| The exuberance over Donald Trump’s election win is rippling through multiple corners of the crypto world. At Coinbase Global Inc., it means optimism about being able to offer more products and tokens that were previously out-of-bounds for US exchanges. The San Francisco-based company is hoping to list more smaller tokens including memecoins on the largest US crypto exchange. Except for Bitcoin, many tokens are considered by the US to be securities, a characterization that Coinbase and other exchanges have rejected. While there are some constraints, Coinbase still offers several such tokens, including Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency. Once the Trump administration offers more specifics around its plans for the digital-asset sector, Coinbase will be able “to do more with some of those projects and some of those tokens that we weren’t able to offer and some of the services we were not able to offer Americans,” Tom Duff Gordon, vice president of international policy at Coinbase, said in an interview. “We’re talking more about some of the smaller tokens, some of the memecoin tokens.” One such token, the Shiba-Inu themed Dogecoin that has been promoted by Trump supporter Elon Musk, has jumped more than 170% in the last month. Gordon’s optimism underscores the mood in the industry during the crypto market’s resurgence after Trump’s win. The president-elect’s pledged support for the industry marks a sharp contrast to the lawsuits, financial penalties, enforcement actions and even prison sentences for digital-assets players in the last few years. Coinbase has been among a slew of companies that the Securities and Exchange Commission has sued for allegedly violating federal securities laws. The SEC accused Coinbase of operating an unregistered securities exchange and offering staking as a service, which allows holders of certain cryptocurrencies to earn rewards for locking them up in the projects for various purposes. Coinbase has been fighting the SEC’s action. Others who have come faced the SEC’s wrath include trading firm Cumberland DRW, Consensys, Ripple, Binance and Crypto.com. To reduce its reliance on the US, Coinbase launched a new international platform and diversified into 38 countries in 2023, including Singapore, Australia, Spain, France and Bermuda. It also launched a derivatives exchange in Bermuda to tap into the massive volumes in that market segment. And it has decided to focus on more-predictable businesses and reduce its reliance on trading revenue, Gordon said.
“Whether that’s staking or whether it’s revenue from stablecoins or whether it’s from people who are having subscriptions that they pay on a monthly basis,” he said. “Because what we want to do is have an earnings profile that is not fully dependent on the volatility of the market.” Under the crypto-cheerleader Trump, who has vowed to appoint supportive regulators and create a strategic Bitcoin stockpile, such frictions are expected to ease and create an environment that particularly benefits exchanges like Coinbase that have a predominant presence in the US.
“The US will continue to be our most important markets,” Gordon said. “It’s where we employ most of our staff. It’s where we have most of our users. So it’s the single most important place.” | 
