Coinbase Prime

Company and ownership

Coinbase Prime is the institutional prime brokerage of Coinbase Global, Inc., which Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam founded in 2012. The parent has traded on Nasdaq as COIN since a direct listing on April 14, 2021, with Armstrong as chair and CEO. Prime opened to all institutions in September 2021. Its home unit, Coinbase Institutional, is run by co-CEOs Brett Tejpaul and Greg Tusar.

Coinbase Global had 4,951 employees at the end of 2025 and cut about 700 roles in a May 2026 restructuring. Its annual report put assets on platform, a measure that includes custody accounts, at $376.1 billion on December 31, 2025. In February 2026 Armstrong said Coinbase holds more than 80% of U.S. bitcoin ETF custody.

Custody model and security

Prime custody assets are held by Coinbase Custody Trust Company, LLC (CCTC), whose principal address is 550 West 34th Street in New York. In the European Economic Area, Coinbase Luxembourg S.A. keeps client assets in segregated cold storage as MiCA requires. Coinbase says it generally holds no more than 2% of assets under custody in hot wallets. A June 2026 ETF prospectus describes offline, multi-layer cold storage vaults, with private key material kept in secure facilities in the U.S. and Europe. According to the same filing, no single person at the custodian has access to a full private key.

Next to the vaults sits the Prime Onchain Wallet for EVM networks and Solana, launched in 2023 as a Web3 wallet built on multi-party computation. With the optional server signer, key material is split between the client's cloud and Coinbase, and neither side ever holds a full private key. Most Prime actions, transfers included, need consensus approval under rules each portfolio sets.

Regulation and insurance

CCTC received a limited purpose trust charter from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) in 2018 and is a fiduciary under Section 100 of the New York Banking Law. Coinbase, Inc. holds a BitLicense from NYDFS. In June 2025 Luxembourg's financial regulator, the CSSF, authorized Coinbase under the EU's MiCA regulation for custody and trading across the EEA. On April 2, 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) granted conditional approval for Coinbase National Trust Company, an uninsured national trust company meant to hold the institutional custody business.

CCTC's SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 reports cover private key management controls. Coinbase carries a commercial crime insurance policy of up to $320 million, placed with a syndicate of insurers. All Coinbase customers share that limit, and the policy runs for one year with no automatic renewal.

Products and integrations

Prime pairs custody with execution, trade financing and cross margin. Desks connect over REST and FIX APIs, plus a WebSocket feed for live market data and trade updates, and can place market, limit, TWAP and VWAP orders. Portfolios with a trade finance line can buy on T+1 settlement instead of prefunding every order.

Institutional customers had staked more than $15.2 billion of assets through Prime at December 31, 2025. The stake and unstake API endpoints handle ETH and SOL, with minimums of 1 ETH for additional stakes and 1 SOL for partial stakes; SOL staking by API arrived in July 2025. CCTC is also one of three custodians that stake SOL for the Fidelity Solana Fund.