The new UK licence adds equities and perpetual futures to Coinbase's product menu but retains the FCA's blanket ban on retail crypto derivatives. Tiger Brokers immediately lifted its price target on COIN to $200.
Coinbase secured a UK investment services authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority on Tuesday, clearing the Nasdaq-listed exchange to sell equities and derivatives to British customers alongside crypto for the first time. The company called the licence the largest expansion of its UK product line since it entered the market.
The new authorisation is a MiFID-equivalent permission and does two distinct things. It lets institutional and advanced traders in the UK access perpetual futures on crypto, single stocks and commodities. It lets retail customers buy and sell equities directly on Coinbase. Retail investors still cannot trade crypto derivatives, because the FCA's 2021 blanket ban on selling those products to consumers is untouched by the new licence.
The permission sits on top of two existing British approvals: Coinbase's FCA cryptoasset registration from February 2025 and an e-money licence. Together they make Coinbase, in the exchange's own phrasing, the most comprehensively regulated crypto operator in Britain. That is a strong claim, but on the face of the register, no other US exchange holds all three permissions in the UK.
The strategy is the ‘Everything Exchange’ that Brian Armstrong set out in December: crypto, prediction markets, stocks, derivatives, tokenised assets and consumer finance under one login. Coinbase already runs stock and ETF trading in the US, and since March it has offered non-US customers USDC-settled perpetual futures on Apple, Microsoft and Tesla. In June it said it would launch tokenised US equities, backed one-for-one and paying dividends, to eligible non-US users. The UK licence pulls another jurisdiction into that funnel.
The timing is deliberate. The UK's full crypto authorisation regime is not due to switch on until October 2027, and every US exchange waiting for it is now stuck behind the crypto registration hurdle. The new investment licence lets Coinbase route around the delay by regulating the non-crypto parts of its business first. It is the same manoeuvre Coinbase pulled in Australia, where it became the first crypto exchange to secure an Australian Financial Services Licence directly from ASIC in April.
Which stocks and which futures products will go live in Britain first has not been disclosed. Coinbase did not respond to a CoinDesk request for detail before publication, and the FCA's public register lists only the scope of the permission, not the venue selection. The company's US stock offering runs on partners including Paxos for execution; the UK product will need FCA-registered execution and custody arrangements, and Coinbase has not named them.
The economics matter to Coinbase because its core crypto business is under pressure. Q1 2026 crypto trading revenue was down 47 per cent year on year at Robinhood, down materially at Kraken, and slipping at Coinbase itself. Adding a stocks and derivatives revenue line into a saturated crypto market is a hedge as much as an expansion. Barclays downgraded COIN to Underweight in April on precisely that trading-volume weakness. A UK stock brokerage carrying, say, a fifteen-basis-point commission on retail flow would not fix that gap on its own, but combined with the perpetual-futures product it materially widens what Coinbase can charge for.
Binance withdrew its Greek MiCA application on 24 June, and by the same week Coinbase and OKX were courting its EU customers. Robinhood is running a chain and a stablecoin. Kraken is preparing an IPO. Coinbase's UK licence now gives it the widest legal mandate of any of them: it can sell British customers spot crypto, spot equities and perpetual futures at a moment when several of its rivals cannot legally do any two of those things at once.
Markets reacted quickly. Tiger Brokers lifted its rating on Coinbase from Hold to Buy on Wednesday morning and set a $200 price target; COIN traded between $158.07 and $159.99 in the session. That is a modest reaction for a licence that opens the sixth-largest equities market in the world to a company already sitting on an OCC conditional trust charter and an Australian licence — but Coinbase's crypto trading revenue is still down sharply year on year, and the market is pricing the UK news as strategic rather than immediately accretive.
The FCA has not said whether the retail crypto derivatives ban will be lifted before the 2027 framework starts. Until it is, Britain's most regulated crypto exchange will be selling its UK retail customers everything except the product it was built to sell.
