Two issues here with the comparison. First Coinbase isn't just an exchange in the sense that the CME is an exchange. Coinbase is an exchange, a clearinghouse, a

Two issues here with the comparison. First Coinbase isn't just an exchange in the sense that the CME is an exchange. Coinbase is an exchange, a clearinghouse, a custodian, a broker dealer, a prime brokerage, and a user platform. When you want to trade on CME, you don't just go to CME dot com, open an account with them, and have them hold your money. There's layers of other service providers, with CME itself basically being a B2B platform that also offloads much of the banking and custody to other institutions. Second, Coinbase has ambitions beyond just being an exchange and that's driven a lot of hires. It runs Coinbase Ventures, Coinbase Cloud, an NFT platform, develops tooling (e.g. Coinbase Wallet), and contributes to crypto protocols. A lot of the recent hiring was driven by these "other bets".