The coins stored on Coinbase (and other crypto exchanges for that matter) are at all time lows, people are self-custodying their coins and using them on decentralized protocols where they don't have to trust centralized 3rd parties. Coinbase is just one player in the whole space.
Re:Coinbase from YC to DPO
by spurdoman77 on Thursday April 15, 2021 @02:32AM
(#26816809)
Coinbase is custodying 760k BTC or so... thats more than 5% of all BTC in existence.
They claimed that they were holding about 11% of crypto market cap on their exchange.
To me, it's a shame to see. Now that Gmail and Coinbase have captured so much of their markets, they (or anyone who can coerce them) are now free to start censoring what goes in or out, turning a federated, permissionless system into effectively a dictatorship.
https://cryptobriefing.com/bitstamp-begins-track-off-exchang...
I really hope that's not what ends up happening. It's a bummer that financial services in the global west engage in such legally-mandated gatekeeping, locking billions out of the most lucrative payments markets. The internet and cryptocurrencies present a new opportunity there, and re-using the same decades old regulation to segregate the technology into the haves and have-nots is, to me, a tragedy.