Coinbase Wins an FCA Licence for UK Equities and Perps

The Financial Conduct Authority has authorised Coinbase as a MiFID investment firm in the United Kingdom, clearing the exchange to offer regulated investment products alongside crypto for the first time. Institutional and advanced traders gain access to perpetual futures on crypto, equities and commodities, while UK retail customers gain equities trading on the platform. The stock perpetual futures will be settled in USDC and reference large-cap names including Apple, Microsoft and Tesla. Coinbase said the rollout would be progressive from the announcement, and it did not attach dates to individual products. The permission sits alongside the two the firm already held in the country, an e-money licence and an FCA cryptoasset registration granted in February 2025.

The Permission: What MiFID Adds to a Crypto Registration

MiFID is the investment-services framework that governs how a firm may deal in financial instruments such as shares, commodities and derivatives, and an authorisation under it is what a broker needs before it can arrange or execute those trades for clients. A cryptoasset registration reaches only a firm's crypto business; it does not extend to equities or to derivatives written on them, which is why Coinbase could run a large UK crypto operation for years without being able to show a British customer a share of stock. The new authorisation removes that boundary and puts both categories inside one regulated entity. Coinbase described the combination as the clearest step yet toward what it calls its "everything exchange" strategy, which the company defines as payments, savings, borrowing, crypto, derivatives and equities behind a single login. Keith Grose, who wrote the company post announcing the approval, said the change was concrete rather than procedural: "This is not an abstract regulatory milestone. It changes what UK users can do on Coinbase."

The Products: USDC-Settled Perpetuals and Retail Equities

Perpetual futures are derivative contracts with no expiry date, which a trader can hold open for as long as margin is maintained rather than rolling into a new contract each quarter. Coinbase's UK versions will be margined and settled in USDC and will cover crypto, equity and commodity underlyings, with the equity contracts referencing large-cap listed companies including Apple, Microsoft and Tesla. Access is split by client type: the perpetual futures are for institutional and advanced traders, while the retail-facing part of the announcement is ordinary equities trading, which UK users of the platform have not had before. Tokenised real-world assets were flagged as a later addition rather than part of the initial set. Nothing in the announcement set out pricing, position limits or the order in which the products would appear.

The Stack: Three Permissions and a Regime That Starts in 2027

Coinbase now holds three separate UK permissions covering payments, crypto and investment services, each granted under a different rulebook. That layering is a consequence of timing: the FCA's separate cryptoasset regime, which does not take effect until October 2027, will eventually replace the registration-based arrangement that currently covers the crypto side of the business. Until then, a firm that wants to sell both crypto and conventional investments in Britain has to assemble the permissions one at a time. The contrast with the other route open to large exchanges is sharp: in the European Union, Binance withdrew its application rather than complete authorisation and stopped serving users in the bloc when the transitional period expired at the start of July.

What Is Not Settled: Sequencing, Scope and Competitive Response

The immediate open question is timing. A progressive rollout with no published schedule leaves open when equities trading reaches British users, which instruments arrive first, and how large the initial perpetual-futures universe will be. The tokenised real-world assets Coinbase mentioned sit further out still, and no regulatory basis for offering them was described. Also unstated is whether the same permissions will be sought in other markets where Coinbase already runs a crypto business. What is on the record is narrow and specific: an investment-firm authorisation, a defined product set, and a rollout that begins now and runs into a regime that does not exist yet.