On Thursday, the CEO of Coinbase Global (Nasdaq: COIN), Brian Armstrong, announced a partnership with Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine that answers users’ questions with cited, real-time data pulled from the web.
According to Armstrong, the move will integrate the crypto exchange’s market data into Perplexity’s large language model (LLM), further connecting AI and crypto and helping users make more informed decisions about digital assets.
The partnership is being rolled out in two stages. Starting Thursday, Perplexity will pull market data from Coinbase, including from its COIN50 index, to power “market analysis” in Perplexity’s new Comet browser.
The next step, which is expected “soon,” will see responses to user queries linked to Coinbase market data, providing a direct connection between Perplexity’s interface and Coinbase.
AI Bots could execute trades and manage portfolios
As LLMs continue to reshape how users search for information online, Coinbase’s partnership with Perplexity aims to give users a journey between their crypto questions and the Coinbase terminal. The partnership also sets the stage for further integration between AI chatbots and crypto exchanges.
For the time being, Perplexity will show market data and prices sourced from Coinbase. However, as the integration matures and LLMs evolve, Perplexity and other AI chatbots could fulfill crypto orders, rebalance portfolios, and manage staking and yield, transforming a basic Q&A window into a full-service trading desk.
While this degree of integration between AI chatbots and crypto hasn’t come to fruition just yet, Coinbase is moving fast in that direction. Back in August 2024, Armstrong wrote that “LLMs should have crypto wallets.” A few weeks later, he oversaw the first crypto transaction managed entirely by AI bots.
Related: Coinbase unlocks off-exchange settlement for institutions amid ‘high’ demand
Perplexity AI’s valuation grows as LLM race heats up
Perplexity was founded in San Francisco in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, a former researcher at OpenAI, and quickly gained a large following from users who appreciated the chatbot’s focus on pulling real-time information. While Perplexity’s current user count is unknown, in an interview in January 2024 with Bloomberg Technology, Srinivas said the platform had “more than 10 million users.”
In contrast, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has more than 800 million active weekly users, according to industry data.
Since its founding, the company has raised more than $900 million in funding, including a Series B round backed by Nvidia, Databricks, and NEA. At the end of 2024, Perplexity was valued at about $9 billion.
News of the partnership with Coinbase comes just a day after Perplexity released Comet, a web browser with agentic AI tools that aims to compete with Google. In January of this year, Perplexity submitted a bid to merge with TikTok U.S.
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