Dan Tapiero says Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN) will one day be worth $1 trillion, a generational winner he compares to Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).

That is a climb of more than 20 times from where the stock trades today.

Tapiero, founder of 50T Funds, laid out the case on the “When Shift Happens” podcast.

Why He Would Rather Own The Exchange Than The Coins

His fund buys equity in crypto companies but refuses to touch the tokens those companies issue.

The reason, he said, is legal.

A century of case law spells out what an equity holder owns, while token holders have little assurance that a project’s revenue ever reaches them.

That stance looked dull through the last cycle but has since paid off.

The speculative tokens collapsed, he said, while his equity bets produced six exits last year, among them options venue Deribit, which Coinbase acquired.

Coinbase is that trade at scale, a regulated exchange Tapiero ranks alongside Kraken as a potential once-in-a-generation business rather than a wager on any single coin.

A Line Item In A $50 Trillion Bet

Tapiero models the entire digital asset economy reaching $50 trillion within a decade, roughly $20 trillion of it in crypto equity.

He counts about 10 significant public crypto companies today and expects 50 to 100, with Coinbase as the flagship.

He argues that the figure is conservative.

Stablecoins went from nothing to $33 trillion in annual transaction volume in five years, and he expects autonomous AI agents to settle payments on blockchains rather than through banks, adding what he calls thousands of trillions of future transactions.

Coinbase already earns from that shift.

It keeps the interest on USDC held on its platform and splits the rest with Circle Internet Group (NYSE:CRCL).

That stablecoin income brought Coinbase $305 million last quarter.

However, competition for those retail accounts is intensifying. Robinhood Markets (NASDAQ:HOOD) is fighting it on both crypto and event contracts, while traditional brokers move in from the other side.

Charles Schwab (NYSE:SCHW) began rolling out spot Bitcoin and Ethereum to retail this year, and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) is adding crypto through E*Trade.

Polymarket Is Pricing The Pain

Kalshi traders think there is a 24% chance that Base, Coinbase’s EVM chain releases a token this year.

On Polymarket’s most active crypto market, “What price will Bitcoin hit in 2026?”, traders assign better than a 90% chance that Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) sinks to $60,000 this year, and a 56% chance it hits $50,000, with the token already well below its roughly $120,000 peak.

Tapiero says Bitcoin is in a “distribution” phase, as early retail cashes out 100x gains while institutions accumulate for a slower 10x decade, and says a drop to $50,000 would likely mark the bottom.

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