Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher
This month, Coinbase's leadership has undergone intensive reshuffling.
Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal will leave on July 31 to join a startup. Molly Abraham, promoted internally, will succeed as General Counsel.
Simultaneously, a new Vice Chairman position was created for Ryan VanGrack, who has a background at the SEC and the White House, to oversee policy and corporate affairs.
Chief People Officer Lawrence Brock will move to an advisory role; Greg Tusar, co-head of institutional business, will transfer to a policy position; and Base lead Jesse Pollak is stepping back from a frontline role.
On July 28, Coinbase appointed veteran employee Rob Witoff as its new Chief Technology Officer. Witoff previously served as Coinbase's Head of Platform.
These changes come at a time when the company's core business faces pressure. A report from Benchmark noted, affected by weak crypto market trading activity, the institution has lowered its revenue forecast for Coinbase's Q2. Spot trading volume on centralized exchanges fell approximately 28% in Q2, and the company's stock price has retreated about 30% year-to-date.
With these five key positions seeing changes, what kind of company is Coinbase being pushed towards?
From Winning Lawsuits to Shaping Rules
Grewal's departure coincides with the resolution of several of Coinbase's legal battles with regulators.
As Chief Legal Officer, his most crucial battle was the SEC's securities lawsuit against Coinbase in June 2023. The case, which accused the company of operating as an unregistered securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency, was seen as pivotal for the crypto industry's legal existence in the U.S. It concluded in February 2025 with the SEC dropping the case and not imposing a fine on the company.
According to the Wall Street Journal, on July 22, Coinbase settled a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the SEC. The SEC will pay $150,000 and reform its record-keeping policy. The case exposed the absence of nearly a year's worth of communication records from the tenure of former Chairman Gary Gensler.
Coupled with a similar settlement with the FDIC in February, these lawsuits, aimed at holding regulators accountable and demanding government transparency, were also concluded before his departure.
Molly Abraham, who replaces Grewal, was promoted internally. Meanwhile, the newly created Vice Chairman role went to VanGrack, with his SEC and White House background, focusing specifically on policy and external affairs. Tusar, with his institutional business background, also moved to a policy role.
The composition of the successors reveals a shift in the company's legal and governmental affairs priorities.
According to public filings, on July 27, Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad sent a formal letter to the CFTC regarding predictive market rule-making, expressing support for the new rules and seeking further coordination.
However, the transition from fighting lawsuits to shaping rules has not been smooth.
The much-anticipated clarity bill has stalled in the Senate. Some attribute the delay partly to Coinbase, as the bill's restrictions on stablecoin interest payments directly affect the revenue-sharing agreement between Coinbase and Circle for customer acquisition.
The company initially opposed it loudly, then pivoted to push for it. After several twists, the new version imposed stricter limits on active yield, 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 might move out of the U.S.
Expanding Trading Entry Points, Contracting On-Chain Narratives
Business-level adjustments are also concentrated, pointing towards the "Everything Exchange" strategy.
This strategy was proposed as early as December 2025. Its core is to integrate trading of various assets—cryptocurrencies, stocks, ETFs, prediction markets, perpetual contracts—into a unified account. The goal is to transform Coinbase from a spot crypto exchange into infrastructure connecting the on-chain economy with traditional finance.
This vision was rolled out intensively in June. On June 16, the company launched and activated a large batch of products at once, including:
- Opening U.S. stock, ETF, and index trading within the main app, allowing users to transfer existing holdings from external brokerages.
- Launching tokenized U.S. stocks for non-U.S. users, claimed to be 1:1 backed by real stocks, supporting 24/7 trading.
- Introducing Pre-IPO perpetuals for betting on a company's valuation before its IPO, with SpaceX as the first target and Anthropic and OpenAI following.
- Launching index perpetuals bundling themes like AI, China, and defense.
- Partnering with compliant platform Kalshi to integrate prediction markets covering elections, interest rate decisions, and macro events.
- Additionally, the company embedded Coinbase Advisor, claimed to be among the first SEC-registered AI financial advisors.
In May, the CFTC approved Coinbase as the first licensed entity to offer global crypto perpetual contracts to U.S. clients, allowing its previously offshore derivatives to return to the U.S. market.
In July, the strategy intensified. On July 21, Coinbase International Exchange launched S&P 500 index perpetual contracts supporting 24/7 trading. The next day, Coinbase's Canada head stated publicly that the company is advancing plans to build an all-in-one exchange in Canada encompassing crypto assets, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets.
In contrast to this expansion, Base is contracting. In mid-July, Pollak posted a long article handing the daily management of the Base app back to Coinbase, to be taken over by the community-known Cobie, while he himself refocused on the Base chain. He admitted that the bets on social and creator directions over the past two years were significantly off the mark. What actually succeeded were prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and stablecoins, while 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 interconnected. Payments require foreign exchange trading, and AI agents will heavily involve trading and payment scenarios. Currently, most resources are concentrated on the trading track.
This retreat can be seen as a phased conclusion of the consumer-grade on-chain narrative.
External competitive pressure is amplifying this urgency. According to Token Terminal data, just over ten days after its mainnet launch, Robinhood Chain's daily transaction volume is already approaching Base's, backed by the more direct entry point of tokenized U.S. stocks and tens of millions of brokerage users.
Using AI to Reshape Operations and Products
Returning to the CTO appointment, AI is playing two roles simultaneously at Coinbase.
Internally, it's a tool for cost reduction and efficiency improvement. Following a roughly 14% staff reduction in May, the organization explicitly shifted towards leaner team structures. Projects that previously required over ten people now often need only two or three.
Reportedly, 95% to 100% of the company's code is now completed with AI assistance, a figure that was only around 40% in February. Each engineer on average runs 5 to 10 AI agents simultaneously, collectively equivalent to the output of about 1,200 full-time developers. The company even has a longer-term goal: by 2030, for AI agents to perform work equivalent to that of 100,000 employees.
However, this streamlining is not uniform. On July 22, Coinbase's Singapore office officially opened. The company plans to increase its local headcount from about 150 to around 200 by year-end, with the fastest-growing roles in engineering and institutional sales. The team is also exploring equipping AI agents with stablecoin wallets.
Externally, AI is 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 pivot to AI. He wrote that crypto is infrastructure, like electricity or the internet; it does not compete with the next wave of trends but rather supports them.
AI agents cannot open bank accounts and cannot wait days for wire transfers. They need real-time, programmable money, which is precisely what crypto provides. He summarized the company's current direction as "agentic finance" and pointed out that future transaction and payment volumes by agents could far surpass human ones.
In terms of deliverables, the official announcement stated that last month, agentic traffic on Base's documentation pages exceeded human traffic for the first time. The company simultaneously released updates across three fronts: merchants can receive USDC payments from AI agents via Coinbase Business; individuals can use natural language commands to have agents monitor markets and execute based on conditions (e.g., sell all if BTC falls below a certain price); and developers can integrate agent payments with three lines of code.
Real Vision founder Raoul Pal stated that billions of AI agents are about to come online, and they will pay each other for computation, data, and services at a scale never seen in human markets. The existing financial system is too slow and cannot handle this. Coinbase's agent payment rail has already been adopted by Google and Amazon.
Both internal and external fronts are running in parallel, with heavy bets placed on AI. However, both directions currently lack full validation.
On the internal front, it's unclear whether the efficiency gains from AI can truly offset revenue pressure from declining trading volume. There's also a significant execution gap from the current scale to the long-term goal.
On the external front, agentic finance products are still in their early stages. According to public data from sites like agenteconomy.to, x402 has accumulated around 159 million transactions, but the cumulative transaction value is only about $40-50 million. Moreover, a significant portion of early traffic came from meme-related testing and speculative activity. There remains a distance between the actual business scale and the rhetoric.
Conclusion
Against the triple backdrop of trading volume pressure, a temporary regulatory victory, and a leap in AI capabilities, what kind of company is Coinbase aiming to become? The answer is beginning to take shape.
This set of adjustments aims to reduce reliance on the single crypto trading cycle. By broadening asset coverage and improving operational efficiency, it seeks a more stable foundation while simultaneously positioning early 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 is whether this combination can deliver results during a sluggish cycle.
