Seven of the world's largest banks are now running on Coinbase infrastructure, and Brett Tejpaul, Co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, says the banking sector is having a "Kodak moment" — a nod to the photography giant that lost its dominance after missing the shift to digital imaging.

Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine's Grace Remington and Sean Hagan in an interview published Oct. 26, Tejpaul explained that the driver of institutional adoption has shifted from Bitcoin ETFs to stablecoin payments. Money can now move from a Citi account into USDC — the dollar-pegged stablecoin launched in 2018 by Circle and Coinbase through their Centre consortium — across the blockchain in a second, and into a corporate account on the other side, he said.

He cited roughly400 million an hour in stablecoin volume and described stablecoins as a "speck of dust" within the broader payments landscape, with payment providers adopting first and banks to follow. He added that agentic commerce is arriving at the same time as the big players. The remarks arrive months after the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established the first federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins in the United States.

On Bitcoin, Tejpaul offered a candid read: the macro setup is great, the performance has been disappointing, and institutions are not yet treating the asset as anything other than a tech trade. That framing stands apart from the earlier wave of institutional exposure, which came largely through U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs following their approval in January 2024. He also discussed connecting U.S. funds to Deribit — the crypto derivatives exchange Coinbase acquired earlier this year in a deal valued at roughly $2.9 billion — which holds an 85% options market share.

Tejpaul described bitcoin's "second wave" of institutional capital as net-new entrants and likened Coinbase's evolution to Amazon's pivot into AWS, the cloud unit that grew out of Amazon's own infrastructure into its most profitable business. He said Coinbase aims to activate the whole U.S. through its infrastructure, and addressed quantum computing alongside the platform's 90% ETF custody share, describing it as "safe forever." For readers following the story, the near-term markers are the pace of bank adoption of stablecoin settlement and how Deribit access for U.S.-based funds takes shape — both threads Tejpaul described as already underway.

The full conversation is available on YouTube. This article first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Patrick Green.

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