Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong stated that on-chain capital formation remains one of the biggest opportunities in the crypto industry, and the company is working on it. This statement was accompanied by a segment from Yahoo Finance's The Daily Wolf interview, without mentioning new product names or launch dates.

He identifies the bottleneck as policy rather than technology. On January 1, 2026, he responded that the company is working on application tokens and on-chain capital formation, but that policy will take time; this is not a technical issue. In the 2026 priorities, he listed global integrated exchanges, stablecoins and payments, as well as moving activities on-chain through the developer platform, Base, and Base applications as three parallel tasks.

The acquired entry point is Echo. Coinbase completed the acquisition on October 20, 2025, for approximately $375 million in cash and stock, with standard price adjustments retained. Echo was founded by Cobie and allows projects to conduct private placements to the community or use Sonar for self-hosted public token sales. The announcement stated that approximately 300 transactions had been completed post-launch, raising over $200 million, with early Sonar cases including Plasma's XPL sale. Echo will maintain its independent brand, with Sonar integrated into the Coinbase interface.

Native financing has already been successfully executed on Base. On September 6, 2026, Armstrong retweeted a record from the head of Base: that week, projects completed on-chain native fundraising on Base, raising over $14 million from thousands of participants, with funds directed towards on-chain reputation and capital formation. His exact words at the time were that capital formation is starting to work on Base, and he has long believed that on-chain can be more efficient.

The secondary market has already expanded ahead of the primary issuance. On August 24, 2026, Coinbase opened tokenized U.S. stocks to qualified users outside the U.S. on Base, with the first batch including Apple, Nvidia, Meta, and Alphabet, followed by Tesla, Microsoft, and others. The tokens are issued by Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd, with the underlying stocks held in a segregated account at SEC-registered broker Alpaca Securities LLC. On September 25, 2026, Aave V4 on Base accepted AAPLc, AMZNc, GOOGLc, METAc, MSFTc, NVDAc, TSLAc as collateral to borrow USDC, with Chainlink used as the oracle.

Buyers are projects and retail investors looking to bypass traditional private placement lists, while sellers are Coinbase, consolidating issuance, custody, and trading into the same interface. The event was driven by regulatory developments: on September 17, 2026, the SEC granted a five-year conditional exemption, allowing licensed automated market makers to trade tokenized U.S. market system stocks, provided they have equal rights to the underlying securities and comply with OFAC regulations. Benefiting from this are Coinbase, which already has Base, custody, and stablecoins, while under pressure are tokens that only provide offshore economic exposure without full shareholder rights, and traditional underwriters that still rely on roadshows and lock-up periods for allocation of shares.

Armstrong did not announce quotas, rates, or opening days for U.S. users this time. In January, he had already tied the timeline to policy, not to code.

Source: Public information