By Andrew Welsch
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase now wants to become customers' go-to financial advisor and stock trading platform. Artificial intelligence may help it realize that ambition. On Tuesday, the company said it is launching a no-fee, AI-powered investment advisor and is enabling customers to use their own AI agents to trade securities on Coinbase's platform.
Coinbase Advisor is being made available first to customers of Coinbase One, the company's subscription service with fees that start at $4.99 a month. The company says Coinbase Advisor is Securities and Exchange Commission-registered and designed to provide professional-grade investment advic e.
"It works just like talking to a human advisor, except it works 24/7, doesn't charge any fees, and knows you and your portfolio," said Max Branzburg, head of consumer products, at a Coinbase event on Wednesday unveiling the AI-powered advisor as well as other new products and services.
Human financial advisors traditionally charge a fee of around 1% on a client's assets under management. Branzburg said Coinbase Advisor can fill a gap in the marketplace. "Today, you can pay an advisor an arm and a leg for generic advice from nine to five, Monday through Friday," he said. "Or you can ask your AI for advice, but it can't offer 'real' financial advice without knowledge of your portfolio or proper licensing."
The Wednesday announcement didn't include information about what investments the AI advisor would recommend. A company representative was unavailable for immediate comment.
AI-enabled trading, or "agentic trading," will allow Coinbase customers to use their own AI agents to execute strategies on their behalf. "You can have agents buy Bitcoin whenever it drops by a certain percentage," Branzburg said. "Or trade dollars or euros based on CPI prints. Or develop any other thesis and let it run."
Coinbase stock. The AI announcement comes as the company is trying to be a one-stop shop for customers' every financial need. Achieving that goal may help the cryptocurrency company diversify its sources of revenue. Shares of Coinbase were up 1.6% as of midday Tuesday. The benchmark S&P 500 index was flat. The company's stock has struggled amid a slump in cryptocurrency prices. Shares are down 24% this year.
Active traders will likely be the power users and chief beneficiaries of new AI-enabled trading capabilities, Alex Markgraff, analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, wrote in a June 16 research note. Active traders may be small in number, but they generate outsized trading volume. Markgraff, who has a Sector Weight rating on Coinbase stock, noted some of Coinbase's announcements were light on detail making it hard to model their impact, especially since AI is a relatively new technology.
"With respect to agentic trading, we believe asset breadth to be an important factor as the trading experience moves into a different environment," he wrote. "As for the actual multiplier effect of agentic trading, there is more to learn given the uncharted territory."
Coinbase isn't the only company to launch customer-facing AI services recently. For example, SoFi Technologies recently debuted a personal finance chatbot, dubbed SoFi Coach. And OpenAI added a personal finance component to ChatGPT, the company's AI chatbot. Coinbase rivals such as Robinhood Markets are also striving to be customers' financial super app.
At the Coinbase event, the company said it would expand customers' ability to trade securities on its platform. For instance, it plans to allow customers to trade stock and crypto options contracts. It also intends to enable non-U.S. customers to trade tokenized U.S.-based stocks around the clock.
In addition to investments, Coinbase is angling to serve customers' other financial needs. It is sweetening travel rewards for customers who use Coinbase One Card, the company's credit card. And Coinbase said it is joining with Better to offer what it says is the first-ever crypto-backed mortgage.
At the company event, Coinbase showed a photo of a house that it says was purchased this month by a Coinbase customer using a crypto-backed mortgage. "One day we might see entire crypto-backed neighborhoods," Roy Zhang, director of product management, said.
Write to Andrew Welsch at andrew.welsch@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 17, 2026 14:23 ET (18:23 GMT)
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