28th January 2026 > > ARK Invest research & Coinbase, conqueror of the world.
- Mark Timmis
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
tl;dr
An interesting piece of research from ARK Invest. Coinbase is going to rule the world.
Market Snap
Market Wrap
The dollar sell-off doesn’t help the value of crypto bags for non-US based investors, though over time commodities that are priced in dollars will respond with a commensurate dollar price increase. Trump’s response yesterday to journalists’ questions on this topic, meandering as always, suggests that the administration is comfortable with ongoing devaluation.
Curious Crypto’s Commentary – ARK Invest
Cathy Wood’s passion is for the power of technology to disrupt legacy systems, which is why she is such a vocal supporter of cryptos. But’s that not all. In Big Ideas 2026, her research team:
“… examines how converging technologies – led by Artificial Intelligence – are reshaping productivity, capital allocation, and the structure of the global economy.
This year’s research highlights critical inflection points across AI, robotics, energy, digital finance, and biology—areas where rapid technological progress may matter most.”
It’s a cracking piece of research available free. Read all 100-odd pages now:
If you only want to focus on cryptos, pages 38 to 57 are for you. Interesting to note the Vanguard’s pivot away from authoritarianism and towards embracing privacy and freedom by allowing its clients to access spot BTC ETFs is claimed to be an important event for the wholesale adoption of BTC. I guess that’s because there are now no naysayers left in the TradFi world.
Curious Crypto’s Commentary – Coinbase & Jupiter
Coinbase, under the inspired leadership of Brian Armstrong, has the ambition to become an Everything App. Its role within the USDC infrastructure will place it at the heart of the stablecoin revolution that will dominate TradFi payment rails soon. Tokenised RWAs will be tradeable on Coinbase, and I see a banking license heading its way. Maxis don’t like it, but the wholesale adoption of cryptos cannot happen within an ecosystem that relies entirely on self-custody.
This latest development proves that point in spades.
In 2024, the self-custodial Coinbase Wallet integrated with Jupiter, a large Solana-based DEX aggregator, on which there are literally hundreds of thousands or more of coins, which are mostly meme-based, speculative, and of little to no benefit to humanity. Still, with volume of around $250 billion in 2025, Jupiter is a major player within DeFi. This integration allowed Coinbase to access that liquidity for its clients who are comfortable with self-custody, whilst increasing fee flow.
The real strategic value of that collaboration has now been revealed – Coinbase is integrating Jupiter for its clients who access Coinbase as a centralised cryptocurrency exchange either in the app or via a web browser. This opens the DeFi world to the very large number of crypto investors who do not wish to worry about wallets and private keys but want to rely on legacy username/password/2FA processes whilst delegating the security of their assets to Coinbase, a company which is the global leader by far in the crypto custody business.
This is of course just the start. Coinbase will integrate many other DeFi platforms within its centralised business providing an ever-increasing revenue stream driven by other people’s innovations, which is a very handy position to be in. An added benefit is the removal of the ever-present risk of interacting with malicious websites. The feral scammers’ opportunities to ruin people’s lives has suddenly got a whole lot smaller.
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Coinbase’s ambition is larger than most. To date, its execution has been very successful – Brian is a true visionary and a great leader. At a market cap of just $57bn, this stock will remain a core holding of the CC Treasury for a very long time.
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