Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher
Since the beginning of this month, Coinbase's leadership team has undergone a series of intensive changes.
Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal will step down on July 31 to join a startup, with internal promotion Molly Abraham succeeding him as General Counsel.
Additionally, a new position of Vice Chairman has been established, to be held by Ryan VanGrack, with prior experience at the SEC and the White House, overseeing policy and corporate affairs.
Chief Human Resources Officer Lawrence Brock has transitioned to an advisory role, co-head of institutional business Greg Tusar has been moved to a policy position, and Base lead Jesse Pollak has stepped back to a supporting role.
On July 28, Coinbase appointed longtime company employee Rob Witoff as its new Chief Technology Officer; previously, Witoff served as Head of Platform at Coinbase.
These changes occur at a time when the company’s core business is under pressure. According to Benchmark’s report, the firm has lowered its revenue forecast for Coinbase’s second quarter due to weak trading activity in the crypto market, with spot trading volume on its centralized platform declining by approximately 28% in the second quarter, and the company’s stock price retreating by about 30% year to date.
Five key positions have been filled or exited—what kind of company is Coinbase becoming?
From winning a lawsuit to helping set the rules
Grewal's departure comes as Coinbase resolves multiple fronts with regulators.
As Chief Legal Officer, his most critical battle was the SEC’s securities lawsuit against Coinbase in June 2023, which alleged that the company operated as an unregistered exchange, broker, and clearing agency.This case was seen as a pivotal moment for the entire crypto industry’s ability to legally exist in the U.S., and it concluded in February 2025 with the SEC dropping the case and imposing no fines on the company.
According toThe Wall Street Journal, on July 22, Coinbase reached a settlement with the SEC over a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, in which the SEC will pay $150,000 and revise its recordkeeping policies; the case revealed the absence of nearly a year’s worth of communications from the tenure of former chair Gary Gensler.
Including the similar settlement with the FDIC in February, these lawsuits seeking accountability from regulators and demanding government transparency were each resolved before his departure.
Molly Abraham, who succeeds Grewal, has been promoted internally,while the newly created role of Vice Chairman has been assigned to VanGrack, with prior experience at the SEC and the White House, focusing on policy and external affairs; Tusar, with a background in institutional business, has also transitioned to policy.
The composition of the successor reveals a shift in the company’s focus toward legal and governmental affairs.
According to public filings, on July 27, Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad formally wrote to the CFTC in support of the new prediction market regulations and sought further coordination.
However, transitioning from litigation to setting rules has not been a smooth path.
The much-anticipated clear bill was stalled in the Senate, with some attributing part of the delay to Coinbase, as the bill’s restrictions on interest payments for stablecoins directly impact Coinbase’s customer acquisition revenue share with Circle. The company first loudly opposed the bill, then switched to actively supporting it; after several reversals, the revised version imposed even stricter limits on active yields, leading to questions about its stance.
CEO Brian Armstrong even stated that if the bill remains stalled long-term, parts of the company’s business may move out of the United States.
Expansion of trading entry points, contraction of on-chain narratives
Business-level adjustments are also focused, with direction pointing toward Everything Exchange.
Thisstrategy was proposed as early as December 2025, with the core goal of integrating trading for multiple asset classes—including cryptocurrencies, stocks, ETFs, prediction markets, and perpetual contracts—into a unified account, transforming Coinbase from a spot cryptocurrency exchange into infrastructure connecting on-chain economies with traditional finance.
This set of concepts was rapidly implemented in June this year, when the company launched and activated a large number of products on June 16.,including:
- Trade U.S. stocks, ETFs, and indices directly within the main app, and transfer existing holdings from external brokers.
- Launch tokenized U.S. stocks backed 1:1 by real stocks, available to non-U.S. users with 24/7 trading;
- Launch perpetual contracts allowing users to bet on a company’s valuation before its IPO, starting with SpaceX, followed by Anthropic and OpenAI;
- Launch index perpetuals bundling themes such as AI, China, and defense;
- Partner with the compliant platform Kalshi to integrate prediction markets covering elections, interest rate decisions, and macro events.
- In addition, the company has integrated Coinbase Advisor, touted as one of the first SEC-registered AI advisors.
In May of this year, the CFTC approved Coinbase as the first licensed institution to offer global crypto perpetual contracts to U.S. customers, enabling derivatives previously restricted to overseas markets to return to the U.S. market.
In July, the strategy continued to intensify. On July 21, Coinbase International Exchange launched 24-hour trading of S&P 500 index perpetual contracts. The following day, the head of Coinbase Canada publicly stated that the company is advancing efforts to build a comprehensive exchange in the region, offering crypto assets, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets.
In contrast to this expansion主线, Base has contracted. In mid-July, Pollak published a lengthy post handing over day-to-day management of the Base App back to Coinbase, entrusting it to Cobie, who is well known to the community, while he refocused on Base itself. He acknowledged that the bets placed over the past two years on social and creator initiatives had clearly misfired; what truly gained traction were prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and stablecoins, while the related social experiments failed to achieve sustainable adoption.
Brian Armstrong also stated that Base’s current core focus areas, in order, are trading, payments, and AI agents—all of which are interconnected: payments require foreign exchange trading, and AI agents will heavily involve trading and payment use cases, with the majority of current resources allocated to the trading sector.
This withdrawal can be seen as the conclusion of a phase in consumer-level on-chain narratives.
External positive pressure is also amplifying this urgency. According to Token Terminal data, just over ten days since its mainnet launch, Robinhood Chain’s daily trading volume has approached that of Base, backed by a more direct gateway of tokenized U.S. stocks and tens of millions of brokerage users.
Reimagine operations and products through AI
Returning to the line about the CTO role, it’s clear that AI plays two roles at Coinbase simultaneously.
Internally, it is a tool for reducing costs and improving efficiency. After the company cut approximately 14% of its workforce in May, the organization clearly shifted toward a leaner team model, where projects that previously required more than ten people now often only need two to three.
It is reported that currently 95% to 100% of the company’s code has been assisted by AI, up from approximately 40% in February this year; each engineer averages running 5 to 10 AI agents simultaneously, resulting in overall output equivalent to about 1,200 full-time developers. The company has even set a longer-term goal of having AI agents achieve workloads equivalent to 100,000 employees by 2030.
However,this streamlining has not been uniform. On July 22, Coinbase officially launched its Singapore office, with plans to increase local staff from approximately 150 to around 200 by the end of the year. The fastest-growing roles are 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 a post explicitly opposing the zero-sum thinking that if you're in crypto, you should shift to AI. He wrote that crypto is infrastructure—like electricity or the internet—and does not compete with the next wave of trends; rather, it enables them.
AI agents cannot open bank accounts and cannot wait days for wire transfers to clear—they need real-time programmable money, which cryptocurrency provides. He summarized the direction the company is moving in as agent finance, noting that the volume of transactions and payments by agents in the future could far exceed that of humans.
On the delivery side,the officialsaidlast month, agentic traffic on the Base documentation page surpassed human traffic for the first time. The company has also rolled out updates across three platforms: merchants can receive USDC payments from AI agents via Coinbase Business, individuals can use natural language commands to instruct agents to monitor markets and execute trades based on conditions—such as liquidating positions when BTC drops below a certain price—and developers can integrate agent payments with just three lines of code.
Founder of Real VisionRaoul Pal says that billions of AI agents are about to come online, paying each other for computation, data, and services at a scale never seen in human markets—and the existing financial system is too slow to handle it; Coinbase’s agent payment rail has already been adopted by Google and Amazon.
Both internal and external lines are proceeding in parallel, and AI has been heavily wagered on in both directions. However, neither path has yet been sufficiently validated.
Internally, it is not yet clear whether the efficiency gains from AI can fully offset the revenue pressure caused by declining trading volumes; there remains a considerable execution gap between current scale and long-term goals.
On the external side, agency financial products are still in their early stages..According to public data from agenteconomy.to, the total number of transactions for x402 is approximately 1.59 billion USD, but the total trading volume is only around 40-50 million USD, and a significant portion of early traffic came from meme-related testing and speculative activities, indicating a gap between the actual commercial scale and the claims made.
Conclusion
Amid three converging factors—pressured trading volumes,阶段性 regulatory victories, and a leap in AI capabilities—what kind of company is Coinbase becoming? The answer is beginning to take shape.
Companythis adjustmentoraims to reduce reliance on a single crypto trading cycle, exchanging it for a more stable foundation through broader asset coverage and higher operational efficiency, while proactively preparing for payment and trading demands that AI agents may generate.
This round of leadership adjustments addresses issues of organizational priorities and strategic focus. The real test is whether this team can deliver results during a sluggish cycle.