Coinbase is planning to expand its core trading app beyond crypto, the company said Thursday.
The newly imagined “everything exchange” will include tokenized real-world assets, stocks, derivatives, prediction markets and early-stage token sales. The new offerings will roll out in the next few months, first to U.S. users, followed by a “gradual international rollout based on jurisdictional approvals,” Max Branzburg, vice president of product at Coinbase, told CNBC.
“We’re building an exchange for everything,” he said. “Everything you want to trade, in a one-stop shop, on-chain. … We’re bringing all assets onchain — stocks, prediction markets, and more. We’re building the foundations for a faster, more accessible, more global economy.”
The expansion puts Coinbase in even closer competition with Robinhood, Gemini and Kraken, all of whom have recently opened tokenized equity offerings to users outside the U.S. CEO Brian Armstrong has said he has a goal of making Coinbase the top financial services app within the next decade.
Coinbase’s announcement comes hours after the Securities and Exchange Commission introduced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to “modernize” securities rules and regulations to allow for crypto-based trading activity.
Tokenization of stocks and other traditional, non-crypto native assets, has surged in popularity this year as the Trump administration has worked to roll back restrictive crypto policies from the previous U.S. leadership.
While trading for retail and institutional investors is Coinbase’s core business, the company is in the midst of a big push to amplify consumer engagement through new services, taking advantage of the new pro-crypto policies out of Washington. Two weeks ago, it unveiled the “Base App,” which it aims to make the West’s answer to a WeChat-style super app.
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Figma opened at $85 on Thursday under the ticker FIG, and shares closed at $115.50 for a 250% gain. On Friday, the stock traded above $120.
Figma is the latest tech company to hit the public markets after an extended IPO drought. Artificial intelligence infrastructure provider CoreWeave debuted in March, followed by the digital physical therapy company Hinge Health in May.
The stablecoin issuer Circle, virtual chronic care company Omada Health and the online banking services provider Chime all went public in June.
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In an update to its prospectus last week, Figma said it would price shares at $25 to $28 each. On Monday, it issued another update and said it expected pricing between $30 and $32. The company ultimately priced shares $1 above that range.
Figma, founded in 2012, almost had a very different story.
Adobe tried to buy the company for $20 billion in 2022, but after U.K. regulators said the acquisition would likely harm competition, the deal fell apart the following year.
The San Francisco-based company ranked 45th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list of private companies.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy looks on during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, U.S., February 26, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Amazon on Thursday reported second-quarter earnings that beat expectations on most metrics, but the results weren’t good enough to please Wall Street.
Amazon stock slid following the release and throughout the conference call. Shares were down about 7% Friday.
Profit guidance was weaker than expected, while cloud growth underwhelmed investors.
That overshadowed an otherwise upbeat report that included strong revenue and profits, steady retail growth and a 23% increase in advertising sales. Amazon also offered a rosy revenue forecast for the current quarter.
Here are three key takeaways from Amazon’s earnings:
AI spending boost
Amazon reported that it spent $31.4 billion on capital expenses in the last quarter, and the company expects that to be “reasonably representative” of its spending in the second half of the year. In the first quarter, Amazon’s capital expenditures exceeded $24 billion.
Taken together, it means that Amazon could spend an upwards of $118 billion on capital expenditures this year, up from its previous forecast of $100 billion. Amazon’s capex, which hit $83 billion a year ago, is primarily going toward building out tech infrastructure to support artificial intelligence demand.
Amazon’s competitors are also throwing big money at AI.
On Wednesday, Meta lifted its forecast for capital spending to a range of $66 billion to $72 billion. Google parent Alphabet raised its capital spend last week to $85 billion this year.
The question on investors’ minds is when these big AI bets will begin to pay off in revenue or profit.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hinted the company’s progress on AI has improved its “operational efficiency and business growth,” but offered few specifics beyond that.
Amazon has also said previously that generative AI is contributing revenue to AWS at an annualized rate equivalent to “multiple billions of dollars.”
On a conference call with investors, Jassy pointed to Alexa+, an upgraded version of its digital assistant, as a way it could monetize AI. The service, which launched in early access in late March, is $19.99 a month, or free for Prime members.
“I think over time, you could also imagine, as we keep adding functionality that there could be some sort of subscription element beyond what there is today,” Jassy said.
Jassy reiterated that it’s “very early days” in AI development and adoption.
Cloud rivals
Amazon Web Services continues to lead the cloud infrastructure market, but it’s facing steeper competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which posted stronger growth rates in their latest quarterly results.
AWS grew its revenue by 18% year over year, which just beat Wall Street’s estimates. That trailed the big gains reported by Microsoft and Alphabet. The companies recorded cloud growth rates of 39% and 32%, respectively.
Analysts asked Amazon leadership on the call why its cloud business isn’t growing as quickly as its rivals.
“There is a Wall Street finance person narrative right now that AWS is falling behind in generative AI with concerns about share loss to peers, etcetera,” said Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak. The firm has an overweight rating on Amazon’s stock.
Attendees walk through an exposition hall at AWS re:Invent, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024.
Noah Berger | Getty Images
JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth said there’s been “significantly faster cloud growth among the number two and number three players in the space.”
Jassy said sometimes the company is growing faster than rivals, and vice versa, but AWS still has a “meaningfully larger” cloud business.
“I think the second player is about 65% of the size of AWS,” he said.
Jassy also appeared to take a swipe at Microsoft over a recent worldwide attack on its SharePoint collaboration software, saying AWS customers see a “very big difference” in security.
“You could just look at what’s happened the last couple months, you can just see kind of adventures at some of these players almost every month,” Jassy said.
The comments failed to sway some investors.
Bernstein analysts said Friday that the “tone wasn’t great” and Amazon’s explanation for its competitive positioning and trajectory “sounded less constructive than peers.”
“Words matter…but numbers matter more,” the analysts wrote.
Tariff risk better than feared
In May, Amazon warned it was bracing for potential uncertainty ahead linked to President Donald Trump‘s shifting tariff and trade policies.
At the time, products imported from China were subject to a steep 145% levy. That threatened to drive up costs for Amazon vendors and its millions of third-party sellers, raising concerns of price increases and a drop-off in consumer demand.
Since then, the U.S. and China have reached a truce, with China now facing a 30% combined tariff rate.
Amazon’s latest earnings showed the company seems to be navigating the tariffs and shifting trade policies better than Wall Street had feared.
Sales in its online store topped analysts projections and grew 11% year over year, while seller services revenue also beat expectations. The number of items sold in Amazon’s online and physical stores jumped 12%, indicating that the consumer remains “healthy” despite tariffs and economic uncertainty, analysts at Citizens wrote in a Friday note to clients.
Amazon’s third-quarter sales forecast, which implies 13% growth at the high end, suggests “tariffs appear to have been effectively absorbed by suppliers, merchants and customers,” Citizens analysts wrote. They have an outperform rating on the company’s shares.
Jassy struck a positive but cautious tone on the call, saying it’s “hard to know” where the tariffs will settle, especially when it comes to China.
“We’re unsure at this point who’s going to end up absorbing those higher costs,” he said.
A deal between the U.S. and China hasn’t been finalized, and the two countries have until Aug. 12 to reach a final agreement.
So far, Amazon has been able to weather Trump’s trade war.
“We just haven’t seen diminished demand, and we haven’t seen any kind of broad scale [average selling price] increases,” Jassy said on the call. “So that could change in H2. There are a lot of things that we don’t know, but that’s what we’ve seen so far.”
An electric air taxi by Joby Aviation sits at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in New York City, Nov. 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Joby Aviation and defense manufacturing giant L3Harris announced a partnership Friday to develop a next-generation military craft that can be piloted or fly autonomously.
The partnership brings together Joby’s hybrid vertical take-off and landing, or VTOL, aircraft and L3’s expertise in military systems and certification.
The companies expect to begin testing this fall, followed by operational demonstrations in 2026, according to the release.
“Conflicts like Russia, Ukraine, are really changing how people think about, you know, low altitude aviation generally,” Joby executive chairman Paul Sciarra told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan. “Getting something out there that can move very quickly from demonstration to deployability felt especially important.”
Jon Rambeau, president of Integrated Mission Systems at L3Harris, said initially the project will focus on use cases like airborne surveillance, reconnaissance and contested logistics applications.
“We’re going to target … the broader government exercises that the military services hold periodically, and see if we can fit some of those use cases into those larger exercises,” Rambeau told Brennan.
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The announcement comes as government spending is under scrutiny and the U.S. military works to bolster the technology in battlefield operations, adding artificial intelligence with autonomous vehicles and drones.
“I think the branches are questioning whether or not you know the right approach for low altitude support is, you know, $30 million crude Apaches, or whether or not it’s something that is smaller, cheaper and autonomous — it has the ability to adapt to flexible payloads,” Sciarra said.
Joby is known for its commercial air taxis, which are electric. The company delivered its first electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft to the United Arab Emirates at the end of June, where it is working toward a 2026 launch.
The new military vehicle with L3, based on Joby’s S4 craft, will be developed with a gas turbine, according to the release.
Joby, which is still working on Federal Aviation Administration approval for its aircraft, recently announced an expansion of manufacturing and hopes to double production at its California hub.
Shares of Joby are up more than 100% this year. L3Harris stock is up 30% so far in 2025.