Coinbase is making its biggest push yet to reposition itself as a mainstream trading and financial platform, moving beyond crypto and into the broader retail investing stack as competitors show there’s real money in always-on engagement products.

The digital asset exchange announced Wednesday that it’s rolling out a major slate of new products designed to turn Coinbase into a one-stop financial app, expanding into stocks, more advanced trading, and prediction markets, while doubling down on its on-chain ecosystem and new tools for businesses, developers, and automated financial guidance.

While many of these offerings have been telegraphed for months, Coinbase says the products are now built, and ready to go.

CEO Brian Armstrong is looking to make his platform the place to trade everything.

That includes stocks, a streamlined futures and perpetuals experience, and prediction markets through Kalshi, alongside a tokenization roadmap aimed at eventually bringing more traditional assets on-chain, including equities.

The area of prediction markets, in particular, is quickly getting crowded.

DraftKings has moved to buy its own exchange, FanDuel is teaming up with CME, and Polymarket is entering the U.S. through a newly approved venue. Robinhood, meanwhile, is putting LedgerX at the center of its regulated push.

The defining rivalry in the space remains Kalshi versus Polymarket, regulated rails versus crypto-native liquidity.

Armstrong said the category’s appeal isn’t just trading, but its insight into sentiment, and what people think will happen next on any given topic.

“If you look at things like economic indicators … or elections, people are using prediction markets to try to figure out what is going to happen next month,” Armstrong told CNBC. “Maybe1% of people use it as an asset class to trade, and 99% of people are using it as a way to figure out what’s going to happen — almost like a competitor to traditional media or maybe even entertainment.”

In the company’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts in October, Armstrong showed just how easily prediction market wagers can be manipulated, rattling off several words that were being bet on.

“I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call,” Armstrong said. “And I just want to add here the words bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain, staking and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call.”

Robinhood underscored that shift this week by expanding prediction markets into sports-style contracts that resemble parlays and prop bets, and by touting the category as its fastest-growing business by revenue.

Coinbase is now bringing the same kind of outcome trading into its own ecosystem, but as a part of a much wider bet that the next-generation brokerage is a single app that blends traditional assets, derivatives, and on-chain rails.

Coinbase is pairing the trading expansion with a tokenization roadmap that signals…

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

Homebuilding has long been one of the slowest industries to modernize, and commercial construction isn’t far behind. Its scale is enormous, and yet it remains one of the least digitized industries in the world. 

That lack of innovation in commercial technology contributes to outdated documentation and errors in tasks that then have to be redone as well as administrative drag. It’s a huge drain on time, budgets and materials and can lead to costly delays and unnecessary environmental waste.

All told, it contributes to nearly $1 trillion in lost productivity each year, according to an August 2024 report from McKinsey Global Institute. Historically, construction companies spent an average of less than 1% of revenues on IT, less than a third of what is common in automotive and aerospace, according to the report.

Sarah Buchner learned all this the hard way. The daughter of a carpenter in Austria, she came to the U.S. to learn construction and worked her way up to foreman, superintendent and eventually contractor. 

“At the peak, I was running a $400 million high-rise, 600 guys working for me in the job. And on that specific construction side, I had a fatality, which in construction happens, unfortunately, a lot,” she said. “But I was, I think, very young, and couldn’t fully process what was happening.” 

So Buchner decided to build a health and safety app, switching careers from construction to construction software and construction tech. A decade later, with the proliferation of AI, she launched Trunk Tools, a generative AI platform trained on real construction workflows. It automates some of the more tedious tasks and also pinpoints project risks and simplifies documents.

“We take all of the unstructured documentation on a construction site, and we use different AI and machine learning tools to restructure it,” Buchner explained, noting that an average high-rise project in New York City, costing about half a billion dollars, would require about 3.5 million pages of documentation. 

“Those pages change every single day, because the planning isn’t finished by the time you start construction,” said Buchner.

So contractors often get conflicting orders and can’t search the documents to clarify. For…