Coinbase announced Monday that it will acquire prediction-market start-up The Clearing Company — its tenth acquisition of the year — as the exchange doubles down on a strategy to become a one-stop financial app. The deal, whose terms were not disclosed, is expected to close in January 2026. Coinbase said the move complements a broader product push that will add stocks, advanced trading tools and prediction markets to its platform, aiming to knit together traditional finance, derivatives and crypto trading in a single experience. Why prediction markets? Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket drew mainstream attention during the 2024 U.S. presidential race, and Coinbase sees them as a high-frequency product that can boost user engagement beyond spot crypto trading. CEO Brian Armstrong has laid out a vision of Coinbase as a place to trade everything from stocks to streamlined futures and perpetual contracts — and prediction markets are a key building block in that roadmap. Coinbase already has a partnership with Kalshi as it builds out these capabilities. Strategic context Analysts say this diversification is timely. With competition heating up, expanding into multiple asset classes could help Coinbase reduce reliance on crypto trading volumes and create more consistent user interaction. Benchmark analysts specifically flagged prediction markets as likely to increase app engagement, while JP Morgan analysts noted that many of Coinbase’s new initiatives are clearly aimed at getting customers to use the platform more frequently — an area where the exchange has room to grow. Part of a bigger M&A and product swing This acquisition follows a busy year for Coinbase: in May it agreed to buy derivatives exchange Deribit for $2.9 billion, and in October it struck a roughly $375 million deal for investment platform Echo. The Clearing Company joins those purchases as Coinbase builds what it calls “the Everything Exchange.” Beyond outcome trading and prediction markets, Coinbase is rolling out additional products and infrastructure. It plans to introduce its own version of outcome trading and has launched “Coinbase Tokenize,” an institutional-grade platform for tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs). The exchange is also expanding its appeal to businesses and developers: Coinbase Business will be available to qualifying customers in the U.S. and Singapore, and an expanded API suite now includes custody, payments, trading and stablecoin services. New enterprise features Coinbase is also developing “custom stablecoins” for companies that want branded payment rails and is promoting an x402 payments standard designed to streamline stablecoin transactions tied to web requests — part of the company’s effort to simplify payments and on-chain integrations for commercial users. Market reaction COIN shares closed Monday at $247.90. Bottom line The Clearing Company deal underlines Coinbase’s broader pivot from a pure crypto exchange toward a multi-asset financial platform. By layering prediction markets, tokenization infrastructure and business-facing products on top of its core crypto offering, Coinbase is staking a bet that a more diversified product suite will deepen engagement and reduce exposure to crypto market cycles. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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