Brian Armstrong is the CEO and cofounder of Coinbase. Michael Nagle—Bloomberg/Getty Images
The largest crypto exchange in the United States announced on Thursday that Bermuda’s financial regulator has given it the green light to let retail traders outside the U.S. buy and sell perpetual futures.
As of Thursday, small-time investors, as opposed to only deep-pocketed institutional traders, will be able to apply to trade the risky financial products, which allow investors to speculate on the future price of an asset. Trading will begin in the coming weeks, Coinbase said in a blog post announcing the Bermuda news.
“We chose to build our business and become a public company in the U.S. believing that the U.S. should be at the forefront of efforts to update our financial system,” wrote the exchange.
Coinbase’s move to open up its international exchange to small investors is the latest in the company’s ongoing efforts to expand its footprint beyond the U.S. where it has faced growing regulatory scrutiny.
Following the collapse of competing exchange FTX and the arrest of its now-disgraced CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the Securities and Exchange Commission soon cracked down on a slew of high-profile crypto companies and founders, including Genesis, Gemini, Justin Sun, the crypto celebrity behind TRON, and Do Kwon, creator of the so-called stablecoin TerraUSD.
In March, Coinbase, which has long styled itself as the white knight of the crypto industry, revealed that has also become the target of impending SEC litigation after it received a so-called Wells Notice, which informs companies that they are the targets of soon-to-be litigation.
Shortly after, the U.S.-based exchange, headed by CEO Brian Armstrong, announced that it had received regulatory approval in Bermuda to operate an offshore exchange, and in May, the publicly traded company unveiled Coinbase International Exchange for the use of institutional investors.
The SEC eventually filed an outright lawsuit against Coinbase in June, but that hasn’t stopped billions of dollars of crypto from flowing through both its domestic and offshore entities. Its Bermuda outpost has seen $5.5 billion in trading volume—strictly from institutional investors—as of the second quarter of 2023. (By comparison, Coinbase reported $92 billion in total trading volume in the same period.)
