Crypto to redefine money and information, says Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam

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Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam took to Twitter to reminisce the company’s journey over the past 10 years.

Recalling how Coinbase was founded in 2012, Ehrsam said he and co-founder Brian Armstrong had one mission: “to make crypto easy to use.”

“When Brian Armstrong and I started Coinbase in 2012, a Bitcoin was worth $6 and only known by a few nerds on the internet. Bitcoin was the crazy idea that the world could have a digital money for everyone. Coinbase had one mission: to make crypto easy to use.” (sic)

He admitted that the beginnings were “not glamorous” and that Coinbase was “launched out of a two-bedroom apartment we shared with another company.”

“We were far from conventional. For our first hire, we selected a whip smart fanatical lumberjack over a Google manager. Over time, crypto grew, and so did the company. A simple Bitcoin wallet evolved into individual and institutional products to support a blossoming crypto-economy.”

Ehrsam also shared that he and Armstrong met on Reddit, adding that “two nerds who met on the internet turned into a company of 1000+”

He was also open about the hardships – sharing that in the three years between 2014 and 2017, the “outside world thought crypto was dead” and over a third of employees left.

“Yet crypto kept building. Ethereum (another cryptocurrency) came on the scene and showed that crypto native applications were possible, opening up a whole new world of possibilities. Today, almost 10 years later, crypto is a sprawling ecosystem quickly redefining money, the financial system, and, ambitiously, the internet itself,” he wrote.

Ehrsam also noted that “entrepreneur quantity and quality flowing into the ecosystem astonishes daily” adding that this tackles “everything from centralized infrastructure (brokerages, exchanges, custodians), to crypto-native financial tools (DeFi), to new ways of owning and using digital media (NFTs).”

He also spoke about how top schools such as Harvard, Duke, MIT and Stanford offer highly attended crypto classes, and that today there are many more dedicated cryptocurrency institutes.

“Institutions have adopted, including banks, asset managers, fintech companies, and even non-financial services companies. A Bitcoin is now worth $63,000. Crypto-assets are cumulatively worth ~$2 trillion,” he noted.

Ehrsam is very optimistic, stating that “crypto is just getting started.”

“We are ~1% into the most important technology of the coming decades. Crypto will redefine money and information, the two fundamental ways the world coordinates. I feel honored to be a small part of this journey which will transform society for the better. I salute all the crypto builders exploring this fertile and critically important frontier. And I look forward to seeing what we all create together,” he wrote (sic).

He ended his tweet thread by thanking Satoshi Nakamoto, the presumed pseudonymous person(s) who developed Bitcoin, authored the Bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed Bitcoin's original reference implementation. “Thank you Satoshi, whoever you are.”

When @brian_armstrong and I started @coinbase in 2012, a #bitcoin was worth $6 and only known by a few nerds on the internet. #bitcoin was the crazy idea that the world could have a digital money for everyone.@coinbase had one mission: to make crypto easy to use.

— Fred Ehrsam (@FEhrsam) April 14, 2021

Ehrsam is now also the co-founder of crypto asset investment firm Paradigm, Armstrong is also a co-founder at crypto donation organisation Give Crypto.

Ehrsam's tweets came after Coinbase Global Inc. valued at $86 billion at the end of its NASDAQ debut on Wednesday, in a choppy day of trading when its valuation went as high as $112 billion.

Coinbase's stock market debut, done through a direct listing where no shares are sold ahead of the opening, marks another milestone in the development of Bitcoin and other digital assets.

It comes amid a surge in the value of cryptocurrencies which has lured a clutch of mainstream, top-tier firms that have dived into the space.

Reuters reported that Coinbase's stock opened at $381 per share, up 52.4 percent from a reference price of $250 per share set on Tuesday though only 10.9 percent above the $343.58 volume-weighted average price Coinbase's shares were trading at privately in the first quarter of 2021.

The stock closed at $328.28, which gives Coinbase a fully diluted valuation of $85.78 billion, including unvested stock options and restricted stocks, and a market capitalization of $65.39 billion.

By comparison, New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange Inc has a market cap of around $66 billion.

Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based firm boasts 56 million users globally and an estimated $223 billion assets on its platform, accounting for 11.3 percent of crypto asset market share, regulatory filings showed.

Notably, the shares jumped 11 percent in early trades on Thursday, a day after the cryptocurrency exchange went public in a high-profile debut on the NASDAQ that briefly valued it at more than $100 billion.

Coinbase was valued at just under $6 billion as recently as September, but its valuation has surged toe-to-toe with Bitcoin's gains this year. The company was valued at $86 billion at the end of Wednesday's trading session.

(With inputs from Reuters)