GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the crypto encyclopedia your group chat pretends to have read.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ COIN owns the AI agent payment rails.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The Future of Banking Is Being Built on Ethereum.
- 🍪 Tom Lee: This is the signal you've been waiting for…
Securitize is the platform institutions trust to tokenize their assets onchain. See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like.
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COINBASE OWNS THE RAILS AI AGENTS PAY EACH OTHER ON 🤖
99% of onchain agentic commerce last quarter ran on USDC.
97% of it settled through x402.
90% moved over Base.
Coinbase owns all three, and earns almost nothing from any of them yet.
That was sitting in the Q2 deck. It just got buried under the headline figures.
The part everyone already saw: revenue of $1.22B against Street expectations near $1.3B, a GAAP net loss of $359M, and a stock that fell about 5% after hours.
But look at the quarter they reported into…
Total crypto market spot volume fell 25%, total crypto market cap dropped 11%, and volatility compressed to multi-year lows.
Crypto is in a rough patch, and you can't expect a crypto-native company to hit new records at a time like this - even Robinhood's crypto revenue fell 38% to $100M.
Which brings us to what Coinbase actually built while the market was dead…
The Bitcoin dependency is basically gone:
88% of net revenue now comes from something other than Bitcoin spot trading, and subscription and services alone accounts for 48% of it.
They cut hard into the downturn too:
- Headcount went from 4,988 to 4,321.
- Adjusted expenses dropped 9% quarter over quarter.
- And the full year expense outlook came down to $4.2B to $4.45B.
All of which produced a 14th consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, at $208M, in a market like this one.
But the cost discipline isn't the exciting part to us…
THE RAILS BEHIND BLACKROCK'S ONCHAIN FUND
Assets still run on decades-old infrastructure:
Slow settlement, walled access, paperwork everywhere.
Tokenization fixes that but who’s actually doing it at an institutional scale?
With nearly nine years in the business, Securitize has become the platform institutions trust to bring assets onchain.
Here's why it stands out:
- BlackRock, Morgan Stanley & ARK Invest have all invested in Securitize
- NYSE, VanEck & BNY have chosen Securitize to tokenize their stocks.
- The only public pure-play in tokenization infrastructure
This isn't a crypto project waiting for TradFi to catch up. It's the regulated bridge that the largest asset managers in the world already build on.
See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like.
COINBASE OWNS THE RAILS AI AGENTS PAY EACH OTHER ON (P2) 🤖
The part of the report that IS exciting to us: those three agentic figures.
According to the Artemis data in the Q2 deck:
- 99%+ of onchain agentic commerce completed in USDC.
- 97%+ of onchain agentic transactions ran through x402.
- And 90%+ of agentic stablecoin volume settled on Base. 👇
Coinbase is becoming the settlement layer for AI agents paying each other.
Kyle Reidhead, our Head of Research, thinks this is the single most interesting thing happening at Coinbase right now - and it's a big reason he keeps holding it.
The catch, which Brian flagged himself: it isn't driving meaningful revenue yet, and there's no guidance attached to it.
Kyle's fine with that. Free options don't come with guidance.
What he's less happy about is the everything-app race.
Robinhood's event contracts generated $156M in Q2 revenue alone, ahead of both its equities and its crypto businesses.
Coinbase's prediction markets grew 106% quarter over quarter and crossed $100M annualized, which is real growth off a much smaller base… but still second place.
At the same time - USDC (the other revenue engine) has stalled. Average USDC market cap sat roughly flat at $77B, and stablecoin revenue slipped to $292M from $305M.
The split underneath is sharper than the total suggests…
Revenue on USDC held inside Coinbase products actually rose ($161M to $174M), while the off-platform portion fell from $163M to $146M.
I.e. the engine is growing where Coinbase controls the surface, and shrinking everywhere else.
Kyle's view: Coinbase is struggling to expand outside its crypto bubble, and that's what's holding it back in this bear.
But he's still long, for two reasons…
Coinbase is the number one U.S. exchange for both retail and institutions, so it wins the recovery by default, and Kyle thinks crypto has already bottomed.
Then there's the CLARITY Act, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently described as sitting on the one yard line.
That's the unlock for stablecoins and tokenization that Coinbase is built to capture.
He holds it as a call on CLARITY plus the crypto rebound, with the agentic rails as free upside on top.
Long term, he backs Brian to figure out the rest.
The clock is ticking, though.
ICYMI: Kyle first called COIN to PRO members as low as ~$60, back in 2023 (it trades at ~$147 at the time of this writing).
Source: Milk Road PRO Discord channel
That's what getting in early buys you: enough room that a brutal crypto bear and a missed quarter still leave you multiples ahead.
If you want Kyle's calls in real time, you can try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days.
P.S. We went live with Coinbase's CBO Shan Aggarwal yesterday, watch it here. 👇
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Tom Lee: This is the signal you've been waiting for - hedge funds just sold tech at the fastest pace in nearly 10 years. "Massive deleveraging has already taken place."
Warsh: If the Fed fogs up market info, "I can assure you that we're going to have less information, less ability to land the plane successfully and deliver price stability."
Saylor: The Bitcoin debate is basically over. "The Senate's pro Bitcoin. The House is pro Bitcoin. The cabinet is pro Bitcoin" - plus every financial regulator.
Get 15% off with code “MILKRO_15.” The European Blockchain Convention is back in Barcelona on September 16-17.**
**this is partner content.
See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like.
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