Coinbase (COIN) has its personal technique for BTC on the company steadiness sheet, however it’s not a bitcoin maximalist play like that of Michael Saylor’s Technique (MSTR).
On the corporate’s first quarter 2025 earnings name, CFO Alesia Haas revealed that Coinbase bought $150 million in crypto, “predominantly bitcoin,” bringing its long-term funding portfolio to $1.3 billion, or 25% of internet money.
Haas, nonetheless, went out of her method to attract a line between Coinbase and corporations that explicitly tie their company identification to holding bitcoin on the steadiness sheet.
“To be clear, we’re an working firm,” she mentioned. “However we do make investments alongside the house.”
In different phrases, Coinbase isn’t betting the corporate on bitcoin. On a Q&A name with retail buyers, Armstrong mentioned there was a temptation in its early days to place a whole lot of BTC on the steadiness sheet, however it was too dangerous. Crypto is unstable and, on the time, Coinbase was too younger of an organization to take that danger.
Now, as a listed large issues have modified, however there’s nonetheless not a must go all-in on bitcoin. Coinbase is allocating income from operations again into crypto belongings, equally to how a commodity agency would possibly accumulate uncooked supplies it understands deeply. The transfer is much less Michael Saylor and extra sector-aligned capital recycling.
The truth is, Coinbase didn’t even trumpet the acquisition in its shareholder letter. The information solely surfaced in response to a retail shareholder’s query about “accruing arduous crypto reserve belongings.”
CEO Brian Armstrong didn’t communicate instantly concerning the purchases, however he did supply a philosophical context. Coinbase, he reminded buyers, isn’t dabbling in crypto – it’s crypto.
“We’ve been targeted on crypto for the reason that starting, 12 years in the past, and we proceed to be targeted there,” Armstrong mentioned. “Crypto is consuming monetary providers.”
For Armstrong, shopping for BTC is a byproduct of conviction and operational alignment and never a headline play, treasury pivot, or activist guess.
Coinbase isn’t holding BTC to sign to markets some broader conviction, or grow to be a proxy like MSTR. Behind the accounting language is one thing deeper: a long-view guess that holding Bitcoin, like constructing the rails beneath it, is solely a part of Coinbase’s job.
That is not a treasury technique — it is one thing within the center.
