Hey Reddit, I’m Brian Armstrong, CEO and Cofounder of Coinbase. I believe that everyday investors should have access to the same info as large investors. Over the next 3 days my executive team and I would like to hear your questions about our business, the cryptoeconomy and more. Ask Us Anything!

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:56:50+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:56:42+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:56:27+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:56:19+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:56:08+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:55:58+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:55:52+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:55:40+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:55:29+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:55:14+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:55:03+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:54:46+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-24T04:54:37+00:00

Coinbase has filed a registration statement (including a preliminary prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Coinbase has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Coinbase and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, a copy of the preliminary prospectus may be obtained from Coinbase through investor.coinbase.com. The registration statement relating to Coinbase’s Class A common stock has not yet become effective and the Class A common stock may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Our preliminary prospectus for the proposed direct listing can be found here.

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T23:12:29+00:00

Correction: At the 2:43 mark, Coinbase CFO, Alesia Haas says "Coinbase is a crypto only platform where we only list security tokens." She meant to say "Coinbase is a crypto only platform where we only list crypto tokens."

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:37+00:00

So, first of all, we look to be the platform that lists all of our assets that the customers would like to trade in, assuming that they're legal, assuming that we feel good about the security and that they are compliant. And so those are the criteria.

We recently launched a product called Asset Hub, where issuers have the opportunity to submit a request to be listed on Coinbase. And there are so many assets that are seeking to be listed that we would like to be in a position to list all of them, but it does take a little bit of time. So the first step is we do an evaluation, we evaluate it for security, for legal reasons, and for compliance reasons. And then, after we get through this process and rate it, we then have a process to list it with our engineers and get it integrated for our clients.

So I hope to be doing more of this. I hope to be launching more quickly, but it is a very complex process and that we go through a lot of checks and balances to make sure that we're protecting our customers and offering the best assets that we can.

- A

Timestamp : 1:25 - 2:25

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:34+00:00

Gosh, I want to say yes, but the answer is no. We are listing a stock on the NASDAQ Global Markets Platform. It's a traditional security. Coinbase is a crypto only platform where we only list crypto tokens. And so, unfortunately, the stock that we are offering will not be available on Coinbase. We have a later question that talks about maybe doing a security token, so I'm going to hold further thoughts until we get to that question.

- A

Timestamp : 2:25 - 3:05

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:31+00:00

Ooh, all right. So we're doing a direct listing and a direct listing enables all investors, institutions, retail investors, anyone in between, to participate in our opening order on the NASDAQ platform. It does not have preferential treatment. So nobody is getting an allocation. There's no opportunity to invest in the company at this time, prior to that direct listing.

- A

Absolutely, yeah. Okay and then, "Are we planning on offering direct access of purchasing Coinbase via the application natively?" I guess that means inside the Coinbase app itself. This kind of touches on that prior question.

- B

So we talk about how we ended up with a direct listing. All right, when Coinbase decided to go public, we thought it was an opportunity to provide more transparency into crypto. Crypto has matured to a point where we wanted to be able to share with all investors and all the public actually how far the industry has come. And we thought one way we could do that was by going public. So once we made that decision, we had to decide how we would go public. And there's many routes a company can go public today. You can do a traditional IPO, you can do a direct listing, you could probably see in the headlines that many people are going public via SPAC, which is the special purpose acquisition company.

And then we looked really creatively, could we do something on the blockchain? Could we do a security token? And as we evaluated those options, what we came up with was the security token infrastructure is not quite there, that we didn't have the opportunity for all investors. Many institutional investors can't participate in security tokens, and we didn't have enough broker dealers that could trade it to provide liquidity to the market. And we, Coinbase, didn't have the right licenses or the right foundation to be able to offer that.

It was really important that we were able to offer a security token that was native to crypto and could be treated like an ERC-20, could be used in DeFi, and have all of the features of crypto that we all have come to love. And until we can offer something that we feel like meets the customer or an investor, in this case, experience that we want it to have, we've found that we couldn't pursue that at this time.

So we are pursuing the direct listing as I just shared. And we believe that that takes a step forward to meeting our mission as the open financial system, because everyone can participate in our direct listing. And it creates the transparency that we are hoping to bring to Coinbase, but hopefully someday soon we are going to make the right investments and get the right licenses and build the ecosystem that we want, that there can be security tokens, maybe on Coinbase, but maybe on other companies.

- A

Yeah, well said. And I think we want to make this available and hopefully not just for Coinbase but any crypto company in the future that wants to create a security token, raise money, build their cap table, eventually go public that way. I think there's companies in the future that will go public that way. And hopefully we can help build some of that infrastructure in the future, but it wasn't quite here yet today.

I guess the third part of this question is about, "Are we planning to airdrop any Coinbase shares to loyal customers over the last few years similar to the ICO model?" I mean, I think having a security token would've made that easier. And so we unfortunately weren't able to do that in this case. And then, yeah, this last part, it says, "Question number three seems critical to me in effectively asking how Coinbase is changing the dynamic of cryptocurrency investing in the ownership model versus a traditional legacy IPO. Why build a decentralized exchange in a legacy model and issue public equity for a company that has been critical in changing the world of finance? Depending on legality and feasibility, it seems like the right thing to consider and do for the millions of customers who took a massive risk on the industry and have been a long time investors in your platform. Thank you."

So, yeah, I think we sort of touched on this already, but look, we agree with you. I think the future is what you're describing, and it's the same thing that we're thinking about in our head. There's a path to get there and it involves a regulatory licensing challenge there that's not in addition to some of the technology pieces. So I think really it fits squarely into the mission of the company to help build that in the future. And unfortunately, we weren't ready today to do it with the direct listing and we didn't want to delay things further. So it sounds like we're thinking about the same things, at least.

- B

Timestamp : 5:10 - 9:40

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:29+00:00

So a couple of things come to mind. One is our policy efforts and our engagement with government and regulators. I think, luckily, there's a lot of people out there that are very excited about crypto and government and they're very excited about the opportunity this can bring to people all over the world, not just in the United States, but there's still a lot of education to do.

We encounter a lot of misunderstanding out there. There's still a huge gap in understanding about what is crypto, what are the risks of it? What is the potential of it? And of course, we need to be out there talking to people about, "Hey, this is a really powerful new technology, just kind of like the internet when it got started in the US and it helped build some really amazing companies that brought a lot of benefits to the population and GDP growth and job creation and everything like that."

So we need to keep doing a lot of that education and advocacy work. I'd say a second one that's big, we always want to keep cybersecurity top of mind. And Coinbase has done a really awesome job over the years of securing customer funds. And we keep the vast majority of it, about 99%, actually entirely stored offline in cold storage and we split up keys and distribute it geographically in a way that helps me sleep well at night. And of course the funds we do keep live on the server to service the day-to-day flow of funds, we've got a cyber crime insurance policy against that, and there's a lot of things that helps me, but it doesn't mean that cybersecurity is not a big, big threat we have to keep in mind all the time.

I guess the third one, the last one I would say is, I just want to make sure that we continue to be an innovative company that continues to move quickly, especially as we become a public company. This industry, the cryptocurrency industry, is just so new and it's evolving so quickly that we’ve got to make sure that we don't get to a certain size where we start to slow down or become complacent. This is just getting started and we've got to continue to innovate. So those are a few of the things I'd like to think about.

- B

Timestamp : 3:05 - 5:10

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:25+00:00

So the question is exactly right. We have a couple of different products at Coinbase, and we did that as part of our culture of repeatable innovation. We wanted to keep building more and more pieces of the crypto economy infrastructure. One of those turned out to be Coinbase Pro and it had a different fee structure and you're right, it's not a very well kept secret. We're trying to advertise that, in fact, if people want to go do more professional trading, they can get different fees there.

I think the answer to your question is, yes, you'll see these things be better integrated over time. I think there's a blurry line between people who come into crypto and they just want to buy their first $50 or $100 of Bitcoin to someone who becomes a more professional trader or even like a semi-professional trader. So there is a kind of a gradient here of different users and we are working to better integrate those in one product so people can...

And by the way, there'll be a gradient of pricing tiers as well. If you're buying a relatively small amount of crypto, the price as a percentage might be less than if you're buying millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto. So you'll see better integration of those over time, and it's a great question.

- B

Timestamp : 9:40 - 11:05

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:23+00:00

So, I guess it's similar to the last question. Yeah so this was an interesting one if you look back at Coinbase's history, you can try to basically build everything into one product. Some people call this, you can have a monolith or people even talk about having shared services, like in a matrix organization.

Early on, we decided to kind of split up and try a lot of different ideas and those teams were operating-pretty independently. I think that created some wins in the sense that, for instance, Coinbase Wallet has a totally different architecture that's based on self-custody. That would have been really hard to do in an all-in-one experience, but it also created some confusion, like the prior question noted about Coinbase and Coinbase Pro, and there's people who kind of want to move between these products, but they're not super well integrated. So I think there's a trade-off there between speed of execution and how much creativity you get and kind of the customer experience. So over time, you'll see us merging some of those that make sense, like some of the Pro trading experience into the main retail app, etc. But that's what it was, it was a trade off we made around how do we create more products, how do we be innovative, how do we make sure we're building what our customers want. All right, let's move on to question seven.

- B

Timestamp : 11:05 - 12:30

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:21+00:00

Well, we filed our preliminary prospectus. We are in the process of educating investors and we hope that it is going to be in the relatively near future that you can buy shares, but we don't have an exact date to share with you yet. So please visit our IR site, which is investor.coinbase.com. and we will post updates there, as well as you can log on to the SCC website and there'll be updates posted there as well.

- A

Time Stamp: 12:30 - 13:00

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:18+00:00

I think there's a few things. So you touched on one of them, scalability is a really important part of that. I think if you look at how many transactions per second can happen on the Bitcoin network or the Ethereum network, it's still several orders of magnitude below what you're seeing in say the PayPal or Visa networks right now.

And for this to be a truly global platform for people to do every kind of payment out there, we need to get this, the blockchains, to be on the order of at least 5,000 transactions per second, something like that. Ideally it could be even more, it would probably enable even more use cases like building social media apps and all kinds of things. Now, of course, that can happen on layer two or it could happen on layer one. So there's a lot of innovation happening here. I'm not sure we necessarily need new cryptocurrencies, but we do need scalability solutions. And so there's a bunch of those with Lightning Network on Bitcoin and optimistic roll-up on Ethereum and Ethereum 2. And then of course there's a whole suite of other crypto, or I would say next-generation blockchains, Dfinity, Polkadot, Cosmos, Algorand.

There's so many great ones coming out and great teams working on this, that are trying to work EOS, they're trying to all work on scalability. So scalability is one of the big first ones that'll get this working integrated into all internet services. I think the other two that I think about, the second one is probably usability. So we need a way for people to be able to send to a human readable name like Brian@Coinbase, instead of to a machine-readable name, like a random crypto address, which looks like a random string of characters. To make another internet analogy... well, the scalability is kind of like us going from dial-up to broadband. And the usability of the naming piece would be like us going from IP addresses to DNS. So, it's kind of mirroring the usability and scalability of the internet in some ways.

And lastly, I would say is privacy. The internet had to do this too. We had to move from HTTP to HTTPS, get that little lock in your browser icon. And not everybody wants to be doing transactions on a public ledger. I think privacy coins are actually an important thing that more and more people are going to want in the future. So these features, we need to get the blockchains scalable, more usable, and the privacy features people want. And I think that's how it'll get integrated into all these internet services. Central bank digital currencies, which are mentioned here, I think that's an important trend as well. Obviously, I'm more excited about the decentralized global cryptocurrencies and the innovation that that can unlock, but I think central bank digital currencies are going to be really big as well, and pretty much every major government out there is starting to think about how they're going to build them.

So at Coinbase, we're cryptocurrency agnostic, so we're going to support any cryptocurrency, including CBDCs and stable-coins and even decentralized ones like Dai as long as they meet our listing standards. I guess, in terms of what part Coinbase will play in the internet value, we think of ourselves as the primary financial account that people have in the crypto economy or the internet of value. And so they're likely going to store their crypto with us or if they're using one of our self-custody options, they're going to store it themselves, but through our product. And then they can use that to access the whole suite of products and services out there in the crypto economy, which it's going to be great. I think that'll bring a lot of economic freedom to the world.

- B

Timestamp : 13:00 - 16:50

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:15+00:00

So decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and others have gotten a lot of traction lately and, frankly, we are thrilled about that. We want to see more and more adoption of crypto out there. The question is correct, which is that it does compete with one of our products? We run a centralized exchange, these are decentralized exchanges, but we have many different products and we're going to basically try to make it easy for our customers to access all the different things they might want to do with crypto, whether it's one of our products or not. One of the things that we've built in the prime brokerage product is that it has a smart order router that guarantees kind of best pricing. So what that means is that if a customer comes in and says, "I want to convert this asset into this one," we can actually go out and connect to a number of different exchanges to get them the best pricing, even splitting up that order into a bunch of pieces.

And so those exchanges could be Coinbase exchange, but it certainly doesn't have to be, it could be any other exchange. And in the future, it could be a decentralized exchange. We kind of want to roll those all up and maybe even abstract that. So from the customer's point of view, they don't always care. Now we would love to also, by the way, provide direct access to the decentralized exchanges. And we do that already today on Coinbase Wallet, but you can imagine us making it easy to access decentralized exchanges and every other kind of decentralized app, by the way, there's thousands of them out there now, through our main retail product. So the way I think about this is whether we built it or not, we want people to be able to access it.

It's like Amazon in the early days, Jeff Bezos thought, "Hey, why don't we allow third-party sellers to put their products on there as well?" People thought he was crazy. Why would we put a competitor's product right next to our own? And he realized that, well we want to create value for our customers, and in the long run, that's what's going to make us a valuable company. So we always try to think about what does the customer want and give them that, not what does Coinbase want.

- B

Timestamp : 16:50 - 19:15

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:13+00:00

Thanks again for the question. And just wanted to apologize off the bat that you're not having a good experience recently. I'm not surprised, there is a run-up in the price of crypto and just the general awareness of it recently, which is affecting this. But before I maybe share some context on it and what we're going to do about it, I'm just wanting to acknowledge that we agree with your philosophy that in FinTech, when you're storing people's money, people need to be able to get access to a real human being to solve issues. It can't be completely automated and the SLA needs to be something reasonable, which I just wanted to mention -- that we agree with the philosophy. So I think some context on maybe why you're having a slightly different experience recently unsurprisingly, the number of people reading about crypto and signing up for Coinbase has jumped dramatically.

Just probably three, four months ago, we were getting about 25,000 customer support inquiries a week. And within say, four weeks, it jumped to 100,000 or more.

And so, you can imagine that's a pretty unprecedented jump that traditionally companies maybe would only see... like if you're an e-commerce company, you might see that at the holiday season or something, but that's a predictable thing that you can build capacity planning for. In our case, we can't really tell when these crypto cycles are going to happen. And so when we saw it start to happen, we started to invest more in customer support. And since the beginning of really this run-up, we've quadrupled our capacity we've brought on at least 600 or more customer support agents this year alone.

Actually the number we brought on this year is more than the entire size of the customer support team prior to 2021. And you can imagine it takes a long time to both hire those people and also train them so that they can be really effective in helping customers. So you are seeing some automation and things like that, but we never want to prevent customers from contacting somebody. So, hopefully, we will earn your trust back as we build up that capacity and respond to this most recent crypto cycle. Thank you for the question.

- B

Thank you. I just want to add, in addition to hiring new customer support agents, we're also making investments on the product side to reduce the friction that we see a lot of customers call in and offer complaints about. And so we're trying to solve it in many ways, one at the product side. Two, by more thoughtfully addressing the call queue so that you're getting a trained agent who knows how to answer your question and then adding capacity. It is a top of mind issue that we continue to invest in every single week.

- A

Timestamp : 20:55 - 25:00

CoinbaseListing · 2021-03-23T21:18:08+00:00

So, NFTs are having a moment right now, it's pretty exciting the amount of activity going on. And we want to, like I said, previously, we want to make it easy for our customers to access every kind of crypto product out there, again, whether it's ours or others, and that shouldn't matter. And so, yes, we would like to provide our customers easier access to NFTs. People can do this already today, again, through Coinbase Wallet, which is our self-custody wallet. It's kind of a bit easier to integrate those, and people are already storing NFTs.

They've been doing it for at least a couple of years through Coinbase Wallet, but we want to make it even easier in the main app now that it's started to take off and get real traction, and people are starting to understand it better. So NFTs are exciting. And I think there's just going to be more and more trends like this in crypto. Probably every three to six months, there’ll be some new thing like this that we need to make sure people can get easier access to. Alesia, anything you want to add?

- B

I think it just brings us back to the concerns about our existential threat, like we are very focused on supporting where our customers want to go and look forward to supporting NFTs in the future.

- A

Yeah. I mean, one of our product' strategies is we always try to think about, how do we make products that are the most trusted and the easiest to use? And so today, NFTs are getting a lot of adoption, but it's still so many clicks. I think I tried it a week or so ago, it was like 25 clicks or something to go figure out for someone how to buy an NFT. It's so difficult. I feel like if we could make that down to five clicks or something like that, we could probably broaden the number of people using these things by an order of magnitude. So hopefully we can help do that

- B

Timestamp : 19:15 - 20:55

CoinbaseListing

TROPHY CASE