Coinbase is planning a pivotal acquisition that will allow it to launch crypto derivatives in the EU
LONDON, ENGLAND – NOVEMBER 09: In this photo illustration, a flipped version of the Coinbase logo is reflected in a mobile phone screen on November 09, 2021 in London, England. The cryptocurrency exchange platform is to release its quarterly earnings today. (Photo illustration by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
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Coinbase plans to offer crypto-linked derivatives in the European Union, and it’s planning to acquire a company with a license to do so.
The U.S. cryptocurrency exchange told CNBC exclusively that it entered into an agreement to buy an unnamed holding company which owns a MiFID II license.
MiFID II refers to the EU’s updated rules governing financial instruments. The EU updated the legislation in 2017 to address criticism that it was too focused on stocks and didn’t consider other asset classes, like fixed income, derivatives and currencies.
It’s part of a long-standing ambition by Coinbase to serve professional and institutional customers.
The company, which began 12 years ago, has been seeking to expand its offering to institutions such as hedge funds and high-frequency trading firms over the last several years, looking to benefit from the much higher sizes of transactions done by these kinds of traders.
If and when Coinbase completes the deal, the move would mark the first launch of derivatives trading by the company in the EU.
With a MiFID II license, Coinbase will be able to begin offering regulated derivatives, like futures and options, in the EU. The company already offers spot trading in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
The deal is subject to regulatory approval and Coinbase expects it will close later in 2024.
“This license would help expand access to our derivatives products by allowing Coinbase to offer them to eligible European customers in select countries across the EU,” Coinbase said in a blog post, which was shared exclusively with CNBC on Friday.
“As the industry leader in trusted, compliant products and services, we aim for the highest standards for regulatory compliance, and before operationalizing any license or serving any users, this entity must achieve our Five-point Global Compliance Standard.”
Coinbase said it would look to adhere to rigorous compliance standards that are upheld in the EU, including requirements related to combating money laundering, customer transparency and sanctions.
The company said it is committed to ensuring a five-point global compliance standard, supported by a team of more than 400 professionals with experience at agencies including the FBI and Department of Justice.
“We have a long road ahead before finalizing the acquisition and operationalizing the EU MiFID licensed entity, but this is an exciting step forward in our efforts to expand access to our international derivatives offerings and bring a more global and open financial system to 1 billion people around the world,” Coinbase said in its blog post.
A key battleground
Derivatives could be a crucial battleground for Coinbase. According to the company, derivatives make up 75% of overall crypto trading volumes. Coinbase has a long way to go to compete with its larger rival Binance, which is a massive player in the market for crypto-linked derivatives, as well as firms like Bybit, OKX and Deribit.
According to data from CoinGecko, Binance saw trading volume of more than $56.6 billion in futures contracts in the past 24 hours. That’s seismically larger than the amount of volume done by Coinbase. Its international derivatives exchange did $300 million of futures trading volume in the last 24 hours.
Coinbase does not currently offer crypto derivatives products in the U.K., where they are prohibited. The Financial Conduct Authority banned crypto-linked derivatives in January 2020, saying at the time they are “ill-suited” for retail consumers due to the harm they pose.
Coinbase currently offers trading in bitcoin futures and ether futures in the U.S., and bitcoin futures, ether futures, “nano” ether futures and West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures in markets outside the U.S.
Derivatives are a type of financial instrument that derive their value from the performance of an underlying asset.
Futures are derivatives that allow investors to speculate on what an asset will be worth at a later point in time. They’re generally considered riskier than spot markets in digital assets given the notoriously volatile nature of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and the use of leverage, which can significantly amplify gains and losses.
The company made its first move into derivatives in May, with the launch of an international derivatives exchange in Bermuda. And the company debuted crypto derivatives in the U.S. in November after receiving regulatory approval from the National Futures Association.
Coinbase had reportedly considered acquiring FTX Europe, the European entity of the now-collapsed crypto venue, but subsequently shelved the idea, according to reporting from Fortune. CNBC has not been able to independently verify Fortune’s reporting.
Expanding beyond U.S.
The move into derivatives continues Coinbase’s expansion drive in markets outside of the U.S.
Coinbase has been aggressively chasing international expansion in the past year as it faces a tougher time at home. The company is the target of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit alleging it violated securities laws.
In October, the firm picked Ireland as its primary regulatory base in the EU ahead of an incoming package of crypto laws known as Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), and submitted an application for a single MiCA license, which it hopes to obtain by December. 2024 when the rules are slated to be fully applied.
Coinbase also recently obtained a virtual asset service provider license from France, which gives it permission to offer custody and trading in crypto assets in the country.
The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
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