Coinbase has secured authorization from the UK Financial Conduct Authority to provide investment services in Britain, a regulatory clearance that extends the exchange's permissions beyond digital assets for the first time in the country.
The new license allows the Nasdaq-listed company to offer traditional financial instruments alongside crypto through a single platform. In a blog post on Tuesday, Coinbase described it as "the single biggest expansion of our UK product suite since we entered the market."
What the new license covers
Under the authorization, institutional and advanced traders will gain access to derivatives including crypto, equity, and commodity perpetual futures. Retail users in the UK will be able to trade equities on Coinbase for the first time, a product available to US customers but not to British users until now.
The license sits alongside Coinbase's existing UK e-money license and FCA cryptoasset registration, obtained in February 2025. Together, those earlier designations covered crypto, fiat, and payment services in the UK. Neither permitted Coinbase to offer equities or derivatives.
How Coinbase built to this point
For the period Coinbase operated in the UK before Tuesday's announcement, its product offering remained constrained by what its existing licenses allowed. The company had launched savings and borrow products for UK users in the months before this authorization, steps that preceded the broader expansion it announced Tuesday.
Keith Grose, who authored the company's blog post on the authorization, credited the UK government and the FCA for building the conditions that made the expansion possible.
"We chose to deepen our commitment to the UK because the UK made itself worth committing to," he wrote.
Coinbase entered the UK market several years ago with narrow regulatory permissions. Each subsequent designation, from the cryptoasset registration to the e-money license and now the investment services authorization, extended what the company could legally offer British users. That progression also reflects a UK regulatory environment that has moved from ambiguity around digital assets toward a defined legislative framework, something Grose acknowledged as central to the company's decision to stay and expand.
FCA data and the regulatory gap
The FCA's own research, cited by Coinbase, found approximately 7 million UK adults currently hold crypto. A quarter of non-holders said they would be more likely to participate if the sector operated under clearer rules.
"We look forward to October 2027, when the UK's full crypto regime takes effect and that becomes a reality. But this licence means UK users don't have to wait to benefit," Grose wrote. "It gives both crypto holders and newcomers regulated access to traditional investments today, on a platform millions of Britons already trust to invest, save and trade."
The UK's full crypto regulatory framework is not scheduled to take effect until October 2027. The investment services authorization gives Coinbase a regulated path to expand before that deadline.
The everything exchange
The authorization connects to what Coinbase calls its "everything exchange" strategy, a platform where users can access everything from stablecoin payments and borrowing to crypto derivatives and equities, with tokenized real-world assets planned for future inclusion.
Grose described the financial fragmentation the strategy targets.
"Today, a typical UK investor juggles a banking app, a brokerage account, a savings product and a crypto wallet. We think that era is ending," he wrote.
US users already have access to stock and ETF trading on Coinbase. The company also plans to offer tokenized stocks backed one-for-one by US equities to eligible non-US users, products designed to give investors ownership of the underlying shares along with dividends. Eligible non-US customers can also trade USDC-settled stock perpetual futures on large-cap names.
"We believe crypto is the foundational architecture of the modern financial system, and the gap between traditional and digital finance is closing fast," Coinbase's statement said. "The UK is now one of the first markets where users will see what that convergence actually looks like."
Tanya Petrusenko
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