Blue chip in the world crypts. Coinbase Exchange History, which costs more than $ 100 billion

In 2017, Coinbase became the world's first crypto united. Now the estimate of the cryptocurrencies exceeds already $ 100 billion, and it itself is going to conduct public placement on NASDAQ. If the deal takes place, Coinbase will become one of the most expensive in the history of IT companies that go to the exchange. We tell the story of a startup, which attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from eminent investors and earned an impeccable reputation in one of the most unfinished markets in the world.

The duet of enthusiasts

The startup Coinbase, founded by the 29-year-old programmer Brian Armstrong in 2012, has become an important tool for US departure from the traditional banking system. In time, starting in the popularity of cryptocurrencies gaining popularity, Armstrong in nine years managed to raise a company with an estimate of $ 100 billion and bring his own fortune to $ 1 billion. Who is he?

The future crypto millionaire has grown in California, in the family of an environmental engineer and a mathematics teacher. In high school, Armstrong became interested in programming and began to make simple sites. After school, he entered the University of Rice, where he received two higher educations: in economics and computer science. In his student years, Brian launched the University.com tutors selection service and first encountered how difficult it is to accept and make payments on the Internet.

Armstrong tried to work in consulting, moved to live in Argentina, but in the end he returned to San Francisco and got a job as an engineer-programmer in Airbnb. There, he focused on the problems of international money transfers that were understandable to him: delays, high and opaque commissions, fraud. “Sending $ 100 to Uruguay, you never know which part of them will receive on the other side, and the intermediary companies simply refused to disclose this information,” the entrepreneur described the then state of affairs.

Therefore, when Armstrong stumbled upon a document on the document of an anonymous inventor Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto, describing the principle of work of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, he was "delighted." “Blockchain transaction is recorded in a single digital register, copies of which are stored on computers around the world-a revolutionary idea that sharply reduces the time and cost of transaction, while increasing their safety,” Brian with American Forbes shared .

Around the same time, another American - Fred Ersam - also thought about the prospects of Bitcoin. Economist and programmer by education, Ersam worked as a trader at Goldman Sachs in New York. In 2011, he became interested in the topic of bitcoins and even received a small profit, trading them at night. And in October 2012, he stumbled upon Armstrong's message to Reddit, where he described his prototype of a cloud bitcoin-wallet for those who did not want to take risks and store currency on their computers.

A few months later, Ersam wrote by e -mail Armstrong - it turned out that he had already developed a wallet and took a selection of Y Combinator's incubator. After a personal meeting, Armstrong invited Ersam to join him as a co -owner of Coinbase.

Open gateways

In the same 2012, Coinbase launched services for the purchase and sale of bitcoins using bank transfer, and in May 2013 received the first investments - $ 5 million from the Union Square Ventures Foundation. In December of the same year, $ 25 million in Coinbase invested one of the largest in Silicon Valley of Andreessen Horowitz, along with a number of other investors - this was the largest venture investment in a crypto company at that time. Since 2012, Coinbase has attracted more than $ 500 million.

A powerful impetus for the development of Coinbase was a speculative cryptopus, inflated by 2013. Over the year, the price of bitcoin increased more than a hundred times: from $ 10 in 2011 to $ 1100 in 2013, and by 2015 it fell below $ 200. The storm of excitement around Bitcoin was accompanied by hacker hacks of wallets - for example, the GOX Tokyo Exchange closed in 2014 after a loss of $ 450 million of its customers.

During this period, Coinbase absorbed several related services, introduced the cost of the bitcoins stored on the servers, and also launched a system of safe storage of cryptocurrency. All this aroused confidence and provided the exchange for the influx of new customers.

In November 2013, the founders attracted another “obsessed with bitcoins” of a partner, Adam White, an engineer who served in the US Air Force for five years, and then graduated from Harvard. It set an ambitious task: to find ten companies with sales volume of more than $ 1 billion each and conclude contracts for receiving payments in bitcoins. Two months later, Coinbase had a signed agreement with Overstock.com. Bitcoins conducted by a large company via Coinbase “opened gateways” for other corporate customers, White recalls. Soon, giants like ExpeDia and Dell began to cooperate with a startup, which increased confidence in Coinbase and cryptocurrency in general. Today, thousands of large companies and small merchants are already accepting payments in bitcoins through Coinbase.

Coinbase has also concluded agreements with traditional STRIPE, BRINETREE and PayPal payment systems, which, thanks to Coinbase, were able to process transactions in bitcoins.

Big cryptocurrency brother

The base of private customers grew up an incredible pace: already in 2014, the number of Coinbase users reached a million people. Belief in Bitcoin and the company's cryptocurrency was strengthened, and in January 2015, Coinbase received another $ 75 million investments from the Dramer Fisher Jurvertson, New York Stock Exchange and United Services Automobile Association, which is part of the Fortune list 500.

In 2016, users of the platform performed operations with cryptocurrencies for more than $ 25 billion. But the victorious procession of Coinbase shook the launch of the new Bitcoin protocol, the so -called hard fork, which actually divided the cryptocurrency into two versions: “ordinary” bitcoin and Bitcoin cash. Coinbase initially refused to support both the new blockchain and the currency associated with it, as a result of which users deduced almost half of the funds stored on it from the exchange.

After the outflow, Armstrong still backed away, saying that he would add token support. Some of the investments eventually returned.

One of the principles of Coinbase allocating the company in a strongly overgrown market of cryptocurrency exchanges is strict adherence to US laws and increased attention to suspicious transactions. If, in the user’s wallet, dubious, in the opinion of analysts of the exchange, operations, the site may require the owner of the wallet explanation or close the account. This Coinbase has repeatedly caused the anger of Reddit users, who accused the startup of behaving as a “big brother”, “spying in favor of the US government” and “uses Gestapo tactics”. “Wow, someone clearly forgot why people generally use bitcoins. If I wanted to be asked about the origin of each transaction, I would ask the tax audit from me, ”Forbes quotes one of the exchange users.

$ 100 billion and NASDAQ

During the next round of investments in 2017, the exchange attracted $ 100 million. The Institute Venture Partners Foundation became the leader, which had previously been invested in Netflix, Twitter, Dropbox, Slack and Snap. Then the startup was estimated at $ 1.6 billion. So Coinbase was the first in the world among the cryptocurrency exchanges “Unicorn” (a company with an estimate of more than $ 1 billion).

The 2020 cryptobum opened new doors for Coinbase. During the pandemic year, the exchange, due to the sharp growth of the cryptocurrency course, earned more than $ 300 million (mainly at the transaction commissions) against a loss of $ 30 million a year earlier.

The financial successes and the growing base of customers (at the moment about 43 million users) were helped by Coinbase to conduct another round of investment on an almost unprecedented assessment of $ 100 billion for an IT market. Success pushed Armstrong to an exchanger-but not through the IPO procedure, but in the form of direct listing on NASDAQ. Now the platform claims to be the status of one of the most expensive US IT companies since the IPO Facebook in 2012.

Fred Ersam, who came out of the founders of Coinbase in 2017, believes that this is far from the limit for the development of the project and the cryptorrhnik as a whole. “If you told someone in 2012 that the capitalization of bitcoin will exceed $ 1 trillion, as it was at some point last week, people would think that you are absolutely crazy.” According to Ersam, the idea of ​​new digital money seemed to most strange simply because "new money never appeared in our lives, at least in the life of the Americans." “But these stereotypes are easily collapsed. It just takes time for such a new powerful idea to penetrate into society and gained its trust, ”the entrepreneur believes.