On March 14, crypto journalist Wu Blockchain reported, citing three sources with direct knowledge, that Coinbase is in talks with Bybit for a strategic investment partnership. The discussions involve Coinbase taking a minority equity stake in Bybit. Neither company has officially confirmed the talks.
The strategic logic on both sides is straightforward. Bybit wants a compliant entry into the US market. Coinbase has spent a decade building exactly what Bybit lacks: federal licensing, regulatory infrastructure, and the institutional credibility that comes from being a publicly listed company on a major US exchange. A minority stake gives Bybit a route into the US market without requiring a full acquisition and it gives Coinbase a foothold in the offshore derivatives market it does not currently dominate.
The deal, if completed, would value Bybit at approximately $25 billion — in line with the valuation applied to OKX when Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, made a strategic investment in OKX earlier this year. The Bybit talks are the latest move in a strategic expansion that Coinbase calls Everything Exchange. In 2025, Coinbase acquired Deribit, the world’s largest crypto options exchange, for $2.9 billion, a deal that gave Coinbase the most sophisticated derivatives infrastructure in the industry. The pattern across all three moves — Deribit, agentic wallets, Bybit — is a company building the infrastructure for every layer of the crypto market simultaneously, from the most sophisticated institutional products to the most automated consumer applications.
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