Coinbase (COIN) Q4 2025 earnings call transcript

Coinbase Global, Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Analyst Q&A Call February 12, 2026 Anil Gupta, Vice President, Investor Relations: Good afternoon and welcome to the Coinbase Fourth Quarter 2025 Analyst Q&A call. Joining me is Alesia Haas, CFO. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that during today's call, we may make forward-looking statements. Actual results may vary materially from today's statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings. Our discussion today will also include references to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the shareholder letter on our investor relations website. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, GAAP measures.

With that, let's take our first question, please.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Thanks for the question. So, we have approached our acquisition of Bitcoin as a weekly buy. So, we are long-term HODLers. We're dollar cost averagers. And we look at each quarterly operating income and we allocate a percentage of any positive operating income to that purchasing portfolio, and then we buy on a weekly basis. So, we are mostly buying Bitcoin. Occasionally, we are buying other top five assets, but 95% of all dollars plus are going straight into Bitcoin. And you can see that we doubled the native units year-over-year in that portfolio. So, it's not a market signal. We're not increasing dollars based on certain prices in any material way. We put $39 million to work in Q4.

It's going to go up modestly for Q1.

Alesia Haas, CFO: They're separate. So, the board has authorized an incremental $2 billion of availability to us to buy back our common shares. We previously had two billion authorized and we've used 1.7 of that previously existing authorization as of February 10th. So as of February 10th, we had about 2.3 billion that we have available to us, and our focus is to be opportunistic as well as to offset future dilution and manage down dilution from our stock-based compensation.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Thanks for that. We're absolutely focused on international growth, and as Brian shared in his opening comments, one of our goals is to continue to diversify the tradable assets for our customers outside the US. Now that we've rolled out prediction markets and equities to US customers, we look to continue to expand the tradable assets outside the US, as well. International as a percent of total has been relatively constant quite candidly for the last few quarters and years—in the high teens as a percent of total revenue—with no other country being material to break out as a separate item. What we've really focused on is compliance in our European markets over the last year. As MiCA was rolled out in Europe, we were rebuilding foundations and securing our new MiCA license.

We effectively migrated all of our customers then to Luxembourg at the end of the year. This has now given us the ability being MiCA compliant that we can focus on marketing and growth now as we move into 2026 and beyond. So in addition to growing in markets we already are in, one of the new markets we're focused on is India. 2025 was getting the fundamentals in place, the unlocks that we needed to scale—compliance, operating, localization, bank partnerships, etc—and so now as we go forward, it's unlocking revenue streams and focused on growth.

Alesia Haas, CFO: The primary product focus we focus on internationally is our retail product. In addition to the retail product, Base is international in more than 100 markets. And so Base has the ability to grow at a faster pace. But the product that we have in what we call our go-deep markets is predominantly our consumer products. Simple retail.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Good question. There's two drivers. One is the lower price of Ethereum and Solana, which drove down staking revenue. The second is the protocol reward rates were lowered. As these protocols mature, you often see a reduction in the underlying reward rates as there's more stakers, there's more people participating in the network. And so both of those were drivers that reduced staking revenue in the fourth quarter. Price and the reward.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Not much to share other than it's a 2026 priority. We acquired Echo in the fourth quarter of 2025, and this provides a platform to connect builders with their users. Combining this with our LiquiFi acquisition, which we now call the Coinbase Token Manager, it then brings together our strength in listings, custody, staking, trading, and we're now supporting token issuers to distribute to their customers. So, that's going to be what you see first as a growth objective in 2026. We're then also working on products to tokenize other assets, but that is dependent on regulatory clarity. So as we get regulatory clarity, tokenizing equities, bonds will fast follow.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Absolutely. Not materially dependent on regulatory unlocks for our 2026 plans. We absolutely are excited about the growth of the derivatives products we have in market, our spot trading, equities, prediction markets. There are unique things that we think we can do with incremental regulatory unlocks, but I would say that those are just additive, but we feel very unblocked and able to grow in this market.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Yeah, our practice is that when things become material, we will break them out as separate disclosures within our financials. So to the extent that we hit milestones that will be material, we absolutely will broaden our disclosures. If they're immaterial, we'll provide more qualitative updates or periodic numbers as they make sense to provide.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Great question. So there's two things that occurred in Q4. One was a mix shift towards Advanced away from Simple. The second is incremental trading that was occurring under the Coinbase One membership. So both of those drove down the effective take rate that you can calculate for the fourth quarter. We absolutely look at all of our products to ensure they are unit economic positive, and we feel really good about the growth of Coinbase One membership, because those customers tend to be our most active and sticky customers, monetizing multiple products across the platform. Not only trading but they’re more likely to stake. They're more likely to use the Coinbase Card. They're more likely to hold a USDC balance.

So we absolutely look at it around profit in aggregate against that Coinbase One membership.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Yes.

Alesia Haas, CFO: It's an unsatisfying answer, which is to say: it depends. And if it is USDC on Base, you could see transactions showing up in sequencer fees. If it is USDC payments transactions via our product APIs that we're building, that we could monetize through that product offering. So it will depend on if it is on our platform and touching our platform in some way and/or touching Base, and in that case, we are monetizing that transaction activity through those infrastructure products.

Alesia Haas, CFO: No, no, that means that we're going to be monetizing in different ways. That there's going to be ways that we monetize as USDC as an asset on platform that generates asset a NIM and a spread from the revenue that we earn from the Circle relationship versus any rewards that we may pay out for the loyalty programs that we have. So that is one way to monetize. Other ways are monetizing USDC on Base through a transaction payment that ends up as a sequencer fee, or through these payments APIs products that we're building as part of our business payment suite.

Alesia Haas, CFO: We're here to find win-wins, and we think that we are all united as the crypto industry, and we're looking to be at the table until we get to an answer that is a win-win-win for the White House, banks, and crypto, and we are working to really support our customers when their ability to participate in these rewards programs.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Our commitment is that we will be adjusted EBITDA positive in any market environment. So, we will dynamically revisit our expenses if we see a material degradation in our revenue opportunities this year. And we have things that would be near-term and we have things that would be harder to achieve. But we feel really good with the continued diversification of revenue opportunities that we're cautiously optimistic that we would not have to make a material change to our expenses. But as we note, we started our year flat and we will keep our eye carefully on that steering wheel to make sure that we can continue to drive adjusted EBITDA.

And if it is that latter, is there some kind of cannibalization potential? Alesia Haas, CFO: I mean, it's been two weeks, and so we have not marketed this outside of our existing users at this time. And what we're seeing for existing users is that it appears to be incremental. It's the opportunity to trade something else that they didn't have before. But I want to share that again, we are a few weeks in, and so I don't want to have any comments at this point in time about what we think this has the potential to do. But we think it should be both a cross-sell and an incremental user, but we have not turned on marketing dollars yet to drive it as an incremental customer acquisition channel.

Alesia Haas, CFO: Okay, we don't break out the guide into the components of each of the products. If you look in our disclosures of subscription and services in the interest income area, it is both lending and custodial balances. You can look at our balance sheet, and the customer fiat balances are separately broken out and disclosed. So you can get a sense of what that balance is and what the prevailing interest rates are to get a split between what is prime financing versus what is customer interest income. So that can kind of help you understand the mix of that line item. In other, CB1 subs is the largest of the components of other subscription and services.

Custody is the second. And beyond that, they're relatively newer products that we don't have a lot of disclosure or discussion on at this time.

And we believe that milliseconds is what we need this network to gain transaction adoption. We're also focused on scaling, but we don't want to scale ahead of volume and demand. And so we're trying to manage those sequencer fees to be at the levels they are to be pretty consistent as we also scale to meet volume. I think it's really important to say that we don't see any limit on scaling and so we will scale as the market demand dictates and needs to be. Switching gears on the Base token. It is something we're exploring and don't have any new updates to share at this time.

Anil Gupta, Vice President, Investor Relations: That does it for today. Thank you all for joining us and we look forward to speaking to you again next quarter.