Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase, says the crypto exchange wants to offer liquid crypto staking to financial institutions, corporations and funds in the future.
This ambition is in line with the collaboration with Blackrock announced earlier this week. This investment fund has started a bitcoin investment fund for institutional investors together with Coinbase.
Coinbase strike for individuals and institutions alike
According to Haas offers Coinbase provides a strike service to institutional customers similar to what is available to retail customers.
“Previously, the way institutions accessed staking was through Coinbase Cloud and so they could have used our service to run their own node. But by offering it as the delegated staking service, similar to what we have for retail clients, we’ve just taken on institutional clients.”
Institutions already have coins at Coinbase
Haas says this tactic will work once Coinbase starts offering staking for coins that institutions already own and have deposited with Coinbase. For example, consider Ethereum.
“What I want to share with you, these are the early days. We do see many institutions holding Ethereum as a deployable asset. But what I would note there is that we have not yet rolled out a truly liquid staking option for ETH2.”
Strike at Coinbase not yet liquid
It is more difficult for institutions and funds to immediately stop crypto, especially in the case of Ethereum. The secured ethers are not liquid and are stuck for months, if not years. Haas therefore wants to offer liquid staking through Coinbase.
“So when you lock in ETH2, you lock in your assets in Ethereum until the merger and then some time after that. For some institutions, this liquidity block is not palatable to them. And so, while they may be interested in staking, they want to bet on a liquid asset.”
He continues:
“And that’s something we want to solve for them. And I think once we have liquid staking available for the assets that institutions have pooled in larger proportions, we will see the real material impact of institutional income.”
Haas expects Coinbase to not be able to offer liquid staking any time soon, but they are certainly working to make it possible in the future.
