Coinbase wants to be Canada’s ‘everything exchange,’ but says clearer rules are needed first

TORONTO — Coinbase wants to bring more of the crypto products available to its U.S. customers, including derivatives, decentralized finance services and tokenized assets, to Canada, but Eric Richmond, the exchange’s newly-appointed Canadian CEO, says the country’s regulatory framework needs to evolve beyond temporary exemptions if it wants to keep pace with the industry’s next phase.

Richmond said the firm ultimately wants to expand beyond just a crypto trading platform, instead offering a broader suite of financial products built on blockchain infrastructure.

“We want to have all your financial services in one place,” Richmond said in an interview with CoinDesk at the Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto. “We want to be that everything exchange… underpinned by this technology, where it’s 24/7, seamless, frictionless.”

However, delivering on that vision in Canada depends largely on the country’s regulatory framework, according to Richmond.

“We just need to find the regulated path to get launches to Canadians, and we’ve started to do that,” said Richmond. He has been deeply involved in the Canadian digital assets landscape from his former executive roles in companies including Shakepay and Coinsquare.

While Canada was among the world’s earliest jurisdictions to approve spot crypto exchange-traded funds and to establish a registration framework for crypto trading platforms, Richmond said much of that progress relied on regulatory staff notices and company-specific exemption orders rather than legislation specifically designed for digital assets. That approach helped Canada move quickly in crypto’s early years, he said, but has become less effective as companies seek to launch more sophisticated products.

“It’s not a new bespoke legislative framework. And that is something I actually think we still need,” Richmond said.

His comments come as Canada and the U.S. are beginning to take different approaches to crypto regulation.

Take tokenization, for example: both countries generally treat tokenized financial instruments under the same laws that govern their traditional equivalents, according to a July report from global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. However, the U.S. has moved further in issuing detailed guidance for tokenized securities, collateral, custody and capital treatment, the report said.

Regulators in Canada, meanwhile, “remain at a predominantly consultative stage, with the [Canadian Securities Administrators] CSA having issued only limited exemptive relief for pilot projects and [Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization] CIRO’s custody framework expressly described as interim guidance,” the law firm wrote.

Neither country has completed a comprehensive, permanent framework designed specifically for tokenized financial assets. Still, Norton Rose said the more advanced state of U.S. regulatory guidance could allow American infrastructure to achieve wider adoption and give U.S. firms greater influence over emerging industry standards.

Another consequence of current Canadian regulations is that consumers face delays in accessing apps that users south of the border already use.

One of the products that Coinbase U.S. offers to its “Coinbase One” customers is a stablecoin lending program that pays about 7% APY, somewhat similar to what Robinhood’s Earn product offers. However, that product isn’t available to Canadian users. Instead, they earn up to 4.5% APY for holding USDC on Coinbase.

Richmond is actively working to ensure customers on both sides of the border have similar access. “My focus is to bring the products that you see in the U.S. to Canadians,” he said.

Another product Coinbase hopes to roll out is access to certain crypto futures products for “permitted” Canadian customers through its CFTC-regulated arm, Coinbase Financial Markets. Richmond said that was possible because it received an “international exemption” from Canadian regulators to offer such a product in Canada.

However, Coinbase would need additional regulatory approvals to offer the product to broader retail customers in Canada, unlike in the U.S., where, because it’s CFTC-regulated, retail expansion approval would naturally be embedded in the process.

To Richmond, the delay isn’t about regulators moving slowly, but a structural difference between U.S. and Canadian frameworks.

“It’s not necessarily just a regulatory thing; just the nature of the rules is different,” he said.

While there is still work to be done, Richmond is encouraged by the fact that Canadian regulators are actively listening to industry players about digital asset products and are open to creating new regulatory frameworks to support the growing industry.

One example Richmond cited as “a very good piece of legislation” is the new Stablecoin Act, which was enacted by the Canadian Federal government earlier this year, after the U.S. passed the GENIUS Act last year.

In the wake of the Stablecoin Act’s passage, Canada has already seen Tetra Trust — a company backed by heavyweights such as Wealthsimple, Shopify and National Bank of Canada — launching Canada’s first regulated financial institution-issued Canadian-dollar stablecoin CADD.

Canada has already shown that crypto companies can operate inside a regulated market. The next test is whether its rules can accommodate products that move beyond spot trading into payments, derivatives, tokenized securities and decentralized finance.

Richmond said that, rather than having companies interpret these guidelines, “codifying” the existing regulatory practices into a national framework that applies consistently across provincial securities regulators will help reduce legal uncertainties for builders. Essentially, he argued that Canada should consolidate more of its existing crypto requirements into a ‘national instrument’ — a set of harmonized securities rules adopted across provincial and territorial regulators.

“When you call it a national instrument, it means every single securities commission has approved this rule, and so it’s harmonizing the rules across Canada, ensuring that everyone’s treated fairly in every single province across the country,” he said.

That would move Canada beyond a framework built largely on exemptions, toward one that provides both regulators and companies with greater certainty as crypto expands into areas such as payments, tokenized assets and decentralized finance.

Whether policymakers choose that path could determine how quickly products already available to U.S. customers reach Canada.