Coinbase’s pitch to Canadians is no longer “come trade some Bitcoin.” It is “close your brokerage account, close your prediction-markets app, and run your whole financial life from here.” That is the shape of the “Everything Exchange” that Coinbase Canada CEO Eric Richmond described to BNN Bloomberg this week — a single platform where crypto, equities, exchange-traded funds and event contracts all clear from one login (Decrypt).
The framing matters more than any one feature. Richmond drew a line between two eras of the company’s Canadian business. “Chapter one of Coinbase in Canada was really about being a crypto exchange,” he said, before describing “phase two” as an attempt to build “that one place for Canadians to have their entire financial experience in one app” (BNN Bloomberg interview, via Decrypt). The tell is the language: this is a financial-super-app strategy dressed in crypto-native rails, aimed squarely at the accounts Canadians currently keep at banks and discount brokerages.
No date, and that is the honest part
What Coinbase conspicuously did not offer is a launch date. There is no committed timeline for when Canadians can buy a stock next to their ETH, and Richmond was explicit that the company is “working closely with local regulators to get there.” That caution is earned. Coinbase became the first international crypto exchange registered in Canada back in April 2024, and the regulatory relationship it has built since is the asset it is now trying to spend.
The most concrete near-term promise is tokenized stocks — shares recorded on a blockchain rather than in a traditional brokerage ledger, so they settle instantly and trade outside standard market hours. Coinbase has said those are slated to reach non-U.S. customers, Canadians included, this month, with full dividend rights attached. If that ships on schedule, it becomes the first visible brick of the Everything Exchange to actually land in Canada, ahead of the broader equities and prediction-markets rollout.
The U.S. blueprint Canada is being sold
Canada is not getting an experiment; it is getting an export. In the United States the build-out is already running. Coinbase opened stock and ETF trading to eligible American users in February 2026 and, a month earlier, added regulated event contracts through a tie-up with Kalshi, the federally regulated prediction-market operator now valued at roughly $22 billion. The company’s stated roadmap points at putting close to 10,000 stocks and ETFs on a single platform. The Canadian version is essentially that stack, re-papered for a different regulator.
Richmond was unbothered by the incumbents he would be taking on — Robinhood on one flank, Canada’s established bank-owned brokerages on the other. His argument leaned on friction rather than price: “banks close at 4 p.m., or the markets close at 4 p.m., or… wires can take days to settle,” he told BNN Bloomberg, positioning always-on, instantly-settling rails as the differentiator. Whether Canadians treat 24/7 settlement as a genuine want or a solution in search of a problem is the open question underneath the whole pitch.
The piece Coinbase can’t ship itself
One component of the plan is not in Coinbase’s hands at all: a Canadian-dollar stablecoin. That waits on the Bank of Canada, which is expected to finalize implementing regulations for stablecoins in 2027. Until that framework exists, Coinbase cannot list a CAD stablecoin, and a fiat-native, always-on money layer is exactly the connective tissue an “everything” app needs to move value between a user’s stocks, crypto and event bets without touching the slow banking rails Richmond keeps criticizing.
So the accurate read is a strategy with a clear destination and a deliberately blurry map. Tokenized equities may arrive within weeks; the full super-app, with a homegrown stablecoin at its center, is gated behind a regulatory calendar that runs into 2027. For Canadians, the interesting decision is not whether Coinbase can build this — the U.S. product proves it can — but whether they want their brokerage, their crypto wallet and their prediction market to share the same balance, and the same company’s risk.
