Business Insider sat with Coinbase’s Dan Romero who recently took on the role of general manager and vice president of the company in January; the interview covered the company’s plans for growth on the engineering and product sides; he said the company is looking to become for cryptocurrency what Google has become for search; the interview also talks through the recent SegWit upgrade, where Coinbase is headed in the next few years and how they compare to their biggest competitors. Source.
Coinbase launched their Coinbase Commerce platform to allow merchants to accept digital currency; the service will be integrated into the merchant’s checkout or added as a payment option; the company is accepting merchants by having them email in to be added; this positions Coinbase well as Stripe no longer accepts payments and PayPal has been slow to adopt. Source.
The new fund will allow accredited investors to access all of the cryptocurrencies currently on Coinbase; the currencies will be weighted on market capitalization and new cryptocurrencies will automatically be added to the fund; the fund will charge a 2% management fee. Source
According to a blog post by the company, the fund will provide. ”financing to promising early stage companies that have the teams and ideas that can move the space forward in a positive, meaningful way”; the company also said it will not invest in security tokens at this time; it is likely that the company is sitting on significant amounts of cash which put it in a good position to launch a fund; revenues in 2017 totaled over $1 billion; Bloomberg reported that the top ten largest crypto exchanges take in $3 million in fees per day. Source
Coinbase was ordered to hand over information on customers who made transactions over $20,000 between 2013 and 2015; the IRS believes people have not been correctly reporting income made from trades; the information required by the IRS was significantly less than they originally tried to get back when the IRS initially summoned records a year ago; Coinbase might still challenge the order. Source.
Coinbase announced they will add support for ERC20 tokens, the technical standard behind ethereum blockchain tokens; they don’t have plans to add any new token yet but is building out their technology to do so; "This is an infrastructure upgrade that will enable us to support many more assets in the future," a Coinbase representative told Business Insider.; the company did caution that they will wait regulatory clarity before adding any assets. Source.
San Francisco-based Coinbase has received approval for digital currency trading of Ether and Litecoin in New York; the company was also granted approval for a debit card service called Shift Card; with the approval, Maria Vullo and the the New York State Department of Financial Services reiterated their position on the OCC's fintech charter, noting the importance for state fintech oversight. Source
Bitcoin exchange Coinbase is reported to have brought in more than $1bn in revenues this past year; according to a report in Recode the revenue figures for Coinbase were supposed to be $600mn but the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas pushed them to over $1bn; the company has also seen spikes in users, with more than 100,000 users signing in over the Thanksgiving day weekend. Source.
Coinbase announced four new services that show the exchange is looking to court institutions; Coinbase Custody is a custodian partnership...
Coinbase has been the top cryptocurrency exchange for the US market as it’s process makes signing up and buying bitcoin simple; they have seen accounts jump from 5.5 million to more than 13 million in less than a year; their success has not been without growing pains with a number of outages occurring and customers lodging complaints that no one was available to help them; recently they also came to an agreement with the IRS to hand over records of customers involving more than $20,000 which was a compromise from a year long battle. Source.