Anthony Bassili, President of Coinbase Asset Management, joined Julie Cooling, Founder and CEO of RIA Channel, at iCapital Connect 2026 to discuss how family offices and institutional investors are allocating to digital assets.
Coinbase Asset Management (CBAM) was created in 2023 when Coinbase acquired a small RIA firm. CBAM now manages and advises on nearly $1 billion in its investment and wealth management business. The firm manages two flagship strategies, including a bitcoin yield strategy and a stablecoin credit strategy. These funds are available in tokenized form and as traditional private funds through iCapital.
CBAM also works with institutional clients to manage their digital asset accounts on the Coinbase platform. Bassili notes that most family offices and institutional investors are still at the first step, seeking to understand the case for owning bitcoin and how it fits into their portfolios.
Some investors come to CBAM with large bitcoin positions with a low cost basis, seeking to earn income on their holdings. The bitcoin yield product is a private fund that accepts in-kind contributions of bitcoin. In Coinbase accounts, bitcoin can be used as cross-margined collateral backing futures basis and options overlay strategies.
Over the next 10 years, Coinbase projects bitcoin to deliver an 8% annualized real return, exceeding the rate at which inflation debases the US dollar. There are a variety of roles that bitcoin can potentially play in a portfolio, including diversification, earning a new risk premium, and hedging against inflation and monetary debasement. Bassili expects that liquidity and monetary debasement will be invested into scarce risk assets, with bitcoin a leading candidate to absorb those asset flows.
Today, CBAM is focused on private market funds and tokenization. Tokenization rewires capital market infrastructure, providing liquid access and lower minimum investments for private funds with transactions and custody on blockchain rails. The technology for tokenizing a private fund is similar to that of an ETF, which has procedures for in-kind creation and redemptions. Any traditional security can be tokenized, including stocks, ETFs, and interval funds.
Coinbase Institutional offers crypto-as-a-service, working with over 300 banks and institutions to integrate wallet technology into their fintech operations.
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