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  • Our Mission, Strategy and Culture

    Our Mission, Strategy and Culture

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    From the earliest days I built Coinbase to harness the power of cryptocurrency and create more freedom in the world. Five years ago we codified this into the first version of our vision, mission and strategy, the top level objectives that our products and goals align to.

    Every few years we take another look and see if we can improve the communication of these core tenets. Why? Because they inform almost every decision we make at Coinbase. “Does this help us achieve our mission?” is one of the most common questions we ask ourselves. This is how we ensure the decisions we make and products we ship are helping to drive our mission forward.

    One of my philosophies around building a company is that you have the opportunity to stick only a few key messages in people’s heads about what you’re trying to achieve in the world. There are too many other brands in the world for people to remember much more than that. In this vein, we recently rolled out a simplified set of artifacts that describe Coinbase, with the goal of distilling each to their core.

    Here is how we define them:

    1. Our Mission: What we’re trying to achieve in the world
    2. Our Strategy: How we are going to get there
    3. Our Culture: How we hire and work together

    If people only remember one item, it should be our mission.

    Mission

    Our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world.

    Why economic freedom? Economic freedom is a global indicator that is clearly defined and has been measured for decades. It is a composite metric, assessed both globally and for every country, that looks at a variety of factors like property rights, stability of currency, ability to start the business you want and work where you want, free trade, corruption, etc.

    Economic freedom is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for human progress. Societies with greater economic freedom have higher life expectancy and GDP growth, less war and corruption, better treatment of the environment, and higher income of their poorest 10%. Higher economic freedom correlates with the kind of societies that we all aspire to create.

    The problem is that economic freedom isn’t growing fast enough; the trend over the last 25 years has been a very gradual increase. Our job at Coinbase is to bend the shape of this curve upward.

    Index of Economic Freedom (Heritage Foundation)

    When I first read the Bitcoin whitepaper back in 2010, I realized this computer science breakthrough might be the key to creating more economic freedom. The current financial system is rife with high fees, delays, unequal access, and barriers to innovation. In many countries, citizens don’t have access to sound money, a functioning credit system, or even basic property rights. I realized that we could use cryptocurrency to create sound financial infrastructure in every country around the world.

    Cryptocurrency can provide the core tenets of economic freedom to anyone: property rights, sound money, free trade, and the ability to work how and where they want.

    At Coinbase, we are laser focused on increasing economic freedom, because we believe that this is how we can have the biggest impact on the world. Everyone deserves access to financial services that can help empower them to create a better life for themselves and their families, and Coinbase is tasked with making this future a reality.

    Strategy

    About five years ago, I wrote the Coinbase Secret Master Plan that outlined the four phases I envisioned cryptocurrency going through on its path to reaching 1 billion users. We have made incredible progress towards this plan, with >50M verified users on Coinbase, and more using other crypto products.

    If our mission of increasing economic freedom is what we’re trying to achieve, then our strategy represents how we’re going to get there. This revised framing reflects where we are in the evolution of crypto 5 years later, and what we think the next 5+ years will look like.

    Our strategy has 3 pillars:

    CRYPTO AS AN INVESTMENT

    Crypto investing remains our core business and it’s the foundation of growing the cryptoeconomy. Investing is the first use case for every crypto holder and user, and we are the world’s most trusted onramp. We will continue focusing on:

    1. Adding new assets: Ramp pace of asset addition, ultimately offering every reputable cryptocurrency to our users (read: not a scam, or illegal).
    2. Institutional infrastructure: Building advanced trading tools professional traders are used to in traditional markets; building out the critical infrastructure and prime brokerage services to bring access to crypto markets to institutions of all sizes.
    3. International expansion: Grow the reach of crypto, enabling safe and easy to use onramps in every country we can legally operate.

    CRYPTO AS A NEW FINANCIAL SYSTEM

    Crypto investing was the first use case, and it is bootstrapping a large and growing network of crypto holders. As more users hold crypto, new products will be built to help them use their crypto. Coinbase will offer financial services that are powered by modern crypto infrastructure, including:

    1. DeFi: Safe and easy-to-use onramp to emerging decentralized finance use cases, accessible from the Coinbase app.
    2. Payments: Tools to send and receive fast, cheap, and global payments, as well as tools for any merchants or businesses to accept crypto.
    3. Earning: Unique opportunities to make money in crypto native ways, including staking (participating in network governance) and airdrops for completing educational tasks and incentives.
    4. Borrowing/lending: More open, and more fair access to credit, as well as additional opportunities to earn yield on assets.

    Our centralized products will continue to play a critical role in the growth of the cryptoeconomy. Over time, we expect DeFi (decentralized finance, built on open protocols) to outpace CeFi (centralized finance, including first party Coinbase products). We embrace decentralization, and will build products to make interacting with new DeFi as easy as we do our own first party products.

    CRYPTO AS AN APP PLATFORM

    Finally, crypto companies and protocol teams are driving new innovations and products beyond financial use cases. Coinbase will invest deeply in discoverability and usability of third party products in the cryptoeconomy, and make crypto as easy to use as it is to buy:

    1. Surfacing apps: Enable our users to discover new applications and networks in our core product.
    2. Externalizing shared services: Externalize our robust crypto infrastructure to non-crypto native organizations, making it safe and easy for anyone to interface with the cryptoeconomy.
    3. Investing in the cryptoeconomy: Provide financial support for new compelling projects and teams through Coinbase Ventures that we think can help increase crypto adoption or otherwise further our mission.

    Culture

    Our mission and strategy are the what and the how, but building a world class company starts with building a high performing team. Our #1 priority is attracting and retaining top talent, which is why we are constantly working to build a culture to enable our team to do the best work of their careers. Our culture is the foundation of how we hire, and promote, and we’ve described it in detail in this document.

    If you’re passionate about our mission, strategy and culture, come help us build the cryptoeconomy.

    Our Mission, Strategy and Culture was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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  • Coinbase expands international payments options for institutional customers

    Coinbase expands international payments options for institutional customers

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    One of our top priorities at Coinbase is to be the most trusted and easy-to-use platform for accessing the broader cryptoeconomy. Coinbase currently offers our institutional clients easy access to the crypto markets through advanced trading and custody technology. But being easy-to-use also means providing a strong set of global fiat payment rails. Starting today institutional customers can access additional trading pairs and payments options through an expansion of supported fiat currencies on Coinbase Exchange.

    Until now, many of our global clients have been limited to purchasing crypto in their local currency only. We now offer the fiat rails to enable deposits and withdrawals in USD, EUR, or GBP and access to the related trading pairs. This expansion of supported currencies has been a top request from international clients and has the potential to unlock billions of dollars in trading volume through improved access to major pools of liquidity. Institutional customers will now be able to trade in and out of various currencies regardless of where they are based. This is an important step in Coinbase’s journey towards creating a global trading platform.

    “Access to SEN on Coinbase provides us with the flexibility to move USD quickly, keep providing liquidity in fast markets, and take advantage of opportunities” says Morgan Vincent, Head of Trading at Wintermute.

    To learn more about Coinbase Prime, Exchange, Custody, our execution services, or Coinbase’s white label brokerage services click here.

    Coinbase expands international payments options for institutional customers was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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  • Mixed Signals from Bitcoin: BTC Wraps Another Week between $30-$40K

    Mixed Signals from Bitcoin: BTC Wraps Another Week between $30-$40K

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    At times, Bitcoin looks as though it may be moving towards recapturing the $40K support line. But then, only a few hours later, Bitcoin seems to take a turn in the opposite direction. Still, the price of BTC seems to have developed some fairly resilient support around the $30K line. The only time Bitcoin managed to dip below $30K over the past few weeks, and then it quickly snapped back up.

    Since that point, Bitcoin continued along the same meandering trajectory, wandering around $32K-$34K, occasionally visiting the neighbourhood of $35K-$39K. In comparison to the astronomical journey of swells and dips that Bitcoin went on earlier this year, it seems as though Bitcoin is taking it easy.

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    Mixed Messages from Bitcoin

    So, the big question is all about what is going to come next. Will BTC crash through $30K after all? Will it surge past $40K, $50K and reach new heights above $60K? What gives?

    (The answer, of course, depends on who you ask.)

    Cointelegraph reported this morning that the number of active addresses on the Bitcoin network fell sharply over the course of the past several weeks, from 1.3 million to approximately 500,000, roughly 60%. The drop caused the number of active wallets on Ethereum to take the lead over Bitcoin for the third time in a month. Before this, the last time that the Ethereum network had more active wallet addresses than Bitcoin was in early 2017.

    A Twitter analyst known as ‘Mr Whale’ pointed out that based on a weekly moving average, active addresses on the Bitcoin network have fallen to their lowest point since April of 2020, a point at which many analysts tie to BTC’s run to $60K earlier this year.

    “Bitcoin’s active addresses on the blockchain network just plunged to its lowest level since April 2020,” Mr Whale wrote on Twitter. “This data is bearish. It shows demand for Bitcoin is drying up very quickly.”

    The dip in the number of active Bitcoin addresses could indicate several things. However, it is likely that this change has much to do with the exodus or dormancy of retail investors who entered the market for the first time during BTC’s big rally throughout 2020 and earlier in 2021. If these retail investors fail to actively re-enter the market, it is unclear what the long-term consequences could be.

    “Bitcoin Is like a Spring. We Stretch It Too Much and We Put Too Much Leverage.”

    Some analysts do not seem to be too concerned about the dip in active wallet activity. Alex Mashinsky, Chief Executive of Celsius and renowned crypto commentator, told CoinTelegraph at the Miami Bitcoin 2021 conference in June that he sees Bitcoin reaching as high as $160,000 this year. “We haven’t seen the highs yet for 2021,” he said.

    Mashinsky believes that the Bitcoin market correction that took place in May was just another step along the path to new heights.

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    Alex Mashinsky, Founder and CEO of Celsius.

    “When you go too high, too fast, you are bound for a correction,” he said, adding that “You can see my tweets in both March and February saying ‘we’re going to have a crash, we’re going to have a correction.’ I predicted $30,000.”

    Mashinsky cited over-leveraged markets as the reason for Bitcoin’s volatility earlier in the year: “Bitcoin is like a spring,” he said. “We stretch it too much, and we put too much leverage. Too many people got greedy.”

    Rebuilding without Leverage?

    Indeed, a number of analysts agree that leverage seems to have been the primary cause behind Bitcoin’s volatility earlier this year.

    Shortly after the crash in May, CNBC reported that: “Traders taking excessive risk in unregulated cryptocurrency markets” were forced to sell when prices started to drop. Therefore, what may have been a minor correction in the price of Bitcoin spiralled into a price drop of roughly 30 percent.

    Leverage is not unique to Bitcoin. It can be practised across capital markets. However, the difference between leverage in Bitcoin and leverage in traditional markets is the fact that it is so unregulated. Some cryptocurrency exchanges allow their customers to take extreme risks. For example, BitMEX allows any one of its users, no matter their level of trading experience, as much as 100-to-1 leverage for cryptocurrency trades.

    When Bitcoin crashed in May, $12 billion was liquidated across 800,000 leveraged Bitcoin positions. Therefore, rebuilding the price of Bitcoin in a sustainable way cannot include high amounts of leverage, lest history repeats itself.

    A More Balanced Future for BTC?

    Now that leverage has been rinsed from the markets, Bitcoin may indeed have an opportunity to rebuild in a healthier way.

    There is some evidence to show that this growth could come from the developing world.

    In June, El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, said in a national address that bitcoin will officially become legal tender in the country on September 7th. A second bill proposed in Paraguay would make the country the second to embrace Bitcoin as legal tender. Moreover, the American University of Paraguay announced that it will accept bitcoin tuition payments.

    Additionally, Tanzanian President Suluhu Hassan told the nation’s financial chiefs to prepare for cryptocurrency: “We have witnessed the emergence of a new journey through the internet,” she declared. “I know that throughout the nation, including Tanzania, they have not accepted or started using these routes. However, my call to the Central Bank is that you should start working on that development.”



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  • FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Gives the Tom Brady/Gisele Bundchen Backstory

    FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Gives the Tom Brady/Gisele Bundchen Backstory

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    by Laura Shin

    Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and founder of FTX, explains FTX’s sports-centric advertising model and talks about what is on his regulatory wish list going forward. Show highlights:

    • why Sam is so excited to bring Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen onto the FTX team
    • how FTX decides on who to sponsor
    • why so many of FTX’s sponsorship are targeting US customers
    • what makes the sports industry such an attractive place to advertise for FTX
    • how FTX’s tokenized stocks work
    • what Sam learned from the GameStop/Robinhood situation
    • what makes FTX’s tokenized stocks different from Binance’s offering
    • how FTX is dealing with regulatory obstacles
    • what item is on the top of Sam’s regulatory wishlist
    • whether FTT is a security

    Thank you to our sponsors!

    Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unchainedcardearnfeb2021    

    Oasis: https://oasisprotocol.org 

    NEAR: https://near.org  

    Episode Links

    Sam Bankman-Fried

    FTX

    Website: https://ftx.com

    Carbon credits: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/ftx-bitmex-to-become-carbon-neutral 

    Tokenized Stocks

    FTX Sports Deals



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  • Building Crypto Out of India

    Building Crypto Out of India

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    by Pankaj Gupta, VP Engineering and Site Lead, India

    I joined Coinbase about two months ago to establish and lead a new tech hub for Coinbase in India. In this blog post, I wanted to share a bit about our plans and ambitions in India and how we are thinking about this hub in general.

    There’s never been a more exciting time for builders working in crypto. This is true worldwide, but especially in India which is seeing a boom in crypto-native talent and in creating and growing important crypto projects — Polygon and Instadapp to name just a couple. It is of course well known that India has a vibrant, world class community of software engineers, technology builders and entrepreneurs. To add to this, we have been pleasantly surprised at the growing expertise in crypto and blockchain technologies as well.

    Building a high quality tech hub

    Coinbase is fully committed to expanding the understanding of crypto and blockchains in the region. It is early days for our India tech hub but it has already taken off with an incredible amount of interest in our open roles from across India. We have ambitious plans for this hub in the near future — we want to hire hundreds of world class engineers in the near term. This team of engineers will be complemented by equally high quality product and design teams, as well as support functions such as recruiting and HR to build out a sustainable, well-rounded tech hub. One of our cherished cultural tenets is top talent in every seat — so even though we wish to hire in large numbers, we are proud to say that each of these new hires is and will be among the topmost talent available anywhere in the world.

    To support our ambitious growth plans in India, we are also exploring startup acquisitions and acquihires. Founders who might be interested in joining Coinbase’s journey and mission, please contact me.

    Coinbase is an ambitious and fast-moving company. As we build our presence in India from scratch, this is an incredible opportunity to work in a start-up-like, fast growing environment. The crypto space — together with its terminology, its protocols, projects, tokens, etc. — is a whole new exciting universe with new stuff to learn about every day. For me, it is frankly like being a kid in a candy store — or a mithai shop if you will — every day 🙂

    Independent and autonomous charters in exciting deep tech areas

    We have intentionally planned out a continuously learning environment and an org structure to maximise learning, growth and impact. We will have teams in all major areas Coinbase works in today — infrastructure, cloud, platform, payments, crypto, blockchains, data engineering, machine learning, growth, product engineering — to name just a few. These teams in India will be led by local engineering directors, who will have large, independent and autonomous charters. They are being intentionally set up for local decision-making to optimise for impact and velocity. These teams will work on a combination of projects that support both our global products and systems, as well as projects in the greater APAC region. We believe this will increase the speed, empowerment, and local decision making, as well as provide a sustainable and better quality of work life for all our teams worldwide.

    In order to be fully functioning, independent and fast-moving, we are also hiring roles — both senior and junior — across product management, user experience, design and program management. In addition, we’re creating a core support team — in areas such as in HR and recruiting — to provide well-rounded support for our India hub.

    Flexible and modern work environment, with plenty of perks

    Given our remote-first strategy, we offer a truly flexible and modern work environment. That means that we’re hiring from all parts of India in order to find the best talent wherever they are or choose to work from in the country. We plan to complement this with physical offices in key cities as well to have a hybrid, flexible environment. In addition to the challenging and meaningful work, we also provide top tier perks and compensation, which allows us to ensure we have top talent in every seat across the company.

    As a product led company, it’s important that our new hires in India truly understand the products and services that they are helping to deliver. That’s why we’re introducing a new program called CIkka — short for “Coinbase India Sikka” — offering each new employee in India a one-time $1000 in crypto when they start. Our expectation is that they’ll leverage this offering to learn about crypto, and will use this knowledge to help us build the next generation of products that will delight our customers around the world.

    Want to do challenging work that has worldwide impact?

    So, what types of employees are we looking for? We want to hire nimble and innovative people who want to make an impact and contribute to our mission of increasing economic freedom in the world. We’re looking for builders, who want to create products that will drive the global cryptoeconomy forward. We have built a culture of sustained innovation in the company, exemplified by Project 10%, where we dedicate 10% of our resources to supporting big product bets.

    To learn more about our innovative culture, please review this recent post from our co-founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong. In it, he outlines our cultural tenets that describe how we treat each other and operate day-to-day at the company. If you’re interested in joining us on our mission, please visit our hiring website and apply for our open positions in India.

    Building Crypto Out of India was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.



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  • Scaramucci’s Skybridge Capital Launches Ethereum Fund

    Scaramucci’s Skybridge Capital Launches Ethereum Fund

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    The CEO of Skybridge Capital, Anthony Scaramucci, has announced that the firm will launch an Ethereum fund. The fund is planned to be a private fund. Alongside this, Skybridge Capital has filed for an Ether ETF with the SEC. The fund already has a pending Bitcoin ETF filed with the SEC.

    Anthony Scaramucci was on The Scoop podcast to talk about his bitcoin journey and the fund’s crypto game plan going forward. The fund had made the news late last year when it announced that it had invested $182 million in bitcoin.

    Related Reading | Robinhood Fined $70M For Causing “Significant Harm” To Customers

    This makes it one of the first hedge funds to properly dip its feet into the crypto market. A big bet made in Bitcoin when the coin was still trading for less than $30,000 apiece.

    The investment firm partnered with a number of crypto firms to achieve this. Skybridge Capital expected institutional money to flow into the market and they didn’t want to be too late to get in.

    Skybridge Capital Going All In

    Scaramucci said on the podcast that the fund was fully committed to crypto.

    “We have a full commitment to crypto,” Anthony Scaramucci, CEO, Skybridge Capital

    The CEO explained that they planned to launch the Ethereum fund on July 1st. And then they would file for an ETF. A path that a lot of firms have been taking but have had no success so far.

    This is due to the fact that while the SEC has received numerous filings for Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, it is yet to approve a single one.

    Ethereum chart from TradingView.com

    Ethereum back in the red | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com

    With the bull market, the number of Bitcoin and Ether ETFs filed with the SEC has grown significantly. Skybridge Capital now joins in a long line of investment funds waiting on the decision of the SEC.

    Firms wait with bated breaths as the SEC takes its sweet time in deciding if it will approve the ETFs or not. Countries like Canada have approved Bitcoin and Ether ETFs and have recorded much success with the ETFs. But the U.S. SEC is yet to approve a single one.

    Although approvals are not forthcoming, it says a lot about the current state of the market when so many firms are filing for crypto-related ETFs.

    More Institutional Money In The Market

    Scaramucci took the time to talk about the adoption of digital assets in the financial world. The CEO believes that while everyone might not jump in, there will be enough people coming into the market, enough to drive the price of the assets up.

    “I just think it’s one of those weird assets where the higher the prices go, the more people are going to be drawn into the pool,” said Scaramucci.

    Anthony Scaramucci sees the buy-in from Morgan Stanley into its Bitcoin fund as a sign that institutions are ready to get into the crypto market. Hence, he is very bullish that more institutional money is going to flow into the market.

    Related Reading | How Ethereum Can Reach $2 Trillion In Market Cap, Matthew Sigel

    Skybridge Capital is not the only firm with vested interests in the crypto market. MicroStrategy has been ramping up its Bitcoin portfolio over the last year. With a $500 million buy recently pushing the portfolio over 100,000 bitcoins.

    Goldman Sachs had also taken the plunge and had started offering customers Bitcoin and Ether options and futures. It had also filed a Bitcoin ETF with the SEC but like others, it has not gotten approval.

    Skybridge Capital currently has a $500 million Bitcoin fund. And it plans to keep investing and growing the fund and other digital assets funds.

    Featured image from Crytpoknowmics, chart from TradingView.com

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  • Socios partners with Turkish soccer club union to explore digital revenue models

    Socios partners with Turkish soccer club union to explore digital revenue models

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    The soccer world continues to seek out new revenue models amid the coronavirus pandemic, which saw the suspension of league matches in some countries, and new partnerships form to find sustainable answers in the digital space.

    Representing soccer clubs playing in the Süper Lig, Turkey’s primary soccer league, the Turkish Union of Clubs has partnered with fan engagement platform Socios.com to promote innovation in the country’s soccer landscape, according to a July 1 announcement.

    “Few countries in the world match the unique passion that Turks feel for the game of football,” Socios and Chiliz CEO Alex Dreyfus told Cointelegraph:

    “This partnership will benefit the entire Turkish football ecosystem in a critical moment for the industry, in which it is crucial for sports properties to shift their fans’ role from passive to active.”

    Socios already launched fan tokens for six Turkish soccer teams playing across different leagues. Along with over 40 global sports organizations, Turkey’s Alanyaspor, Bursaspor, Galatasaray, Göztepe, İstanbul Başakşehir and Trabzonspor are using fan tokens and Socios’ voting and reward app to engage and monetize their fans.

    Related: Crypto fan tokens a mixed bag for game-deprived soccer fans

    The new partnership makes the sports-focused blockchain company the fan engagement partner of the Union of Clubs. Socios will help the union to apply new technologies to Turkish professional clubs to improve fan engagement, generate new revenue models and increase financial sustainability.

    As part of the deal, the Union of Clubs and Socios.com will co-host a number of workshops and seminars to engage the industry’s main players in conversations around the latest trends affecting the business of football, the announcement reads.

    Ticket sales and streaming deals account for a big part of revenue for the soccer industry. Since the games are either suspended for a period of time or played without a full audience in most leagues during the pandemic, clubs are in need of fresh business models. Clubs see fan tokens as a strategic move to enhance their digital presence and stay closer to fans.