Morning Minute: Coinbase Pushes to Become ‘Everything Exchange’ With Stocks, Perps, and AI

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our new daily news show covering all of the top stories in 5 minutes, downloadable on Apple Pod or Spotify.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors fall 2-3% ahead of Warsh’s first FOMC today; BTC at $64.8k
• Saylor’s STRC falls to $91.80, lowest level of the year
• Coinbase rolls out suite of new products including stocks, perps and AI
• Ethereum’s Amsterglam upgrade enters final development stage
• SBF teases launching a coin when he gets out of prison

🏦 Coinbase Pushes to Become an “Everything Exchange” With Stocks, Perps, and AI

Coinbase unveiled a sweeping set of products on Tuesday as part of its latest System Update, making its clearest move yet to become what it calls the “everything exchange.”

The list of updates is long. Customers can now trade US stocks, ETFs, and indexes alongside crypto, and even transfer a stock portfolio from another brokerage. On top of that comes:

• options on both equities and crypto
• tokenized stocks backed one-for-one by real shares with dividends passed through
• perpetual futures tied to thematic baskets like AI, defense, and Chinese equities;
• pre-IPO perps
• an SEC-registered AI advisor
• automated trading agents, and
• consumer products including a USDC-backed credit card, Bitcoin travel rewards, and loans against staked Solana.

The pitch is that the wall between crypto and traditional finance is coming down, and Coinbase wants to be the single app standing on the other side of it. Move your equities over from Schwab or Robinhood, trade options and crypto in the same place, borrow against your staked SOL, and let an AI advisor manage the whole thing. That is a brokerage, a bank, and a robo-advisor on top of a crypto exchange. It’s certainly a win for users, with more options than ever.

So will this move the needle for Coinbase?

They certainly aren’t early with these updates, but the vision makes sense. Agentic trading is clearly the future and enabling infra for AI agents is a smart step forward. And tokenized stocks and perp futures are as hot as ever on the back of Hyperliquid’s scorching success. If the overall pie grows enough (and Standard Chartered is calling for RWAs for 40x by 2030), Coinbase may not even need to steal market share to win. They can ride the rising tides.

🤖 SpaceX Buys AI Coding Startup Cursor for $60 Billion

Days after the largest IPO in history, SpaceX is already spending the stock.

Yesterday it agreed to buy Anysphere, the maker of AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal that folds it into xAI. That’s roughly double the $29 billion valuation Cursor carried in November.

And Cursor’s growth story back up that valuation bump. It went from $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2024 to $1 billion by late 2025 to more than $2 billion by February, the fastest a software company has ever scaled, with about 50,000 engineering teams and nearly 70% of the Fortune 1000 on board, from Nvidia to Salesforce.

Cursor rents the intelligence that powers it, paying Anthropic and OpenAI for the models behind every suggestion, and those inference bills have been punishing. At one point in 2025 it was paying Anthropic an estimated $650 million a year against roughly $500 million in revenue, an underwater gross margin no normal software company would survive. Worse, its biggest supplier is also its biggest rival, since Anthropic’s Claude Code competes head-on with Cursor. It was effectively funding the company trying to replace it.

The key business change was to stop renting. Cursor’s own Composer model and cheaper model routing dragged it to slight gross-margin profitability on enterprise by April, and that’s exactly where SpaceX fits. Cursor already had a deal to tap xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, and owning it lets Musk feed it cheap compute, shift more work onto xAI’s models, and finally fix the margins while cutting the cord to Anthropic. Cursor had rebuffed OpenAI twice to stay independent, so it’s telling that the first big thing Musk does with SpaceX’s public stock is buy his way into enterprise AI. And at a forecasted $6 billion run rate, $60 billion is under 10x forward revenue. So he got a decent deal…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are red down 2-3% ahead of FOMC; BTC -3% at $64.8k; ETH -3% at $1,763; SOL -4% at $72.20; HYPE -6% at $71.
• UNI (+10%), ASTER (+10%) and VVV (+5%) led top movers
• Oil -2% at $76.50; Gold even at $4,350
• Stock futures are mixed ahead of today’s FOMC (Warsh’s first) with the Nasdaq up 0.5% but DOW flat
• Saylor’s STRC fell as low as $91.80 yesterday, its lowest level of the year
• Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, entered its final development stage, with developers testing all planned changes on devnets before moving to testnets
• Binance is likely to be rejected for an EU license under MiCA, which could curb its access to the European market as the compliance deadline nears
• Robinhood cut about 10% of its staff to streamline operations as its crypto trading revenue declines
• Altcoin sell pressure on spot exchanges has hit a 5-year high according to data from CryptoQuant
• Kalshi perps volume passed $5.5B in its first two weeks since launch, with plans to expand into new asset classes

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were red; DOGE -3%, SHIB -1%, PEPE -2%, PENGU -2%, TRUMP -2%, BONK -2%, SPX +12%, FARTCOIN -1%
• OGDOGE (+65%), Merlin (+65%), and Trilly (+675%) led movers on Solana
• Base movers included Edel (+20%), PRVXT (+27%) and LBM (+34%)

📈 Myriad Market of the Day

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• SBF teased launching his own coin after being released from prison, as building a real business would require $50M-$100M
• MegaETH delivered $1M in USDM to those who participated in its points program and teased their MOSS program starting today
• MNSTR hit a smashing new ATH in daily gacha volume with $1.5M as the broader gacha meta grinds higher

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mixed; Punks +2% at 33.5 ETH, BAYC even at 9.18 ETH, Pudgy -6% at 4.48 ETH; Hypurr’s -7% at 253 HYPE
• Re0rder (+40%) and Normies (+13%) led top movers