Coinbase Integrates Market Data with Perplexity AI Search Engine
On Thursday, Coinbase Global (Nasdaq: COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong announced a strategic partnership with Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine designed to pull real-time, cited data from the web.
Armstrong stated the collaboration will embed Coinbase’s market data into Perplexity’s large language model (LLM), enhancing the connection between AI and cryptocurrency and enabling users to make more informed decisions regarding digital assets.
The integration is being implemented in two distinct phases. Initially, starting Thursday, Perplexity’s Comet browser will utilize market data sourced directly from Coinbase, particularly its COIN50 index, to provide “market analysis.”
Phase two, anticipated “early next week,” intends to link user queries specifically to Coinbase market data, creating a direct interface connection between Perplexity and the crypto exchange.
Potential for AI to Execute Trades and Manage Portfolios
The partnership aims to bridge users’ crypto questions with their actions on the Coinbase platform. This initiative signals a broader push towards AI integration within crypto exchanges.
Currently, Perplexity displays market data and prices originating from Coinbase. Industry analysts suggest that as AI capabilities progress and integration deepens, platforms like Perplexity could potentially handle crypto transactions, portfolio rebalancing, and managing staking and yield, fundamentally transforming information retrieval into integrated financial management.
Demonstrating rapid advancement in this AI-crypto space, Coinbase has already explored automated trading. In August 2024, Armstrong advocated for “LLMs [large language models] should have crypto wallets” and subsequently oversaw the first entirely AI-managed crypto transaction.
Perplexity AI’s Valuation Surges Amid LLM Competition
Founded in San Francisco in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, a former OpenAI researcher, Perplexity rapidly built a user base impressed with its focus on real-time information retrieval.
According to data from January 2024 where Srinivas was quoted by Bloomberg Technology, Perplexity had “more than 10 million users,” a figure significantly lower than OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which boasts over 800 million active weekly users.
Since its inception, Perplexity has secured over $900 million in funding, notably including a Series B round co-led by Nvidia, Databricks, and NEA. This valuation earned Perplexity a reported worth of approximately $9 billion towards the end of 2024.
Notwithstanding the Coinbase deal, Perplexity recently introduced Comet, a web browser equipped with agentic AI tools, competing in the browser market dominated by Google. Earlier this year, the company submitted a bid to the U.S. government regarding a potential merger with TikTok.
