Is Coinbase A Publicly Traded Company

American digital nugget substitution company

Coinbase Global, Inc.

Blazon	Public company
Traded equally	Nasdaq: COIN Russell 1000 component
Manufacture	Cryptocurrency
Founded	June 2012; 10 years ago  (2012-06) in San Francisco, California, U.S.[i]
Founders	Brian Armstrong Fred Ehrsam
Headquarters	Remote-first[a] No physical headquarters
Area served	100+ countries
Key people	Brian Armstrong (Chairman & CEO) Emilie Choi (President & COO) Alesia Haas (CFO)
Products	Bitcoin, Bitcoin Greenbacks, Ethereum, Litecoin, substitution of digital assets
Revenue	US$vii.84 billion (2021)
Operating income	US$3.08 billion (2021)
Net income	US$iii.62 billion (2021)
Full assets	United states of america$21.3 billion (2021)
Total equity	United states$6.38 billion (2021)
Owner	Brian Armstrong (19%)
Number of employees	iii,730 (2021)
Website	www.coinbase.com
Footnotes / references ^ Legal address at Corporation Trust Heart [2] [3]

Coinbase Global, Inc., branded
Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency commutation platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote piece of work and the company lacks a concrete headquarters. Information technology is the largest cryptocurrency commutation in the United states by trading volume.^[4]
The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam.^[1]
In May 2020, Coinbase announced it would shut its San Francisco, California headquarters and change operations to remote-kickoff, role of a moving ridge of several major tech companies closing headquarters in San Francisco in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.^[v]
[6]
[7]

History

2012–2019: founding and early years

Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a one-time Airbnb engineer. Armstrong enrolled in the Y Combinator startup incubator plan and received a $150,000 cash infusion.^[8]
Fred Ehrsam, a sometime Goldman Sachs trader, later joined every bit a co-founder after noticing Armstrong’due south posts on Reddit.^{[ix]
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[11]
[12]
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British programmer and Blockchain.info co-founder Ben Reeves was originally supposed to be function of the Coinbase founding team merely parted ways with Armstrong just earlier the Y Combinator funding event, due to their different stands on how the Coinbase wallet^[14]
should operate.^[8]
The company is named subsequently coinbase transactions, which are special transactions that introduce cryptocurrency into apportionment in proof of work cryptocurrencies.<sup>[xv]

: ch. 8</sup>

In October 2012, the company launched the services to purchase and sell bitcoins through bank transfers.^[16]

In May 2013, the company received a Usa$v million Serial A investment led by Fred Wilson from the venture capital business firm Union Foursquare Ventures.^[17]
In December the aforementioned year, the company received a U.s.$25 million investment, from the venture majuscule firms Andreessen Horowitz, Wedlock Square Ventures (USV), and Ribbit Upper-case letter.^[eighteen]
Olaf Carlson-Wee, a graduate from Vassar College, was hired as the commencement employee in the same yr.^[19]

In 2014, the visitor grew to one million users, acquired the blockchain explorer service Blockr and the web bookmarking company Kippt, secured insurance roofing the value of bitcoin stored on their servers, and launched the vault arrangement for secure bitcoin storage.^{[20]
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[22]}
Throughout 2014, the company also partnered with Overstock, Dell, Expedia, Dish Network, and Time Inc. allowing those firms to accept bitcoin payments.^{[23]
[24]
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In the aforementioned year, company as well added bitcoin payment processing capabilities to the traditional payment companies Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal.^[27]
[28]
In January 2014, Coinbase Global, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware as a holding company for Coinbase and its subsidiaries. The corporate reorganization that saw Coinbase become a subsidiary of Coinbase Global was completed in April that twelvemonth.^[29]

In January 2015, the company received a United states of america$75 million investment, led past Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the New York Stock Commutation, USAA, and several banks.^[xxx]
Later in January, the company launched a U.S.-based bitcoin substitution for professional traders called Coinbase Exchange.^[31]
In September, Coinbase began to offering services in Canada and Singapore.^[32]

In May 2016, the company rebranded the Coinbase Exchange, changing the name to Global Digital Asset Exchange (GDAX).^[33]
In July, they added retail support for Ether.^[34]
Also in July, they announced they would halt services in August subsequently the closure of Canadian online payments service provider Vogogo.^[35]

In January and and then March 2017, Coinbase obtained the BitLicense and licensed to trade in Ethereum and Litecoin from the New York Country Section of Financial Services (DFS).^[36]
[37]
In November, Coinbase was ordered by the US Internal Revenue Service to report any users who had at to the lowest degree $xx,000 in transactions in a year.^[38]
On Dec 19, Coinbase listed Bitcoin Cash, and the Coinbase platform experienced price abnormalities that led to an insider trading investigation.^[39]

On February 23, 2018, Coinbase told approximately 13,000 afflicted customers that the visitor would be providing their taxpayer ID, name, birth date, address, and historical transaction records from 2013 to 2015 to the IRS within 21 days. In March, Coinbase appointed Emilie Choi, a former LinkedIn executive, as Vice President of Corporate and Business organization Evolution.^[twoscore]
She was promoted to the part of president and chief operating officeholder in May 2019.^[41]
On March 26, 2018, Coinbase announced their intention to add together support for ERC-xx tokens.^[42]
On April five, 2018, Coinbase announced that it had formed an early-stage venture fund, Coinbase Ventures, focusing on investment into blockchain- and cryptocurrency-related companies.^[43]
[44]
On May 16, Coinbase Ventures appear its kickoff investment in Compound Labs, a start-up building Ethereum smart contracts similar to money markets.^[45]
On May 23, GDAX was rebranded as Coinbase Pro.^[46]
Likewise in May, Coinbase launched Prime number, a platform dedicated to institutional customers.^[47]
In August, Amazon cloud executive Tim Wagner joined Coinbase as vice president of technology.^[48]
In September, Coinbase, forth with Circumvolve and Bitcoin miner company Bitmain, was part of a consortium called Centre that launched a digital coin called USD Money, pegged to the Us dollar.^[49]
[fifty]

In January 2019, Coinbase stopped all trading on Ethereum Classic due to a suspicion of an attack on the network.^[51]
In February, Coinbase announced that it had acquired “blockchain intelligence platform” Neutrino, an Italy-based startup, for an undisclosed toll.^[52]
The acquisition raised concern among some Coinbase users^[53]
based on Neutrino founders’ connectedness to the Hacking Team, which has been accused of providing internet surveillance engineering to governments with poor human rights records.^[54]
On March 4, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said his visitor “did not properly evaluate” the deal from a due diligence perspective and thus any Neutrino staff who previously worked at Hacking Team “will transition out of Coinbase.”^[55]
In April, a UK corporate filing stated that Coinbase’s non-U.S. acquirement grew 20% to €153 million (U.South.$173 one thousand thousand) in 2018 resulting in a internet profit of €half dozen.6 1000000.^[56]
Coinbase United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland CEO Zeeshan Feroz said the visitor’s non-U.S. operations accounted for virtually i-third of the visitor’s overall revenue and Reuters estimated that the visitor’south global revenue totaled “effectually $520 million” in 2018.^[57]
In August, Coinbase announced that it was targeted past a sophisticated hacking assault try in mid-June. This reported attack used spear-phishing and social engineering tactics (including sending imitation e-mails from compromised email accounts and created a landing page at the University of Cambridge) and 2 Firefox browser cypher-day vulnerabilities. One of the Firefox vulnerabilities could let an attacker to escalate privileges from JavaScript on a browser page (CVE-2019–11707) and the second one could allow the aggressor to escape the browser sandbox and execute code on the host estimator (CVE-2019–11708). Coinbase’due south security team detected and blocked the attack, the network was not compromised, and no cryptocurrency was stolen.^{[58]
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2020–2021: remote-first model and IPO

In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced it was shifting completely to remote work and would no longer recognize a formal headquarters.^[v]
Likewise in May, the company appear the acquisition of New York-based digital asset trading business firm Tagomi for a price betwixt $75 and $100 million.^[4]
In June, Coinbase received internal backlash afterward CEO Brian Armstrong initially refused to make a argument about Black Lives Matter, citing the company’s apolitical culture, but Armstrong afterwards reversed his form on Twitter.^[61]
In September, Armstrong published a blog post emphasizing that Coinbase would not engage in social activism, citing that such activism had hurt other technology firms such every bit Google and Facebook, and offered a severance package for those who disagreed with this direction.^[61]
[62]
The company too faced complaints by employees maxim they were treated unfairly due to their race or gender.^[63]
In October, Coinbase announced the launch of a Visa debit bill of fare program.^[64]
In Dec, the
New York Times
reported that based upon information up to 2018 (already two years old as of engagement of publication) women at Coinbase were paid an average of 8% less than men at comparable jobs and ranks within the company, and Black employees were paid 7% less than those in similar roles.^[65]
[66]

In March 2021, the company cruel under review by the Role of Strange Avails Control, with concerns that the company may have provided their blockchain service to blacklisted individuals or companies, noting that the nature of blockchain technology makes information technology “technically infeasible” to prevent specific users from making transactions.^[67]
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In March 2021, the visitor agreed to pay $six.5 1000000 to settle regulatory claims that it had reported misleading information well-nigh its trading volumes.^[69]
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Also in March, Coinbase announced that information technology was establishing a business presence in India and hiring employees for IT services, including engineering, software development and customer back up operations. The visitor as well announced plans to open up a concrete role in Hyderabad.^[71]
[72]

In April 2021, with its final earnings release before its April 14 direct listing, the company reported a nine-fold increase in Q1 revenue, to $ane.8B, up from $190.6M the previous year. The jump was attributed to the increase in the price of Bitcoin over that fourth dimension flow.^[73]

On April fourteen, 2021, Coinbase became a public visitor on the Nasdaq exchange via a direct stock listing.^{[74]
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Before the listing, Nasdaq prepare a reference price of $250.00 a share, giving the visitor an estimated value of $47 billion.^[76]
At the end of its first day of trading, Coinbase airtight at a price of $328.28 per share.^[77]
In May, the visitor’due south Chief People Officer published a blog postal service announcing that Coinbase was eliminating bacon and equity negotiations during recruiting, citing salary disparities with women and minorities. The announcement said that “all employees in the aforementioned position, in the same location, receive the same bacon and disinterestedness offer.”^[78]
In June, Coinbase added Dogecoin to its tradable avails for Coinbase Pro users.^[79]
[80]
In September, the Securities and Substitution Committee reportedly threatened to sue Coinbase if the visitor decided to launch a cryptocurrency lending production called Lend.^[81]
The company initially responded in a blog mail service that it was confused for beingness singled out past the SEC, but later appear it had canceled the planned launch. Technology publication TechCrunch covered the story and noted the being of like cryptocurrency lending products already on the market.^[82]
In November, Coinbase fabricated its get-go acquisition in Republic of india by purchasing AI-powered support platform Agara for an estimated $twoscore–l million. The company stated that it would utilize Agara’southward applied science to automate its customer experience tools.^[83]
On December 15 a display glitch vastly inflated balances such that numerous users were plainly, albeit briefly, trillionaires.^[84]

2022–present

Super Bowl advertisement

Coinbase’due south sixty second commercial during Super Bowl LVI accomplished viral condition and was considered to exist the nearly effective of any commercial during the game.^[85]
The ad, credited to Accenture Interactive, cost $217,000 per second (or $xiii million)^[86]
and featured just a black, screensaver-like screen with a bouncing color changing QR lawmaking. The code directed users to a web page ad a $15 in gratuitous Bitcoin for new accounts plus entry into a promotion for a sweepstakes to win 3 $1 1000000 prizes for Bitcoin. The low tech epitome evoked the retro await of the sometime DVD screensaver logo billowy around the screen.^[87]

The advertizement had no narration and only music. The influx of users acquired Coinbase’s website to crash. Coinbase’s landing page received 20 million hits in i minute. Its iOS app jumped from #186 to #ii in overall downloads subsequently the advertising.^{[88]
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The advertizement was parodied later on in the dark by Meta (which posted its ain, similar ad on social media to advertise a streaming Foo Fighters concert afterwards the game). Meta quipped “Hopefully this doesn’t suspension.”^[89]
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The Super Bowl which has been nicknamed the “Crypto Bowl” also featured commercials by Crypto.com, eToro, and FTX on the American telecast.^[88]

The Martin Agency CEO Kristen Cavallo criticized Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong for non acknowledging the role that agencies had played in the creation of the advertisement.^[91]

Russian invasion of Ukraine, failure of Republic of india expansion, layoffs, and partnerships

In response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Coinbase blocked 25,000 cryptocurrency wallet addresses related to Russia, believing them to take engaged in illicit activity.^[92]

Coinbase began operations in India in April 2022.^[93]
The company initially relied on Unified Payments Interface to permit users to catechumen rupees to cryptocurrencies,^[93]
but ceased using UPI after a statement released by the National Payments Corporation of India indicating it was “not aware of any crypto exchange using UPI”.^[93]
This statement forced Coinbase to append most of its business organisation in India.^[94]
Users in India cannot convert rupees into cryptocurrency, simply can trade between dissimilar cryptocurrencies.^[94]

On June 14, 2022, the company announced it would be laying off approximately 18 pct of its workforce, virtually one,100 full-time jobs, amidst the global downturn in cryptocurrencies and services.^[95]

In August 2022, Coinbase announced a partnership with BlackRock. The venture allows BlackRock clients to use their Aladdin investment management organisation to oversee their exposure to Bitcoin along with other portfolio assets, and to facilitate trading on Coinbase’southward substitution.^[96]
[97]

Coinbase reported a cyberspace loss of $1.1 billion in the second quarter of 2022, a record for the company.^[98]
In October 2022, Coinbase entered into a partnership with Google Deject Platform that would allow the latter’due south customers to pay for cloud services with cryptocurrencies supported by Coinbase Commerce. Coinbase also agreed to transfer its data-related applications from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud.^[99]

Coinbase exposure to FTX’s bankruptcy is $15 million.^{[100]
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Products

Coinbase offers products for both retail and institutional cryptocurrency investors, besides as other related cryptocurrency products.

The visitor’southward products for retail traders include:

• Coinbase, an app used to buy, shop and trade different cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Greenbacks, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin.^[34]
• Coinbase Pro, a professional asset trading platform for trading digital avails.^[101]
• Coinbase Wallet, an app that allows customers to access decentralized crypto apps (dapps) using a dapp browser.^[102]
• Coinbase NFT, a market where NFT collectors tin buy and sell their pieces to ane another.^[103]

Products for institutional traders include:

• Coinbase Prime number, a trading platform for institutional customers.^[47]
• Coinbase Custody, specialist level services for institutions that hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with Coinbase.^[47]

Other cryptocurrency-related products include:

• USD Coin, a digital stablecoin that lets customers put upwardly U.S. dollars in exchange for a cryptocurrency that has the aforementioned value simply can be traded more than speedily.^[50]
• Coinbase Card, a debit Visa card that allows customers to spend cryptocurrency.^[64]
• Coinbase Commerce, a payment service for merchants.^[104]
• Coinbase Earn, a cryptocurrency learning platform that rewards users with small amounts of altcoins for watching videos and taking quizzes to learn most them.^[105]

The company develops an application programming interface (API) for developers and merchants to build applications and accept payments in digital currencies.^[106]

Coinbase has a mobile app for both iOS and Android.^[107]
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Operations

Coinbase operates as a remote-first company and has no physical headquarters.^[5]
As role of its SEC filing to go public, the company reported 43 1000000 verified users, seven,000 institutions, and 115,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries. It also reported net revenue of $1.14 billion in 2020, up from $483 meg the previous twelvemonth. The company also reported a cyberspace income of $322 1000000 subsequently posting a loss in 2019.^[109]
Out of the $782 billion worth of assets on the crypto marketplace, some $90 billion worth is held on the Coinbase platform.^[109]

As of 2018^[update], the company offered buy/sell trading functionality in 32 countries,^[110]
while the cryptocurrency wallet was available in 190 countries worldwide.^[111]

Custody of client assets

In a May 2022 Form ten-Q filing, Coinbase stated that “because custodially held crypto assets may exist considered to exist the property of a bankruptcy estate, in the upshot of a bankruptcy, the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings and such customers could be treated as our general unsecured creditors”.^{[112]
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Coinbase effect

The “Coinbase Issue” refers to the rise in price of cryptocurrencies listed for auction on a dominant crypto exchange such equally Coinbase in the days after the news becomes public.^[115]
According to
Barron’s, the effect of getting a cryptocurrency listed on the exchange plays a large role in what cryptocurrencies proceeds widespread acceptance.^[116]

Complaints

On February sixteen, 2018, Coinbase admitted that some customers were overcharged in error for credit and debit purchases of cryptocurrencies. The problem was initiated when banks and card issuers changed the merchant category code (MCC) for cryptocurrency purchases before that month. This meant that cryptocurrency payments would now be processed equally “cash advances”, meaning that banks and credit card issuers could begin charging customers cash advance fees for cryptocurrency purchases. Customers who purchased cryptocurrency on their commutation betwixt January 22 and February 11, 2018, could accept been affected. At first, Visa blamed Coinbase, telling the
Financial Times
on Feb 16 that it had “not made any systems changes that would result in the duplicate transactions cardholders are reporting.” Still, the latest statement from Visa and Worldpay on the Coinbase blog clarifies: “This outcome was not caused by Coinbase.”^[117]

In March 2018,
Quartz
reported that the number of monthly customer complaints confronting Coinbase jumped more than than 100% in January of that year, to 889, citing official Consumer Financial Protection Bureau information, with more than 400 of those categorized every bit “money was non available when promised”.^[118]
The article also noted that the company was later increasing its customer service staff to reduce wait times.^[118]

In December 2021, CNBC reported that Coinbase froze the cryptocurrency GYEN due to a sudden price spike, resulting in many traders losing money.^[119]

Insider trading

On July 22, 2022, a former Coinbase product manager, Ishan Wahi, forth with Nikhil Wahi (Ishan’s brother) and Sameer Ramani (a friend), was charged in the first-always insider trading instance in cryptocurrency by prosecutors for the Southern Commune of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission.^[120]
Co-ordinate to the complaint filed in
SEC 5. Wahi,
Ishan Wahi allegedly shared information that certain tokens were about to exist listed by Coinbase with Nikhil Wahi and Ramani, who then allegedly acted upon that information to make trades for an alleged illicit profit in backlog of $i.5 million.^[121]
Co-ordinate to federal prosecutors, Ishan Wahi purchased a i-way ticket to Bharat upon being summoned past Coinbase to the visitor’s Seattle office for a meeting. Wahi was subsequently intercepted by law enforcement from boarding a May 16 flight to India. Coinbase’due south master security officeholder, Philip Martin, noted that the company provided prosecutors with information from an internal investigation.^[121]

See too

• List of bitcoin companies

References

External links

• 
  Official website
  
• Business organization data for Coinbase Global, Inc.:
  • Bloomberg
  • Google
  • Reuters
  • SEC filings
  • Yahoo!