US Crypto and Fintech Firms Chase Asia’s ‘Super App’ Model amid Clearer Rules

United States-based crypto and fintech companies — including Coinbase, Robinhood, and X (formerly Twitter) — are expanding their platforms to offer a broader range of financial and communication services, as the “super app” model popularized in Asia gains traction in the West.

The trend has accelerated as U.S. regulators continue to push forward with crypto-friendly legislation and policies that provide long-awaited clarity to the industry.

Last Thursday, Max Branzburg, Coinbase’s head of consumer and business products, told CNBC that the largest U.S. centralized exchange (CEX) would soon offer its domestic users access to tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), stocks, derivatives, and prediction markets.

Shortly afterward, Branzburg posted on X that Coinbase is building an “everything exchange” and described it as a “BIG deal.”

“Equities is a $100T market. We can transform it by building the bridge to on-chain capital markets,” Branzburg wrote, continuing: “Imagine all of this in one place: millions of crypto assets, derivatives, tokenized equities, and more.

On the same day, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced “Project Crypto,” a new initiative that aims to bring traditional finance (TradFi) systems in the U.S. on-chain.

The new policy comes amid broader regulatory momentum in the United States, as the House of Representatives recently passed the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts, and President Donald Trump signed the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act into law.

Earlier last month, Coinbase announced that it had rebranded its non-custodial wallet app, Coinbase Wallet, to Base app, and revealed that the product now combines a web3 wallet, trading, payments, social media, messaging, and mini apps into one platform. Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, told media as far back as 2023 that the CEX is moving toward “super app” status, emulating the model popular in Asia.

‘Super-App Reality’

In his announcement unveiling Project Crypto last week, SEC Chair Paul Atkins praised the idea of crypto-powered “super-apps” and emphasized that this new policy “represents more than a regulatory shift — it is a generational opportunity.”

“A key priority of my chairmanship is to allow market participants to innovate with ‘super-apps.’ I am often asked, ‘What do you mean by a super-app?’ Plain and simple: securities intermediaries should be able to offer a broad range of products and services under one roof with a single license,” Atkins said.

The unveiling of Project Crypto follows Chair Atkins’ previously stated support for a “‘super-app; reality.” In remarks on May 19, Atkins said that he wants registered broker-dealers to be able to hold and trade cryptocurrencies, even if those assets aren’t classified as securities.

“I would like the Commission to allow SEC registrants to custody and trade both securities and non-securities under one roof. Enabling this reality could reduce costs for investors while allowing non-security trading to enter a regulated environment at the federal level expeditiously,” Atkins said at the time, laying the groundwork for the much larger scope of Project Crypto that would follow.

“This would be an initial step towards the possibility of eventually achieving a ‘super-app’ reality,” Atkins stated in his May remarks.

‘All-in-One Investment Product’

Earlier this summer, retail brokerage app Robinhood also announced that it will offer more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks and exchange-traded fund (ETF) tokens to users in Europe, with plans to expand that number to 2,000 by the end of 2025. Robinhood’s current tokenization model uses Arbitrum, but the brokerage plans to migrate to its own permissionless Layer 2 (L2) next year.

Robinhood’s product manager, Seong Seog Lee, told The Defiant in an interview in June that this was part of the platform’s efforts to become an “all-in-one investment product powered by crypto.”

Lee explained to The Defiant, “In the EU today you actually can’t buy the most popular U.S. ETFs directly like VOO and SPY, you have to buy an alternative, but stock tokens will give you the opportunity to gain direct exposure there.”

Robinhood’s product manager continued:

Notably, Robinhood’s proposed tokenization structure — especially for its tokenized private company shares, which it announced would start with shares of OpenAI and SpaceX — quickly drew criticism from OpenAI, as well as from blockchain researchers and other industry commentators.

‘WeChat Equivalent’

The recent moves from Coinbase and Robinhood are part of a growing trend among Western fintech and crypto firms to emulate Asia’s super app model, exemplified by WeChat. Launched in 2011, WeChat comprises payments, messaging, shopping, and other services in one platform.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X, has for years expressed a similar goal: to turn X into a global marketplace that combines “comprehensive communications” with the ability to “to conduct your entire financial world.”

In his first town hall meeting with Twitter employees, Elon Musk directly referenced WeChat, Forbes reported at the time. “There’s no WeChat equivalent out of China,” he said at the meeting. “There’s a real opportunity to create that.”

Most recently, in June, Musk announced that XChat, an encrypted messaging and calling platform, would begin rolling out on X. Features include vanishing messages and the ability to send any type of file. “This is built on Rust with (Bitcoin style) encryption, whole new architecture,” he elaborated.

‘Cultural Chokehold’

Some industry participants see the crypto-powered super app trend as confirmation that traditional finance is indeed moving on-chain, and that mainstream crypto user experience is moving toward unification, instead of fragmentation across networks, apps and protocols.

“For the last decade, the idea of ‘everything apps’ has had a cultural chokehold on the tech industry, so the fact that Coinbase and Robinhood have similar ambitions for finance is not surprising,” Douglas Colkitt, initial contributor at Layer 1 blockchain Fogo, told The Defiant:

Colkitt explained that the largest centralized platforms realize having separate accounts, different types of assets, and multiple user interfaces is no longer practical.

“What we’re seeing now is a convergence — trading, custody, payments, even social — collapsing into seamless, integrated ecosystems,” he continued. “But there’s a catch: the regulatory framework hasn’t caught up yet. Whoever can thread the needle between compliance and composability will win it all in the end.”

For other industry experts, however, the super app push across crypto and tech more broadly is cause for concern.

Mike Maloney, the CEO of DeFi software firm Incyt and founding executive at Galaxy Digital, told The Defiant that even though advocates pitch the concept of a super app as convenient, that kind of all-in-one app is “fundamentally anathema to crypto’s decentralized vision.”

“Rather than continue the path of trustless exchange, these apps set the stage for regulatory capture — or capitulation — that would be harmful to all U.S. consumers,” Maloney argued, adding: “A super app is also likely just a glossy dream on a corporate pitch deck.”

Maloney explained that creating an “everything app” with many services would also discourage competition, and be overwhelming from a UX perspective — even if consumers say that they want it.

“A singular app would be required to build every feature from a myriad of apps. This is incredibly anti-competitive in its own right, but unsustainable,” he explained. “Most users don’t truly want this nonsense.”

Commenting on the recent moves from U.S. crypto and tech giants, Maloney added, “Ultimately, I suspect the idea of a super app is just vaporware intended to spur market sentiment. Coinbase is certainly hoping to buoy itself, and Elon Musk is always ready to play the showman for his declining impulse purchase.” Maloney continued with a reminder to crypto industry participants of the space’s original ethos:

Meanwhile, the founders, and in most cases the founding teams, of some of the world’s largest CEXs by trading volume — including Binance, OKX, Bybit and Gate — are from China. For years, these Chinese-origin platforms have arguably already been pursuing an “everything exchange” model on a global scale, offering a wide array of trading products that integrate centralized and decentralized finance to differing degrees.

Aside from a variety of crypto assets and instruments, including derivatives, these CEXs launched proprietary blockchains, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), noncustodial wallets, and NFT marketplaces, in most cases well before U.S. leaders like Coinbase.