If today’s news that Coinbase is introducing personal payment pages wasn’t enough for you to take in, here’s another.
The San Francisco-based company today delivered an update on their ongoing educational promotion that they announced about two weeks ago.
Just in case you’re not up to date, the company announced they would be giving $10 worth of free bitcoin to students with a .edu email address at the top 500 higher education institutions in the world.
The company had already started the promotion secretly by the time they announced it, and had already managed to pay quite a few students, but the statistics since the announcement are now available.
On the official Coinbase blog Wednesday, the company said it was “very pleased” with results, attracting twenty thousand students to the Coinbase service — which allows consumers to easily buy and sell bitcoin.
That’s twenty thousand students who have become acquainted with actual bitcoins they can spend at a slew of locations.
It’s also big money for Coinbase, who has easily spent $200,000 on this promotion — and they’re keeping it going.
The company adds:
[blockquote style=”2″]In order to make sure that we are giving these bitcoins to actual college students, we made it so that you have to verify a unique phone number before you get the bitcoins. It is a bit of a hassle, but you do get the benefit of two-factor security on your account. This extra check has greatly reduced scammers trying to take advantage of this promotion. So it allows us to keep this promotion going.[/blockquote]
Despite being a promotion open to international students, the top ten sign-ups came from schools here in the United States.
The University of Illinois came in third place with 873 students paid; University of California Berkeley in second place with 939 paid; and the University in Michigan with the most students paid, 941.
Here’s the leaderboard:
[textmarker color=”C24000″]Source[/textmarker] Coinbase blog