Coinbase says capital access beats income in wealth creation
The policy paper argues that access to capital markets, rather than income or banking, now defines who can build wealth and says tokenization could widen participation.
A new Coinbase Institute report argues that the most important divide in global finance is no longer rich versus poor, but between those who have direct access to capital markets and those who do not, which it describes as the “brokered” versus the “unbrokered.”
The report estimates that traditional intermediated rails exclude roughly four billion unbrokered individuals from owning productive assets or raising capital at scale. Closing this gap, it argues, will require rebuilding core market infrastructure so smaller investors and issuers can participate directly rather than through layers of intermediaries.
According to the report, over the last 40 years in the United States alone, capital income grew 136% while labor income lagged at just 57%.