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Although Coinbase has recently become a controversial company, especially as it began to add crypto assets left and right, the company has long had an unrelenting drive for innovation. Since setting up shop in 2012, the San Francisco-headquartered startup, headed by a former Airbnb employee with visions of grandeur, has quickly set the industry standard in a number of subsectors.
The firm may have started as a consumer-centric exchange, which sported a simple (near-)one-click interface, but Coinbase has evolved far beyond its original premise now. And interestingly, even as digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC) — Coinbase’s lifeblood — continue to lose value, the firm has only doubled-down on its expansion and development efforts.
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Coinbase Outperformed The Bitcoin Sell-Off
Recent Giving Pledge signee Brian Armstrong, the fervent, sometimes controversial chief of Coinbase, recently issued a note to his underlings — a swelling group of talent — accentuating the fact that the company has not only survived but thrived in the recent bearish downturn.
The American firm, which now has offices around the globe, started Q4 of 2018 with a bang, securing $300 million in funding from Tiger Global, Y Combinator, A16Z, Polychain Cap, and a number of other crypto-friendly venture groups. This round valued Coinbase at a jaw-dropping $8 billion, making the firm arguably the most valuable company in the entirety of Bitcoin ecosystem.
And since that $300 million cash boost, which was explained to be allocated towards global expansion efforts, institutional services, and applications for crypto, Coinbase has arguably been on the up-and-up. As explained in Armstrong’s letter, released to the public in an evident attempt at transparency, Coinbase launched a number of pertinent products, including support for Circle-backed USD Coin, a revamped version of Earn, PayPal withdrawals, and crypto-to-crypto trading, to only name a few products.
The firm also added a dozen crypto assets to its platform, an evident sign of changing times, with notable additions including ZCash (ZEC), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Maker (MKR), and 0x (ZRX). In a podcast, vice-president Dan Romero explained that firm’s clientele has begun to clamor for crypto asset support, presumably catalyzing the recent listings.
Along with adding the aforementioned tokens and products, Coinbase forayed into six new regions, opening the ground-breaking potential of crypto to millions more. The Coinbase chief also explained that his firm made a number of investments, into organizations such as Alchemy, Securitize, Starkware, Nomics, and Abacus.
Closing the retrospective post, Armstrong made his excitement and gratitude more than apparent when he wrote:
“I continue to be so impressed by the ability of this team to execute on aggressive timelines, all while solving problems that have never been solved before. This was a year of scaling Coinbase up to meet the demand of the market and efficiently executing to serve our customers.”
Great Year Ahead For The Crypto Juggernaut
Interestingly, the firm already seems to have prospects for a great 2019. As reported by NewsBTC earlier today, an apparent survey from Coinbase has polled users on the appeal of a subscription model, which would reduce “maker” and “taker” fees for Pro traders, while offering perks for premium members. If implemented, this program would be the first of its kind in the cryptosphere, and would likely propel the company’s trading platforms to new heights.
Asiff Hirji, president of the fledgling company, recently hinted that 2019 will be a great year for institutional participation in cryptocurrencies. In an interview with CNBC, Hirji explained that Coinbase’s custodial service “has blown by internal goals,” as “hundred of institutions” have boarded onto the platform in recent memory. Seeing that Coinbase has been playing a role in that facet of this industry, it can be assumed that this influx of Wall Street hotshots will trickle down to the company’s growing roster of institutional products.
Zeeshan Feroz, the chief at Coinbase’s U.K. branch, also expressed a similar positive outlook, but from a broader perspective. He said:
“I think you can expect a more aggressive approach to us adding more countries in the coming months. Much of what we’re doing here is driven by customer needs and what we’re seeing in the market… I think if you look at last year, a lot of the focus was on people who bought crypto from an investment point of view and a lot of projects raised a ludicrous amount of money as a result of that.”
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