Coinbase

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Coinbase, Inc.

logo
legal form Corporation
founding June 1, 2012
Seat San Francisco , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
management Brian Armstrong (CEO)
Number of employees 51–200 employees
Branch Cryptocurrencies
Website www.coinbase.com
As of August 28, 2017

Coinbase, Inc. is an American company that has a commercial splattform for crypto currencies operates. Via Coinbase, the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin , Ethereum , Ethereum Classic , Bitcoin Cash, XRP and Litecoin can be traded and exchanged for official currencies , including US dollars and euros .

history

Coinbase was founded on June 1st, 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. The company was founded in the summer of 2012 as part of a Y Combinator competition . Y Combinator is a startup incubator , from which reddit and Airbnb , among others, have emerged. The company is based in San Francisco , California, United States. Armstrong previously worked as a developer at Airbnb and Ehrsam as a forex trader at Goldman Sachs .

In May 2013, Coinbase received $ 5 million in venture capital from US venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

In a second round of funding in December 2013, the company raised additional venture capital of $ 25 million from Andreessen Horowitz and $ 6 million from Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital, bringing the total funding to $ 31 million.

In January 2015, Coinbase raised around $ 75 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson , the New York Stock Exchange and several banks in another financing round . At the time, this investment was the first major investment by traditional finance companies in a company active in the cryptocurrency sector.

Also in January 2015, Coinbase was the first company to receive government approval from US authorities to operate a trading platform for Bitcoin in around half of the US states. The Bitcoin price rose promptly. The Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss , who are known among other things for their won lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, had announced just a few days earlier that they would also found a licensed Bitcoin exchange called Gemini . To that time (January 2015) managed Coinbase about 2.1 million virtual wallets, so-called Cyberwallets from customers.

In December, the US federal tax service , the IRS , asked the company to disclose all identities of US taxpayers and provide documents relating to their transactions. The reason for this was the discovery of three cases of tax evasion with crypto money in the United States. The IRS suspects that other users could use cryptocurrencies to smuggle taxable income by the tax authorities. According to its own information, Coinbase had 4.9 million customers worldwide in December 2016, a large proportion of which were probably in the USA.

As of May 2017, Coinbase has raised a total of $ 117 million from investors, according to TechCrunch .

After the Bitcoin hard fork on August 1, 2017 and the spin-off from Bitcoin Cash , the company announced on August 3 that it wanted to carry out withdrawals and payouts of the newly created cryptocurrency Bitcoin Cash, contrary to previous announcements.

Coinbase was valued at $ 1.6 billion in early August 2017. Coinbase was the first cryptocurrency company to exceed the valuation of 1 billion US dollars and is therefore the first “crypto unicorn ”.

In early June 2018, Coinbase opened a headquarters in Japan. There the company works closely with the Japanese Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) to ensure compliance with Japanese laws at all times.

In November 2019, Coinbase joined forces with Galaxy Digital, Winklevoss Capital , Kindred Ventures, SV Angel, Animoca Brands , Signia Ventures and Bobby Goodlatte in a $ 3.5 million seed investment round in Bitski.

Products

Coinbase has two main products: the Global Digital Asset Exchange (abbreviation GDAX , formerly Coinbase Exchange ) as a stock exchange and professional trading platform for crypto currencies , as well as a retail trading platform with digital wallet for crypto currencies. In addition, a programming interface is offered for developers and sellers to connect external programs to Coinbase and to carry out automated payment transactions.

Via Coinbase, the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin , Ethereum and Litecoin can be traded in the official currencies of US dollars , euros and British pounds through both the GDAX and the end customer trading platform . It is also possible to trade cryptocurrencies with one another. The cyberwallet enables purchased currencies to be saved and stored on Coinbase's servers (so-called "safe storage").

criticism

Users criticized several times that the Coinbase trading platform was sometimes not accessible for a short time. For example, the servers of the Coinbase and GDAX trading platforms collapsed in May 2017 under the load associated with unexpectedly high trading and traffic volumes and were temporarily unavailable. In June 2017, trading in Ethereum on numerous major exchanges, including Coinbase, was temporarily suspended due to a sudden, rapid drop in prices. After trading reopened, the price rallied quickly. Coinbase announced plans to compensate users who suffered losses due to the suspended trading.

In August 2017, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that Coinbase was recently criticized because the service is said to have decreased significantly. Coinbase promptly announced that it would invest more money in improving the service.

On January 11, 2018, the Bitcoin payout failed, with all outstanding transactions being processed in the blockchain, and with the resumption of payouts, the queue rose again within a short time. Since Coinbase does not support SegWit or bundled payouts, each transaction takes up more space in the blockchain. Coinbase then announced that it would work on SegWit and bundled transactions.

Web links

Individual evidence

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  6. a b Internet money: Investors smell big business. In: handelsblatt.com. Handelsblatt GmbH , December 13, 2013, accessed on August 28, 2017 .
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