When I was browsing the news recently, one piece of news caught my eye: Coinbase announced the acquisition of token management platform Liquifi .

At first I thought it was just a common industry dynamic, but then I thought, this feels a bit familiar... I quickly reviewed it, and sure enough! This is already Coinbase's fourth major acquisition since entering 2025.

One acquisition may just be a business supplement, but there must be a deeper logic behind the continuous "buy, buy, buy". This aroused my great curiosity. So, I decided to take some time to take everyone to review Coinbase's shopping list this year, so that we can get a glimpse of the real strategic intention behind this series of acquisitions.

Spoiler alert: Coinbase is no longer content to be just a leading cryptocurrency exchange, but to build a " financial operating system " that serves the entire on-chain world.

🌪️ Right time and right place: Why is COINBASE “buying, buying, buying” in 2025?

Any big move is inseparable from the right time and right place. Coinbase's acquisition offensive was launched in an excellent macro environment.

In the crypto industry in 2025, an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is taking place. According to industry analysis reports, the number of M&A transactions and the total amount of disclosed transaction consideration in the first quarter of this year both hit record highs, and the integration speed of the entire industry is even expected to exceed the peak of the bull market in 2021. In addition to the series of actions of Coinbase to be introduced below, the entire industry is surging with huge waves of capital, including some sensational big moves, which together confirm this wave:

• In February 2025, Stripe acquired Bridge Network for $1.1 billion, significantly enhancing its stablecoin infrastructure and improving the speed and cost advantages of cross-border payments. In June 2025, Stripe acquired Privy, a crypto wallet integration service provider, further strengthening its capabilities in the crypto wallet and digital identity fields.

• In May 2025, Robinhood acquired Canadian crypto company WonderFi for approximately $179 million in cash, gaining control of two mainstream exchanges, Bitbuy and Coinsquare, greatly expanding its compliance market in Canada. On June 2, 2025, Robinhood acquired the established European crypto exchange Bitstamp for $200 million in cash, obtaining more than 50 international licenses and a large number of institutional clients, accelerating its global expansion.

• On May 1, 2025, Kraken acquired the U.S. retail futures trading platform NinjaTrader for US$1.5 billion, becoming an important player in the U.S. futures and crypto derivatives markets and promoting the deep integration of traditional finance and crypto assets.

What does this mean? It means that the industry is maturing. Even financial technology giants such as Stripe and Revolut have entered the market, making mainstream investors feel that "playing crypto" is not so dangerous. In such an era of "big fish eat small fish", giants like Coinbase are decisive in mergers and acquisitions not only for expansion, but also for survival .

What’s more interesting is that we have also seen a new trend. In the past, traditional financial companies acquired crypto companies, but now the opposite has happened. Crypto giants like Kraken and Coinbase have begun to acquire traditional financial service companies. This indicates that crypto giants have gone from being disruptors to integrators.

🛒 Exclusive reveal: What’s in COINBASE’s 2025 luxury shopping cart?

Okay, now that we have the background, let’s take a look at what Coinbase has bought this year. Each acquisition is like a piece of a puzzle, which together form its grand blueprint.

SPINDL: Installing a "growth rocket" for its own BASE ecosystem

Imagine a scenario like this: a new DEX project cooperates with 10 KOLs for promotion, and each KOL posts promotional content on social media. When a user sees a KOL's tweet, clicks on the link and completes a transaction on the DEX, the project party needs to issue token rewards to the corresponding KOL according to the agreement.

But the question is: how can the project side accurately identify which KOL promoted this transaction? Traditional Web2 marketing can easily track user behavior paths through technical means such as cookies, but in the decentralized environment of Web3, there is an insurmountable data gap between off-chain social media interactions and actual transactions on the chain.

The value of Spindl lies in solving this core pain point. As an on-chain advertising and attribution analysis platform, it can be understood as the native Google Analytics of Web3. Spindl can help developers accurately identify user acquisition channels, measure the real ROI of marketing activities (such as airdrops, KOL promotions), and create precise target audiences based on users' on-chain behavior data .

In January 2025, Coinbase acquired Spindl with the goal of creating a unique competitive advantage for its own Layer 2 network "Base". In the fierce L2 competition, relying solely on high throughput and low Gas technology advantages is no longer enough. By integrating Spindl, Coinbase provides developers on Base with a top-level "viral growth" toolkit , attracting them to prioritize building applications on Base rather than other competing blockchains. This forms a powerful positive flywheel: better applications attract more users, and more users will encourage more developers to join, thereby accelerating the expansion of the entire Base ecosystem.

IRON FISH team: Engrave "privacy" into the DNA of BASE

In March 2025, Coinbase acquired the core team of the privacy blockchain project Iron Fish. This was an "acqui-hire" in which Coinbase acquired the Iron Fish development team, not its company or tokens. The Iron Fish team is a top expert in the field of privacy protection technology, especially in zero-knowledge proof (zk-SNARKs) technology. After the acquisition, the team will form a special "privacy team" within Base, dedicated to building privacy protection functions directly into the underlying architecture of the Base network.

This will solve the common transaction transparency problem in the current public chain. Because of the need for commercial confidentiality and privacy protection, many real-world business scenarios - such as corporate salary distribution, B2B payment, supply chain finance, etc. - cannot be realized on a completely transparent ledger.

By building compliance-friendly privacy features into Base, Coinbase enables the Base ecosystem to carry enterprise-level application scenarios that are more privacy-focused and have higher value , establishing a unique differentiated advantage in the fierce L2 competition.

DERIBIT: Spending $2.9 billion to seize the "throne" of derivatives

In early May 2025, Coinbase acquired Deribit, the world's largest crypto derivatives exchange, for US$2.9 billion, the largest M&A deal in the cryptocurrency industry to date .

Before this acquisition, although Coinbase performed well in the spot trading field, it had obvious shortcomings in the derivatives market, especially futures and options trading. Offshore exchanges such as Binance and OKX have long dominated the perpetual contract market and have a dominant position in the derivatives field. The addition of Deribit has completely changed this situation. As the world's leading cryptocurrency options and futures exchange, Deribit has an absolute dominant position of up to 85%-90% in the Bitcoin and Ethereum options markets.

The acquisition has made Coinbase a leader in the global crypto derivatives market and brought Coinbase a highly profitable and less cyclical revenue source. Unlike spot trading, options are a hedging tool that has trading demand regardless of market ups and downs, so its revenue stream is more stable. Deribit's record of continued profitability (adjusted EBITDA is positive) will directly thicken Coinbase's financial statements.

After the acquisition is completed, Coinbase will achieve true differentiated competition . It will become the only comprehensive platform in the market that can provide spot trading, US compliant futures, international perpetual contracts , and options trading at the same time. This "four-in-one" product matrix is currently unreplicable by competitors such as Binance and OKX. Coupled with Coinbase's own compliance advantages, this "all-round" and compliant product portfolio is unparalleled in its appeal to institutional capital that has reservations about offshore exchanges due to regulatory uncertainty.

LIQUIFI: Starting from the "cradle", locking in the next unicorn

In July 2025, Coinbase acquired token management platform Liquifi. To understand the strategic value of this acquisition, we first need to recognize the limitations of the current industry standard model. The Launchpad model of competitors such as Binance Alpha and OKX Jumpstart is essentially an initial token issuance platform serving "late adolescent" projects, which requires projects to have a mature team, a complete roadmap, and a designed token economics . The core function of Launchpad is marketing and token sales, but it does not touch the most difficult infrastructure construction work at the beginning of the project .

Liquifi fills this gap. Imagine you want to issue your project tokens. You need to deal with a lot of complicated things: Who owns how many tokens? When can you sell? How to deal with taxes? How to solve compliance issues? Liquifi is like a professional "token steward", providing one-stop service to help you handle complex matters from equity distribution, unlocking plans to compliance taxes . Liquifi has previously raised $5.5 million and manages more than $8.5 billion in token value. Its clients include well-known projects such as Uniswap and OP Labs.

The acquisition of Liquifi enables Coinbase to intervene in projects while they are still in the "kindergarten" stage - only the white paper and the team's conception period have been completed, which is earlier than the traditional Launchpad model. By integrating Liquifi into the institutional service platform Coinbase Prime, Coinbase has built an end-to-end service closed loop from project incubation to maturity. This "full life cycle" model not only greatly enhances customer stickiness, but also establishes an exclusive, high-quality project delivery pipeline for Coinbase. When the project party establishes a deep cooperative relationship with Coinbase from day one, subsequent transactions, listings and other businesses will naturally follow.

More importantly, as the trend of traditional financial assets going on-chain accelerates, institutional clients are increasingly demanding compliant and efficient token lifecycle management tools. The addition of Liquifi enables Coinbase Prime to perfectly meet the needs of this emerging high-value market, and this acquisition is “ just in time .”

🔮 Looking to the future: COINBASE’s ambitions go beyond this

With these acquisitions, does Coinbase stop? No.

Rumored big goal: CIRCLE

There have been rumors in the market that Coinbase wants to acquire Circle, the issuer of USDC. If this happens, the synergy will be huge:

• Financial aspect : Acquiring Circle will enable Coinbase to fully internalize all interest income from USDC reserves, rather than just a share of it. This will bring it a huge and stable cash flow.

• Strategic level : This will give Coinbase direct control over the world's largest " compliant " stablecoin. With the passage of the GENIUS Act, owning USDC will become a powerful weapon for Coinbase against its competitors and consolidate its position as a global regulatory-compliant, dollar-centric digital financial hub.

Although the strategic logic is clear, Circle's successful listing and soaring stock price have greatly increased the cost and reduced the possibility of acquisition in the short term. However, given the deep integration between the two parties, this is undoubtedly a long-term strategic option.

Entering the “Tokenized Stocks”

In June 2025, Coinbase's chief legal officer confirmed that the company is actively seeking SEC approval to provide "tokenized equities" services to its customers. The move is clear in its intention to connect traditional financial markets with the on-chain economy. Once successful, Coinbase will directly compete with retail brokers such as Robinhood.

This move is closely linked to the previous acquisition of Liquifi . A platform that excels in managing token equity structure tables, vesting plans, and compliance is the core backend infrastructure required for tokenized stocks. This shows that Coinbase's acquisition layout is not only focused on crypto-native assets, but also in preparation for supporting RWA tokenization.

Together, these moves reveal a larger strategic goal for Coinbase. From acquiring Deribit to strengthen its control over crypto-native derivatives, to seeking regulatory approval for tokenized stocks, to using Liquifi to build a back-end system to manage any tokenized assets, Coinbase's strategy has gone beyond "cryptocurrency." It is building an infrastructure that can support the tokenization , creation, management, and trading of any asset (whether it's a new crypto protocol or a traditional company's stock ) on the blockchain. This is a "financialization of everything" strategy, and its potential market size far exceeds simple cryptocurrency trading.

🏁 Ultimate Decryption: COINBASE's Grand Vision

So, putting all the pieces together, Coinbase's strategy is very clear. It is transforming from a simple "trading platform" to a " financial operating system " that serves the entire on-chain economy. This operating system provides developers with building tools (Base, Spindl, Iron Fish team), asset management solutions for enterprises (Liquifi), and top investment and trading platforms for institutions and retail users (Exchanges, Deribit, Prime)

This system can be summarized into four pillars:

1. Dominate the institutional market : Use Deribit and compliance advantages to win the most valuable institutional customers.

2. Empowering the developer ecosystem : Win the hearts of developers with tools such as Base, Spindl, and Iron Fish.

3. Vertically integrate the value chain : Use tools such as Liquifi to capture the value of the entire life cycle, from project birth to transaction.

4. Build a regulatory moat : turn compliance into the strongest weapon to resist external competition.

Simply put, Coinbase wants to be the "Apple of the crypto world" : an ecological empire that is vertically integrated, has a smooth experience, and is safe and compliant. Its competitors, on the other hand, are more like an open "Android" alliance. Coinbase has already made several key moves in this game, and now it depends on whether it can perfectly integrate these acquisitions and truly realize its dream of an "empire on the blockchain". Let's wait and see!