Coinbase wants to monopolize trading.

One of the most famous cryptocurrency trading companies in the world has seen better days. The stock is down more than 30% from its July 2025 high of $445. Their cryptocurrency trading volume is also clearly showing signs of cooling down, with the volume declining from $1.07 billion in the first quarter of last year to an expected $922 million in the first quarter of 2026.

Perhaps that’s why it launched commission-free trading of stocks and ETFs 24/7 for all users in the US, joining Robinhood and SoFi in the ever-competitive market for retail traders’ cash.

Rumors have been floating around for a while that Coinbase would begin trading 24/7. This is a direct attack on companies like Robinhood and SoFi. Last December, Coinbase announced a soft launch for a limited number of users, and the floodgates finally opened on February 24th.

The full launch will include over 8,000 US-listed stocks and ETFs, zero-commission trading, $1 fractional shares (similar to Robinhood), instant funding in USD or USDC stablecoins, and direct integration with Yahoo Finance. This is part of the Everything Exchange vision that CEO Brian Armstrong laid out on New Year’s Day.

But Wall Street doesn’t seem interested in giving too much credit to Mr. Armstrong’s success. COIN is up slightly on the news, but the market seems to be realizing that it is a competitive market with many companies offering similar products.

So, the crux of the Coinbase question is: What sets them apart? And more importantly, what drives users to switch from one trading platform to another?

Traders have not been able to escape the AI ​​and crypto saga in recent years.

Until now, AI chatbots have never worked with companies like Coinbase, Robinhood, and SoFi. This is because there was no direct or obvious use case. Perhaps more AI-adapted traders could ask ChatGPT for advice on specific stocks, ask for charts of trades, and even create passive trading bots that can make money. However, these are narrow use cases for most traders. And remember, just a few years ago, crypto traders were excited about meme coins with Solana and Base. Once the NFT craze dies down, all that liquidity has shifted to prediction markets, which are currently gaining traction and are also offered by Coinbase.

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And Coinbase has an edge in the cryptocurrency story, along with general trust among its users. This and the deal announcement tie in nicely with the looming agent AI or “AI agent” trend. AI agents are essentially little worker bees that cater to your every want and need. Would you like to ask an AI agent to send you an automated text response of “hamburger and fries” every time your wife or girlfriend asks what she wants for dinner? Of course. You might get into trouble, but it’s probably possible. Coinbase isn’t necessarily interested in that, but they want users to create and design AI trading agents tailored to their trading style.

Late last year, Coinbase released its “Based Agent” template. This allows users to do just that. You can now deploy customized AI trading agents in under 3 minutes without writing a single line of code. Coinbase’s customizable AI trading agent can autonomously execute swaps, stake assets, and manage portfolios based on simple natural language instructions from users, so users don’t have to do any of those technical things themselves, they just need to prompt the agent to do it for them. Coinbase also launched Agenttic Wallet on February 11th, which uses AI trading agents to do all of the above without “seeing” the user’s private keys. All the AI ​​trading agent does is what the user requests based on constraints set by Coinbase, and it has reportedly already processed over 50 million operations.

This is an advantage for Coinbase, as Robinhood and SoFi have not widely adopted AI agents. To be fair, they leverage AI, but in the classic sense of using agents as supportive assistants, rather than autonomously finding the perfect trade for the day all at once. Robinhood has introduced Robinhood Cortex, a sophisticated research assistant that essentially creates “digests” that summarize earnings reports, news, and technical data into personalized, conversational insights. There have been reports that Robinhood allows AI agents to scan and trade the market, but it doesn’t appear to be as advanced as Coinbase. When it comes to AI trading agents, SoFi lags even further behind, relying on more traditional tools such as “Automated Investing,” a classic robo-advisor that uses algorithms to rebalance portfolios, optimize tax loss recovery, and pursue longer-term indexing.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with these tools. But when Coinbase, Robinhood, and SoFi are competing in a fintech market as saturated as stock trading and cryptocurrencies, lukewarm feature updates can no longer protect their outer moat.

Businesses must remain adaptable and in sync with the narrative of the day. Because that’s how you get more users, drive more volume, and accumulate more results in future earnings reports. It’s important to do so, especially as your financial life becomes truly 24/7.

In early November, former Google CEO and AI expert Eric Schmidt spoke at the American Business Forum (ABF) in Miami.

He touched on this “age of agents” for companies, arguing that the best way to make money is to start a company that builds AI agents that perform specific tasks and compete with other agents.

“If you really want to make money, it’s actually easy. Find an agent AI company. And I don’t mean design an agent, I mean build an agent to do something,” he said.

“This is the age of agents in AI, and for the next year or two everyone’s going to be building agents. They’re all going to be competing. If you can build an agent that’s better than everyone else, you can probably build one great company and own it.”

Coinbase followed that advice. I hope Robinhood and SoFi can make a comeback.

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