Coinbase (COIN) has its personal technique for BTC on the company steadiness sheet, nevertheless 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 web money.
Haas, nevertheless, went out of her approach to attract a line between Coinbase and companies that explicitly tie their company id 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 traders, Armstrong mentioned there was a temptation in its early days to place a number of BTC on the steadiness sheet, nevertheless 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.
In actual fact, 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 converse straight in regards to the purchases, however he did supply a philosophical context. Coinbase, he reminded traders, isn’t dabbling in crypto – it’s crypto.
“We’ve been targeted on crypto because the 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 wager.
Coinbase isn’t holding BTC to sign to markets some broader conviction, or turn out to be a proxy like MSTR. Behind the accounting language is one thing deeper: a long-view wager 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.
