Kathryn Haun: Maverick VC

Exclusive: Why star VC Katie Haun departed Andreessen Horowitz with an audacious plan to build a $1 billion crypto investing juggernaut The a16z vet made her name with big bets on Coinbase and OpenSea. Her new venture is on track to be the biggest Web3 fund raised by a solo female VC. .

Katie Haun Seeks $900M for Crypto Funds After A16z Departure: Report Haun is aiming for $300 million for an early investment fund targeting crypto startups and $600 million for a fund focused on larger companies and digital tokens.

Crypto’s Top V.C. Is Playing the Long Game Katie Haun, a co-chair of Andreessen Horowitz’s new $2.2 billion crypto fund, is betting that the blockchain will be as big as the internet. ....... A top crypto cop turned venture capitalist is now one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, with more than $2 billion at her fingertips. ....... Katie Haun, who created the first federal cryptocurrency task force as a prosecutor in the Justice Department, will co-chair a $2.2 billion crypto fund Andreessen Horowitz announced this week. She is a general partner at the venture capital fund and an independent director at the crypto exchange Coinbase. Chris Dixon, also a general partner at Andreessen, will be the fund’s other co-chair. ........ A Chinese regulatory crackdown on Bitcoin is battering prices and raising questions about the value and future regulatory landscape of crypto. .............. Xi Jinping and China have made no secret of the fact that they consider crypto and blockchain a top-five national priority for China in the next decade. They’ve publicly stated this, and they are developing their own version of cryptocurrency, a digital renminbi. We know that they plan to export this, to tie trade to it, to incentivize people around the world, not just in China, to use it. ............

the tremendous staying power of a decentralized, open system like Bitcoin.

......... There’s this myth that crypto founders want the Wild West. They’re really kind of desperate for regulators to say what the rules are. It takes so much time, money and resources — specialty resources — to figure out how to navigate the morass of agencies ranging from the C.F.T.C. to Treasury, let alone the regulators in 50 different states. .......... I’m full-time in the industry with experts all around, and I can’t keep up with the pace of this technology that’s changing so fast. ............ anyone today with an internet connection and a VPN can pretty easily go access products and services that are offered in other countries. It’s incredibly hard, if not almost impossible, for the U.S. to police what’s happening overseas on offshore platforms......... Criminals are early adopters and in some ways they make great beta testers for new technology. They’re always looking for a way around the system. Frankly, law enforcement officials actually really like when payment is made in Bitcoin as opposed to fiat. I think it’s funny because as a former prosecutor, I take this for granted. There’s a real false sense of security where wires are used or traditional financial services are used. People think, “Oh, we know everything about that. So we’ll just go subpoena. The bank will give us these records and we’ll just go get the money.” That is just so far from the reality of the situation. .......... I prosecuted many of the Justice Department’s largest online money laundering schemes. In fiat systems, 99.9 percent of money laundering claims succeed. Actually, the thing that really stands out about the ransomware attacks — the Colonial Pipeline is a great example of this. It is unprecedented that the Justice Department would be able to recover the proceeds from international criminal activity so quickly. ........

One of the only things that unites Congress lately is China

, and I think U.S. policymakers and lawmakers are starting to realize that China and other countries are moving forward, recognizing that crypto and blockchain is a real priority, and that we are behind, unlike in the internet, where DARPA and the U.S. government had a hand in helping create it. ............. There’s something fundamental going on right now with the internet and culture, and I think crypto is at the epicenter. .......... A lot of people that I talk to about NFTs think, “oh, yeah, digital art.” I think it’s so much more than just about art. It’s about much more than gaming, it’s about much more than goods. It’s about this new business model for creators and bringing entirely new audiences to crypto, entirely new types like creators, sports fans and media types......... Then the third category is DeFi or decentralized finance. ......... With crypto, we think that its potential for growth is as big as the potential for the internet.

Katie Haun on the Dark Web, Gangs, Investigating Bitcoin, and the New Magic of “Nifties” (NFTs) (#499) . Previously, she spent a decade as a federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice, where she focused on fraud, cybercrime, and corporate crime, alongside agencies including the SEC, FBI, and Treasury. She created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force and led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force. ....... While serving as a federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice, she also prosecuted RICO murders, organized crime, public corruption, gangs, and money laundering. She held senior positions at Justice Department headquarters in both the National Security Division and attorney general’s office, where her portfolio included antitrust, tax, and national security. Katie has testified before both houses of Congress on the intersection of technology and regulation. .......... She teaches a class on cryptocurrencies at Stanford Business School and previously taught cybercrime at Stanford Law School. ....... Katie clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and is an honors graduate of Stanford Law School. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. ....... Katie gives us a rundown of how blockchain technology both powered the Silk Road darknet market and dropped the breadcrumbs that led to its downfall — as well as the arrest of the corrupt agents who were exploiting the investigation for their personal enrichment. .......... As a federal prosecutor, Katie never lost a case. ...... While working to put violent criminals behind bars, what was the self-talk that kept Katie level-headed when risks to personal safety were of valid concern? How large are these criminal organizations, and how much reach do they have in the outside world? ........ What developments does Katie expect to see in crypto or blockchain over the next three to five years? .





From Crimefighter to ‘Crypto’: Meet the Woman in Charge of Venture Capital’s Biggest Gamble Kathryn Haun was the Justice Department's go-to prosecutor for Bitcoin-related felonies. Now she's one of cryptocurrency's most important investors. Here's why her career change is a watershed moment...... In one corner is Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate in economics. In the other is Kathryn Haun, an accomplished federal prosecutor recently turned venture capitalist. .

Federal Prosecutor Kathryn Haun On How Criminals Use Bitcoin -- And How She Catches Them . The first time federal prosecutor Kathryn Haun heard about Bitcoin was when someone asked her if she’d like to prosecute it. ....... The assistant U.S. attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in San Francisco, who had previously focused on organized crime, prison gangs and murders, very quickly realized that wouldn’t be possible — that it would be like “trying to prosecute cash,” but it set her off on a path of discovery. She is now also DOJ’s digital currency coordinator, teaches Stanford Law School’s first class on digital currency and cybercrime, and, last year, put away two federal agents who tried to steal more than $800,000 in bitcoin. ......... begins with her being tipped off by an investigative journalist about one of those agents ....... when I started looking into this matter, I was doing it from the perspective of, I want to clear this person’s name, but I quickly learned that wasn’t going to be the result.” ........ She describes how she uncovered what were actually “the perfect criminals” — being federal agents, “they knew how to cover their tracks,” she says. ......... she was able to follow the bitcoins, how tracking those patterns revealed to her that there were two dirty federal agents, not one, and what telling detail led her to suspect the second must also be a federal agent. ........ she thinks it would be particularly revolutionary in the area of public records. “Of all the kinds of cases that I’ve ever done, whether you’re talking about the Hell’s Angels, marriage fraud, the bank officer I prosecuted for impersonating dead people or the criminals I’ve prosecuted using cryptocurrency, they all have one thing in common: there’s always been, somewhere along the way, a forged, counterfeit or stolen public document — even a murder case I tried,” she says. ........ in the United States, more than 6,500 entities can issue birth certificates on 14,000 different types of forms, making it easy to counterfeit a birth certificate. “We call these ‘breeder documents’ — because they quite literally breed new identities,” she says. “You get a forged, fake or stolen birth certificate and a name, and you take that down to the DMV and you get your photo taken with that, and now you all of a sudden also have a driver’s license. You take the driver’s license and birth certificate to the passport office and now you’ve gotten yourself a passport. And all of a sudden, with these three kind of identity documents, the sky’s the limit on what kind of criminal activity you could do — you could file for fraudulent benefits from the government, you could commit some kind a terrorist offense, you could purchase weapons, you could traffic in people, you could obviously commit drug smuggling.” ............. Another problem she sees in public records is that they are kept in centralized databases, which are subject to tampering. For instance, in 2008, the city of San Francisco’s network administrator became disgruntled and changed all the admin passwords and held all the records hostage. .

LinkedIn

Biden Takes Step Toward Regulating Cryptocurrencies The president signed an executive order that will coordinate efforts among financial regulators to better understand the risks and opportunities presented by digital assets...... President Biden signed an executive order on cryptocurrencies Wednesday, in the face of “explosive growth” in digital assets.Credit... ......... President Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday that will direct the federal government to come up with a plan to regulate cryptocurrencies, recognizing their popularity and potential to destabilize traditional money and markets. ......... The order, under development for months, will coordinate efforts among financial regulators to better understand the risks and opportunities presented by digital assets, particularly in the areas of consumer protection, national security and illicit finance. ....... The order lays out a national policy for digital assets across six areas: consumer and investor protection; financial stability; illicit finance; U.S. leadership in the global financial system and economic competitiveness; financial inclusion; and responsible innovation........ “We’re operating in a gray zone and in a sandbox. And time and again, someone comes into the sandbox and arrests somebody, and that’s not the best way to grow an important part of the economy.” ........ “We’ve seen a complete lack of any strategic direction or thought from the federal government for years. The industry still doesn’t know what’s a security, for example, and what’s a utility token that is exempt from regulation. Those are things that would help us.” .

Crypto-related companies and funds jump after Biden signs executive order on cryptocurrencies

Kathryn Haun: Maverick VC https://t.co/UxxKSsY4ug @katie_haun @KatieHill4CA @katiecouric #crypto #cryptocurrencies #Bitcoin #nftart

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 9, 2022

Crypto And Climate Change

Those of us who believe in the science of climate change think of this as something existential. A few degrees of warming and earth becomes uninhabitable. There is chaos. If the monsoon were to leave South Asia, what would happen? Climate change could do that. It is an unthinkable scenario.

I have argued for years inequality is similarly existential. And the solution there is crypto. We need the Blockchain to empower individuals everywhere, to democratize money, to narrow the inequality and make it manageable.

Regulating Crypto

Can The Government Regulate Cryptocurrency? . we first must understand that Bitcoin and most other ICO issued tokens are in fact decentralized. ........ the supply of cryptocurrency tokens is not set by a central authority or government. It also relates to cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange. Transactions using the blockchain can be conducted, authenticated, and recorded in the public ledger without third party interference. ........ The number one way that the government could regulate cryptocurrencies is by taxing any fiat money you use to cash out a virtual token. The main caveat with this is that this would have to apply to specific tokens and a cryptocurrency owner could simply turn to another coin to cash out. Beyond this, many early adopters and hardliners prefer cryptocurrencies as medium of exchange for basic goods and services over traditional fiat currencies. ................ Right now, cryptocurrencies fall under the jurisdiction of the SEC for investment, the CTFC for any crimes involving interstate commerce, and the IRS, making it subject to either income or a capital gains tax. .......... the CTFC recently subpoenaed major crypto exchanges Bitfinex and Tether because Tether couldn’t verify over $2.3 billion in reserves ......... Much of the proposed regulations being mulled around the world comes on the fears of a dangerous speculative bubble that many fear could harm the nation if cryptocurrency commodities tumble. ........ Less transaction fees than credit cards or most major financial instruments ........ No paperwork for investing in a token, unlike a share ........ The biggest problem with current monetary policy is that federal interest rates are arbitrary issued and the creditors have no interest in controlling the supply of money. .......... No matter your opinion over the cryptocurrency craze, it has

the potential to completely disrupt monetary policy across the globe

. With hundreds of new tokens offered each month, it seems as though the effort to regulate cryptocurrencies will forever remain a game of cat and mouse. .

Regulation By Enforcement And Crypto Assets . In November 2021, the SEC Chair Gary Gensler delivered his remarks at the Securities Enforcement Forum and stressed enforcement as a “fundamental pillar in achieving the SEC’s mission” to safeguard investors. ....... “legislative priority should center on crypto trading, lending, and DeFi platforms” so as to bring “the field of crypto” within regulatory frameworks comparable to those already in place for conventional securities ......... Given the broad range of “crypto” assets, it is hardly surprising that such digital assets fall under the responsibility of an alphabet soup of regulatory bodies and agencies – the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and individual state authorities. Digital assets are challenging to define and impact different aspects of the financial service industry. Indeed, some in the traditional financial services refuse to refer to crypto tokens as currencies. For example, Jamie Dimon recently said that he no longer uses the word cryptocurrency. Regardless, blockchain-based products and services were designed, at least in part, like other FinTech products, to disrupt the traditional financial service industry and no one can contest the disruption they have caused, regardless of what you call them. ........ The innovative, disruptive potential of crypto assets is a source of regulatory concern, which is why there have been increasingly vocal calls to step-up regulatory efforts in connection with the crypto sector. These calls are legitimate, but to whom should they be addressed? ........ the price tag of what is at stake, given the massive growth of the crypto sector. ......... when Bitcoin and Ether (the world’s two largest cryptocurrencies) surged to record highs in November 2021, cryptocurrencies hit a market cap of $3 trillion for the first time. Then, in January 2022, cryptocurrency prices fell sharply, including Bitcoin which plunged 50% from its all-time high. That level of volatility in such a large market is a cause for concern regardless of whether you call the underlying crypto-asset an asset, a security, a currency, or a token. ........ Lawmakers have been pushing for the regulation of decentralized exchanges in an attempt to fight rug pulls, which enable a cryptocurrency coins’ creators to deprive the coins of liquidity, causing unwitting investors to basically lose all of their money. .......... Clear regulatory guidance is crucial to the growth of the industry, and regulation by enforcement, or threat of legal action, risks driving business outside of the U.S.” ......... With the rise in abuse, manipulation and fraud in the crypto industry, the SEC is interested in taking immediate (and much needed) action. Several months ago the SEC put the crypto industry on notice by sending Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange platform, a warning letter that the SEC would sue the company if it moved forward with a planned lending product. The SEC took similar actions last year when BlockFi faced SEC scrutiny over high-yield crypto accounts. Somewhat similarly, BlockFi along with Celsius were also the subjects of earlier enforcement actions by state securities regulators. These lawsuits, letters and warning of enforcement by federal and state agencies underscore the tense legal debate regarding the preferred regulatory approach towards the financial industry in general, and in particular, towards the growing crypto sector – regulation first and enforcement later, or regulation by enforcement? ............ Massive amounts of money have flown into crypto, requiring regulators to keep up with the technology in real-time in order to close risk gaps as much as possible. Tasked with this mission impossible, regulators must remain cautious to work with industry players. But the enforcement first approach, does not facilitate cooperative action between regulators and industry. Instead, regulatory agencies should regulate first and then enforce the law second, reserving to themselves, as former Secretary Geithner suggested, the ability to make adjustments to regulations after the fact in cases where flexibility is needed. ........... “The SEC famously keeps a large shotgun behind the door to keep markets in line. It can be judicious in its use of enforcement power and fire some warning shots before leaving some business lying dead in the street” .

U.S. Officials Send Mixed Messages on Crypto Regulation. Here’s What It All Means for Investors . One of the founding principles of cryptocurrency is that it’s decentralized and unregulated. But the U.S. government isn’t too worried about crypto’s founding principles. .......... a few key themes have emerged on the subject of new U.S. cryptocurrency regulation: stopping cryptocurrency crime and tax evasion, stablecoin regulation, and the potential for investment vehicles like crypto ETFs and other funds. ........ For many crypto enthusiasts, the decentralized nature of digital currencies — which, unlike traditional currencies, aren’t backed by any institution or government authority — is a big draw. But regulatory guidance can help protect investors. “As much as I like the decentralization and the lack of government [involvement], I am glad that they are paying attention because unfortunately with cryptocurrency, there are a lot of scams” .......... One possible provision would expand the definition of a brokerage to include companies that facilitate digital asset trades — like cryptocurrency exchanges. This kind of change would mean increased tax reporting responsibility to help the IRS track crypto tax evasion. .......... cryptocurrency “poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion.” ........ Under a potential new law that has been considered by lawmakers, companies that facilitate crypto trades would be required to report tax information about those trades to the IRS (just as brokers of traditional investments like stocks do) starting in the 2024 tax season. ........ if the bill passes, exchanges will have to issue 1099-B tax forms with cost basis information to investors.” ........ It’s already important to keep your own records of any capital gains or losses on your crypto trades, which you should report on your federal tax returns. ....... Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency pegged to an existing currency, like USDT (Tether). USDT is tied to the price of the U.S. dollar, so its value is constantly $1. ........ many established, high-volume U.S.-based exchanges, like Coinbase and Gemini. ....... The Investing Companies Act requires companies, including mutual funds, to disclose information about their finances and investments on a “regular basis” ......... every initial coin offering (ICO) he has seen is a security: “Generally, folks buying these tokens are anticipating profits, and there’s a small group of entrepreneurs and technologists standing up and nurturing the projects … I believe we have a crypto market now where many tokens may be unregistered securities, without required disclosures or market oversight.” ........... the SEC has jurisdiction, and “our federal securities laws apply.” .

I need to stack more before #Bitcoin hits $100k 🏃🏽‍♀️

— Natalie Brunell (@natbrunell) March 6, 2022

The Challenges of Regulating Cryptocurrency The S.E.C. has yet to set clear rules on cryptocurrencies, leaving the industry guessing. Maybe that’s just how the agency wants it. ........... he turned to cryptocurrency markets, which are notoriously volatile, and adopted a darker tone. “Frankly, as I’ve said before, I think it’s more like the Wild West,” Gensler said. On another occasion, he had described cryptocurrency investments as “rife with fraud, scams, and abuse.” ......... The S.E.C. has so far failed to keep up as thousands of tokens and digital currencies have been introduced, and new companies and platforms have emerged to help store and trade them. The lack of regulations over this burgeoning area has created an opening for widespread fraud .......... After leaving the C.F.T.C., in 2014, Gensler worked as a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. During his time there, much of his teaching focussed on cryptocurrency. His first class, “Blockchain and Money,” covered the development of blockchain and its potential uses. .......... One of the biggest questions facing the industry is whether tokens—which are tradable assets that may serve as the units which denominate cryptocurrencies but can also represent other things of value—qualify as securities; if so, they would be subject to securities laws and regulations.

And if they aren’t securities, what are they?

......... around 2017, as a frenzy of initial coin offerings—a fund-raising strategy for cryptocurrency that resembles an I.P.O.—was in full swing, a client came to his law firm wanting to know what the S.E.C. thought about I.C.O.s, and whether the agency considered digital coins to be under its purview. Morgan said, jokingly, that his first question was, “What’s an I.C.O.?” He quickly learned that there was little S.E.C. guidance available. ........ Jay Clayton, at a Senate hearing: “To the extent that digital assets like I.C.O.s are securities—and I believe every I.C.O. I’ve seen is a security—we have jurisdiction and our federal securities laws apply.” ........... Ripple argues that XRP is a currency, which would make it subject to different laws and regulations overseen by different agencies—such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency or the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which are both part of the Treasury Department. Ripple has taken to Twitter to defend itself, in addition to making its arguments in court. ............ Part of its strategy seems to involve trying to embarrass the S.E.C. over the agency’s apparent contradictions surrounding cryptocurrencies. ......... Coinbase ...... According to the company, its executives had been “​​proactively engaging” with the S.E.C. for six months, to clarify the legal standing of its projects, but it “didn’t get much of a response.” It also said that the S.E.C. had so far refused to clarify whether it considered the act of lending cryptocurrency a security, or whether the cryptocurrency itself was the security, and any other aspects of its reasoning. .

Global Crypto Regulation Should be Comprehensive, Consistent, and Coordinated . The IMF’s mandate is to safeguard the stability of the international monetary and financial system, and crypto assets are changing the system profoundly. .......... While the nearly $2.5 trillion market capitalization indicates significant economic value of the underlying technological innovations such as the blockchain, it might also reflect froth in an environment of stretched valuations. ........ in emerging markets and developing economies, the advent of crypto can accelerate what we have called “cryptoization”—when these assets replace domestic currency, and circumvent exchange restrictions and capital account management measures. .......... Crypto’s cross-sector and cross-border remit limits the effectiveness of national approaches. ............ many crypto service providers operate across borders, making the task for supervision and enforcement more difficult. Uncoordinated regulatory measures may facilitate potentially destabilizing capital flows. .

Will Cryptocurrency Regulation Affect Crypto Prices? This price-sensitive asset class could have either a positive or negative reaction to regulation. .

The crypto regulation era is here . .

Regulators put cryptocurrency in crosshairs Business School professor offers look at landscape and challenges for industry, government .

Federal Reserve: Money and Payments: The U.S.Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation (40 pages) .

Let me in! https://t.co/kL4MrnovcJ @JCZarate1 @BSchuler @katie_haun @cdixon @fredwilson @FEhrsam @Gavin__Andresen @gokulr @brian_armstrong @surojit @LJBrock @choi2_emilie @manish_cb @ShanAggarwal @coinbase

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 9, 2022

The Purpose Of Crypto Regulation

The primary purpose of crypto regulation ought to be to make innovation and business possible. There are plenty of operations that call themselves crypto but are shady, deceptive, and outright fraudulent. It is for regulation to protect the true innovators from those that give the space a bad name. Weed out the bad guys.

There is great danger that Barnes And Noble might attempt to hobble Amazon because, in 1994, Barnes And Noble had gobbles of money, and Amazon had none, and Capitol Hill is pay as you go. In 2009 we saw Wall Street walk away with murder. The moneyed interests of the old might get in the way of the new. And their nefarious attempts might have the legitimacy of misguided regulation. The new innovators have to get into the political fight. They have to be part of the debate. They have to be in the arena. They have to show up on the Hill, and they have to show up in the court of public opinion.

The primary purpose of crypto regulation ought to be to make business possible.

There is a line of thought, and I subscribe to it, that America is a different kind of country. I am plenty critical of the US political system as it exists today, it is an imperfect union, but at the bottom of it I do believe America is an idea, this oldest modern democracy carries the unique responsibility of holding the torch in the far corners of the world. You could spend 700 billion dollars every year on guns and trillions on forevermore wars, you could spend hundreds of billions on diplomacy, or you could, at no direct cost to you, let crypto do the work of empowering individuals everywhere. The Blockchain is about empowering individuals everywhere, and this is much more fundamental than voting rights. The suggestion is that the individual right here in the US is not sufficiently empowered. The entrenched status quo will come by the way of regulations to stop the unstoppable work of empowerment. And that worries me.

It is said when they first started making movies, they would simply capture plays with movie cameras. It was some time before they realized the movie can be its own product. Blockchain native products and services can not be captured with regulations that were designed for the previous era unless the idea is to suffocate the innovation.

I think the best way to regulate will be to bring the cat to the table. The top 100 crypto companies around the world by market cap should form a consortium, perhaps to be called Blockchain100, that will each send a Chief Policy Officer to it, and together they will suggest laws and regualtions to national parliaments around the world, of course, to be debated by elected officials and the general public, but spearheaded by those in the know. Because ultimately it is about the consumers. The most successful crypto products, by definition, will be those that are effortlessly understood.

How do you solve identity? Most people on the planet lack identity that they can take to the bank. How do you solve credit history? The dollar a day people are the best at paying loans, but nobody gives them loans. How do you solve that? Sidewalk businesses around the world have no bookkeepers, and because they don't, they can't go to banks and get loans. How do you make it possible for their excellent businesses to easily get loans? The SEC is not even asking those questions. Crypto has the solutions. And so the SEC should know when to stay out of the way.

The Blockchain is a concrete promise that every single transaction can be completely traced. That is not a place where criminals can go to hide. That is a place where criminals will find it impossible to hide. But we don't want a surveillance regime. And so regulation will have to be able to do it just right. That is a challenge. Engineers are not lawmakers. We pay lawmakers fat money. They might as well rise up to the challenge. They should know when to lead, follow, or get out of the way. Or we should hire a new set.

The Blockchain will take democracy to every country. The SEC, the IRS, the CFTC, FinCEN, the OCC, and that entire alphabet soup does not even have it in their vocabulary to attempt something like that. The thing is, the Blockchain is unstoppable. Regulatory agencies don't want to be like the emperor who went to the banks of a flooding river and asked it to stop. He thought emperors are supposed to command, and the commands will be obeyed.

@GrantDarcy I dare you to find a better combo on political instincts and feel for tech in any one person for the Senior Policy, US role I applied for yesterday. :) ... Something more fundamental than voting rights is about to happen.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 5, 2022

The Purpose Of #Crypto Regulation https://t.co/BVWqcWXLhS @Coinbase @BitcoinMagazine @aantonop @APompliano @karacalvert @brian_armstrong @GrantDarcy @fredwilson @albertwenger @thegothamgal @bfeld @msuster @cdixon @vkhosla @nihalmehta #blockchain #cryptocurrency

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 6, 2022

The Purpose Of #Crypto Regulation https://t.co/BVWqcWXLhS @alexisohanian @MariaShen @divine_economy @chaserchapman @Flynnjamm @JuliaLipton @fodmc @mccannatron @eshita

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 6, 2022

The Purpose Of #Crypto Regulation https://t.co/BVWqcWXLhS @mattshap1 @ljin18 @awrigh01 @AnnikaSays @puntium @gaby_goldberg @jpoGMI @aweissman @jacksondahl @richardchen39 @fkpxls @Cooopahtroopa @HanelBaveja

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 6, 2022

Applied yesterday for Senior Manager, US Policy. https://t.co/Mz97JlOWHe

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 5, 2022

Canada, Ukraine and Russia have sparked a turning point for crypto.

You are only one incorrect opinion and one war away from being shut out from the world.

The #bitcoin age is officially upon us.

— Layah Heilpern (@LayahHeilpern) March 6, 2022

If another VC who passes on my round asks "do you know of @ArlanWasHere " I will flip a freakin table lmao Do I know of Arlan Hamilton?? What Black startup founder doesn't?! Do you not realize that you all ask us this? Do you realize that Arlan can't write us all checks? 😂

— BEE LAW (@bossassbee_) March 6, 2022

Coinbase

2 Growth Stocks Down 47% to 70% That Wall Street Says Could Soar This Year. Coinbase is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. .........  Coinbase Global ( COIN -6.90% ) and Pinterest ( PINS -3.01% ) have dropped 47% and 70%, respectively. ........ Oppenheimer analyst Owen Lau has a price target of $377 on Coinbase, implying 98% upside in the near term ....... Coinbase is the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange. Its platform helps retail traders, financial institutions, and ecosystem partners engage with the cryptoeconomy in a variety of ways. Of particular note, Coinbase enables investors to buy, sell, spend, store, and stake digital assets, and it generates the majority of its revenue from transaction fees, meaning it benefits from volatility in the crypto market. ..........  The platform has never lost customer funds due to a security breach, and the company grew its user base 107% to 89 million last year. To that end, as of Dec. 31, Coinbase held a market-leading 11.5% of all crypto assets on its platform, creating a deep pool of liquidity with which it can fund growth projects, such as integrating with new blockchains or adding support for new digital assets. ..........  Last year, monthly transacting users surged 307% to 11.4 million, and trading volume skyrocketed 766% to $1.7 trillion. That growth was driven by strength across both retail traders and institutional investors, and it translated into an impressive financial performance. Revenue rose 514% to $7.8 billion, and earnings according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) soared 936% to $14.50 per diluted share. ........... Coinbase's future is tied to the fate of the cryptoeconomy. Since peaking at $3.1 trillion in November, the crypto market has fallen 41% from its high. Similarly, Coinbase stock also peaked in November, and it has since fallen 47% from its high. So if you're bullish on the future of cryptocurrency, Coinbase is a great way to tap into that trend. And if the cryptoeconomy gets its second wind in 2022, this stock could certainly jump 97% (or more) over the next 12 months. 

💼Looking for pro-tips on getting hired at Coinbase?

VP of Talent Grant D’Arcy shares his secrets in the latest blog from our #LiveCrypto series👇https://t.co/ojizNGSH73

— Coinbase (@coinbase) March 4, 2022

How to get hired at Coinbase . There’s no doubt Coinbase is one of the most exciting places to work right now. ........ Crypto is at a defining moment — public adoption is at an all-time high and growing, and the explosion of Web3 applications is uncovering new possibilities every day. As the first publicly-traded crypto company and the world’s most trusted exchange platform, Coinbase is at the epicenter of the industry. ........ In just the last 12 months at Coinbase, we’ve tripled our headcount, expanded into new markets, and brought new crypto innovations to our customers — and we’re just getting started. We recently announced our plans to continue to scale globally while we add 2,000 technical roles, which are just a fraction of the 6,000 total hires we aim to make across the business this year. ........... a rocketship company, we offer competitive, transparent compensation ...... a remote-first environment where >95% of our roles are not tied to any particular office or location. ........ Interested in joining us as we work to increase economic freedom in the world?a ...... we eliminated negotiations on salary and equity. .......... Employees in the same position, in the same location, receive the same annual salary and equity offer. No exceptions. ........ For a successful candidate, the time from this initial call to offer can take up to 6 weeks. ......... “Preparation for the recruiter screening can be fairly light compared to later-stage interviews, but it is beneficial to come into this call having done at least some research on our company and your potential role. This is a great time for you to ask questions about us; our culture, mission, strategy, etc. Don’t take it for granted.” .......... “Don’t use interview time to cover what is already apparent from your resume. At Coinbase, we favor clear communication, so be direct and succinct. You should be prepared to answer at least one question about why you’re interested in crypto and Coinbase.” ........ final stage .... 4 to 5 short interviews, sometimes ending with a work trial presented to your panel of interviewers. ......... ask your recruiter lots of questions about how to best prepare. ........ Look up each of your interviewers on LinkedIn and think of questions that might relate to their work and experience at Coinbase. Also, read the job description carefully and come to the interview with clear examples of how your past job experiences will make you successful in this specific role at Coinbase.” .......... thorough conversations with your recruiter to walk through our compensation, benefits and pay for performance philosophy in great detail. ........ We go to extraordinary lengths to get top talent in every seat at Coinbase. So, for those who make it through our rigorous, but proven, interview process, we’re feeling confident and excited to welcome you to the team. ...... We look for people who are motivated by our mission to increase economic freedom in the world, curious about crypto, and love building. ........ more Coinbase hires come from applications through coinbase.com/careers than from employee referrals ....... If you didn’t receive a call or offer for one role at Coinbase, keep looking for and applying to other roles that interest you and fit your background. .... https://www.coinbase.com/careers

@GrantDarcy I dare you to find a better combo on political instincts and feel for tech in any one person for the Senior Policy, US role I applied for yesterday. :) ... Something more fundamental than voting rights is about to happen.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 5, 2022

Applied yesterday for Senior Manager, US Policy. https://t.co/Mz97JlOWHe

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 5, 2022

Coinbase provides institutions with trusted access and storage for DeFi tokens .

Crunchbase: Coinbase . Total funding: $547M .... Founders Brian Armstrong, Fred Ehrsam ...... Coinbase is an online platform that allows merchants, consumers, and traders to transact with digital currency. It allows its users to create their own bitcoin wallets and start buying or selling bitcoins by connecting with their bank accounts. Also, it provides a series of merchant payment processing systems and tools that support manyhighly-trafficked websites on the internet. Coinbase was launched in 2012 with a mission to create an open financial system for the world. It is operated from San Francisco, California. ..... Coinbase has raised a total of $547.3M in funding over 16 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Oct 1, 2020 from a Venture - Series Unknown round. Coinbase is registered under the ticker NASDAQ:COIN . Their stock opened with $381.00 in its Apr 14, 2021 IPO. Coinbase is funded by 65 investors. Pegasus Tech Ventures and Paradigm are the most recent investors.

Coinbase, Binance resist calls to kick Russians off crypto platforms Two of the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase Global Inc and Binance, rejected calls on Friday for a blanket ban on all Russian users to stop their platforms from being used as a way round Western sanctions. ......... We believe everyone deserves access to basic financial services unless the law says otherwise," Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong said in a series of tweets on Friday. The exchange, however, would enforce such a blanket ban if the U.S. government decides to impose one, Armstrong added. ....... The price of bitcoin has jumped following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as people in those countries look to store and move money in anonymous and decentralized crypto. ........ Some global corporate giants have taken more aggressive measure to cut off ties with Moscow. Exxon Mobil said it would exit oil and gas operations in Russia, while Boeing Co has suspended parts, maintenance and technical support for Russian airlines.

Crypto Is a ‘Lifeline’ for Russian Citizens, Coinbase CEO Says
Y Combinator: Coinbase Founded in June of 2012, Coinbase is a digital currency wallet and platform where merchants and consumers can transact with new digital currencies like bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin. Our vision is to bring more innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity to the world by building an open financial system. Our first step on that journey is making digital currency accessible and approachable for everyone. Two principles guide our efforts. First, be the most trusted company in our domain. Second, create user-focused products that are easier and more intuitive to use.

Coinbase Brought Crypto to Main Street. Now Brian Armstrong Wants to Be Your Banker Inc.'s

Company of the Year

has proved that cryptocurrencies can work like national currencies, and that the digital economy doesn't need the U.S. dollar at all. ........ Brian Armstrong once feared he'd been born too late. As a teenager growing up in the late 1990s, he could play video games and chat and surf on the burgeoning internet. But he was too young to take part in the dot-com startup boom happening all around him, transforming the economy along with how he spent his days and nights. "I didn't know if something so important would come along in my lifetime again," he says today. Something did. And Coinbase is the company he co-founded to do something about it. .......... For most of Coinbase's nearly 10-year history, Bitcoin and its cybercoin kin were not so much investable assets as they were the focus of a philosophical and economic argument. ........ Old, fiat money asked: How can any store of value be based on an algorithm that solves a cryptologic problem tied to something called a blockchain ledger created by a pseudonymous code ninja named Satoshi Nakamoto? Could a hash function really replace cash? .......... Crypto's tech bro-libertarian-anarchist evangelists viewed things much differently. (So, too, did criminals and terrorists.) ........ crypto, they proclaimed, was the perfect transaction medium, especially for digital nomads job surfing the global economy. ........ as the Bitcoin they bought for $226 in April 2015 rocketed to $13,062 in December 2017 ......... and nonfungible tokens (NFTs)--unique digital assets tied to music, sports, the arts, and the stupid--generated around $4 billion in sales in August 2021 alone. The crypto market cap is now some $2.7 trillion. ........

And decentralized finance--DeFi--is on the verge of reshaping the global economy.

......... Large central banks may soon issue their own digital currencies, and everything from contracts to car titles to medical records could migrate to blockchain ledgers--digital repositories of data and value. Businesses of all sizes are integrating crypto into their payment systems, perhaps the greatest change to money since the development of credit cards in the 1950s. ........... cash is dead ....... No U.S. crypto company has been a bigger winner in that debate than Coinbase--Inc.'s 2021 Company of the Year. It has served as both the industry's lighthouse and its powerhouse throughout the sector's stormy initial decade. "You never know exactly, in crypto, what's going to happen," Armstrong told Inc. during an interview from Los Angeles, where he lives (his company is based in San Francisco). ........ Through the first three quarters of 2021, Coinbase's revenue rose nearly eightfold, to $5.34 billion from $692 million the previous year, and generated a profit of $2.78 billion. That's a breathtaking net profit margin of 52 percent. ....... Coinbase is already a colossus of the cryptoverse: Seventy-three million users and more than $255 billion in customer assets are parked on that platform. To keep up with the growth, the company hired some 1,200 new employees this year, more than doubling its staff. ..... Go ahead, regulate me: Unlike most crypto firms, which take a libertarian or even anti-government view, Armstrong has welcomed regulation and regulators. Reason? Better to have a seat at the table when the rules are made than have them made for you. ........ (Its market cap briefly topped $100 billion in mid-November.) ......... Why go public, then? Because Armstrong says he wants to embrace regulators and the public markets to make Coinbase as transparent--even mundane--as possible. ........ a more inclusive global financial system. ...... DeFi purports to offer more economic freedom, less friction, and lower costs than traditional financial operators, and it avoids third parties such as big banks that get between you and your money. ......... Likewise, Armstrong sees Coinbase as one of the architects for Web 3.0, a blockchain-based version of the internet that isn't ruled by dominant tech companies like Facebook/Meta, one where developers are free to create and market apps without having to pay a toll to Apple. "One thing that's really exciting to me about the crypto economy and the crypto culture is that it has this sense of optimism about it," he says. "We can build a better future. There's opportunity all around us. Anybody can participate in it." ....... Most of Coinbase's income consists of fees earned from executing trades. ....... the company is diversifying. The initiatives include a hosting service for developers called Coinbase Cloud (think of it as AWS for crypto), a trading platform for institutions called Prime, and Coinbase NFT. There's also Coinbase Direct Debit and Coinbase Reimburse, which allows you to deposit your salary and expense payments. There's a Coinbase debit card, too. As Armstrong has made clear again and again, Coinbase wants to be

"the Amazon of assets."

.......... "A lot of things went well that I had hoped for this year," Armstrong says, "which is that we would be a public company, that we would have multiple revenue streams, and that we'd be seeing more uses of crypto. Not just people trading it as speculation, but actually using it for NFTs and games and DeFi and now even identity and the metaverse." ......... In addition to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Dogecoin, and other well-known coins, more than 7,000 cryptos are now trading on more than 300 exchanges globally. With the launch of two crypto futures-based exchange-traded funds in the U.S. in October, institutional asset managers gave their blessing to 401(k) investors. More than 1,000 hedge funds, VCs, and pension funds are trading on the Coinbase Pro platform, and blockchain companies--those involved in creating crypto, NFTs, websites, and the plumbing that connects all of them--raised $7 billion in venture capital in the first half of the year alone ......... New York City's mayor-elect Eric Adams declared that he wants his first three paychecks paid in Bitcoin, which would make the new mayor of Wall Street the mayor of Crypto Street, too. ......... The Mississippi and South Sea bubbles of the 1700s, schemes to convert royal debt to equity, collapsed in heaps that left Sir Isaac Newton, among others, poorer for it. Preceding them was the Tulipomania of the 1630s in Amsterdam, when a single bulb could buy you a mansion (until it couldn't). Yet out of these and other early disasters came lasting innovation: convertible debt, the joint stock company, the futures contract, and the stock exchange itself. Today's global economy can't run without them. ......... a study in intensity topped by a radar dome of a shaved skull that you imagine is constantly emitting large amounts of data .......... he was born and raised near San Jose ..... When he headed off to college, it was not to nearby Stanford but to Rice University in Houston, where he took up economics and computer science, earning a master's in the latter. ........ While a student, Armstrong founded a company called UniversityTutor.com, in 2003. Like many internet businesses, it sought to rationalize a highly fragmented category and create an efficient marketplace where sellers and buyers could find one another. But he could not overcome one issue--getting customers to part with their money. "One lesson I took away is that you have to get the value to the user before you ask for anything in return," he says. "And I always struggled to get a good business model that really worked in that tutoring company." ........ he founded Coinbase 10 years ago partly motivated by FOMO. “This is a rare moment in history--like starting an internet company in the 2000s.” ......... He struggled, in fact, for eight years before selling the company for, he says, "not a lot of money." (He also founded ResearchHub, an open-source repository for scientific papers.) He later moved on to a role as a technical product director at Airbnb, another place where fragmented excess capacity--this time in hospitality--could meet up with fragmented demand in a transparent marketplace. ............ Then, in 2010, he read a white paper--and his life changed. The title was "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," published in 2008 by the now famously mysterious, perhaps nonexistent, Nakamoto. The paper describes a process to "allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." The process is powered by blockchain, which, to vastly oversimplify, orchestrates a network of users to create and verify unhackable ledgers that can store and serve up digital assets. ............ Armstrong says he immediately sensed that the next great opportunity was at hand. "It was describing something like the internet. It was this global, decentralized network, but instead of being for moving information around, it was for moving value around," he explains. There had to be value in it, then. ........ As an economics student, Armstrong had been struck by the inefficiency and unfairness of the global financial system--big banks controlled by small groups of people in every country. He also lived for a year in Buenos Aires right after college to experience a new culture and a digital lifestyle. There, he watched hyperinflation gnaw away the wealth of the poorest people, because cash was their only asset. .......... (Now worth about $14 billion, he has already signed the Giving Pledge, and started GiveCrypto.org, which makes direct cash transfers to people living in poverty.) ........ Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank entrepreneur, has become an ardent proponent of crypto and NFTs as a way for people to invest in appreciable assets at relatively low cost. ......... His travels to Argentina had taught him how to live on a modest income and with few possessions. He earned money from the tutoring company, real estate investments, and a blog he authored called Start Breaking Free. "When you have an idea you're excited about, get going on it right away," he counseled in a 2009 post. "If you wait around too much, you'll lose your motivation." ........ Coinbase sprang to life after Armstrong presented his business plan at the Y Combinator Demo Day in 2012. His original idea, hatched while he was working at Airbnb, was a hosted Bitcoin wallet as easy to access as email.

Seed investors such as Union Square Ventures bought in.

............ But the business didn't click until, after talking with customers, he created a crypto exchange. By making crypto trades as easy as stock trades, the technical details of Bitcoin and blockchain became irrelevant, the way the technical details of electricity and Wi-Fi are now irrelevant. Stuff just works. ....... It also solved the value exchange issue that had dogged his tutoring company, because traders got everything they wanted immediately. ......... Fred Ehrsam was a professional gamer as a high schooler, which introduced him to the notion of virtual currency. He went on to study computer science at Duke before moving to Wall Street. Ehrsam fled a trading desk at Goldman Sachs after failing to convince the company's hierarchy--the same one that had bet big on the risky collateralized debt obligations that contributed to the Great Recession--of crypto's looming importance in global finance. .............. Ehrsam and Armstrong found each other on Reddit, or as Ehrsam once put it, "Two nerds who met on the internet turned into a company of 1,000-plus." In true startup mode, they set up a two-person shop in San Francisco. After four weeks of writing code, they launched their service in November 2012. In 2017, with the company firmly established and growing, Ehrsam departed to co-found Paradigm--a blockchain investment firm that recently announced a $2.5 billion venture fund--leaving Armstrong alone at the helm. ........ by the end of 2017, the company was flailing. Though the swelling trading volumes left it awash in cash, the company was plagued by system outages that prevented trades from being executed, which infuriated customers, and its slow response times to their complaints made them even madder. It had grown too hot to manage. ......... "The finance team was closing the books in Excel and didn't even have accountants," she says. "I'd gone from being a public company CFO and had done my Q1 earnings, and when I showed up at Coinbase, they didn't have a year-end audit. And didn't have a clue how to do it." ........... Besides Haas, Armstrong hired Emilie Choi, now president and COO, from Linked­In to spearhead mergers and acquisitions. "I met Brian Armstrong and I had tingles down my spine," Choi says. "I felt that I had to be a part of it even though it was a little bit intimidating." But what also sent tingles down her spine was the lack of structure in a company that was no longer tiny. "You went from people knowing that Brian in the hallway was the single decision maker to not knowing how to get a single decision made," she says. ........ Armstrong's grand strategic vision: Coinbase would thrive by providing every possible crypto service that an individual or an institution could demand. ........... In 2020, the institutional money that had been wary of crypto fully adopted it as an asset class. Pension funds added crypto to their portfolios the way they would Swiss francs or precious metals, to hedge other holdings. In other words, crypto became as good as gold. .............. 2021 was the year of crypto's cultural revolution, especially in the form of NFTs, driven by the Ethereum platform ...... NFTs mean that almost anything one can own--a song, a house, a video of LeBron James's first NBA dunk--can be monetized. ........ the company was steadily building or buying the plumbing to handle the massive flows of institutional liquidity and NFT business heading its way ....... Coinbase has executed eight acquisitions, the latest being Agara, whose A.I.-powered customer-support platform addresses a key Coinbase weakness. ........... Coinbase says it has become the biggest corporate investor in crypto through its Coinbase Ventures, which has made 37 investments in 2021 in companies such as OpenSea, an NFT platform ........ a stripped-down decision-making system called RAPID that starts with Recommend--the suggestion of an initiative by any person in the company--and ends with Decide, with one leading manager--Armstrong or Choi--making the call. In between is a tightly choreographed process going from Agree--one or two people take up the case; to Perform--what the decision would mean for the people who have to execute it; to Input--whether anyone relevant to the discussion should add their thoughts. ........... Early on during the pandemic, Coinbase became a remote-first company, which has had the side benefit of making it less dependent on the Bay Area for talent............ The company boasts of a "culture of compliance," in effect seeking permission before the fact in contrast to tech's historic approach of asking for forgiveness if challenged by authorities. ......... Armstrong is certainly familiar with tech's break-the-rules history and had been a student of startups such as PayPal and Square. That led him to the opposite approach: "I knew that if you try to start something that flies under the radar, OK, maybe they won't have time to look at you while you're small. But if the thing gets big, they're going to come after you. So that's never going to work long term." ........ Coinbase has asked to be regulated. It has met with U.S. regulators such as SEC chairman Gary Gensler with the idea of creating a single rules framework for crypto. The company has even offered a framework called the digital asset policy proposal to do just that. "We really want this space to grow and have a thousand companies to create economic growth and economic freedom here in the United States," Armstrong remarked during the company's third-quarter earnings call. And if multiple regulators get into the act, Armstrong says, Coinbase's size gives it a competitive advantage over the small fry. Meanwhile, the renegade Binance, which has largely avoided authorities, is now in the sights of regulators globally . ............ "There's never been a better time to start a crypto company," he says. "This is a rare moment in history." ....... And now you don't have to say 'dot-com startup,' because everyone uses the internet."

Coinbase, Under Pressure, Faces a Difficult Balancing Act . After having made a sensational entry into the homes of households following its big publicity effort during the Super Bowl, the company finds itself in a delicate position with little wiggle room......... "I'm asking all major crypto exchanges to block addresses of Russian users," Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's vice prime minister, posted on Twitter on Feb. 27. "It's crucial to freeze not only the addresses linked to Russian and Belarusian politicians, but also to sabotage ordinary users." ....... excluding someone from the space goes against the crypto spirit. This approach advocates inclusion and rejects any discrimination linked to social origin, gender, sexuality or nationality ....... cryptocurrency has arguably become the go-to for many ordinary Russians as the ruble has collapsed

5/ That being said, we don’t think there’s a high risk of Russian oligarchs using crypto to avoid sanctions. Because it is an open ledger, trying to sneak lots of money through crypto would be more traceable than using U.S. dollars cash, art, gold, or other assets.

— Brian Armstrong - barmstrong.eth (@brian_armstrong) March 4, 2022

Coinbase Says Crypto Markets Resilient After Russian Invasion of Ukraine
WHY COINBASE ADMITTED APPLE CALLS THE SHOTS Mainstream adoption means being listed in the App Store ........ One of Web3’s benefits, according to boosters such as Jack Dorsey, is that it’s censorship-resistant. Because it is decentralized, this argument goes, it is impossible to censor anyone. But it isn’t true that cryptocurrency is decentralized. Right now, Web3 has a choke point: Big Tech. .......... One problem with cryptocurrency is that the technology is fairly user-hostile, at least to normal users of the internet. And so centralized services have sprung up for the non-technical, such as Coinbase, OpenSea, Metamask, VeVe, and Rarible. Meanwhile, mainstream payment apps — Venmo, PayPay, and so on — have added cryptocurrency capabilities. .......... As Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on February 4th, “For any app to be listed in the Apple and Google App Stores, it needs to play by the rules of those two companies.” ......... Armstrong says. “Our approach is to be free speech supporters, but not free speech martyrs.” (Emphasis his.) So if a “critical partner” such as Apple or Google objects to something and requires its removal, Coinbase will remove it. .......... the notions that “broader societal issues” and “political causes” were minimally important. ......... One reason that Coinbase has stuck around as long as it has — while competitors have toppled — is pragmatism. ......... Coinbase’s content moderation capitulation here is understandable: Apple, Google, and even Amazon are going to run the show if you’re trying to make Web3 a mass-market technology. Collectively, this group owns the stores where your app appears, the cloud servers you use for your service, the operating systems, and the devices. Say whatever you like about the distributed future of Web3, but for the time being, centralized Big Tech is going to continue calling the shots.

Coinbase’s Philosophy on Account Removal and Content Moderation . Our high level philosophy is that, in a democratic society, the people and their elected officials should decide what behavior is allowed and not allowed by setting laws. We think it sets a dangerous precedent when tech companies, such as Coinbase, or their executives start making judgment calls on difficult societal issues, acting as judge and jury. ........ it can be very complex to determine whether an activity is legal or illegal. Laws vary greatly across different countries, states, and regions. ........... The world is littered with polarizing, uncomfortable, or obscene content that may still be legal. ........ there is great danger of falling down a slippery slope, having to render decisions on every difficult societal issue, where you are sure to upset someone no matter where you land ........ Very few companies are completely vertically integrated, with the luxury of making their own decisions in a vacuum. ...... we group our products as either infrastructure products or public-facing products ......... we believe that governments, not companies, should be deciding what is allowed in society. ........ We also believe that everyone deserves access to financial services, and a test of legality should be sufficient for these products. ........ the First Amendment is a U.S. focused concept only ........ The First Amendment has hundreds of years of case law built up, and provides a reasonable framework to moderate content such as incitement, fighting words, libel, fraud, defamation etc. ............ getting kicked out of the app stores wouldn’t help anyone ....... when working with partners, our approach is to be free speech supporters, but not free speech martyrs ......... how we can create a reasonable moderation policy that doesn’t get co-opted over time, succumb to pressure, or descend into us playing judge and jury. ....... The open nature of crypto protocols provides lower switching costs, which is an important customer protection ........ Decentralization moves you from the slippery slope to the crypto cliff, where the would-be censor must compromise an entire blockchain to censor just one person. .......... Decentralization is a spectrum, and Coinbase is moving farther down this path over time, embracing self-custody with Coinbase Wallet, stepping up user education around private keys, and by investing in Bitcoin core development and web3 protocols. The more decentralization we can support, the better protection customers will have. ............ we’ve laid out some principles we can fall back on when difficult decisions arise, and that investors, customers, and employees can have a better understanding of our process

Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, to join Coinbase Board of Directors . he is a tremendous entrepreneur, building Shopify from the ground up into a global commerce leader. He also deeply believes in the power of crypto and was an early adopter of crypto through Shopify’s integration with Coinbase Commerce. Serving millions of merchants in more than 175 countries, Shopify sits at the nexus of three important areas that crypto seeks to revolutionize: Finance and payments, web applications, and the internet itself. ........ Tobi’s experience as a founder & CEO, scaling his business from a small, niche online marketplace into what has become a critical backbone of global ecommerce will help guide Coinbase as we seek to bring crypto to more people and businesses around the world. ........ Shopify democratized online commerce.

Reflecting on Coinbase Ventures’ record year in 2021 . the entire market followed suit nearing a record $3T market cap in November. Meanwhile, $30B in venture funding poured into the space: more than all prior years of crypto’s history combined. ......... 2021 was also a record year for Coinbase Ventures, with just under 150 deals, averaging a new deal every 2.5 days. On a cumulative basis, more than 90% of the capital Coinbase Ventures has deployed since inception was deployed in 2021, reflecting an accelerated pace of activity in our fourth year of operation. ........ Coinbase Ventures is among the most active corporate venture funds in operation, with the mandate of increasing economic freedom around the world by supporting the leading entrepreneurs and projects in the ecosystem. Ultimately, we see crypto and Web3 as a rising tide that lifts all boats, Coinbase included, and Coinbase Ventures is dedicated to making investments that are crucial to the space’s overall growth. ........ the nascent “Web3” space, which we generally think of as a trustless, permissionless, and decentralized internet that leverages blockchain technology ......... 2021 saw Web3 begin to expand to other Layer 1s like Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Terra, Flow, among dozens of others. .......... the demand to safely and easily move funds across blockchains ....... this cross-chain movement, including Biconomy, Movr, LayerZero, Chainflip, and more ........ technologies that introduce standards to Web3 for data storage (Arweave), messaging (XMTP), and identity (Spruce).......... enabling DAO creation/incorporation (Syndicate, Utopia), discovery/participation (Snapshot/Consensys’ Metamask), payroll/operations (Diagonal), and coordination (Orca). .......... DeFi ..... within EVM compatible chains (Avalanche, Polygon, BSC etc.) and Layer 2 environments (Arbitrum, Optimism). Meanwhile, non-EVM chains (Solana, Terra, Cosmos, Polkadot etc.) ...... Coinbase Ventures supported DeFi insurance financial protocols including Neptune Mutual, Risk Harbor, Cozy Finance, and Nayms. ........ In 2022, the smart contract wars will rage on ....... Ventures has now invested heavily in the NFT “utility” phase — one in which NFT assets expand to new types of mediums such as audio (Royal, Mint Songs, Sturdy), avatars (Genies, OFF), AR (Anima, Jambo), and gaming/GameFi (Ancient8, GuildFi). ......... a possible future where we have a series of decentralized, interconnected virtual worlds with fully functioning economies. ......... expect metaverse applications to expand from both decentralized initiatives like Decentraland and the Sandbox and incumbent Web2 companies like Microsoft/Activision and Meta. ....... we followed the “developer journey” from staging (Tenderly), collaboration (Radicle), query (Covalent), audit (Certik, OpenZeppelin, Certora) and real-time simulation/monitoring (Chaos Labs, Gauntlet). We also invested in developer toolkits like API providers (Alchemy, Consensys’ Infura). ............. CeFi ....... centralized finance (CeFi) ....... crypto is inherently global and there is a need for localized platforms that serve as onramps across distinct regulatory, banking, and infrastructure regimes ......... in 2021, we were active investors in crypto financial service providers everywhere from LatAm, Pan-Africa, MENA, South Asia, Europe, and North America. ........

one thing is certain: this is not the crypto ecosystem of 2018.

......... Between the best performing asset class of the last decade being much more accessible to investors around the world, the maturation of the Web3 stack, and an explosion of exciting new use cases across DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, gaming, and the metaverse, this industry appears to be hitting escape velocity

DAOs: Social networks that can rewire the world Exploring the new world of decentralized autonomous organizations ......... decentralized autonomous organizations can reinvent how humans organize and eventually eclipse the size and scope of the world’s largest corporations and even nation-states. ....... DAOs are software enabled organizations. They allow people to pool resources toward a common goal and share in value creation when those goals are achieved. ........ Just as the LLC (limited liability corporation) was the preferred organizing primitive of the industrial revolution, DAOs can be the same for Web3 ........ DAOs run on top of open blockchain networks like Ethereum, organized by tokens with their rules encoded in smart contracts. ........ DAOs aren’t tied to a physical location, which allows them to mobilize quickly and attract talent from all over the world — a notion that was on full display when the ConstitutionDAO recently raised over $40M from 17,000 contributors in less than a week in a failed bid to buy one of the original copies of the US constitution. ......... But DAOs can do so much more than mobilize internet friends to collectively bid on historic documents — they can transform how we organize any manner of economic activity. ......... There are already over 180 DAOs (tracked by deepdao.io) with $10B+ in assets under management and nearly 2 million members. ........ Rather than put every key decision in the hands of a small team of developers, protocol DAOs emerged as a way to give a protocol’s users a collective say in its future direction. Typically, users are issued governance tokens, often directly based on past usage and contributions, that convey voting rights. ........ Similar to other forms of crypto crowdfunding, these DAOs offer a fast and simple means of capital formation when compared to costly and complex legal setups associated with a typical venture capital fund. These funds are also more transparent than traditional venture funds, since members can audit all transactions on chain. ........ Service DAOs look like online talent agencies that bring strangers together from all over the world to build products and services. ......... Service DAOs can reinvent how people work, allowing a global talent pool to work on their own time and receive ownership stakes in the networks they care about. While early service DAOs are crypto focused, one can envision a future where Uber is replaced by UberDAO that pairs drivers with riders, while paying drivers an ownership stake in the network ........... Media DAOs aim to reinvent how both content producers and consumers engage with media. ..... At a time when many agree that the current ad-based media model is broken, media DAOs present a compelling alternative for realigning the interests between readers and producers. ......... DAOs can become the organizational primitive of Web3, reinventing how we govern, invest, work, create, and donate. Expect to see the categories, number, and quality of DAOs evolve dramatically in the future. ......... DAOs are essentially tasked with reverse engineering hundreds of years of lessons learned from democracy and corporate governance! ......... Given that DAOs don’t exist in any one place and don’t operate like corporations, they don’t fit cleanly into existing regulatory frameworks. ........ In the US, DAOs are currently faced with a faustian bargain of forming an LLC in a specific jurisdiction or being treated as a general partnership. The former undermines a DAOs ability to be governed by rules encoded in smart contracts in favor of standard LLC articles of incorporation (and being restricted by the constraints of existing LLC law). The latter potentially exposes members to liabilities through the partnership, which would otherwise be protected by the “limited liability company (LLC)”. ........... Wyoming has pushed forward legislation that will allow DAOs to operate on the same legal footing as traditional LLCs while allowing them to be governed by their own smart contracts but has been met with SEC resistance. Meanwhile, a16z, and OpenLaw have proposed clear legal frameworks for governing DAOs ......... the legal complexity gets amplified when DAOs attempt to crossover to the physical realm (e.g UberDAO). ........ There’s a reason corporations and governments don’t have every employee or citizen weigh in on every decision — it’s a highly inefficient way of getting things done and not everyone is qualified to do so. ............ In the near term, it’s likely that DAO governance will remain messy and chaotic as they experiment with different models before ultimately figuring out what works (much like the long experimental path from monarchies to democracy). ....... DAO tools for governance, payroll, reporting, treasury management, communication, and every other resource at the disposal of modern day corporations are still nascent. .......... the largest crypto networks have a history of fragmentation caused by division from within the community ...... If Web3 is to become an internet collectively owned by its users, DAOs will be the organizational primitive in which that ownership is metered out. ...... As crypto UX improves, DAOs may very well usurp the LLC as the preferred mode of organization in an increasingly digitized world.

2021 in Review . the burgeoning crypto economy - from NFTs to DeFi to the Metaverse.

10 Predictions for Web3 and the Cryptoeconomy for 2022 By Surojit Chatterjee, Chief Product Officer ....... 2021 proved to be a breakout year for crypto with BTC price gaining almost 70% yoy, Defi hitting $150B in value locked, and NFTs emerging as a new category. ......... we’ll live in a multi-chain world in the future. ........

Institutions are increasingly interested in participating in Defi.

.......... cost reduction in providing financial services using Defi opens up interesting opportunities for institutions ......... Growth of regulated Defi and on-chain KYC attestation will help institutions gain confidence in Defi. ......... total value lost by Defi exploits in 2021 totaled over $10B. ...... NFTs will become the next evolution of users’ digital identity and passport to the metaverse. Users will come together in small and diverse communities based on types of NFTs they own. User created metaverses will be the future of social networks and will start threatening the advertising driven centralized versions of social networks of today. .......... NFTs and the metaverse will become the new Instagram for brands. And just like on Instagram, many brands may start as NFT native. We’ll also see many more celebrities jumping in the bandwagon and using NFTs to enhance their personal brand. ......... More people will join DAOs, prompting a change in definition of employment — never receiving a formal offer letter, accepting tokens instead of or along with fixed salaries, and working in multiple DAO projects at the same time.

What to Watch in Crypto in 2022 The projects, trends, and assets worth paying attention to this year. ........ Projects like Ceramic allow users to take their data with them across the internet. ........ It may be the year of the ear. If 2021 saw the proliferation of profile picture NFTs, 2022 could elevate music NFTs. ....... DAOs can do more than simply bid for the US Constitution; they may be how the next life-saving drug is developed. VitaDAO, committed to researching longevity, may prove to be a pioneer in the budding "DeSci" movement. ......... Existing infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with increasing crypto adoption. Better rails are needed to unlock the next stage of growth. ........ wallets serve as a place to track digital goods and experiences – becoming an extension of identity. ........ Crypto is starting to touch the real world in interesting ways. .... it can be leveraged to disrupt incumbents or outright bend or break the rules of legacy industries. The best example to date has been Helium, which is disrupting wireless networks by using crypto-economic incentives to facilitate the buildout of real-world infrastructure. ....... Octane Render, is widely considered the best-in-class GPU rendering solution. It is used by major movie studios, including Disney, and tens of thousands of digital artists, including Beeple. ............. DeFi yields have gone down across the board as new capital has entered the space to offset the demand from borrowers. ....... Crypto will be the testbed for running ambitious economic and social experiments that can create a fairer internet than what existed in the web2 world. ............ The idea of universal basic capital (UBC), or universal basic wealth, presents a solution to structural inequality by giving people ownership of assets that appreciate. Examples include Alaska's social wealth fund, which pays out dividends from the state's oil revenue, and Singapore's Central Provident Fund. .......... Crypto gives us a toolset to build new economies and societies. ........... In 2021, we saw web3 emerge thanks to three overlapping core trends: DeFi, NFTs, and the glimmers of social tokens—all stitched together using the cartilage of DAOs. ........ if the web3 ecosystem can attract more capital, the wealth it generates will increasingly be directed towards harder problems, like decentralized science and climate change. ........... Data is everything. It's a precious asset in and of itself, as evidenced by the rise of companies like Facebook and Google. Both have become among the most profitable businesses globally due to the data they garner from their billions of users. .............. The de-platforming of data will enable user-controlled data storage: a paradigm shift for users and developers alike. .......... Over the long term, successful competitor chains will attract new types of applications that are both priced out of Ethereum and use the unique architectural advantages of different chains. We are starting to see examples of this with games and NFT marketplaces developing natively outside of Ethereum mainnet, but this space is just getting started. .................. Protocol-owned liquidity, vote-locking, bonds, Curve wars – the DeFi ecosystem has seen rapid innovation in economic design around governance tokens. The set of best practices for these protocols is quickly evolving. ............ The wallets of 2022 won't be crypto wallets. They'll be native web3 wallets — built for identity, navigation, personalization, and media. ............ we're seeing more demand for wallets as a place to hold NFTs (see Rainbow or Coinbase Wallet) and multimedia experiences (see Glass, Sound, and Altered State Machine). Put simply, wallets are becoming a place where people want to spend time. ............... Supply of NFT projects, new yield farming opportunities, and social web3 platforms are all at an all-time high and only growing. ......... users (and developers) will need integrated wallets more supportive of leveraging on-chain provenance and transporting your digital identity across apps and chains ....... pseudonymity, unlike anonymity, is a spectrum and a vast design space. ........ people will use multiple identities just as some identities will be made up of multiple people. We've seen glimpses of pseudonymity-at-scale on platforms like Reddit, Discord, Tumblr, and even some parts of Twitter and Instagram. ........... As we spend more and more of our lives in digital spaces, I expect flexible identity to be a vital ingredient to shaping an ideal future, just as digital money and property rights will be. ............ music NFTs have not exploded yet, unlike other categories like fine art, collectibles, and gaming .......... In 2022, we’ll observe a renewed understanding of the relationships between our identity, contributions, and relationships on the Internet. The most interesting assets are the ones that can create an environment that reinforces our understanding of our new selves. ........... the democratizing power of tools enables mass consumers to participate in economic activities once gated by a few institutions or corporations. ............. The most exciting trend in 2022 is seeing how this tale of many cities unfold — giving birth to a class of new workers, citizens, leaders, and infrastructure. ........ DeSci, or decentralized science, aims to make scientific innovation more open, visible, and frictionless, all the way from publishing to funding. ......... I have more questions than answers about this emerging category, which makes me even more excited for what is ahead. ........... The internet erased geographic boundaries and allowed communities to form around any interest, no matter how niche. Crypto unlocked the ability for anyone to create coordination systems at scale. ........... DAOs leverage both the internet and crypto to enable tribes of strangers to wield pools of resources for a common purpose. .......... The largest DAOs control a treasury of billions in value, give out grants, and employ large teams. By contrast, the smallest DAOs can be a group of friends who have pooled resources to purchase an NFT. ........ In the future, we may have as many DAOs as there are subreddits – except rather than just a forum, these organizations will be able to direct resources to ideals they care about. .................. If you were a scholar in the years before the printing press, there is a decent chance that you were also a voyager—spending the bulk of your days neither reading nor lecturing but traveling library-to-library to study and copy books. You moved, but the books did not. ........... in today's internet, we are mostly pre-printing-press. We can't transfer the people we follow, the kind of media we like, the reputation and audience we've built—our data—as platforms. Like the scholars, we spend our time moving between platforms; the media on those platforms does not. .............. What would happen if our data were transportable? ............ People could track the impact of creative work as it's shared, used, and monetized in the farthest reaches of the internet. People would share far more data with platforms to improve performance and recommendations since it could improve their experience across the entire web. People would be incentivized to contribute to public data sets that produced better analytics and social graphs for platforms to innovate on top of. AI could leverage this information to automate many of our daily online tasks. Platforms would compete to have users port their data and audiences from one venue to another. ............... imagine writing a song and not only getting paid when others made money playing it at events but enabling others to remix it permissionlessly with proceeds flowing back to you, all while collecting data on its usage that you could use to find professional opportunities while connecting to others with similar taste. ............. In web3, our ability to manage our data will enable us to manage our entire life online. NFTs are only the frontend of how we'll be seen, in the metaverse, as data. ............ Providing the tools to own and manage our data gives us incentives to collect and create new data types that may even still be outside our imagination. That's the huge potential. Not simply that we can own our data online as individuals, but that we can be rewarded for sharing it, collectivizing it, and recomposing it in new communal social structures of which we haven't fully conceived. ............ Token-based governance is a well-documented organizational design failure. ......... other mechanisms that distribute governance power based on merit, required context for decision-making, and expertise. ......... Over time, I expect that on-chain reputation to supersede social standing on sites like Twitter, better showcasing the value of a particular individual and the work that they've completed. ............ Communities are forming overnight to invest in NFTs, DeFi projects, and even startups. ......... Spinning up a traditional investment fund is expensive, laborious, and legally complicated. Syndicate enables projects, friends, and trustless communities to coordinate capital to invest nearly instantly. We'll continue to see new ways of coordinating labor and capital in 2022 .......... While crypto is currently male-dominated, many women-led projects are capturing our attention and imagination. ..........

The promise of blockchain technology was one of decentralization and the dismantling of traditional power structures, yet we still see significant gender disparity in the web3 world.

............. It is increasingly clear we will be living in a multichain future, and if that is the case, the bridges which link chains are going to be of enormous importance. One of these bridges is Allbridge which connects the Solana, Ethereum, Terra, Avalanche, Celo, Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, and Polygon ecosystems. .......... We've gone through several years of innovation around NFTs, DeFi, dApps, and increasingly became aware that current infrastructure is limiting our ability to decentralize, scale, and provide some of the critical features of web3. ............ The NFT market is not slowing down. Coinbase is expected to launch its NFT marketplace soon, and the expectation is that it will only increase adoption.

Lighting Up The Map: How Coinbase Plans To Scale Globally . Coinbase will adopt a go broad and go deep approach to scale globally in order to further its mission of bringing more economic freedom to each and every individual and business around the world. Leadership roles are now open across the globe to build our international presence. ......... By its very nature, crypto is global and decentralized ........ Crypto can have a seismic impact in driving toward a more equitable global economy. ........ in new high growth markets, the barriers to entry into the traditional financial system may be beyond the reach of many citizens ........... traditional financial systems may require official identification or a credit history to access financial services and the security it provides. In larger, more diversified economies, we take these things for granted, but in many parts of the world, they’re unavailable to a majority of the population. ............. 1.7 billion adults are unbanked, and while the number of underbanked is harder to identify, it’s an issue that impacts almost every country. Yet two-thirds of those identified as unbanked own a mobile phone that could help them access financial services. These numbers are even worse for women, who are roughly 10 percent less likely than men to have access to financial services. ............. Going global is complicated and this is compounded by rapidly evolving regulatory international frameworks for crypto. .......... we will work with governments and regulators in different markets, and will always aim to be the most trusted and compliant crypto company in any market ........ “we see [regulation] as a business enabler.” .......... Coinbase Ventures will double down on regional investments, adding to our portfolio of platforms such as CoinSwitch Kuber and CoinDCX in India, Bitso in Latin America, and Rain in the Middle East.

Sounds about accurate, but how does one measure "Relative Standing?" How do you quantify that? https://t.co/9AIOB3VTIO

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 6, 2022

The Myth of The Infrastructure Phase . But when we talk to founders who are building infrastructure, we keep hearing that the biggest challenge for them is to get developers to build apps on top. ........... the history of new technologies shows that apps beget infrastructure, not the other way around ........ For example, light bulbs (the app) were invented before there was an electric grid (the infrastructure). You don’t need the electric grid to have light bulbs. But to have the broad consumer adoption of light bulbs, you do need the electric grid, so the breakout app that is the light bulb came first in 1879, and then was followed by the electric grid starting 1882. ............ Another example: Planes (the app) were invented before there were airports (the infrastructure). ......... the breakout app that is an airplane came first in 1903, and inspired a phase where people built airlines in 1919, airports in 1928 and air traffic control in 1930 only after there were planes. ........ messaging (1970) and email (1972), which then inspire infrastructure that makes it easier to have broad consumer adoption of messaging and email: Ethernet (1973), TCP/IP (1973), and Internet Service Providers (1974). Then there is the next wave of apps, which are web portals (Prodigy in 1990, AOL in 1991), and web portals inspire us to build infrastructure (search engines and web browsers in the early 1990’s). Then there is the next wave of apps, which are early sites like Amazon.com in 1994, which leads to a phase where we build infrastructure like programming languages (PHP in 1994, Javascript and Java in 1995) that make it easier to build websites. Then there is the next wave of more complicated apps like Napster (1999), Pandora (2000), Gmail (2004) and Facebook (2004) which leads to infrastructure that makes it easier to build more complex apps (NGINX and Ruby on Rails in 2004, AWS in 2006). ............ you can open the door to the next room, but you can’t really skip steps and open the back door from the front porch. It is hard to successfully build infrastructure that is too far ahead of the apps market. .......... YouTube could be built in 2005 but not in 1995 because YouTube only makes sense after the deployment of infrastructure like broadband in the early 2000’s ........ the silly dot coms of the late 1990’s. And what he points out is that all the ‘silly’ ideas of the dot com era are now the billion dollar unicorns. What is now possible several app => infrastructure cycles into the internet made no sense just one or two apps => infrastructure cycles in. .......... Take light bulbs for example. Yes, they were invented before the grid, but looking at it from an investor perspective, no one sold a lot of lightbulbs until the grid was in place. .......... crytpo networks, in fact, really blur the line between apps an infrastructure, due their open and interopable nature

@usv https://t.co/XrTSe9zA8U So what was not a chicken-egg situation has become one?

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 6, 2022

Technological Trends, Financial Capital, and the Dynamics of Disruption . argues Chris Dixon (general partner on a16z crypto), software “has so much more plasticity, ability to adapt, ability to evolve” that unlike hardware, “the core itself will also dramatically change… not just the apps around it”. ........ How do they they both define “decentralized”, what do they think of dApps, and where do NFTs and “crypto goods” come in?? One thing’s for sure: It’s the most interesting time they’ve both ever seen in over 30 years of internet work, life, and play. .............. maybe it’s like TV where there’s like four TV channels, and there’s four big incumbents. ....... We’re looking at everything, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple — you know, they have these massive entrenched platforms, and it’s becoming really, really hard to compete with them. ......... fundamentally the car has stayed mostly the same ....... I just wonder if software has — my view, software has so many more degrees of freedom. It has so much more, kind of, plasticity, ability to adapt, ability to evolve, that maybe unlike the car and the TV, that the core itself will also dramatically change, and not just the apps around. ........... any kind of human process can be encoded in software. ....... the greatest thing about Tesla is the over-the-air software upgrade ......... if you look at the big tech companies, I don’t think that they were disrupted very much by the shift from web to mobile. And, I don’t think they’re gonna be disrupted very much by the adoption of AI power software. ............. Fred: It may just, it may further entrench their monopolies because of the data — the fact that you’re differentiating the AI through data, and they’re most likely to have the most data. ............. if you look at the top 100 mobile apps, and you look at what the top 100 websites were before the iPhone came out, it’s not a very different list, right? .......... I don’t understand why the map on your phone, whether it’s an iPhone or an Android phone, isn’t the ride-sharing application. ........... I think

crypto is the one innovation out there that feels highly disruptive, because it’s a real change in business model.

It’s not just a technological change. It’s a fundamental change in business model. You’re not monetizing with ads, you’re not monetizing with subscriptions, you’re monetizing with the underlying token. ............ what Google did is that they made advertising the business model for applications. Like, my mail and, you know, my browsing and my searching is all supported by advertising. Like, Microsoft would have made me pay for that. ........... I had this game, this board game, I still have it somewhere, it was called “Dot Bomb.” And it was, like, making fun of all the terrible ideas. I blogged about this once, and it was, like, this joke game about all the stupid ideas in the ’90s. And it’s literally, like, every unicorn, like, hot company today. ........... Adi Seidman had YouTube in like ’99. It’s just like it didn’t make any sense in ’99. .......... the internet wasn’t a real thing, I think, until you had broadband. ....... I mean, Microsoft fundamentally is an enterprise company today, right? .......... 90% of the companies, maybe 95% of the companies we back are built on AWS. ........... actually the way that the jobs are actually taken is a much subtler thing, which is these new software applications, just, you know, whatever, your new, you know, payroll system, your new payroll SaaS app, just suddenly, you don’t need as many people in your payroll department. ................ I think it also will create many jobs, they’ll just be — it’s just always harder to envision the jobs that are created than it is to envision the jobs that are destroyed. ........... Fred: And in that world, there’s almost always five, or two to five, credible competitors, too. So, it’s like a cage match. ......... maybe the winner’s not 10 times bigger than number 2, who’s then 10 times bigger than number 3, which you can see in consumer, but maybe in enterprise, it’s the winner’s 3 times bigger than the next biggest one, who is then 3 times bigger the next biggest one. And if it’s a business that can support, you know, billions of dollars of market value, that could be two or three companies that could be pretty big winners for the founders, and for the VCs who back them. .............

there’s more capital available for founders today than there’s ever been

............. what’s good for founders is good for the venture business ...... The traditional angel seed, early-stage VC, then growth VC market — I think the explosion of capital is probably more in the later stage. You know, with the SoftBanks and Sequoia going out and raising however many billions they raised ............ We’re seeing a new way of raising capital that’s global from the ground up, that’s not subject to these, I think, antiquated laws around who can invest in startups and who can’t invest in startups. .......... there’s two parts of crypto. There’s the money part of crypto, and there’s the utility part of crypto. ........ a lot of these businesses where the user is the product. Facebook users made Facebook, Twitter users made Twitter, you know, YouTube users made YouTube. It’s just not right that the people who make the product have no participation in the value appreciation. ......... — like Google, like Google search. Like, if you look at mobile, like it’s hard now, you get all sponsored links on mobile, they just keep adding more sponsored links. ............... the hamburger and the hot dog are the competitors. Whereas in tech, actually, the hot dog and the hot dog bun are the ones that have the most vicious fights. Microsoft-Netscape, you know, Facebook-Zynga, like, Twitter and the Twitter apps or whatever, right? ........ Because, like with Twitter, it just feels, kind of, tragic to me that you had this giant developer ecosystem that was trying to make the protocol proliferate. And they could have worked together in concert, and it could have been a much bigger and more impactful platform. But the logic of the business model, the ad-based business model, said we need to control the experience, we need to control where the ads appear, we need to, like, etc., etc. Again, not placing blame on anybody. It’s the logic of that model, right? ................. traditional economists were taking — it boils down to, “Oh, it’s fake money. It’s digital, therefore, it’s fake.” And like, for example, like to think that gold, which, you know, has whatever, out of dental and speaker wires, and it has no real utility, like, to think that that has some kind of, like, ontological, like, higher status than a digital good is, I think, evidence of this, sort of, offline bias. ............. these things will flip, and it’ll be, like, that’s commerce, and then there’s offline commerce ........... I’ve always bought — I’ve been a longtime collector of domain names. .......... Fred: I mean, it’s the — I own a piece of the internet. It’s like owning real estate around Central Park or something. ............. this should be a wonderful time in history for creative people with, you know, 4 billion smartphones, and the ability to just sit down and write something and create a piece of music .......... a very promising new business model not just for games but for writers, for musicians ........... when we first started investing in the internet in ’94, ’95, ’96, what we were doing was dumb. We were just basically investing in things that had existed in the offline world, that were getting moved on to the internet. Like, “Okay, so let’s invest in an online newspaper, let’s invest in an online store .............. but that’s actually not the move. The move is, [you’ve] got to find the native thing that needs to happen now to have this thing. .......... you go back and you look at the early movies, and they were plays, and they were trying to film the play .......... what I’m much more excited about is people creating brand new things de novo from scratch, on these crypto networks, that never existed off the crypto networks, couldn’t have existed off the crypto networks, and always will live on the crypto networks. Like, to me, that just seems like a 10x or 100x better idea. .......... Chris: People think that NumArray is a hedge fund powered by a crowdsourced network of data scientists. And it is, but I actually think if you really try to understand what Richard’s doing, I think he’s playing around with staking. Like, staking is a really powerful idea. I mean, it’s existed forever. I mean, if you read Taleb’s new book, it’s really all about skin in the game. It’s about staking. But I think that we’re gonna see a lot of really innovative things being done with staking, because I think crypto-tokens make staking super easy to do. .................... Chris: I think that we got to fix — it’s the broadband issue. We’ve got to figure out how to get crypto networks that are truly secure and decentralized, that can handle much higher transaction processing speeds than what we have today. ......... Fred: I had this poor friend who was, like, into mobile from, like, the ’90s. And I think he, like, gave up in 2006. Like, it’s never gonna happen. .......... Chris: That’s what we are.

We have not had our iPhone moment in crypto yet.

............. Chris: What’s the quote, like, power corrupts, absolute power absolutely corrupts, or whatever it is — .......... I think we are maybe in the most interesting time I’ve ever seen in my 30-year career

Coinbase forms a PAC . Coinbase is the latest on the scene to form a vehicle with which to steer money toward crypto-friendly candidates ahead of the midterms. .......... The Coinbase Innovation PAC is the trading platform’s second go at direct spending on candidates. A PAC the company registered in 2018 shut down less than a year later without reporting any funds raised or spent ........ now its efforts have coincided with a major boom for cryptocurrencies — and in heightened interest in Washington in regulating the industry. ........ Though Coinbase has had registered lobbyists in town since 2015, the company went on a lobbying hiring spree last year, spending $1.5 million on federal lobbying — a sum that blows away its previous record outlay of $230,000 in 2020. .......... “we believe the bi-partisan potential is clear and we intend to support crypto-forward lawmakers who align with our mission to advance economic freedom for all Americans.” ..........

Kara Calvert

, who the company brought on in December as its senior director of public policy for North America, will run the PAC alongside CFO Alesia Haas ........ Todd White, a relative veteran in the crypto lobbying space, helped launch a super PAC last fall seeking to haul in $300 million to help elect a new generation of crypto-savvy politicians. Then last month, a group of crypto financiers launched a bid to spend $20 million supporting congressional candidates “who work to give consumers and innovators the opportunity to build and use next-generation technologies and services here in America.” Yet another super PAC seeded with crypto money plans to spend $10 million in Democratic primaries to back candidates who take a “long-term” view on policy planning, including as it relates to pandemic preparedness and prevention.

Coinbase Brought Crypto to Main Street. Now Brian Armstrong Wants to Be Your Banker Inc.'s Company of the Year has proved that cryptocurrencies can work like national currencies, and that the digital economy doesn't need the U.S. dollar at all. Here's why that's important--and why it matters to you.

Coinbase: Brian Armstrong . Brian Armstrong wanted to be a tech entrepreneur since he was in high school, but his first serious venture—a tutoring website—never quite took off. Around 2010, while looking to get a job in Silicon Valley, he stumbled across an intriguing idea for a peer-to-peer digital currency called Bitcoin, which quickly turned into his obsession. ............ Brian's initial prototype for a hosted Bitcoin wallet got him accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator program, and he launched Coinbase soon thereafter. Many experts warned that cryptocurrency was no more reliable than Monopoly money, but the startup prevailed, surviving wild swings in the crypto market and steadily building a user base.

Coinbase’s quarterly volatility highlights rationale for diversification Coinbase’s diversification could lead it into neobanking for consumers—perhaps by teaming up with a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) to power the products—which could enhance its user engagement........ help further Coinbase’s future evolution into a digital financial institution with a large breadth of offerings.

CFTC Orders Coinbase Inc. to Pay $6.5 Million for False, Misleading, or Inaccurate Reporting and Wash Trading
Coinbase Case Study Coinbase, a growing bitcoin wallet and exchange service headquartered in San Francisco, is the largest consumer bitcoin wallet in the world and the first regulated bitcoin exchange in the United States. ...... facilitates bitcoin transactions in 190 countries and exchanges between bitcoin and flat currencies in 26 countries. ........ Since its founding in 2012, Coinbase has quickly become the leader in bitcoin transactions.

. Biden’s SEC is ready to regulate cryptocurrency Coinbase has gotten the government’s attention. ........ Cryptocurrency has an SEC problem — and it just got bigger. The Biden administration is taking a more hands-on approach to the highly volatile, little understood, and barely regulated cryptocurrency industry. Cryptocurrencies are decentralized digital currencies secured by blockchain technology. Bitcoin, ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have become almost as accessible as government-issued currency in recent years, but the government offers few consumer protections for them. ........ The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) classifies crypto as property. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) considers crypto to be a commodity. And the SEC has said that digital assets “may be securities, depending on the facts and circumstances.” ....... The SEC appears to have decided that an upcoming offering from Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, meets its definition of a security. And it’s showing that it will step in and regulate it accordingly — and, by extension, regulate the rest of the crypto finance industry more assertively. ......... The people behind Coinbase might be (or at least claim to be) clueless, but the SEC almost certainly knows what it’s doing here: asserting its regulatory control over the world of cryptocurrency banking and finance. And it’s doing so with a pugnaciousness not typical of the agency ........... And it recently charged another crypto lending platform, BitConnect, with $2 billion in fraud for operating what the Department of Justice called a “textbook Ponzi scheme.” Another crypto company, BlockFi, which offers loans and high-interest deposit accounts backed by crypto and a credit card with a crypto rewards program, has been the subject of investigations from several state-level security regulators. ............ concern over how cryptocurrency can be used to facilitate criminal activities; ransomware attacks often demand payment in bitcoin due to the difficulty in tracing those payments. ......... Crypto regulations are coming. The question now is whether the slow process of creating rules and passing laws will be able to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of cryptocurrency.

. Scoop: Coinbase is launching a media arm .
Coinbase soars in market debut, valued near $86 billion with shares of the digital currency exchange rising as high as $429, briefly giving it a market value over $100 billion....... The San Francisco-based company’s listing on a public stock exchange is seen by some as an inflection point for digital currencies, as Coinbase’s fortunes are closely tied to Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency. Bitcoin’s price topped $64,000 on Wednesday, up from $29,000 at the start of the year, and Coinbase said recently that first-quarter revenue should total around $1.8 billion, exceeding its revenue for all of 2020. ....... That market value makes Coinbase one of the biggest publicly traded U.S. companies — just 93 companies in the S&P 500 index have a higher market value. Coinbase’s value is close to the combined market value of Nasdaq Inc. ....... Unlike many newly public companies Coinbase is profitable ........ “Coinbase is a foundational piece of the crypto ecosystem and is a barometer for the growing mainstream adoption of Bitcoin and crypto for the coming years.” ........ Even as Coinbase made its trading debut, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell described cryptocurrencies as “vehicles for speculation” in comments to the Economic Club of Washington. “No one is using them for payments, for example, like the dollar.” ......... Coinbase earns 0.5% of the value of every transaction that goes through its system. So if someone buys $100 in Bitcoin, Coinbase earns 50 cents. ........ Instead of using a traditional IPO, Coinbase went public through a public listing.

2015: This Coinbase glitch led to soaring cryptocurrency prices Multiple cryptocurrency prices went soaring Wednesday due to a Coinbase glitch

Coinbase embraces NFTs with new peer-to-peer marketplace The cryptocurrency exchange is branching out and launching a new marketplace for nonfungible tokens.
Crypto exchange Coinbase was behind Tesla’s bitcoin buy Coinbase's prime brokerage arm counts more than five Fortune 500 companies as clients. ....... Jack Dorsey’s Square is another early adopter, having bought $50 million in bitcoin last October.

SEC threatens to sue Coinbase, CEO calls it ‘really sketchy behavior’ . He alleged that the SEC is “engaging in intimidation tactics behind closed doors” and called for clearer regulatory guidance and for the SEC to enforce regulations equally across the industry. ........ “In May of this year I traveled to DC to meet with every regulator and branch of government I could,” Armstrong said. “The SEC was the only regulator that refused to meet with me, saying ‘we’re not meeting with any crypto companies’. This was right after we became the first crypto company to go public in the U.S.” .......... They refuse to tell us why they think it’s a security, and instead subpoena a bunch of records from us (we comply), demand testimony from our employees (we comply), and then tell us they will be suing us if we proceed to launch, with zero explanation as to why,” he added.

Coinbase now lets US users pay for cryptocurrency through a PayPal account Once you link the two accounts, you can spend up to $25,000 per day on digital currencies.

Coinbase Blog
Coinbase provides institutions with trusted access and storage for DeFi tokens Coinbase Prime offers custody and trading for more than 50 DeFi coins and tokens, across a wide range of segments, including DEXs, lend, and borrow.We facilitate governance for a growing number of tokens including UNI, COMP, and MKR. This gives our customers the opportunity to directly participate in the governance of DeFi projects. ......... Venture capital funding for blockchain startups reached $25 billion last year, up 713% from $3.1 billion in 2020. Coinbase Ventures, A16Z and Paradigm are some of the VCs doubling down on DeFi. ........ As one of the most trusted names in the industry, Coinbase offers access to a broad range of assets, customized account support, and a rapidly growing number of capabilities for our clients to participate in DeFi. ......... While Bitcoin or Ethereum are the currency of the blockchains, Defi tokens are built on top of the blockchain and represent a wide range of new opportunities for institutions. As of January 2022, nearly $200 Billion was deposited through smart contracts across major blockchains. This measure is referred to as the Total Value Locked (TVL). Ethereum-based projects alone account for 60% of DeFi TVL. ........... Defi offers a global, open alternative to financial services consumers utilize today — including savings, loans, trading, and insurance — creating a financial system that is automated, accessible 24/7, permissionless and more transparent. DeFi protocols with the highest adoption rates include Compound and Aave for lending, Curve for stablecoins swap, Uniswap for token swaps, or DYDX for derivatives.

Wired: Coinbase