Dialogue with Coinbase CBO: Stablecoins are the oil of on-chain finance

Compiled by: Payment 201

In this episode of "Money Code," host Sanjib Kalita talks with Shan Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase, about the future of cryptocurrency, stablecoins, and traditional finance. They discuss Coinbase's vision for "an open financial system built on the blockchain" and why stablecoins are becoming an increasingly important part of financial infrastructure.

The conversation also delves into tokenized assets, agentic commerce, and the rise of machine-to-machine payments. Shan explains why stablecoins are particularly suited for AI-driven transactions and what else needs to happen to make on-chain finance more seamless, accessible, and interconnected.

This episode comes from Money Code—a podcast decoding stablecoins and agentic finance.

They discussed the following key points:

1. Coinbase is now "the full-stack infrastructure for future finance"
   The company is no longer just a broker that simplifies cryptocurrency assets. In Shan's words, the way to view Coinbase today is as "a full-stack financial infrastructure built for future finance": brokerage products serve individuals, advanced traders, and institutions; underneath is their own global custody, global liquidity, market-leading compliant stablecoin, and Base, a leading Layer 2. These products are vertically integrated as much as possible, while also exporting this infrastructure externally—specifically built for a tokenized financial future.

2. What does the Chief Business Officer actually manage?
   Shan's responsibilities include company strategy and operations: what products to create for which customers, and why. Additionally, there are mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, Coinbase Ventures, and investor relations, which he took over earlier this year—responsible for external public narratives, communicating with investors and analysts, and thinking about capital allocation. He sees his role as helping guide Coinbase's near, mid, and long-term growth, ensuring efficient resource allocation, and strategically advancing goals through transactional operations (acquisitions, investments, partnerships).

3. From the ICO era to Coinbase: addressing "centralized trust"
   Before joining Coinbase, Shan worked in an investment fund focusing on early and growth-stage equity investments in fintech and media. During the ICO era, he began researching cryptocurrency—primarily Ethereum—seeing it as an infrastructure that could support more efficient global financial services, ultimately a more globalized, permissionless application platform. His analogy is the early App Store: developers created many applications, but the lifeblood was largely held by Apple or Google. Today's financial system relies on a high degree of trust in a few centralized intermediaries—banks and clearinghouses are critical because they can see both sides of a transaction and ensure correct settlement; in a world where communication and transactions primarily occur online, this logic requires a decentralized alternative.

4. The three pillars of trust, and due diligence that becomes an advantage with experience
   Shan breaks trust down into three components: security; the legal and regulatory foundation, and how products are delivered; and brand image and the company's positioning within the ecosystem. Coinbase has heavily invested in security from the early days, making them the largest cryptocurrency custody institution globally, holding over 80 legal and regulatory licenses and continuing to acquire more; they are also at the forefront of policy agendas, advocating for clear rules for the industry. These foundations enable them to collaborate with major blue-chip institutions like BlackRock, American Express, and JP Morgan. To earn the authorization and cooperation of such institutions, they must undergo intense operational, corporate, and strategic due diligence—Coinbase has done this so many times that it has almost become a differentiating advantage. Shan notes that being a publicly traded company helps: information about the company is generally released publicly, effectively opening everything up for scrutiny, making these processes quite smooth.

5. Globalization is not an add-on
   Cryptocurrency itself is global. Coinbase entered multiple markets early on, including Singapore, Brazil, the UK, the EU, and India, and will continue this pace. A global perspective is reflected in product design priorities and localization. An example he cites is the recently launched tokenized equities: U.S. stocks are widely available in the U.S., but the value proposition lies in enhancing accessibility for individuals outside the U.S.—those who want exposure to U.S. stocks but face high friction.

6. Stablecoins are the oil of on-chain finance
   An open financial system will operate on the blockchain, and the starting point is ensuring there is a global, on-chain liquidity dollar—this is also why they co-launched USDC early on. At the time of its launch, it was uncertain which use cases would emerge, but as long as a regulated, compliant, trustworthy digital dollar is placed on-chain, developers will use it to create new applications. It has proven that the growth of stablecoins is crucial for the development of DeFi: lending markets, DEXs, and perpetual DEXs are all examples. Shan states: stablecoins are the oil in the on-chain financial ecosystem.

7. RWA is a breeding ground
   Putting stocks on-chain not only gives you direct access to these tokenized assets but also creates use cases that were previously impossible: you can permissionlessly borrow these tokenized securities into a liquidity pool to earn yields, or combine them with any other similarly tokenized, on-chain assets. Shan mentions that there are already on-chain experiments pairing tokenized stocks with memecoins—pairing a highly speculative, community-driven asset with a regulated tokenized security, which does not exist outside of crypto. It may look like a toy, but they observe that such experiments often lead to new use cases.

8. Agentic commerce: x402 and machine-to-machine payments
   USDC on Base is inherently accessible to humans or agents, while x402 is specifically designed for on-chain machine-to-machine payments. It's still early, but as agentic use cases become more real, spontaneous adoption has begun to emerge. Shan predicts that more agentic commerce will occur on stablecoins because stablecoins are the internet-native currency, and the way machines pay and interact with services is entirely different from humans. For example: a street vendor at a market is used to a certain regular human customer and a fixed payment method, but if an alien or a machine comes, you cannot assume it will pay in the same way as a human. Machines pay per use, extremely efficiently and rationally, executing thousands of payments daily, while traditional payment infrastructure is not designed for such payment behavior.

9. Build, buy, or partner
   Once it is clear what to build and what the roadmap is, Coinbase will make choices between build, buy, and partner, and in some cases, will invest and collaborate. Three judgment variables: whether there is internal capability, the speed to market required to seize the opportunity, and whether there are available partners in the market. Sometimes, even if they want to collaborate, there are no reliable partners, so they have to build it themselves—Coinbase built a lot in the early days not because they wanted to do everything themselves, but because there were no partners to collaborate with at the time. However, they are humble about this: as long as there is a partner that can bring differentiated expertise or has experience in building in that area, they are very willing to collaborate for a win-win; when it is more appropriate for the team to be fully aligned and share the same roadmap, that is usually when they consider acquisitions and bringing the team in-house.

10. Five to ten years: T+2 settlement will seem very outdated
    Shan says that being in the midst of it feels slow, but think of Bill Gates' quote—people tend to overestimate what they can do in a year but underestimate what can happen in ten years. Stablecoins have already been tokenized, and various asset classes are being tokenized; once these things are held on-chain, the efficiency of markets for trading, credit, etc., will far exceed that of the traditional financial system. Looking back in a few years, T+2 settlement, credit, and counterparty risk will seem quite outdated. The second major trend is at the agent level: today, humans interact with the internet by opening a service and clicking a bunch of buttons; however, agents will ultimately become the execution layer for humans on the internet, with intent becoming the new interface for interaction in the future internet—you will no longer go to a website, but prompt your agent, which executes on your behalf in the background. End-user services will not disappear, but they will increasingly need to optimize themselves to be "default headless": not built for Shan, but built for Shan's agent.

11. The endgame is to have all asset classes under one wallet
    In the past, asset classes were fragmented: Coinbase was a crypto platform, and you also had traditional stock brokerage accounts, possibly a separate retirement account. However, the trend of integration has emerged, and user experience needs to be packaged together—over the past year, Coinbase has added stocks and prediction markets, expanding its derivatives product line, with good growth. But the endgame is that these asset classes will ultimately be tokenized and placed into the same wallet, achieving seamless settlement and interoperability. This will also enhance capital efficiency: you no longer have to think, "I have $100 in this account, it will take three days to transfer out, and then a few days to deposit," transactions can be completed instantly, regardless of the asset form in which your value is held, allowing for greater utility. This may also include luxury watches and artworks—once tokenized, they can be more smoothly used as collateral.

12. From Cash at 0 Basis Points to Institutions All In
    Most consumers keep their money in bank accounts, where the average yield is essentially zero, only a few basis points. There is an educational issue here: in fact, investing money in money market funds or income-generating assets can yield a significant return, but it would be even better if switching between the two could be done very conveniently—holding cash itself generates returns, and when one wants to spend it, there is no need to wait three days to withdraw it. Shan says people have become accustomed to this "inefficiency," and this inefficiency has created business models for companies that can leverage it; however, users and consumers are now demanding much higher value from what they hold. The institutional side understands this more deeply: when the numbers are very large, a two-day delay in settlement represents a considerable opportunity cost. With regulations in place and the continuous growth of tokenized assets expanding into more categories, many of the largest institutions are actually all in—they now see the opportunity that Coinbase has been talking about for over a decade.

13. Regulation: The GENIUS Act Will Truly Take Effect in Q1 2027
    The passage of the GENIUS Act was a huge milestone last year, but it will not officially take effect until the first quarter of 2027—so even though we have seen a lot of growth over the past year and a half, the truly meaningful unlocking will not occur until early next year. The CLARITY Act is scheduled for a final debate vote on September 15, and they are extremely excited about how CLARITY can establish a lasting foundation for U.S. crypto assets. However, even without CLARITY, the numerous proactive measures introduced by the SEC and CFTC are very encouraging—it clearly indicates that understanding and educational outreach regarding crypto are moving forward, which will allow companies like Coinbase to operate under more robust rules in the U.S.

14. Waving a Magic Wand: Three Regulatory Wishes
    If I could wave a magic wand from a regulatory perspective, Shan would want three things. The first is a clear definition of classifications: what is a security, what is a commodity, and what are other types of assets—he has seen many entrepreneurs scared off by uncertainty when wearing his VC hat, and resolving this debate would unleash much more entrepreneurial spirit. The second is the "monetary attributes" of stablecoins: a stablecoin is essentially one dollar and should be treated as one dollar everywhere; until the past year, even Coinbase itself usually had to list cash and held stablecoins separately in financial reports, which itself implies they are different things, and clearing institutions still do not equate stablecoins with one dollar, limiting use cases and adoption. The third is the foundation and clarity of tokenized securities: how these assets circulate, how they are accessed on-chain, where KYC applies, and how dividends are handled.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Welcome to "Money Code." In this show, we decode stablecoins and agentic finance. I am your host, Sanjib Kalita, and today we are honored to have Shan Aggarwal with us, who is the Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase. Welcome, Shan.

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

Thank you, I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

No, no, I’m particularly excited to talk to you. Uh, I want to start by asking you a question about what exactly Coinbase is. You know, I’ve been in this industry for quite a while, and we’ve both been in this field for several years, and I feel like today’s Coinbase is very different from when it first started.

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

Yes, the company has indeed undergone quite a transformation. However, the way we view Coinbase today is essentially as a full-stack financial infrastructure built for the future of finance. The company is best known for our brokerage products, which make crypto assets simple and accessible for various types of customers—including individual users, advanced traders, and institutions. Um, but beyond that, we have also built a very solid infrastructure that supports all our products. This includes global custody, global liquidity, a market-leading compliant stablecoin, and Base—a leading Layer 2 blockchain. We aim to vertically integrate these products as much as possible.

Um, at the same time, we also export this infrastructure externally, and this infrastructure is specifically designed for a tokenized financial future.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

So in your role as Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations, where do you fit into this overall picture?

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

Right, you might ask, what does a Chief Business Officer actually do? I am responsible for the company's strategy and operations, which includes many things, such as what products we make for which customers and why we do so. Um, there’s also mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, Coinbase Ventures, and earlier this year, I took over investor relations, handling external public narratives, engaging with investors and analysts, and thinking about capital allocation. So I see my role as helping to guide Coinbase's growth in the near and long term, um, ensuring we allocate resources efficiently, and strategically advancing our goals—whether through acquisitions, investments, or partnerships.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Speaking of which, I had a title called "Wizard" in several positions before, so it sounds like you do indeed have a bit of a wizard-like role—both guiding and sprinkling some magic dust when needed.

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

I haven’t used that title, but I like it. There’s an internal joke that I’m the Marco Rubio of Coinbase. Uh, that’s another angle.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I really like that saying. So… you’ve been at Coinbase for over eight years now, um, looking back to when you first joined and now, how did you start? And how did you step by step arrive at your current position?

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

Um, before joining Coinbase, I worked at an investment fund focused on early and growth-stage equity investments, investing in fintech and media. During the ICO period, I became very interested in crypto. When I was researching crypto—mainly Ethereum at the time—I saw the potential of blockchain as an infrastructure to support more efficient global financial services, and in the long run, it could become a more efficient and global application platform.

The analogy I made at the time was: if you think back to the early days of the App Store, there were so many developers creating applications, but these app stores were largely controlled by Apple or Google, while blockchain provides a permissionless, decentralized foundation for these applications to go global. I felt this had enormous significance for financial services because blockchain can achieve decentralized trust. If you look at how today’s financial system operates, it relies on a high level of trust in a few centralized intermediary institutions. Institutions like banks and clearinghouses play a critical role because they can see both sides of a transaction and effectively ensure that settlements occur correctly.

Um, this works in smaller, relatively closed regional markets. But if you want to build a financial system to serve a world that primarily communicates and transacts over the internet, um, you need a decentralized way that allows us not to trust centralized intermediaries. Um, so that’s what initially drew me to crypto and ultimately brought me to Coinbase.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Right. Um, I myself… I got into Bitcoin and crypto while working on Money20/20, I remember around 2014, I curated a section called "Bitcoin World." Um, and now it’s clearly far beyond that. So I feel like a lot of what you mentioned has already been realized, or your initial vision has become a reality. Um, trust has clearly always been at the core of it. So in your role, how do you view trust? You are clearly dealing with the entire ecosystem, you know, serving both consumers and enterprise clients. Um, as Chief Business Officer, what role does trust play in that?

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

Right, I think trust indeed permeates everything Coinbase does. Um, we see ourselves as the most trusted platform in the crypto space—this has been the case since Brian founded the company. Um, you know, Bitcoin had already begun to gain some early adoption and attention in the internet community, but it was still very difficult to simply have a secure and reliable custody wallet to hold Bitcoin and trust that your funds would be safe there. So when I look at trust from a business perspective, I break it down into several factors. First is security. Then there’s the legal and regulatory foundation, and how we actually deliver our products.

Next is brand image, as well as the positioning between the company and other partners. So from the very beginning, Coinbase has been heavily invested in building the most solid security foundation, which has made us the largest crypto asset custody institution in the world. We hold over 80 legal and regulatory licenses globally, and we will continue to invest in obtaining more. I believe we have also done a lot in advancing the policy agenda, being at the forefront to advocate for clear rules of the game for the crypto industry, not just in the U.S., but globally.

It is precisely because of these foundations that we are able to leverage and partner with some of the largest blue-chip institutions globally, such as BlackRock, American Express, JP Morgan, and so on. I believe further solidifying these partnerships also helps to establish and even strengthen a stronger sense of trust externally.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I particularly like this. And these institutions— you know, I worked at Citibank for 9 years, and when I look at the collaborations between companies and others, we do a lot of background checks, so much homework that many partners say, "Oh, we only share this information with our own venture capital." I can completely imagine that winning the trust of those institutions probably took quite a bit of effort.

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Oh, yes, this should not be underestimated. To gain authorization and collaboration from those institutions— the ones I just mentioned— we must go through extremely rigorous operational due diligence, corporate due diligence, and strategic due diligence to cross those thresholds. And at this stage, we have done this so many times that it has almost become a differentiated advantage, a process we are very good at. However, I think being a publicly traded company is also very helpful because we basically open everything up for the other party to see; there is a lot of information about Coinbase, and we publish everything for the world to see. We feel very good about our operational foundation and the methodologies we use.

So now going through those due diligence processes is quite smooth.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

You just mentioned letting the whole world see. Obviously, Coinbase started in the United States and then expanded globally. How different is it to make it work globally compared to just in the U.S.?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Cryptocurrency itself is global. So we have always felt that Coinbase is a global company, and we can say we started investing in international expansion early, entering multiple markets such as Singapore, Brazil, the UK, the EU, and India, and we will continue this pace, focusing on this area. Whether it's our custody products, self-custody products, or Base, these are inherently global and aimed at international users.

But when we think about what kind of products to offer and deliver to users, we try to maintain a global perspective, which is reflected in both product design and localization, making them feel intimate and personalized no matter which country you are in.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Returning to your dual role— both Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations. How does the global coverage and scale you have integrate into these two roles?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Well, let's take investor relations as an example. We have many investors outside the U.S. who see Coinbase as a premier cryptocurrency platform. So we spend a lot of time communicating with these investors. I think part of the narrative and part of the appeal is that Coinbase is not just focused on the U.S. Clearly, the U.S. is our home, our core, and we have a very strong and leading position in the U.S., which we never take for granted. But I believe it influences our thinking about the company's market opportunities and addressable markets. Strategically, it almost affects everything we do, whether it's the order in which we launch products or the design of the products themselves.

For example, some of the products we recently launched, such as tokenized equities, just went live in the past few weeks. In the U.S., stocks are widely available, but we see the value proposition in enhancing accessibility for individuals outside the U.S.— these individuals face high friction to gain exposure to U.S. stocks. We make this simpler and more accessible, leveraging the inherently permissionless nature of cryptocurrency to create entirely new financial services. But this is just one example of how we consider products from a global perspective.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I think you've hit on a very hot topic, which is tokenization and real-world assets (RWA). Sometimes I find it a bit overwhelming when I think about these things. Can you help me build a framework to understand it— regarding tokenized assets?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Well, I think, perhaps at the highest level, we often talk about Coinbase's mission, which is to increase economic freedom and create an open financial system. We believe that an open financial system will run on blockchain. Blockchain is very suitable for building an open financial system for the reasons I mentioned earlier. And the starting point for all this is to ensure there is a global, on-chain liquid dollar. This is also why we were early participants in the founding of USDC.

You know, when we launched USDC, we weren't sure which use cases would ultimately take hold, but we knew that as long as we put a regulated, compliant, and trustworthy digital dollar on the blockchain, developers would use this dollar to create interesting new applications. It has proven that the growth of stablecoins is crucial for the development of DeFi. Whether it's lending markets, DEXs, or perp DEXs, this is true. I think stablecoins are the oil of the on-chain financial ecosystem.

Now we are seeing a similar scene with the tokenization of RWAs, whether it's stocks, private credit, or other categories. Putting stocks on-chain clearly allows people to directly access the tokenized stocks themselves, but it also creates new use cases that were previously impossible. You can lend these tokenized securities permissionlessly to a liquidity pool to earn yields, or you can combine these tokenized securities with any other similarly tokenized, on-chain asset class.

So I think we are just beginning to see various possibilities because it really is like a petri dish where a lot of experimentation and innovation is happening. We are starting to see many interesting use cases take shape, which will ignite people's imagination about what open financial infrastructure can do.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I love the petri dish metaphor. Are there any interesting laboratories or sectors doing cool things in this petri dish?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Well, you know, I think you can see what's happening on-chain. For example, you will see some tokenized stocks being paired with memecoins. That is to say, you can pair a highly speculative, community-driven asset with a regulated tokenized security. This does not exist outside the crypto ecosystem. People might look at this and say, "Hey, this looks a bit like a toy or quite playful." But the patterns we usually observe are that these types of experiments often lead to new use cases. So these are exactly the things we are very interested in.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I like that saying. You know, as a former engineer, many times you create something without knowing what it will be used for in the future. In fact, many years ago, I was involved in founding Intel's graphics chip business, and now graphics chips are being used in AI and agentic commerce. So I want to ask you. People are clearly very excited and interested in agentic commerce now, whether it's machine-to-machine or human-to-machine. How do you view this field? How can Coinbase participate in it?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Yes, we started focusing on building open infrastructure for agents early on. USDC on Base is inherently accessible to people or agents, and x402 is specifically designed for on-chain machine-to-machine payments. It is still early, but as agentic use cases become more real, we are already starting to see spontaneous adoption of these products.

My view on agentic commerce is that over time, you will see more and more agentic commerce happening on stablecoins because stablecoins are the internet-native currency, and the way machines pay and interact with services is very different from how humans do. For example, imagine you are in a marketplace, and there is a street vendor who is used to a specific human customer coming by, and this human has a fixed way of paying. But if an alien or a machine comes, you cannot assume that this alien or machine will pay in exactly the same way as a human.

Their payment behavior might be different. Machines typically pay per use because they are extremely efficient and rational. They can execute thousands of transactions daily, or even more. And I believe traditional payment infrastructure is not designed to support this type of payment behavior. So, as these novel payment use cases begin to emerge, more and more payments will migrate in this direction, just like when credit cards and debit cards were introduced— that introduced new ways for people to transact and truly resonated with the internet because you couldn't pay online with cash or traditional payment methods.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Speaking of which, I used to work at Citi Cards, you can see how old I am. Yes. Back in the day, we were concerned about whether consumers would feel safe entering their credit card numbers online. And now that is clearly no longer an issue. So there is indeed an evolutionary process involved, concerning consumer expectations, concerns, and behaviors. So when you talk about agentic commerce, people are indeed a bit uneasy; they worry about what these agents will do, and I know that mindset will change over time. Clearly, we are still in the early stages of agent commerce.

What do you think should be built, and how should it be built? Who should we collaborate with? I mean, it seems… well, it could potentially be overwhelming, and you might feel blocked before you even get in the door. So how do you keep moving forward?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Well, I think the key is to take a gradual approach, right? It’s about breaking the problem down into smaller pieces to tackle them one by one. So the first step is actually to determine whether AI agents can pay for services online or through these payment channels. The x402 protocol is specifically designed for this need. A new concern that has emerged is fraud, or how to perform identity verification—whether the agent wanting to make a payment has truly obtained credible authorization to conduct this transaction, or if the AI agent has gone off track and lost control? You will first notice the existence of these issues, and then as the application scenarios develop, you will solve them one by one.

So I believe that following the customers and the behavioral patterns we observe, especially in the early stages, is the best way to gradually build the product. These are also some real issues we are seeing now, and we are starting to think more about standards and how to address them—whether through a policy engine enforced at the wallet level, standards at the protocol level, or other mechanisms. I think you will see a variety of approaches. But what’s important is that everyone has recognized the existence of this problem, and there will be innovative companies like Coinbase, along with a large community of entrepreneurs, to build solutions to tackle each specific issue.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

When you want to create something in an emerging field, like agentic commerce, you always encounter the trade-off between building or buying. And you have also made many investments in Coinbase. How do you think about this? When do you consider collaborating with a company, and when do you prefer to build internally?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Well, once we clarify what we want to build and what the roadmap is, we consider whether to build, buy, or partner; in some cases, we may also invest and collaborate. Ultimately, it depends on whether we have the internal capability, the speed to market required to seize the opportunity, and what partners are available in the market. Sometimes when we see a problem, even if we want to find a partner, there are no reliable partners to choose from, so we have to build it ourselves, right?

Looking back at the early days of Coinbase, it wasn’t that we had to build every piece of infrastructure ourselves, but because there were no partners to collaborate with at that time, we had to build it ourselves. We have been continuously weighing this. And we are very humble about it—we don’t think we have to build everything ourselves, nor do we believe we can build everything ourselves. So as long as there are reliable partners who can bring differentiated expertise or have building experience in a specific area, we are very willing to create a win-win partnership.

In certain cases, if it’s more appropriate for the team to fully align and work towards the same roadmap, that’s usually when we consider acquiring a company and bringing it in-house—putting the team together, sharing the same roadmap, and moving forward in sync.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Thinking about the various segments of Coinbase’s business, on one hand, you have the investment and exchange business, and on the other hand, you have infrastructure and even payment services. If we look at these two segments, considering my own experience in the payment industry, I would say that payments are not the fastest-changing part of finance. Or I could also say that changes in the investment segment often happen faster than in payments. So how does the speed of the business influence your decisions on investment and collaboration?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Well, everything is changing quite rapidly now, right? You feel like the entire tech field is advancing at double speed. So speed is definitely a factor to consider. I mentioned earlier how important speed to market is—if in certain areas you think, "I have six months to deliver this product, and then I can remain competitive in the market and win," then you might not need to invest or acquire to deliver that solution. But more often than not, the time you have is greatly compressed, which makes us more inclined to invest, collaborate, and acquire.

Another factor is: if both parties see the same opportunity and are building towards the same vision, then to some extent, it’s a duplication of effort—why should we both do these things separately and each build a bunch of the same technology instead of doing it together and seizing this opportunity? That situation often resembles a win-win. So sometimes these things don’t always align, but when they do, they often create a great combination.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

That makes sense. Let’s change the topic a bit. I’m particularly curious because you studied neuroscience at UCLA. When I was in college, I initially wanted to be a physics professor because I was fascinated by how the world works and how the universe operates. But once I got into it, I realized I actually preferred hands-on work and practical applications rather than dealing with abstract concepts; I just liked building things. So I’m really curious about how you made your choice and what drove you to study neuroscience? How have those experiences extended to what you do today?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Well, good question, actually not too different from your experience. I always wanted to be a doctor when I was young, or at least I thought I did. So I studied neuroscience, and I have always been fascinated by the brain and the central nervous system—because even today, we understand a lot about the body and various human organs and physiological processes, but there is still so much we don’t know about the central nervous system and the brain. Things like sleep, cognition, and perception—we know a little, but we haven’t been able to turn it into a precise science, so that has always intrigued me. During college, I shadowed a few doctors and realized that being a doctor was completely different from what I had imagined.

I found that this job was often quite administrative, with less collaboration and relationship-building with patients, and in many cases, it felt a bit transactional. This made me start to wonder what other possibilities were out there. You know, I grew up in the Bay Area, always surrounded by technology. I grew up near the street where Intel is located, which is where you used to work. So I remember those early days, thinking about what I really wanted to do. Then I was quite lucky to hear about "strategic consulting"—I had never worked in a corporate environment before, nor had I seen what it was like to build a company or work in one.

Later, I was fortunate to get an internship at Bain for a summer, and I really enjoyed that collaborative way of working, thinking about issues that could impact the world on a large scale. That led me there. While I was there, I mainly did due diligence for private equity firms while thinking about future growth strategies. I wanted to be as close as possible to decisions like "Should we make this investment? Should we allocate this capital?" and I particularly wanted to focus on technology because that was my area of greatest interest, especially given my background growing up in the Bay Area. This led me to the investment fund I mentioned earlier.

Then around 2017, I got "bitten" by cryptocurrency, which ultimately brought me to Coinbase.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

That’s a great story. As you said, I can relate to many parts of it. So when you got that internship at Bain, what kind of problems were you facing at that time? Or, in that role, did you have to be a problem solver? What kind of problems were you particularly excited to solve that made you feel, "This is the right path for me"?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Good question. When I first joined Bain, I had no idea what I was doing, that was my starting point, right? Because I studied neuroscience, I had taken some economics and accounting classes, and I had invested my own money since I was young, but I didn’t have a traditional business background or business education. The problems that particularly excited me and that I wanted to solve at that time mainly fell into two categories. The first was when we were working with a large global media brand that was thinking about how people’s consumption of video would evolve. At that time, Netflix was taking away everyone’s jobs, while many traditional media companies were still tied to traditional cable packages.

The exercise we were doing was to envision what video and media consumption would look like 5 to 10 years from now, and what that would mean for the company’s strategy. After we completed this scenario planning, the end result was that the company acquired a business, obtained streaming technology, and launched its own video-on-demand service, which has now become a very core part of the company’s strategy. But what I truly enjoyed was playing the cards step by step—not just thinking, "Okay, what will happen next," but running through all the scenarios: What could happen? What’s the probability of each scenario occurring? If it does happen, what’s the impact? And then what are the next steps, third steps, fourth steps, and fifth steps?

That’s why I’m particularly interested in venture capital, because when you do venture capital, you’re never thinking about what next year will look like; you’re thinking about what the next five years will look like. You think about big thematic trends, like stablecoins, tokenization, and the integration of traditional finance and crypto finance in our field. This led me into investing, thinking about those long time horizons. I think of it as playing a strategy game where you have to anticipate: If this happens, how will these people react? If they do that, what should I do? It’s a very interesting thought process, looking at the entire board.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Indeed, indeed. I loved playing strategy games when I was young, so this feels…

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

The same. Yes.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

What kind of games did you play when you were young…

Well, actually at the beginning… what I really got into were real-time strategy games like StarCraft and Warcraft. I played a lot of these games and learned a lot from them, because you have to learn which resources to gather, how to allocate those resources to a unit or an army, and then use various tactics to figure out how to effectively utilize those resources to ultimately defeat your opponent. I think many of the principles here are actually very applicable and relevant to running a company. For example, what kind of people do we need to hire? How should we deploy these people in the most efficient and effective way to achieve the company's goals?

These statements have different names, but the underlying thinking is quite similar to many of these types of games.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I really like this point because I often think about how the simulation in games can allow you to… I think simulation technology is greatly underestimated in the real world, as it can model various scenarios and see what the outcomes would be. I often think about five to ten years into the future, and I believe we will see more and more of this kind of thing. It might sound a bit crazy, but it really is like… So, even when it comes to Coinbase, do you think about it this way, looking five to ten years ahead? Do you have any crazy ideas in mind? Or, even if not specifically about Coinbase, but regarding the entire economy?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Oh, that's a big question. Well, you know, I think for crypto, for… now I see very clearly that the initial vision of crypto and Coinbase is to create an open financial system. And I think you basically see it unfold bit by bit: first stablecoins were tokenized, and now various asset classes are being tokenized. Once these things are held on-chain, you can have use cases like trading, credit markets, etc., and their efficiency is much higher than that of the traditional financial system. I think for those of us in it today, it feels like it's happening slowly.

I remember a saying, I think it was Bill Gates who said: People tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what can happen in ten years. I feel like we are currently at some point in this decade-long journey. But looking back in a few years, we will think about asset settlement methods, like T+2 settlement, credit, and counterparty risk, and as the speed of capital and asset flow increases significantly, we will feel that those methods are quite outdated. So honestly, that's what excites me the most, especially in the entire fintech field. Then I think the second trend is obviously everything we see at the agent layer.

The way humans interact with any internet or mobile service is that we are very accustomed to attractive UIs, opening a service, and clicking a bunch of buttons. But I believe agents will ultimately become the execution layer for humans on the internet. So intent actually becomes the new interface for the future internet, rather than going to a specific website or opening a specific app. You will prompt your agent, and the agent will execute for you in the background. The implication of this is that terminal services will not disappear; they will just become different.

I think you will start to see more and more companies needing to optimize themselves to be default headless. What does headless mean? It means it's not designed for Sanj, nor for Shan, but for Sanj's agent or for Shan's agent. I think this is a very… I think it's happening slowly now, but in the coming years, it will all come together at some point, and headless will become the default. Similarly, just like when mobile phones emerged, they became a default.

The question is no longer "Do you have a mobile app?" but "You must have a mobile app," right? Because that's how humans interact with services now. So I believe this shift will gradually unfold in the coming years.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I think that's a very insightful comment because if you think back, even in the early days of mobile payments, there were various types of wallets forming alliances, like retailers and telecom operators, all worried that this would take down the existing giants, but that clearly didn't happen. The existing giants became even more entrenched; they just started doing different things, and they had to adapt. And what you just said about intent becoming the interaction interface, I definitely see that happening.

Um, and another question that popped into my mind is: I recently spoke with a former congressman who served on the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, and he mentioned that there are significant differences in how different generations view financial services. For example, young people and older individuals may have very different views on stablecoins and crypto. How do you interpret that? Combining the idea of intent becoming the interaction interface, but across different generations— they may have different ways of accepting this stuff and different comfort levels.

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Yes. I mean, new technologies often start with a younger audience and gain larger-scale adoption, and as these audiences and users grow up, they become more mainstream standards. So we are already seeing this with crypto today. You know, I think crypto is now quite widespread; for many young people, stablecoins are just dollars, and tokenized assets can be their securities. I think they view this much more smoothly than those who are accustomed to traditional models, as those people find it hard to change.

So we have been thinking about building for the future, starting with young users, but also making products as simple and understandable as possible for everyone, regardless of where they start.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

You… you know, you've been at Coinbase for quite a while now, and you've been the Chief Business Officer for about a year. During this time, what changes have you seen in this role? Clearly, the macro environment has changed, but you are still pushing towards a long-term vision. So, is it the role itself, or is there something unexpected about what you thought you would be doing?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Well, I wouldn't say it's unexpected; on the positive side, what I'm doing is what I thought I would be doing. Going back to your earlier question, one thing is starting to resonate particularly well, especially among younger users— we used to be accustomed to fragmented asset classes: Coinbase is a crypto platform, and you also have traditional stock brokerage accounts, and maybe a separate retirement account. And now we see a trend of integration; the user experience needs to be packaged together, and that's exactly what we want to do now.

And in the past year, this has been a substantial shift for Coinbase: we have now added stocks and prediction markets, and we have expanded our derivatives product line, and the growth of these businesses has been very good. But for us, the endgame is that these asset classes will ultimately all be tokenized. And once all these asset classes are tokenized and placed in the same wallet, I think that is the endgame for unifying all these systems, because you can achieve seamless settlement and interoperability between every asset.

This will also enhance capital efficiency because you no longer have to think: Oh my, I have $100 in this account, and it will take me three days to transfer it out and then a few more days to deposit it into another account—you can complete a transaction instantly. So, no matter what form of asset you hold value in, you can make it work better. This could also include things like luxury watches and artworks; once they are tokenized, you can more smoothly use them as collateral. I think this vision is now reaching a critical point: starting with the off-chain versions of these asset classes but building towards an on-chain future.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I also really like your statement just now because for me, you know, it’s that kind of… complete global perspective. In financial services, many situations I see are that services initially provided to super prime customers eventually trickle down to the rest of us. I think having this global perspective is something many at the top enjoy, and you want to bring that perspective to everyone. Is that fair to say?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

I think the best example is that most consumers keep their money in bank accounts, and the average yield they can get is basically zero, just a few basis points, right? There is an education issue here: actually, if you invest that money in a money market fund or some income-generating asset, you can earn quite a bit. And how great would it be if you could switch back and forth between these two very easily? That is, when you are just holding cash, the form you hold it in is generating income for you; and when you want to spend it, you don’t need to take three days to actually withdraw that money or transfer it to another account—you can do it instantly. I think people have become accustomed to this state that I call "inefficient."

And this inefficiency has created business models and revenue opportunities for those who can leverage it. But this situation is changing very rapidly, and I believe users and consumers are demanding much more from the value they hold. And we can definitely leverage stablecoins and tokenized assets to better meet these consumer needs.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

That perspective is very good, and as a consumer, I resonate with it. What about from the perspective of businesses? You know, how is that changing over there?

Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations):

Yes, I think from an institutional perspective, they understand it even more thoroughly because when you are dealing with very, very large numbers, a two-day delay in settlement ultimately becomes a significant opportunity cost and business opportunity. You know, I think now with regulations gradually coming into place, we are seeing very strong momentum in this area. We are also seeing the growth of technology—tokenized assets are continuing to grow, and they are now expanding into other asset classes.

You will see that many of the largest institutions have actually gone all in. I think they are now seeing the opportunity we have been talking about for over a decade, which is: we believe the infrastructure provided by blockchain can help build a more open and efficient financial system.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

You mentioned regulation. Obviously, the GENIUS Act has passed, while the CLARITY Act is still… From a regulatory perspective, how are you thinking about it now?

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

Yes, we clearly had a huge milestone last year with the passage of the GENIUS Act. However, the GENIUS Act will not officially take effect until the first quarter of 2027. So I think, even though we have seen so much growth over the past year and a half, the truly meaningful unlocking will not occur until early next year. The CLARITY Act is scheduled for a cloture vote on September 15. We are still extremely excited about the potential for CLARITY to establish a truly lasting foundation for crypto assets in the U.S.

That said, even without CLARITY, we have been very encouraged by the numerous proactive measures introduced by regulatory bodies like the SEC and CFTC—these measures clearly indicate that, regardless of CLARITY, there is a better understanding and educational awareness about crypto assets, which will allow companies like Coinbase and others to operate under more robust rules in the U.S. So all of our eyes are on getting CLARITY passed and moving forward; but even outside of that, we feel very good about the overall situation, especially in light of the current actions from the SEC and CFTC.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I resonate with that. I remember you attending various conferences overseas, hearing what was happening there, and thinking, that was years ago, why can't we do that? So this is indeed progress. Well, if you could wave a magic wand, from a regulatory perspective, what elements do you think would be most helpful in enabling more people to access these new financial services or making the entire system more efficient?

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

Yes. I think the first thing is clear definitions and classifications: what is a security, what is a commodity, or what is another type of asset. You know, putting on my venture capital hat, I have seen many entrepreneurs who are actually scared and hesitant to start companies in this space because they do not have a clear foundation to judge—well, what I am doing is not a security, so I won't face risks like enforcement actions. So I believe resolving this debate completely and providing a clear framework would unleash a lot more entrepreneurial spirit and innovation in this space, which would be a huge victory.

Regarding stablecoins, especially those compliant with the GENIUS Act, we believe a stablecoin is essentially one dollar, so it should be treated as one dollar everywhere. A very real example is that until just last year, even Coinbase as a company had to typically list our cash and our stablecoin separately when reporting finances. And doing so implicitly suggested they were different things, when in fact they should be the same. Now, this treatment has changed for companies like Coinbase.

But when we look at clearing institutions, they currently do not equate stablecoins with one dollar, which limits the potential use cases and adoption that these assets can achieve. So I think achieving the "moneyness" of stablecoins and getting all parties in the industry to agree that 1 USDC equals 1 dollar will be a meaningful advancement in supporting the future growth and adoption of stablecoins.

Then I think the third point, especially for tokenized securities, is to have better foundations and clarity on how these assets circulate, how they are accessed on-chain, where KYC applies and where it may not, and how dividends should be handled. We are working hard to expand on many of these aspects. But if there is more clarity in this area, I believe it would significantly enhance the momentum in this field.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I really like this answer; it's a very good summary. I know that when you were in college, you wanted to be a doctor, and I think you just provided a great diagnosis for our industry, so thank you------

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

The only diagnosis I've ever made in my life. I believe you have made many diagnoses, and I think you have been helping to solve many problems.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Before we wrap up, do you have any final words you would like to share with our audience?

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

I am just very excited about the prospects. I know, at least in terms of the crypto market, it feels a bit slow, like everything is dragging, but even if you set aside the price, the pace of adoption is really exciting from a fundamental perspective. We continue to see growth in stablecoin adoption and growth in the adoption of tokenized assets. If we look at the diversity of on-chain applications and protocols, it is also continuously increasing, and I think there are now some very compelling applications that abstract away all the complexities of crypto and simply provide a better financial product for end users. This excites me a lot because I believe we are at a turning point in this field, and I am very optimistic about the future.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

I feel the same way. That’s also why I joined this industry. If someone wants to learn more about Coinbase, where would you like them to look?

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

I would point them to our investor relations page or our Twitter, which is very active and vibrant.

Host (Sanjib Kalita):

Great, that’s awesome. Thank you so much, Shan. I really appreciate it; it’s truly an honor for me.

Shan Aggarwal (Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations at Coinbase):

Great. Thank you very much, Sanjib.