Comment by nikcub

19 hours ago

They're so tied to crypto that i'm surprised they haven't been tempted to diversify into other asset classes, or even yolo into prediction markets like robinhood did.

It would be slop, but the market would love it

I was logged in when I read your comment, so I flicked over to the tab to see what they have. There is a whole "Predict" section of the site I'd not looked at before with sports betting, elections, commodities etc.

Very curious why they haven’t diversified into real world assets. It seems like an obvious move, even if the margins would be lower than their fee business (~85% margins!!).

They’ve added tokens and altcoins to the platform, but I don’t think that’s a particularly strong long-term bet.

  • Because real world assets are heavily regulated and regulation has costs.

    The competition is also stiff with decades of experience and network effects

    The truth is these crypto shops have a pretty poor reputation in the traditional finance industry. Nobody in trading tech goes to work for them unless they offer insane salaries, because they (we) know it's an unstable place to be.

    • It's going the opposite direction. Those offering real world and tradfi assets are moving into the crypto space. That is going to eat Coinbase's lunch.

      The worst part of using something like Coinbase is having to do yet another bank transfer, waiting for it to clear, doing KYC/AML yet again, etc etc for what most people is just to buy one or two single asset (BTC or maybe ETH probably). Instead just click buy in Robinhood or Schwab along with everything else.

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Have they not? When I log in, I'm given the option to trade (apparently stocks, futures, commodities) and predict (via Kalshi, I think).