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This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Coinbase is shaking things up.  If you somehow didn’t hear, Morpho and Coinbase have teamed up to offer loans where Coinbase users (though New York users can’t, much to the disappointment of some of my colleagues) can borrow USDC against bitcoin held on Coinbase. Pretty cool, right? Definitely yet another sign of the changing times.  Blockworks data whiz Dan Smith joined Empire’s round-up this week, telling host Jason Yanowitz that he thinks the announcement is a win for bitcoin… with some caveats. “ Bitcoin’s money, they [Coinbase] want it to be everywhere,” Smith said. But the asterisk, as he called it, is that the loanee now has to trust that Morpho can hold that bitcoin as collateral on Base. This can, understandably, cause anxiety about that going wrong. As Smith pointed out, the upside is that Coinbase is the largest centralized exchange in the US. For some folks, that’ll be enough to entrust Morpho and Coinbase with holding their loaned bitcoin.  Watch today’s Empire roundup through the jump There’s been a lot of demand for the product, according to Coinbase’s VP of Product Max Branzburg. Smith, in the episode, also noted that the pairing of onchain lending startup Morpho and Coinbase here is a huge win for the former. For Branzburg and Coinbase, Morpho was the go-to because it has “built some really great products in this area, and has built protocols that are very well audited that are safe, secure, [and] provide that kind of value.” But he’s not ruling out the potential for other integrations with other projects.  “As more people are building on base, we’ll find ways to bring Coinbase users to those builders,” Branzburg said.  Honestly, one of my burning questions personally was two-fold,…

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Filed under: News - @ January 17, 2025 4:25 pm