Coinbase Backs Kemet Trading to Wire Four Crypto Venues Together

Coinbase has taken a strategic stake in New York based Kemet Trading and plugged its four trading venues into Kemet’s order management software, giving hedge funds and trading firms a single interface to route spot, futures and options orders across Coinbase Exchange, Coinbase Derivatives Exchange, Coinbase International Exchange and Deribit. The deal, disclosed May 4, 2026 in Coinbase Institutional’s blog post on the Kemet integration, includes an undisclosed equity check from Coinbase Ventures.

The move marks Coinbase’s clearest signal yet that it would rather embed its markets inside professional trading software than fight to drag clients onto its own front end. For firms running multi strategy crypto books, it collapses what used to be four separate exchange logins into one routing layer.

The Deal In Plain Numbers

The Kemet partnership lands in the same week Coinbase reports first quarter results, and follows last year’s $2.9 billion acquisition of Deribit, the world’s largest crypto options venue. Institutional transaction revenue grew 31% year over year to $185 million in Q1 2026, with Deribit’s record derivatives quarter doing most of the lifting against a slumping retail business.

The numbers behind the deal sit at four very different scales:

• $2.9 billion: Deribit purchase price, closed August 14, 2025, paid as $700 million cash and 11 million Coinbase shares.
• $185 billion: Deribit’s July 2025 monthly trading volume, with roughly $60 billion in open interest.
• $30 billion: cumulative crypto derivatives volume processed through Kemet since the firm launched in 2022.
• $185 million: Coinbase institutional transaction revenue in Q1 2026, up 31%, per the firm’s Q1 2026 quarterly results page.

What Kemet Actually Does

Kemet sells what trading desks call an OEMS plus PMS: an order and execution management system bolted to a portfolio management system. The Kemet Trading platform documentation describes a single endpoint covering the full trade lifecycle, from order routing to live risk.

Most institutional crypto desks run three vendors to do the same job: one front end ticket, a second algorithmic router, and a third risk system tracking spot, perpetuals, dated futures and options. The three rarely talk cleanly.

Kemet collapses the stack into one product. Its institutional toolkit covers:

• Multi leg options strategies in a single ticket, including butterflies that span Deribit options and a Coinbase International perpetual hedge.
• Smart order routing across all four Coinbase venues before a child order ever leaves the desk.
• Automated delta hedging that keeps an options book inside preset exposure bands.
• Spread algorithms for basis, calendar and cross venue trades.

Ash Ashmawy founded Kemet in 2022 after running Tradeweb’s cloud business and earlier stints at D.E. Shaw and Arcesium. Chief Product Officer Chris Schneider arrived from Cboe Global Markets. The firm has raised close to $8 million, with a $5 million seed in March 2024 backed by Further Ventures, FalconX and Deribit itself.

Why Coinbase Stopped Asking Clients To Come To It

For most of its history Coinbase pitched institutions to log in directly: open a Prime account, build to its API, run risk in your own systems. The Kemet deal continues a string of moves that flip that posture, with Coinbase content to live inside whatever trading stack a client already runs.

Greg Tusar, Co CEO of Coinbase Institutional, framed the broader strategy in February when the firm wired Coinbase Derivatives nano Bitcoin and Ether futures into Interactive Brokers. “We’re pleased to collaborate with Interactive Brokers to expand access to regulated crypto derivatives,” Tusar said in the launch statement, describing the smaller contracts as a way to lower entry costs for buy side clients. The Kemet integration extends that logic into the hedge fund and proprietary trading segment, where the front end battle has already been lost to specialist OEMS vendors.

Ash Ashmawy, founder and chief executive of Kemet, captured the pitch in remarks reported by TechCabal:

“Coinbase has effectively combined options, perpetuals, dated futures, and spot trading under one single household and one name.”

The Four Venues Now Wired Together

Each of the four venues sits under a different regulator and ships a different product. For a portfolio manager, the value of Kemet is being able to leg a single trade across all of them without four separate operations workflows.

What now lives inside one interface:

The Numbers Coinbase Is Defending

Coinbase needs the institutional book to grow. Consumer transaction revenue fell 45% year over year to $734 million in Q1 2026, pressured by lower crypto prices and fee compression. Global crypto exchange volume in March 2026 hit $4.3 trillion, the lowest reading since October 2024 and a near 48% slump from the October 2025 peak.

Derivatives are doing the rescue work. The Deribit deal, dismissed by some analysts last summer as expensive, is now the single biggest reason institutional revenue rose while consumer revenue fell. Options fees hold up better than spot fees because traders use options to hedge in falling markets, not just speculate in rising ones.

Kemet is the distribution layer for that bet, replacing the custom code most hedge funds had been writing to bridge two trading screens. The recent path:

1. May 8, 2025: Coinbase announces the $2.9 billion Deribit acquisition.
2. August 14, 2025: Coinbase’s deal close announcement for Deribit folds the options book into the group.
3. Q4 2025: Coinbase derivatives volume hits an all time high.
4. February 2026: Interactive Brokers begins routing Coinbase Derivatives nano BTC and ETH futures.
5. May 4, 2026: Kemet partnership announced.

Where The Risk Sits

Concentration is the obvious downside. When one OEMS becomes the front door into four exchanges, an outage at the OEMS becomes a full crypto blackout for that client. Trading desks running Kemet for Coinbase, Deribit and OKX will be expected to keep a backup connection live, the way equity desks keep a manual ticket window open behind a primary EMS.

The other watch item is regulatory. Coinbase Derivatives is a CFTC regulated US exchange; Coinbase International runs out of Bermuda; Deribit operates from Dubai. A single trade routed across all three by Kemet’s algos will increasingly draw regulator attention to cross border position aggregation, particularly as the CFTC and SEC keep sparring over digital asset jurisdiction.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kemet Trading?

Kemet Trading is a New York based software company that sells an order and execution management system, or OEMS, paired with a portfolio management system for institutional crypto derivatives. Founded in 2022 by Ash Ashmawy, Kemet earns revenue from a mix of subscription fees and a percentage of trades routed through its platform, and has processed more than $30 billion in cumulative volume since launch.

Did Coinbase buy Kemet Trading?

No. Coinbase did not acquire Kemet. Coinbase Ventures, the company’s strategic investment arm, took a minority equity position in Kemet as part of the May 4, 2026 partnership. The dollar amount was not disclosed. Kemet remains an independent vendor and continues to sell its platform to other exchanges and trading firms, including OKX and FalconX.

Which Coinbase venues are integrated with Kemet?

Four venues now sit inside Kemet’s single interface: Coinbase Exchange, Coinbase Derivatives Exchange, Coinbase International Exchange, and Deribit. Kemet had already integrated Deribit and OKX before the Coinbase partnership, so institutional clients on Kemet for Deribit flow can now reach the other three Coinbase venues without rebuilding FIX connectivity or onboarding paperwork.

When did Coinbase acquire Deribit?

Coinbase announced the $2.9 billion Deribit acquisition on May 8, 2025 and closed it on August 14, 2025. The price was paid as $700 million in cash plus 11 million Coinbase shares. Deribit had recorded $185 billion in monthly trading volume and roughly $60 billion in open interest in July 2025, the month before the close.

Who founded Kemet Trading?

Kemet was founded in 2022 by Ash Ashmawy, the Egyptian born CEO who previously served as Global Head of Cloud at Tradeweb and held roles at D.E. Shaw and Arcesium. Chris Schneider, formerly Director of Product Strategy at Cboe Global Markets, serves as Chief Product Officer. Ashmawy also hosts Kemet’s Derivatives Decoded podcast, which features interviews with quants and risk managers.

For institutional desks already running Kemet’s pipes, this week’s deal collapses one more login screen and one more reconciliation file. For Coinbase, it is a quiet test of whether owning the rails into a workflow beats owning the destination behind it.