Coinbase accelerates building a "universal exchange": acquires prediction market company The Clearing Co.

America’s leading cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase recently announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire the prediction market startup The Clearing Company, marking its tenth acquisition since 2025. This acquisition comes shortly after Coinbase officially launched its prediction market feature to users last week, aiming to rapidly expand its influence in the emerging field of event contract trading by bringing in top professional teams. Prediction markets allow users to trade on the outcomes of real-world events and have become a high-frequency, high-stickiness business track in the competition among crypto and fintech companies since the outbreak during the 2024 US presidential election. This move clearly demonstrates Coinbase’s grand strategy to transcend single cryptocurrency trading and transform into a comprehensive “all-in-one exchange.”

Strategic Placement: Why is Coinbase acquiring The Clearing Company at this time?

Coinbase’s acquisition pace accelerated again towards the end of 2025. This week, the company officially announced that it had reached an acquisition agreement with the professional startup in the prediction market space, The Clearing Company, with the transaction expected to close in January 2026. Although the specific deal amount was not disclosed (Coinbase stated that “the amount is not important”), it is known that the purchase price will include a combination of cash and Coinbase stock. The most notable aspect of this acquisition is its excellent timing—just a week before the announcement, Coinbase had begun to gradually roll out its own prediction market platform to some users, allowing them to place bets on real-world outcomes such as political elections, economic data, and sports events within a familiar trading interface.

Therefore, this acquisition is not merely an asset expansion but a highly synergistic “talent and expertise acquisition.” The Clearing Company was founded by veteran prediction market expert Toni Gemayel, who previously served as head of growth at Polymarket and Kalshi, two major prediction market platforms, with deep understanding of event contract product design, market operations, and regulatory compliance. The company team consists of about 10 people, almost all of whom are joining Coinbase. Coinbase’s Vice President of Product Management, Max Branzberg, stated plainly that the core of this acquisition is “combining The Clearing Co. team’s unique experience and talent with Coinbase’s global platform.” This means Coinbase is not just buying a product but directly integrating the most scarce industry expert team, aiming to quickly solve the most challenging professional issues in new business expansion, shorten the learning curve, and accelerate product iteration and market expansion.

For Coinbase, this move is a key step in realizing its vision of building a “universal exchange.” The vision aims to create a unified platform where users can trade all asset classes, including cryptocurrencies, stocks, derivatives, and now the newly added “real-world events.” As a high-participation, high-frequency trading category, prediction markets can effectively increase user activity and platform stickiness, reducing reliance on the more volatile spot crypto trading revenue. Wall Street broker Benchmark’s analysts precisely pointed out in a report last week: “Prediction markets provide the company with a high-participation, high-frequency product, broadening reasons for users to open its app, beyond just cryptocurrencies.”

Rising Trend: Why are prediction markets becoming a must-have for exchanges?

Prediction markets are not a brand-new concept, but their entry into mainstream fintech and the crypto world, and the subsequent platform competition, is only within the past one or two years. Essentially, prediction markets allow users to buy and sell financial contracts based on the outcomes of real-world events. For example, users can trade contracts like “Will Candidate X win the election,” “Will the Federal Reserve cut interest rates at a certain meeting,” or “Will a certain team win the championship.” Supporters believe that the prices generated by real money voting can more accurately reflect collective expectations than traditional polls or expert forecasts, serving as a powerful information aggregation tool.

The intense US presidential election in 2024 became a catalyst for the explosion of prediction markets. During this period, trading volume on platforms like Polymarket surged, attracting significant media attention and public participation, successfully pushing this niche product into mainstream visibility. This momentum continued and strengthened into 2025. According to The Block’s data dashboard, in just November 2025, the combined trading volume of the two leading platforms, Polymarket and Kalshi, reached approximately 8 billion USD, setting a record. This fully demonstrates the enormous user demand and growth potential of this market category.

Key information and acquisition details of prediction markets

• Market heat: In November 2025, the top platforms Polymarket and Kalshi had a total trading volume of 8 billion USD.
• Acquisition target: The Clearing Company, founded in 2025, completed a seed round financing of 15 million USD in August, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and others.
• Core team: Founder Toni Gemayel, who previously served as head of growth at Polymarket and Kalshi.
• Acquirer strategy: Coinbase’s tenth acquisition in 2025, following the launch of its own prediction market platform.
• Transaction goal: Acquire a professional team to accelerate the expansion of “event contract” trading categories and improve the “all-in-one exchange” ecosystem.

For trading platforms like Coinbase, prediction markets are attractive for multiple reasons. First, they offer a new asset class with relatively low correlation to traditional financial markets, helping diversify business risks. Second, ongoing political, sports, and entertainment events continuously generate trading topics, driving high-frequency user interaction and capital flow, complementing the often narrative-driven, volatile spot crypto market. Lastly, prediction markets have a natural synergy with blockchain technology. Smart contracts can ensure automatic and transparent payouts, while tokenization can enhance liquidity and accessibility. As Branzberg said, “More financial systems are moving on-chain, and prediction markets are part of this transition.” Coinbase clearly aims to seize this integration trend, building prediction markets into its next growth engine within a compliant framework.

Expanding the landscape: decoding Coinbase’s “all-in-one exchange” ambitions and acquisition matrix

Acquiring The Clearing Company is not an isolated move by Coinbase in 2025 but part of its systematic construction of an “all-in-one exchange” landscape. Over the past year, Coinbase’s acquisition strategy has shown clear main lines: consolidating core advantages, expanding asset boundaries, and capturing future trends.

In consolidating core strengths, the most significant deal was the May 2025 acquisition of Deribit, the world’s largest crypto options exchange, for 2.9 billion USD. This transaction firmly established Coinbase’s top position in crypto derivatives. In expanding asset boundaries, Coinbase acquired investment platform Echo for about 375 million USD in October, and launched stock trading features this month, directly targeting traditional securities businesses and competing with Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and others. In capturing future trends, besides this prediction market acquisition, Coinbase’s investments in privacy network Iron Fish, marketing platform Spindl, and others, show its layout for long-term development elements in the crypto ecosystem.

All these actions point to a single ultimate goal: transforming Coinbase from a “cryptocurrency buying and selling portal” into a comprehensive financial portal where users can manage all their digital assets (and some traditional assets). In this “all-in-one exchange” blueprint, cryptocurrencies are the starting point and feature but no longer the entirety. Users can perform a full range of operations—from buying Bitcoin, trading Tesla stocks, investing in government bond ETFs, to small investments in next year’s Oscar winners—all within one account and one app. This “one-stop” experience brings far greater user stickiness and data value than a single business model.

JPMorgan analysts, after Coinbase’s new product launch, pointed out: “We see many of Coinbase’s new initiatives encouraging and incentivizing customer engagement, which was previously limited in stages.” Prediction markets exemplify such high-participation products. Through continuous acquisitions, Coinbase is rapidly filling gaps in traditional finance, complex derivatives, and specific verticals, attempting to build a powerful and hard-to-copy integrated ecosystem moat.

Future competition and cooperation: the real test of regulation, competition, and prediction markets

Despite the promising outlook, Coinbase still faces significant challenges on its prediction market and broader “all-in-one exchange” path. The foremost is regulatory compliance. Prediction markets have long operated in a gray area between financial instruments and gambling, with vastly different legal classifications across jurisdictions. Critics argue that such products blur the line between financial markets and gambling. Although Coinbase emphasizes launching services through regulated venues and collaborating with licensed entities like Kalshi to obtain initial liquidity, as the business scales, ongoing regulatory communication and compliance costs worldwide will be substantial tests.

Second, market competition is rapidly intensifying. Coinbase is not the only giant recognizing the value of prediction markets. Besides Polymarket, which has established early advantages and community effects, and Kalshi, focused on compliant markets, traditional brokerages, betting companies, and even social media platforms could become potential competitors. The competition in this track will be a comprehensive contest of product experience, liquidity depth, regulatory licenses, and user scale. While Coinbase has a large user base, how effectively it can convert crypto users into prediction market traders and attract entirely new external users remains to be validated.

Ultimately, all of this will return to user value itself. Can prediction markets transcend fleeting curiosity and speculation to develop into a mainstream financial product with long-term vitality? Can they truly serve as practical tools for hedging risks and discovering prices, rather than just entertainment bets? This depends on the industry’s collective effort and positive image building. For Coinbase, acquiring a professional team is just the first step. How to organically integrate this business into its vast ecosystem, achieve synergistic growth, and properly handle the accompanying financial and social responsibilities will be the key to whether its “all-in-one exchange” dream can become reality. At the crossroads of crypto and traditional finance, Coinbase’s acquisition undoubtedly provides an important case for observing the next generation of financial platforms.