The Smartest Crypto Exchanges Are Turning Data Into Their…

For most of their history, crypto exchanges followed a simple business model: they made money when people traded and very little when they stopped. The largest platforms are now rewriting that model, with a growing share of their revenue tied to the information flowing through their platforms, from order books and settlement prices to the behavior of the people placing trades.Coinbase earned about $6 million from subscriptions and services in the second quarter of 2020. By the second quarter of 2026, that segment generated $555 million, accounting for 48% of net revenue, according to the company's second-quarter shareholder update.Its premium Coinbase One tier has also surpassed one million paid subscribers, up from the 600,000 members the company reported in December 2024.Rivals are following a similar playbook. Bullish, the institutional crypto exchange that owns CoinDesk, recorded $62.7 million in subscription, services and other revenue in the second quarter, compared with $29.9 million in adjusted transaction revenue, Finance Magnates reported. That non-trading business spans data products, CoinDesk indices and liquidity services. Morgan Stanley's crypto exchange-traded products, which track CoinDesk benchmarks, drew about $194 million in inflows during their first month after launching in April 2026.The question now is which of these revenue streams can keep producing when trading activity slows. Three people who trade through, build on, and research these platforms gave me different answers.

Coinbase's Services Share Rests Mostly on Balances, With a Data Business Growing Inside It

Pavel Efremov, a director at FinchTrade who works with institutional liquidity flows, called the shift real but urged precision about what the headline number measures. "More than half of that segment is stablecoin income, with custody and staking making up much of the rest," he said, describing those as balance-based financial services in which data and analytics remain "a smaller piece growing inside them."The balance business is large, with Coinbase saying it captured roughly half of all USDC economics over the past year while average USDC held in its products reached a record $20 billion, according to the same Q2 update. Joe Sticco, founder and CEO of Cryptex Finance, which publishes a 36-asset crypto market-cap index priced off Coinbase data, added that the segment's share rose to 48% of net revenue, from 29% in Q4 2024, even as it fell about 15% year over year, because transaction revenue fell faster.Coinbase, he said, "swapped one cyclical exposure for two others," since stablecoin income tracks interest rates and staking rewards track token prices, though he still called it "real diversification."Kyle Reidhead, co-owner of the crypto research business Milk Road, sees subscriptions as only partly insulated from the cycle. Coinbase One members can cancel in a downturn, but memberships are sticky because "people just put their credit card in and they kind of forget about it," and he noted that churn in Coinbase's trading volumes ran well above churn among its subscribers. "I don't think the subscription model is necessarily a savior from crypto trading volumes," he said, adding that it is still helpful.Reidhead is more confident about stablecoins, tokenized stocks and payments infrastructure, and while stablecoins did not grow during the recent nine-month downturn, he believes their acceptance beyond crypto will probably make them resilient.

Institutions Pay for Data They Can Defend to an Auditor, Not Data They Can Glance at

For institutional customers, not all exchange data has equal value. Efremov applies two tests to any exchange data product, asking whether it saves basis points or satisfies an auditor. Real-time top-of-book prices fail both, so venues give them away. What institutions buy, he said, is normalized historical order-book data with reliable timestamps, execution-quality reporting at size, defensible period-end reference prices and derivatives data. "Volume tells you a venue is busy; depth tells you what a large order actually costs," he said.Sticco, whose firm chose Coinbase as its pricing source because the venue "stays up" when an index mark matters most, argues that reference pricing is the most valuable and least glamorous asset an exchange holds. Kraken recognized this earliest by buying CF Benchmarks in 2019, and that administrator, authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, now runs the reference rate behind CME's bitcoin futures. "Reliability is not a feature of the data product," Sticco said. "It is the data product."The weaker opportunity, in Sticco's view, lies in retail dashboards and AI-powered trading signals, which compete against free analytics and churn after a bad quarter. The stronger one is licensing, meaning charging for the right to use data inside a fund, index or structured note as Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange did to build their data annuities. "Nobody cancels the benchmark named in their prospectus," he said.Reidhead expects the biggest exchanges to keep customer behavioral data in-house rather than sell it, using it to build better products and feed AI trading agents like those Robinhood recently unveiled. He sees that tracking as a benefit, since anyone who objects can use a decentralized venue like Uniswap. Efremov draws the line at client-level or near-real-time data, which an exchange's own trading arm or a favored customer could act on, and says the governance test includes whether every buyer receives the same latency. Sticco calls governance separation the condition the industry keeps avoiding, because "you cannot credibly administer a benchmark while trading against it on the same balance sheet."

Separate Disclosure of Data Revenue Would Show Whether the Business Stands on Its Own

For now, exchange data revenue sits bundled with stablecoin income and staking inside Coinbase's reported services segment, which Efremov said makes it impossible to assess. The number that would convince him is a separately reported data and index licensing line, with renewal rates, that grows sequentially in a quarter when spot volumes fall, along with buyers from outside crypto such as fund administrators and auditors. Retail subscriber counts, he added, "won't settle it, because they move with sentiment."Reidhead believes retention will come from breadth instead, with Coinbase and Robinhood folding banking, cards and trading into one app, using data to decide which features to build next.Sticco sees the demand driver as regulation, as tokenized funds, tokenized equities and crypto-collateralized lending each require a defensible mark.The prize, in Sticco's view, is a governed, auditable reference price. "It will not be announced on a conference stage," he said. "It will appear in fund documentation and stay there for twenty years."

What Investors and Users Should Watch Next

Coinbase now describes itself as "a diversified financial infrastructure company" in its second-quarter update, and investors in exchange stocks can test that label against what sits inside the services segment rather than its headline share. Stablecoin income, staking, and custody depend on balances, interest rates, and token prices, so watch any separately disclosed data or index licensing revenue and whether it grows in a quarter when spot volumes fall. Users weighing a paid analytics or signals tier should judge it on logged results net of fees and slippage over several months, because a track record showing only winners is marketing rather than evidence.