Who saw this coming? Bettors, apparently.
Coinbase Global, one of the largest crypto exchanges on the market, announced its third-quarter 2025 earnings on Thursday—a relatively benign event by most measures.
But it wasn’t the revenue or profit numbers that caught many people’s attention. It was some specific comments and words spoken by CEO and cofounder Brian Armstrong.
Armstrong, near the end of Coinbase’s earnings call, squeezed in a last-second barrage of keywords.
“I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call.”
While that may not have meant a lot to most listeners, Armstrong was actually saying specific words that bettors on prediction markets had wagered he would say.
Prediction market bettors on platforms such as Kalshi had made bets that Armstrong or other Coinbase executives would say certain keywords during the call, and up until that point, they had not.
So by saying those words at the end of the call, Armstrong handed some bettors a win. That also meant that he handed others a loss.
Unorthodox? You bet, but it’s all part of a burgeoning new world where sports betting is legal in many states, and American adults can make online bets on almost anything they’d like—from the outcomes of presidential elections to, in this case, what executives of publicly traded companies will say during an earnings call.
While it seems clear that there are going to be a lot of opportunities to rig or manipulate wagers such as these, this is likely the first time that the CEO of a large, public company has gone out of their way to decide the outcome of a wager in such a way.
Fast Company has reached out to Coinbase for further comment, but has yet to receive a response.
After the call, Armstrong replied via X to say, “lol this was fun—happened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a link in the chat.”
One X user called out exactly what appeared to have happened: “At the end of the Coinbase earnings call today, Brian Armstrong pulled up the mention market and rattled off all the words that weren’t said yet,” summing it up as, “What a wild time to be alive.”
Shares of Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN) were up around 3.5% in early trading on Friday, with the stock up more than 27% year to date.
