Coinbase Global 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us live on X today. I'm Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase, and I'm here with our co-founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong. We are also joined today by a group of independent and institutional research analysts. We're excited to connect directly with you, our customers, our community, our shareholders, to talk about our quarter and answer your questions. We're going to take our first question from an independent analyst named Eric Pan.

Yeah, I'll take that one. First off, I am pretty optimistic that it'll get to a full Senate floor vote. There's a lot of last-minute negotiations happening, which to me is a sign that everyone is invested in getting something over the line. There's just thousands and thousands of hours that have been spent by the Senate staff and the senators themselves on getting a really good work product. Like every good negotiation, there's a lot of last-minute details to get right. Having a deadline or a forcing function with this August recess for the Senate is actually a good thing. It tends to get people to the table at the last minute. There's been lots of phone calls happening this week.

Of course, there's more steps that would need to happen for it to become law after the Senate floor vote, and you can never say 100% with these things. Anyway, I'm optimistic it can get done. By the way, a big shout-out to the Stand with Crypto advocates who sent, I think, over 1 million emails and phone calls to their representatives to help get that through. Your question was about what happens if it doesn't pass. I think in that world, it's actually kind of just business as usual for Coinbase, for a few reasons. One is that we already do many of the things that would be required by the CLARITY Act as just sort of a good best practice.

More importantly maybe, Chair Atkins and Selig at the SEC and the CFTC respectively, they have publicly said that they're poised to pass clear rules whether CLARITY passes or not. I think they've been kind of in a holding pattern. I don't speak for them, but I think they're in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting to see what happens with CLARITY, and if it doesn't go through for some reason, then they would come out with their own rules that would allow businesses like Coinbase to continue to operate and have more clarity. We still think on margin, it's better if the CLARITY Act passes. It creates durability through multiple administrations. People can make longer-term investments. It's really the American consumers, as you mentioned, who would lose if CLARITY doesn't pass. I think Coinbase would be fine.

Thank you. We are moving to our next question, and this is going to come from institutional research analyst Owen Lau at Clear Street.

Thanks. Can I address the partnership with Circle first, Brian, and then we can talk about our platform, if that's okay with you?

Yeah, sure. We have already met the conditions for the Circle contract to renew, so it will renew on the same terms.

I want to take away any ambiguity about that for the market, Owen. We will continue to work on growing USDC, partnering with Circle, and driving that ecosystem. Now, why OUSD? Brian, over to you.

The short reason is that we're a multi-stablecoin platform. We want to provide the stablecoins that all of our customers want to use, and where possible, we want to strike good economic arrangements with that. Now, we have a great partnership with Circle and USDC. We have arguably the strongest economics from that point of view, but we want to make sure that we strike economic deals with every major stablecoin out there and support everything. We actually already support other stablecoins, things like PayPal, PYUSD, USDT, Tether. Anyway, we're excited about this open USDC consortium, and we'll keep investing in that. I think this just creates additional business opportunities and revenue opportunities for us to be a multi-stablecoin platform. Not to mention, I guess, FX trading, things like that.

Thank you. All right. Next question.