Coinbase has appointed Anthony Armstrong, former chief financial officer of Elon Musk’s xAI and X and a longtime Morgan Stanley investment banker, to its board of directors and Audit and Compliance Committee. The Sept. 2 announcement, effective Sept. 1 per an SEC filing, expands the board to 10 members from nine as the exchange leans on dealmaking, government and Musk-company experience to compete for liquidity, settlement, custody and regulatory infrastructure behind continuous markets. Armstrong spent nearly a decade at Morgan Stanley, rising to vice chairman of investment banking after helping lead global technology M&A, later advised the Department of Government Efficiency, and has been described as counseling Musk on the $44 billion Twitter purchase and the roughly $113 billion combination of X and xAI. Coinbase said he is not related to CEO Brian Armstrong and highlighted his record of building large organizations efficiently at scale. The hire lands after weaker results: Coinbase reported a $359.5 million second-quarter loss on $1.2 billion of revenue, subscription and services revenue of $555.1 million, and said 88% of revenue came from businesses other than Bitcoin spot trading, while shares closed at $174.96 on Sept. 2 after falling more than 40% over the past year and the company missed Wall Street expectations for three straight quarters. Brian Armstrong has said Coinbase is no longer a bet just on the price of Bitcoin as it advances an Everything Exchange push spanning U.S. stocks and ETFs, prediction markets, tokenized assets and related products, even as rivals such as London Stock Exchange Group pursue tokenized-share partnerships aimed at 24-hour trading.