No Compromises: The case for Coinbase as the best place for institutions
TL;DR: Institutions no longer need to make compromises to access global liquidity. Coinbase Prime provides one access point to spot, US futures, global options, and perpetuals. You get one margin framework, one daily settlement, and your clients' assets are held in qualified custody throughout. And that custody is now backed by a federal charter with the OCC’s approval of Coinbase National Trust Company.
Trade everything, post margin once.
For most of crypto's history institutions had to choose. Regulated providers offered secure custody but not perpetual futures. Offshore venues had perps, but asked you to leave your clients' assets in a hot wallet, offered only retail-style financing, or required the use of off-exchange settlement, creating additional risks and complexity. Many investment managers struggled to get comfortable with these setups, and those that proceeded did so reluctantly.
The tradeoff between regulated venues and access to liquidity is over. Coinbase Prime is now an institutional-grade access point to spot, US futures, and global derivatives via:
Coinbase Exchange, our spot venue, which handled 10.7% of global crypto trading in Q3 2026. Prime's smart-order-routing technology adds additional spot venues and OTC counterparties for even more liquidity.
Coinbase Derivatives Exchange, our US designated contract market, offers 24/7 trading for 24 crypto assets across 46 total crypto futures contracts as well as equity index and precious metals contracts.
Coinbase Global Exchange, created from the integration of Deribit, the largest crypto options exchange in the world. Eligible institutions can now trade the full options suite, linear and inverse, plus more than 20 perpetual and dated futures, through Coinbase Financial Markets, our CFTC-registered futures commission merchant. This is the only US-regulated pathway to this global market, which offers 24/7 access to Deribit’s European-style, cash-settled, options.
One hub. One margin framework, and one daily net settlement across spot and US futures today, extending to Global Exchange positions in the first quarter of 2027.
Your book on Coinbase
The Prime suite allows you to run the strategies you want, in the size you need, with no compromises.
Volatility. Vol surface, skew and term-structure trades, yield-enhanced overlays, tail protection, and gamma trading against spot and perps, with portfolio margining across strikes and tenors.
Basis. Long spot on Coinbase Exchange, short futures on Coinbase Derivatives Exchange or Coinbase Global Exchange - or inter-market spreads - governed by margin processes designed for capital and operational efficiency.
Long/short. Up to 8x leverage on spot crypto. Deep borrow across over 100 assets, with availability and rates provided before the trading day begins.
Capital efficient. Assets may earn via staking, lending, or stablecoin rewards without leaving qualified custody. USDC funds, settles, and collateralises across the platform instantly, 24/7, with no haircut.
Onchain. Prime Onchain Wallet is an institutional-grade self-custodial wallet that allows you to seamlessly borrow or transfer your assets to deploy into DeFi under the same policy rules, allowlists, and approvals you use everywhere else on Prime.
Built like a market, not like an app
Our structure is deliberate: a qualified custodian, a lender that is not the exchange, a futures commission merchant that stands between your clients' assets and the venue, and venues that match trades and nothing else.
Compare that to how some other exchanges still run: custody, order matching, lending, borrowing, and clearing inside a single platform, with limited transparency and often uncertain legal status. This model may have been simpler to operate, but it was not built for institutional investors.
Coinbase offers an institutional-grade, equity-style prime brokerage, built from the ground up for crypto. Your clients' assets stay in a qualified custodian in your name. Financing is extended against their assets in market-standard forms. Execution happens on venues that never touch your balance sheet. In short: the same structure that has carried every other asset class through every market cycle for decades.
Financing that works the way you expect
Portfolio margin. The risk model is transparent and deterministic, so your trading team can always calculate margin requirements before execution.
Cross margin. Assets for derivatives settlement are lent at institutional rates secured against assets you already custody with Coinbase, and funded automatically, so your treasury manages one cash flow at predictable times.
Margin calls. If your Prime account equity declines below maintenance requirements, you get a margin call, not an auto-liquidation or auto-deleveraging in the middle of the night. Locates and borrow rates are published daily on assets representing approximately 97% of Coinbase Exchange’s average daily volume, and every locate, borrow, fill, settlement, and fee is reported and auditable.
If you have run a book in equities or fixed income, none of this needs explaining - it’s how financial markets work, and you shouldn’t have to compromise.
Custody with a federal charter
No platform is complete without custody, and this week The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted final approval to Coinbase National Trust Company, allowing us to bring clear and consistent federal uniformity to our industry-leading custody capabilities and strengthening the regulatory framework under which we serve customers. It sits alongside Coinbase Custody Trust Company, the NYDFS-regulated qualified custodian we launched in 2018.
Keeping assets safe is a core mission
Coinbase is continuing to invest in best-in-class security innovation. More than 99% of customer assets are held in cold storage, and Prime Vault assets are 100% cold and segregated onchain. Private keys are split and never reconstructed in full, no Coinbase employee has standing access to signing systems, and cryptographic kill switches can take signing offline entirely. Client assets are held 1:1 and never lent or used unless instructed by clients, and we undergo biannual SOC 1 and annual SOC 2 Type II examinations.
Moreover, our platform was designed for sophisticated asset managers: your firm configures its own controls, including permissioning user roles at the entity or portfolio level, setting consensus approval requirements and address whitelists, and requiring transaction caps or video approval for the most sensitive outflows.
Recent events remind us why these safeguards are important. There is a world of difference between an exchange that holds assets as a byproduct of letting you trade and a professional custodian that exists to keep them safe.
More on how Coinbase protects client assets here.
No Compromises on Coinbase
For money managers the question is no longer whether a prime broker can provide the access you need to crypto markets. It can, with your assets held at a custodian that carries a federal charter. The question is why any of your capital should sit anywhere besides a regulated custodian, when it no longer has to.
Put your money where your trust is. No compromises.
Contact your Coinbase Sales representative or sales@coinbase.com to continue the conversation on Coinbase Prime.
