Crypto exchanges have morphed from standard trading apps, to singular platforms encompassing payments, embedded infrastructure services, and lending.
Ben Shen, Head of Financial Services & Loyalty at Coinbase, spoke to Payment Expert about its bid to become the “everything exchange”.
Three years ago, the crypto industry found itself in the wilderness, facing one of the most desperate and challenging periods of its short history.
The collapses of FTX and TerraLuna in 2022 triggered a crypto winter unlike any before, sounding alarm bells for governments and policymakers and, perhaps most importantly, for crypto leaders themselves.
As the sector recover, traditional finance watched with a sense of vindication, having long warned of the risks. Policymakers and regulators frequently labelled the sector the “Wild West”, where crypto cowboys operated with little oversight and on their own terms.
Yet the 2022/23 downturn proved to be a turning point. The regulatory scrutiny that followed – once seen as a threat to an industry built on independence from traditional finance and intermediaries – may ultimately have been its saving grace.
Today, countries such as the US, the United Arab Emirates and Argentina have emerged as centres of crypto adoption and innovation. Clearer regulatory frameworks are taking shape, providing transparency for both new entrants and established players, while real-world payment use cases have expanded more than at any time since Bitcoin’s launch in 2008.
For Ben Shen, Senior Product Director at Coinbase, his journey into decentralised finance (DeFi) began during his time at CashApp where he had a revelation: the future of money and payments was rapidly being deployed on blockchains.
“Personally, I started to explore and invest in different assets, essentially playing around with DeFi and I saw this trend where money is increasingly moving on-chain and crypto is sort of empowering all of this,” Shen tells Payment Expert.
“It’s the way money and financial services are moving right now; interoperable, faster, cheaper.”
On-chain money: more rewarding?
Traditional payment systems have made steady progress in improving settlement times, particularly in B2B transactions. In the US, rails such as ACH and FedNow have accelerated transfers, while in the UK, Bacs typically settles funds within one to three business days.
Card networks have also moved to speed things up. Visa and Mastercard, for example, launched Visa Direct and Mastercard Send to enable faster payouts, often settling within 48 hours.
However, on-chain payments aim to go a step further. Blockchain-based transfers can settle near-instantly, while also offering programmability and transparency that traditional rails cannot easily replicate.
In October 2025, Coinbase rolled out the Coinbase One Card to all eligible users. The card, tied to its Coinbase One subscription service, offers incentives such as 4% cashback in Bitcoin on every purchase. Shen notes the average monthly spending on the Coinbase One Card sits at around $3,000 per customer.
“The value proposition of earning up to 4% in Bitcoin on everyday spending is one that is very highly resonant. It also essentially allows you to just have a much more simple and rewarding rewards program, versus points,” says Shen.
In the traditional space, JP Morgan offers 1% cashback on its Chase UK cards and up to five points back on groceries with its Chase Sapphire cards. Bank of America opts for cashback on selected categories, such as 3% back on gas at a minimum of $2,500 spent per month. Shen argues the direct 4% Bitcoin cashback is a greater proposition value to customers believing the points system is “effectively a form of inflation”.
“Oftentimes, you need to remember to use (points) and redeem them. It’s constantly changing. It’s effectively a form of inflation and there are blackout dates and your points might expire.
“We really wanted to lean into simplicity, flexibility and the rewarding aspects of Bitcoin and have this program based on the assets you hold.”
But holding Bitcoin of course comes with its own pitfalls. There is no telling when the price may spike or decline; its valuation has dropped from $87,508 at the start of 2026, to as low as $62,704 on February 6, according to Coinmarketcap.
Embedded finance vs stablecoins-as-a-service
Crypto’s more ‘stable’ offshoot, stablecoins, have seen a major surge in usage and disruption that traditional players can’t ignore. Artemis Analytics revealed in a January 2025 report that global stablecoin payments increased by 72% to $33bn last year, according to data collected by 11 crypto companies.
USDC and USDT were unsurprisingly the overwhelming preferred stablecoins for payments, but perhaps more surprisingly was B2B payments being the most popular method as opposed to peer-to-peer payments. As businesses look for faster ways to send and receive payments, particularly across borders, where stablecoins have emerged as a near-instant and cost-effective option, the supporting infrastructure must evolve at the same pace to enable seamless adoption.
This is where DeFi has taken a cue from traditional finance, developing embedded finance solutions such as stablecoin-as-a-service (SaaS). Under this model, providers supply the technical expertise and infrastructure, allowing merchants to access the benefits of stablecoins without having to build and integrate the systems themselves.
In December 2025, Coinbase launched its own SaaS offering, designed to help partners “benefit from the scale and leverage the USDC ecosystem”. The product enables businesses not only to integrate stablecoin payments more easily, but also to create their own customisable stablecoins tailored to specific payment use cases.
“It brings the power of that ecosystem to then distribute at scale the stablecoin with the added layer of customisability,” explains Shen.
“The use cases for payments are pretty broad,” says Shen. “On merchant payments, our developer group is empowering the acceptance of stablecoins at various merchant partners, for the likes of Shopify. There are a lot of contours to stablecoins. When you hold USDC, for example, there is an ability to earn yield and be able to lend it.”
While the issue of interest-bearing stablecoins continues to divide banks and crypto firms, it is also opening the door for crypto companies to provide customers with an alternative to traditional savings and lending products.
Loans the next part of crypto banking’s evolution
Interest income, whether generated from loans or held deposits, has been one of banks’ core revenue streams for decades. Now, crypto companies such as Coinbase are putting their own spin on that model.
Crypto lending allows individuals and businesses to unlock liquidity from their digital assets without selling them outright. Typically, borrowers pledge cryptocurrencies or stablecoins as collateral to secure a loan, with terms structured around a loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. The loan is then repaid with interest, while the collateral helps maintain stability and mitigate risk for the lender.
“A lot of people are using (crypto loans) for various use cases,” says Shen. “Instead of selling the assets that you believe in, you can continue holding on to the assets and then get instant liquidity, but you don’t have to go to a bank to fill out an application or wait days or weeks to get that instant liquidity.”
DeFi lending operates very differently from traditional bank lending. Banks typically conduct detailed credit checks, reviewing employment history, income and bank statements before approving a loan. By contrast, DeFi loans can often be accessed within minutes, with no intermediary involvement and minimal background checks, as approval is primarily based on posted collateral rather than creditworthiness.
This model brings both advantages and risks. The absence of affordability assessments can expose borrowers to overleveraging and potential losses if asset values fall. However, the flexibility of crypto-backed loans allows users to manage repayments on their own terms.
Regulatory oversight has also increased. Since 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have played a greater role in supervising aspects of crypto lending, recognising even before the collapses of TerraLuna and FTX that clearer guardrails would be necessary if parts of the industry were to mirror traditional banking services.
Crypto firms want to be banks… right?
If the past several weeks have revealed anything, it is that crypto firms and banks are not seeing eye to eye when it comes to finalising the Senate Banking Committee‘s draft for the US CLARITY Act.
While US banks push for stablecoin yield and rewards to be banned, crypto firms are pushing back claiming any ban would be viewed as anti-competitive. And while crypto firms have their own vested interests in ensuring certain proposals are crypto-friendly in the bill, is the anti-competitive angle from the industry a sign crypto firms are now viewing banks as competition more than ever before?
Recent years will have you believing crypto exchanges like Coinbase are slowly morphing into banks, but on their own terms, delivering card payments with Bitcoin cashback, yield attached to stablecoin payments, and crypto lending that can be secured in minutes. In their words, they are becoming the “everything exchange”.
“The everything exchange represents a multi-year journey we have been on to allow people to essentially trade, manage and grow their money across many different assets”, adds Shen.
This shift to become a one-stop-shop to trade, make payments and invest in stocks has also expanded into prediction markets in Coinbase’s partnership with Kalshi. This proliferation of ‘Super Apps’ has seen crypto exchanges deploy banking products within their own DeFi infrastructure; yet the final hurdle continues to remain regulation and perhaps less so the validation from traditional banks.
The natural progression for crypto firms would be to begin to apply for banking licenses, which many have already started to do. Coinbase, Ripple, and Crypto.com are just some of the many digital asset companies which have applied for national trust bank charters in recent months as President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto and deregulation agendas have created new pathways to market,
But while a licence will enable Coinbase to become a recognised and regulated US bank, it may only serve as an enabler for the company’s true objective: to remove intermediaries and the need for multiple services to become the ‘everything exchange’ it promises to deliver.
“With the everything exchange, the vision is to come on Coinbase and have a slew of options on what you can trade, how you want to earn and then use your money flexibly,” concludes Shen.
“You can deploy money through ongoing passive earning, through staking, lending, etc., and then get liquidity against it. And you’re going to have payment needs.
“Instead of having a brokerage account where you keep some of your money in a bank that isn’t earning any money at all, we want to collapse these and make this fluid, all in one place, all earning from all the services we provide.”
