Coinbase's Ex-Head of Markets on the Risks He Wishes He'd Taken

From Goldman to Coinbase

Vishal Gupta joined Goldman in 2002, when markets were starting to go electronic. He later launched and grew USDC at Circle from zero, then ran Coinbase's exchange business from before its IPO through after it, taking it from 20 assets to 235 and launching two derivative exchanges.

The risks he wishes he'd taken

Vishal Gupta calls Coinbase probably the best job he has ever had, but says it should have let his team take bigger risks. His view is that perps and Base should have shipped as one effort: "Brian should have locked me and Jesse in the room," he says.

He also wishes he had pushed harder on securities and prediction markets. In 2022 and 2023, he says, prediction markets were still very exotic, and the company had to stay safe as a licensed CFTC regulated business. At a startup, his advice is blunter: "Fuck around and find out."

Fixing fragmented markets

Vishal Gupta says tokenized securities now come in so many flavors that the fragmentation is never good for a market. He argues the space needs consortiums, a FINRA-like self-regulatory body and help from the SEC and the CFTC to pull it together.

Built for agents

True Markets supports Base, Solana, HyperEVM, Robinhood and other chains, and has a consumer app in the US App Store, with international expansion and Hyperliquid access planned. Gupta says the next retail user will be someone coding on Claude, for whom existing platforms are too expensive. He says providing liquidity on a crypto exchange could cost 40 bps, and it is zero on his.

He calls True Markets one of the first markets businesses built in the AI wave and says the team plans and ships in weekly OODA loops. It runs monthly trading competitions and works with the Pakistani neobank Oversee, Latitude and Dakota, including a prediction market project.