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GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the crypto encyclopedia your group chat pretends to have read. |
Here’s what we’ve got for you today: |
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Securitize is the platform institutions trust to tokenize their assets onchain. See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like. |
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COINBASE OWNS THE RAILS AI AGENTS PAY EACH OTHER ON 🤖 |
99% of onchain agentic commerce last quarter ran on USDC. |
97% of it settled through x402. |
90% moved over Base. |
Coinbase owns all three, and earns almost nothing from any of them yet. |
That was sitting in the Q2 deck. It just got buried under the headline figures. |
The part everyone already saw: revenue of $1.22B against Street expectations near $1.3B, a GAAP net loss of $359M, and a stock that fell about 5% after hours. |
But look at the quarter they reported into… |
Total crypto market spot volume fell 25%, total crypto market cap dropped 11%, and volatility compressed to multi-year lows. |
Crypto is in a rough patch, and you can't expect a crypto-native company to hit new records at a time like this - even Robinhood's crypto revenue fell 38% to $100M. |
Which brings us to what Coinbase actually built while the market was dead… |
The Bitcoin dependency is basically gone: |
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88% of net revenue now comes from something other than Bitcoin spot trading, and subscription and services alone accounts for 48% of it. |
They cut hard into the downturn too: |
Headcount went from 4,988 to 4,321. Adjusted expenses dropped 9% quarter over quarter. And the full year expense outlook came down to $4.2B to $4.45B.
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All of which produced a 14th consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, at $208M, in a market like this one. |
But the cost discipline isn't the exciting part to us… |
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| Assets still run on decades-old infrastructure: | Slow settlement, walled access, paperwork everywhere. | Tokenization fixes that but who’s actually doing it at an institutional scale? | With nearly nine years in the business, Securitize has become the platform institutions trust to bring assets onchain. | Here's why it stands out: | BlackRock, Morgan Stanley & ARK Invest have all invested in Securitize NYSE, VanEck & BNY have chosen Securitize to tokenize their stocks. The only public pure-play in tokenization infrastructure
| This isn't a crypto project waiting for TradFi to catch up. It's the regulated bridge that the largest asset managers in the world already build on. | See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like. |
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COINBASE OWNS THE RAILS AI AGENTS PAY EACH OTHER ON (P2) 🤖 |
The part of the report that IS exciting to us: those three agentic figures. |
According to the Artemis data in the Q2 deck: |
99%+ of onchain agentic commerce completed in USDC. 97%+ of onchain agentic transactions ran through x402. And 90%+ of agentic stablecoin volume settled on Base. 👇
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Coinbase is becoming the settlement layer for AI agents paying each other. |
Kyle Reidhead, our Head of Research, thinks this is the single most interesting thing happening at Coinbase right now - and it's a big reason he keeps holding it. |
The catch, which Brian flagged himself: it isn't driving meaningful revenue yet, and there's no guidance attached to it. |
Kyle's fine with that. Free options don't come with guidance. |
What he's less happy about is the everything-app race. |
Robinhood's event contracts generated $156M in Q2 revenue alone, ahead of both its equities and its crypto businesses. |
Coinbase's prediction markets grew 106% quarter over quarter and crossed $100M annualized, which is real growth off a much smaller base… but still second place. |
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At the same time - USDC (the other revenue engine) has stalled. Average USDC market cap sat roughly flat at $77B, and stablecoin revenue slipped to $292M from $305M. |
The split underneath is sharper than the total suggests… |
Revenue on USDC held inside Coinbase products actually rose ($161M to $174M), while the off-platform portion fell from $163M to $146M. |
I.e. the engine is growing where Coinbase controls the surface, and shrinking everywhere else. |
Kyle's view: Coinbase is struggling to expand outside its crypto bubble, and that's what's holding it back in this bear. |
But he's still long, for two reasons… |
Coinbase is the number one U.S. exchange for both retail and institutions, so it wins the recovery by default, and Kyle thinks crypto has already bottomed. |
Then there's the CLARITY Act, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently described as sitting on the one yard line. |
That's the unlock for stablecoins and tokenization that Coinbase is built to capture. |
He holds it as a call on CLARITY plus the crypto rebound, with the agentic rails as free upside on top. |
Long term, he backs Brian to figure out the rest. |
The clock is ticking, though. |
ICYMI: Kyle first called COIN to PRO members as low as ~$60, back in 2023 (it trades at ~$147 at the time of this writing). | | That's what getting in early buys you: enough room that a brutal crypto bear and a missed quarter still leave you multiples ahead. | If you want Kyle's calls in real time, you can try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days. |
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P.S. We went live with Coinbase's CBO Shan Aggarwal yesterday, watch it here. 👇 |
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BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪 |
Read our review on CoinRabbit now. CoinRabbit is an insanely user-friendly place to borrow against 350+ different crypto assets with no KYC. |
Tom Lee: This is the signal you've been waiting for - hedge funds just sold tech at the fastest pace in nearly 10 years. "Massive deleveraging has already taken place." |
Warsh: If the Fed fogs up market info, "I can assure you that we're going to have less information, less ability to land the plane successfully and deliver price stability." |
Saylor: The Bitcoin debate is basically over. "The Senate's pro Bitcoin. The House is pro Bitcoin. The cabinet is pro Bitcoin" - plus every financial regulator. |
Get 15% off with code “MILKRO_15.” The European Blockchain Convention is back in Barcelona on September 16-17.** |
**this is partner content. |
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See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like. |
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