Coinbase Now Owns Every Layer of Its Derivatives Stack After CFTC Approval

Coinbase has won approval to clear its own derivatives trades, completing a set of three federal registrations that lets the crypto exchange run a futures business end to end without renting any part of it.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission registered Coinbase Clearing LLC as a derivatives clearing organization on Monday. The company already held the other two pieces: Coinbase Derivatives, LLC as a designated contract market, and Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc. as a futures commission merchant.

Owning the clearinghouse changes what Coinbase can build. “For the first time, we can create and settle fully collateralized contracts directly,” the company said in a statement, which it expects to mean faster product development and fewer dependencies when launching something new.

USDC as clearing collateral

Coinbase calls it the first USDC-native clearinghouse, taking the stablecoin as collateral and settling 24 hours a day, which it describes as “purpose-built for the always-on markets of the future.”

Traditional clearinghouses run on cash and Treasuries and settle on a banking calendar. Accepting a stablecoin as margin removes the reason a derivatives venue has to stop trading at the weekend.

Coinbase Clearing handles fully collateralized contracts, so the margined derivatives business and the single stock perpetuals it plans to launch on Apple, Tesla and Nvidia will continue to clear through existing partners.

“Today’s CFTC approval completes Coinbase’s end-to-end derivatives infrastructure,” said Molly Abraham, the company’s general counsel.

Crypto exchanges and derivatives

Payward, parent company of rival crypto exchange Kraken, paid $550 million for Bitnomial last year to acquire the same combination of exchange and clearinghouse registrations that Coinbase has now built in house.

Payward is already using them. It plans to deploy perpetual futures for U.S. clients on Hyperliquid, with Bitnomial creating and clearing the market while it runs on a public blockchain. With its own clearinghouse, Coinbase has the licences to attempt something comparable, though it has yet to announce any such plan.

The approval lands in a busy month for the company. Also on Monday it deepened a partnership with Citi, letting the bank’s institutional clients accept stablecoin payments at checkout. Last week it rolled out fixed-rate USDC loans against Bitcoin with Morpho, and in August it launched tokenized stocks on Base for non-U.S. users.