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Unchained

Coinbase and Robinhood Are Converging, but Who Wins the Onchain Fintech War? - Ep. 864

Unchained

Laura Shin

News, Tech News, Business News

4.51.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 86 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The race to bring users onchain is heating up, but the competitors couldn’t be more different. Coinbase, a crypto-native giant with deep infrastructure and institutional partnerships, is going head-to-head with Robinhood, a retail-focused fintech now making aggressive moves into tokenized assets and blockchain rails. Their visions overlap (tokenized stocks, perpetuals, custom chains) but the strategies, philosophies, and user bases differ sharply. In this episode, Laura speaks with Diogenes Casares (Klyra Protocol) and Ryan Yi (ex-Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund) to unpack: How these two companies will compete What levers they have to increase their profits How Base became a liquidity black hole for Ethereum Why Coinbase may have already won the “flows” game And how stablecoins, social, and tokenization could decide the winner Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Bitwise Ledn Diogenes Casares, founder of Klyra Protocol and advisor at Patagon Management Ryan Yi, ex Coinbase, Coinbase Ventures, and CoinFund Unchained: Hyperliquid Reignited Interest in Crypto Perps. Can Coinbase and Robinhood Capitalize? Robinhood Is Building Its Own Layer 2 Blockchain Why the Arbitrum Stack Won in the Race to Support Robinhood Chain Why Perps Will 'Eat the World' + Tokenized Stocks - Bits + Bips Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🏦 4:17 What really separates Coinbase and Robinhood’s strategies 🛠️ 6:43 How Robinhood’s new chain should try to compete with Base 🔥 14:49 Why the competition between Robinhood and Coinbase is heating up fast in the U.S. 🤔 16:44 Whether Robinhood can catch up to Base’s head start and network effects 🧱 23:48 Why both companies chose to build on Ethereum—and what that signals 📉 36:04 How launching perps in the U.S. could reshape the landscape for both companies 🎮 44:43 How social features and gamification could give one app an edge 🎯 51:31 Why Robinhood is already working with prediction markets and Coinbase isn’t 💰 55:40 How their product differences impact profits and positioning 🤝 1:05:11 Why Ryan believes Coinbase should’ve acquired Circle 🔌 1:10:48 Why Stripe might be eyeing a crypto integration 📊 1:13:57 How Base benefits with small-cap tokens 🚀 1:18:46 Why Ryan says we’re at a real inflection point for crypto Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Unchained wants to hear from you. Help us continue being your no-hype resource for all things

0:05.3

crypto by filling out our quick survey. You could win a free one-year subscription to Bits and Bips

0:11.1

premium coming soon. Visit UnchainedCripto.com slash survey. That is UnchainedCripto.com

0:17.8

slash survey. Or check at the show notes for this episode.

0:21.8

I think this is like one of the most interesting and exciting times for crypto.

0:26.8

And the reason why I say that is we've gotten to this point from 2017 up until now,

0:34.8

mostly like buy us for us, right?

0:37.3

Like all the use cases that crypto came up with,

0:39.7

we were also the users of at the same time. And we were able to survive as an industry and build

0:45.2

this industry to the point of three trillion dollars in crypto market cap, BlackRock's doing

0:50.8

Bitcoin ETFs. Like, you know, we've gotten to this point. But we've now gotten to the

0:57.6

place where we've created all this infrastructure for on-chain and demand for block space.

1:02.6

But I don't think crypto by ourselves can fill all that demand right now. And so I think it's coming

1:09.4

at a perfect time for these large incumbents like

1:12.6

the Coinbase or Robin Hood or a stride or even telegram in time where they're actually

1:18.1

starting to show basically like how much demand can you actually handle on chain. And effectively

1:24.6

the fundamentals and the business case that you can actually have building an

1:29.3

on-chain product is going to become a lot more clear now.

1:35.1

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host,

1:39.6

Laura Shin. Your thoughts on the podcast and Unchained matter to us. Every episode, we feature comments from you all on the show.

1:46.6

Here are comments responding to my recent interview with Calvin Hamilton on the Polymarket-Zolensky suit saga.

1:52.0

On YouTube, Upstanding Citizen 3877 wrote, first I've heard of it. I elected pictures from the NATO summit and I would never call it a suit.

...

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