Coinbase has taken a significant step towards enhancing its decentralized finance (DeFi) offerings by acquiring the founders of Sensible, a team renowned for their contributions to DeFi applications. This strategic move is part of Coinbase’s ongoing strategy to bolster its onchain consumer roadmap and transform into an “everything exchange.”
The co-founders of Sensible, Jacob Frantz and Zachary Salmon, will spearhead initiatives aimed at simplifying the user experience for DeFi tools. This focus aligns with Coinbase’s ambitious plans to make decentralized finance more accessible to a broader audience, particularly retail users.
Previously, Frantz and Salmon developed applications that successfully introduced DeFi functionalities to retail investors, a space where Coinbase has been progressively expanding its influence. The firm’s recent initiatives, including the introduction of Coinbase Wallet and its layer-2 network, Base, signify its commitment to enhancing user engagement with DeFi.
With this acquisition, Coinbase is poised to address the complexity often associated with decentralized lending, staking, and rewards programs, which frequently deter newcomers from participating. The company underscored its intention to develop tools such as non-custodial smart wallets tailored for crypto-backed loans and innovative staking services that enable users to earn rewards by contributing to the security of blockchain networks.
This acquisition is in line with a series of strategic efforts that Coinbase has undertaken throughout 2024 and 2025 to strengthen its onchain ecosystem. These include the acquisition of the Utopia Labs team in late 2024 to accelerate its payments strategy, as well as the integration of Spindl in early 2025 to enhance onchain advertising capabilities. More recently, Coinbase also welcomed leaders from Opyn Markets to assist in developing market infrastructure.
As Coinbase continues to evolve, the emphasis on making DeFi tools user-friendly appears to be a central theme in its future plans. Further developments in this ongoing story are expected as the company progresses with its ambitious roadmap.
