What is Coinbase restructuring with 5 executives changing in a month?

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

Since the beginning of this month, Coinbase's leadership team has undergone a round of intensive adjustments.

Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal will step down on July 31 to join a startup, with Molly Abraham, promoted from within, taking over as General Counsel.

At the same time, a new position of Vice Chairman has been created, filled by Ryan VanGrack, who has a background with the SEC and the White House, overseeing policy and corporate affairs.

Chief Human Resources Officer Lawrence Brock will transition to an advisory role, while Greg Tusar, co-head of institutional business, will move to a policy position, and Jesse Pollak, head of Base, will step back.

On July 28, Coinbase appointed senior employee Rob Witoff as the new Chief Technology Officer; Witoff previously served as the head of the Coinbase platform.

These changes come at a time when the company's fundamentals are under pressure. Benchmark reported that due to weak trading activity in the crypto market, it has lowered Coinbase's revenue expectations for the second quarter, with centralized trading platform spot trading volume down about 28%, and the company's stock price has retreated about 30% this year.

With five key positions changing hands, what kind of company is Coinbase being pushed towards?

From Winning Lawsuits to Setting Rules

Grewal's departure comes as Coinbase concludes multiple legal battles with regulators.

As Chief Legal Officer, his most significant battle was the SEC's securities lawsuit against Coinbase in June 2023. The case accused the company of operating as an unregistered securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency, seen as a crucial battle for the entire crypto industry's legal existence in the U.S., which concluded in February 2025 with the SEC dropping the case and not imposing fines on the company.

According to the Wall Street Journal, on July 22, Coinbase reached a settlement with the SEC regarding a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, with the SEC agreeing to pay $150,000 and amend its record-keeping policy, revealing missing communication records from former Chairman Gary Gensler's tenure.

Along with a similar settlement with the FDIC in February, these lawsuits that questioned regulators and sought government transparency were all wrapped up before his departure.

Molly Abraham, who is taking over for Grewal, has been promoted from within, while the newly created Vice Chairman position has been given to VanGrack, focusing on policy and external affairs, and Tusar, with an institutional business background, is also transitioning to policy.

The composition of the successors reveals a shift in the company's legal and policy focus.

According to public documents, on July 27, Coinbase's Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad formally wrote to the CFTC predicting market rule-making, expressing support for new regulations and seeking further coordination.

However, the transition from litigation to rule-setting has not been smooth.

The much-anticipated clarity bill has been stalled in the Senate, with some opinions attributing part of the delay to Coinbase, as the bill's restrictions on interest payments for stablecoins directly relate to the customer acquisition revenue split between Coinbase and Circle. The company initially opposed the bill vocally but later shifted to promote it, resulting in a new version that imposed even stricter limits on active yields, leading to questions about its stance.

CEO Brian Armstrong even stated that if the bill remains stalled for a long time, some of the company's business might move out of the U.S.

Expansion of Trading Access, Contraction of On-Chain Narrative

Adjustments at the business level are also concentrated, pointing towards Everything Exchange.

This strategy was proposed as early as December 2025, with the core idea of integrating various asset trades such as cryptocurrencies, stocks, ETFs, prediction markets, and perpetual contracts into a unified account, transforming Coinbase from a spot crypto trading platform into infrastructure connecting on-chain economies and traditional finance.

This vision was intensively implemented in June this year, with the company launching and initiating a large number of products on June 16, including:

• Opening U.S. stock, ETF, and index trading within the main app, allowing users to transfer existing holdings from external brokers;
• Launching tokenized U.S. stocks backed 1:1 by real stocks for non-U.S. users, supporting 24-hour trading;
• Introducing Pre-IPO perpetual contracts that allow betting on valuations before the company goes public, with the first target being SpaceX, followed by Anthropic and OpenAI;
• Launching index perpetuals that bundle themes like AI, China, and defense;
• Collaborating with compliant platform Kalshi to access prediction markets covering elections, interest rate decisions, and macro events.
• Additionally, the company has embedded what it claims to be one of the first SEC-registered AI advisory services, Coinbase Advisor.

In May this year, the CFTC approved Coinbase as the first licensed institution to offer global crypto perpetual contracts to U.S. customers, allowing previously restricted derivatives to return to the U.S. market.

Entering July, the strategy is still being intensified. On July 21, Coinbase International Exchange launched S&P 500 index perpetual contracts supporting 24-hour trading. The next day, Coinbase's head in Canada publicly stated that the company is advancing the establishment of a comprehensive exchange covering crypto assets, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets locally.

In contrast to this expansion, Base is contracting. In mid-July, Pollak published a lengthy article handing over the daily management of the Base App back to Coinbase, with the community-familiar Cobie taking over, while he returned to focus on the Base chain itself. He admitted that the bets made in the past two years on social and creator directions had shown significant deviations, with the real successes being in prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and stablecoins, while related social attempts failed to achieve sustainable adoption.

Brian Armstrong also stated that Base's current core focus areas are trading, payments, and AI agents, which are interconnected—payments require foreign exchange trading, and AI agents will also heavily involve trading and payment scenarios, with most resources currently concentrated in the trading track.

This retreat can be seen as a phased conclusion of the consumer-level on-chain narrative.

External positive pressures are also amplifying this urgency. According to Token Terminal data, just over ten days after the launch of the Robinhood Chain mainnet, its daily trading volume has nearly approached that of Base, backed by tokenized U.S. stocks and millions of brokerage users, providing a more direct entry point.

Reshaping Operations and Products with AI

Returning to the line of the CTO appointment, it can be seen that AI plays two roles at Coinbase simultaneously.

Internally, it is a tool for cost reduction and efficiency improvement. After the company laid off about 14% of its workforce in May, the organization clearly shifted towards a more streamlined team model, with projects that previously required more than ten people now often needing only two to three.

It is reported that currently, 95% to 100% of the company's code has been completed with AI assistance, a significant increase from about 40% in February this year, with each engineer simultaneously running 5 to 10 AI agents, resulting in an overall output equivalent to about 1,200 full-time developers. The company even set a more long-term goal, hoping to reach a workload equivalent to 100,000 employees by 2030.

However, this streamlining is not occurring uniformly. On July 22, Coinbase's Singapore office officially opened, with plans to increase local staff from about 150 to around 200 by the end of the year, with the fastest-growing positions concentrated in engineering and institutional sales, and the team is also exploring equipping AI agents with stablecoin wallets.

Externally, AI is being treated as a new product direction. On July 27, Armstrong published an article clearly opposing the zero-sum thinking that if one is doing crypto, they should shift to AI. He wrote that crypto is infrastructure, like electricity or the internet; it does not compete with the next wave of trends but supports them.

AI agents cannot open bank accounts or wait days for wire transfers; they need real-time programmable money, which is exactly what crypto can provide. He summarized the direction the company is pursuing as agent finance, pointing out that the future trading and payment scale of agents may far exceed that of humans.

In terms of delivery, officially stated that last month, the agentic traffic on the Base documentation page surpassed human traffic for the first time. The company also launched updates across three platforms, allowing merchants to receive USDC payments from AI agents through Coinbase Business, individuals to use natural language commands to have agents monitor and execute trades based on conditions, such as liquidating if BTC falls below a certain price, and developers to integrate agent payments with just three lines of code.

Real Vision founder Raoul Pal stated that billions of AI agents are about to go live, and they will pay each other for computation, data, and services at a scale never seen by human markets, while the existing financial system is too slow to bear it; Coinbase's agent payment track has already been adopted by Google and Amazon.

With both internal and external lines running in parallel, AI is being heavily invested in. However, both directions currently lack sufficient validation.

On the internal side, whether the efficiency gains brought by AI can truly offset the revenue pressure caused by declining trading volumes remains unanswered, with a significant execution distance between the current scale and long-term goals.

On the external side, agent finance products are still in the early stages. According to public data from agenteconomy.to, the cumulative transaction volume of x402 is about $159 million, but the cumulative transaction amount is only about $40-50 million, with a significant portion of early traffic coming from meme-related tests and speculative activities, indicating a gap between real commercial scale and rhetoric.

Conclusion

In the context of pressured trading volumes, phased victories in regulation, and leaps in AI capabilities, what kind of company does Coinbase want to become? The answer is beginning to take shape.

The company's adjustments may aim to reduce dependence on a single crypto trading cycle, using broader asset coverage and higher operational efficiency to achieve a more stable foundation, while proactively positioning itself for the payment and trading demands that AI agents may bring.

This round of leadership adjustments addresses issues of organizational priorities and strategic focus. The real test will be whether this combination can deliver results during a soft cycle.