow USDC against your bitcoin and then hold and use that USDC is really powerful.
Absolutely, And I know a lot of people have a long term view on bitcoin and crypto assets and rather than have it just sit there, put it to work and earn a return.
Right, that's right. And that's an area that we're really pushing on across the coinbas platform. So we want to make it coinbase the best place for people to use and grow their assets in crypto. So USDC is a great example of this. Borrowing is a great example of it.
Staking is another good example. So you can now steak assets on coinbase and earn up to fourteen percent yield across eight different assets we support, including Ethereum and Solana, and we've seen people just continue to stake and grow their assets across all of these different products, from trading
to saving, to borrowing to staking. So it's coming together to create this really powerful platform where people's financial services and financial lives are increasingly moving on chain on Coinbase.
Is that the vision for coinbase more than just a crypto exchange, but a finance app, a new modern age finance app.
That's exactly right. I think financial services are being rewritten on chain. They're more efficient, they're more rewarding, they're more accessible, and so the vision for coinbase is to make those financial services accessible to everyone on chain, and I think if we can do that, it'll actually create more valuable financial services for people all around the world who may not be able to access the services that exist today in traditional finance.
Oh, absolutely, are there any plans to add tokenize stocks. It seems the puck is heading in the direction everyone's trying to tokenize stradfi assets. Any updates you can share there.
Oh, it's an exciting time in tokenized real world assets. I think we just dropped a report, the State of Crypto Report, that showed that there's more than twenty billion dollars of tokenized real world assets out there, and with the developments in the regulatory environment, there's tremendous opportunity to really push ahead on tokening real world assets. So we're
very excited about this space. No updates to share that right now, but I think will this space will continue to develop, More real world assets will come on chain, and they will become more efficient and more accessible because of that.
You know, it's fascinating because it's going to open up twenty four to seven truly global markets like trading, no more opening and closing bell. It's like a brave new world. But also I wonder what that's going to look like as well, trading twenty four to seven.
I think it'll create increased efficiency for everyone, and I think particularly I think a lot about retail traders and individual users, and the history of trading and markets has often disadvantaged retail traders. They've often been behind the institutional traders, the market makers, others. They're usually losing out in that
kind of market where access is limited. And so when you think about bringing these asset classes on chain and making them accessible to everyone, you're thinking about empowering retail traders and creating more financial freedom and more access. So I think that that's the world that we're moving towards. It will be more efficient, it'll create more access, and particularly I think it will really empower individuals.
Yeah, absolutely, because now I think people who were maybe they didn't have the proper on ramp, they couldn't find the or they had to be accredited. Now they can buy a fraction of a Tesla stock if it's tokenized, or whicheverstock they prefer, and then they can put that in DeFi if they want to. It just creates so many opportunities for folks, that's right.
And we're also a global platform, so we certainly serve customers in the US. That's where we're based and has been a hallmark of coin based strategy, but we're very much a global company, serving users in more than one hundred countries around the world, and in a lot of those countries, accessing Tesla stock is really difficult actually, right, there's not really platforms that are accessible. It's hard to find the right hours, maybe it's costly to actually trade it.
And so I think as real word assets become tokenized, they not only make it easier for people in the US or developed markets where it's always been relatively easy to access them, but especially in other markets where the financial infrastructure is maybe less developed. And it really brings that up to par I think with other markets and increases access sure.
And I can say anecdotally in my own pool of family and friends, people who are not interested in investing before are now very interested because of the token iszed aspect. And don't get me wrong, in general as well, because investing has gone to the mobile phone. Versus I need to go to an office or I need to log onto my computer, I could simply do it as a click up a button on my phone. So it's just this whole new paradigm shift of like how people can access markets.
Yeah, and I think there's a lot of education that comes with that. That's something that coinbases. We think about making this whole space more accessible. We think about safety and security as a really key principle for us, So We've integrated with the best banks in the world to enable really high quality on and off ramps. We provide the right sort of education and security as people are joining the platform, and I think that's really important. There's
a lot of innovation in this space. There's a lot of new things coming, and so as we're creating this new paradigm for investing and more people are getting access to it, I think the sort of safety and trust of coinbase is a really important way to help people take that next step.
Absolutely well, Max, I got to get your promise you'll come on the podcast one you guys launched the token ised stocks product so we could talk about it.
I would be happy to join you and talk about all the new products for launching. We've got a few exciting announcements coming later today and so we'd love to chat more about this.
Awesome Max, Thank you so much and looking forward to the future updates.
Thanks for having me.
Awesome