Coinbase went public today (April 14th, 2021) via direct listing!
On their first day of trading, they briefly topped a $100B market cap, before closing the day around $86B.
- Coinbase is the world's leading cryptocurrency exchange platform
- They currently store over $200 billion of crypto, which is ~11% of all the crypto in the world (according to TheStreet & CNBC)
On November 16th, 2017, Jason interviewed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on a panel that included Tim Draper at the DFJ Summit 2017
- NOTE: This was near the peak of the ICO craze
For more context:
- Bitcoin price on November 16th, 2017: $7,924, ~$150 billion market cap
- Bitcoin price today (April 14th, 2021): $62,775, ~$1.17 trillion market cap
- Bitcoin's current market cap is about 8x larger than what it was during this interview
- After a brief pullback at the start of the pandemic, Bitcoin has gone 11X from ~$5,500 to its current price of over $60K
- via CoinDesk
Top Insights
During this 2017 interview, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong showed incredible foresight on the following topics:
- The ICO bubble they were in was out of control, and Brian anticipated SEC involvement and a crypto correction
- Coinbase was operating in a highly regulated space (crypto to fiat conversion), which helped them stand out as a trusted exchange because users could not be anonymous
- Bitcoin's market cap made it much less prone to manipulation than other cryptocurrencies
- Ethereum's advantage as a scalable transactional currency over Bitcoin, because of the price associated with trading BTC