Threads are paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it), so to see the rest of the comments you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262170&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262170&p=3

(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)

Love reading the risk factors section. First thought: how can a lay person possibly understood the risks as laid out here?

Also they view this as a major risk: •the identification of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, or the transfer of Satoshi’s Bitcoins;

Second thought, what an incredible business and growth.

1.14bn in revenue on 193bn in trading volume: thats 60bps on every dollar traded. These are insane fees ripe for disruption.

So almost all of the comments here are about bitcoin generally. While that’s not totally surprising, does anyone have any insight on whether or not this S1 reveals interesting data that might inform the public about investing in coin base (eg why they filed an S1)?

I have tried to use Coinbase this past month to buy some ETH. Worst customer support I have ever seen in my life.

Have a look at Reddit to see what's going on with this company:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/new/

It's not ok to brag about your business when many of your customers are in deep emotional stress because you mess with their money.

Coinbase’ customer support is crap. You van only get someone on the phone if your account is compromised; anything else goes to email, and they respond when they get around to it. Also their email verification system for transfers fails frequently causing transfers to be canceled. Pretty convenient way for them to keep your money. I am biased but I’m pretty unhappy with coinbase right now.

I do ask myself if a 100B valuation on public listing is the start of mainstream crypto.

Plus the direct listing is a giant middle finger to traditional banking and overall establishment, right?

Like : Here are the new rules this new internet will be playing by. Direct, decentralized. Adapt or die?

-We have applied to list our Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “COIN.”

This in itself will probably add a few billion in market cap...

Created a coinbase account recently and found that there's no way to verify your identity if you have an expired ID. Because of covid, Maryland let expired drivers licenses still be valid for the forseeable future, but Coinbase automatically declines them.

Looking forward to this IPO. Besides the "crypto comes to main street" cultural aspects. The dark horse may be Coinbase's venture arm. This is quite the portfolio:

https://ventures.coinbase.com/

Number one priority with the new cash: addressing downtimes in periods of high trading activity / market volatility.

https://www.coindesk.com/how-coinbase-is-worth-100-billion

I find it interesting (sad, actually) that most other S-1 posts on here are congratulatory for the most part, giving kudos to the teams (look at the DO one today).

However, when it comes to anything crypto related, the emotions really come out. It's all "bitcoin/crypto is useless, doesn't solve any problem, waste of talent."

For a community of hackers, there really seems to be a lack of vision when it comes to crypto specifically.

Anyone else care to comment on the S-1 itself? Revenues doubling, and a rare example of a tech company that is actually profitable before IPO (to the tune of $320M net profit on $1.1B in revenue). Seems like a great business to me! Given current market conditions, I wouldn't be surprised to see a market cap on first day of trading of $50B or more

Coinbase is currently trading on private markets at a 77 billion dollar valuation:

"Those shares in the largest crypto exchange in the U.S. are changing hands on the Nasdaq Private Market at $303 a piece, according to two people with knowledge of the auction. That implies a total company value of about $77 billion – greater than Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange." (1).

It will be interesting to see how that translates to the public markets.

1. https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-valuation-nasdaq-private-m...

Transaction revenue increased $633.2 million, or 137%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019 primarily due to a 142% year over year increase in Trading Volume.

Subscription and services revenue increased $25.0 million, or 126%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019.

Wow, $1B transaction revenue and $44M subscription revenue. These guys are making a lot of money for a pure digital product.

Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks.

In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.

Do you think BTC is worth $500k? If so buy Coinbase.

Off-topic: Does anywhere exist where one can read a slightly better formatted version of S-1 documents?

I have no doubt that they have a good business model, and that they are positioned quite nicely in the market.

It's just that these valuations are getting crazy.. Everyone is already pricing in like 10+ crazy years of growth. Not everyone can grow like Facebook did...

Didn't know that Mark Andreessen/a16z own that huge chunk of coinbase.

I loathe Coinbase. Their support team is a joke (over a month with no response) and site stability is non existent.

Coinbase is critical to the widespread adoption of crypto because it acts as a bridge between everything-is-regulated and anything-goes. Cryptocurrencies are only bound by the rules of the programs that run them, but they exist in the "real world" where powerful states have guns and nukes and can pass laws that would make using cryptocurrencies too risky for the general public, even if it would still be technically feasible. Coinbase is clearly the leader in this bridge-space and I suspect this IPO will go nicely.

Biggest surprise on the S1: CPO who joined exactly 1 year ago was given 2M shares, currently valued at $750M.

Bitcoin made a lot of sense when I first read about it in 2011. Back then I feel like it was primarily used as an anonymous payment method. Think dark web/silk road type stuff. I certainly don't endorse that behavior, but bitcoin as a payment method made a lot of sense.

Bitcoin makes 0 sense to me as an investment. It's pure speculation with no underlying intrinsic value. It's the Dutch Tulips 10.0 basically.

And now because the value of bitcoin is unbelievably volatile, it now makes 0 sense as a means of payment.

Someone on here once said decentralized systems tend to end up centralized, this will be my goto example. A p2p system of exchanging digital tokens end up centralized around the a bank.

Trading volume of "Other Crypto Assets" (non-BTC/ETH/LTC) made up 44% of revenue in 2020, which they attribute to DeFi crypto assets. I wonder how 13% of their assets drives 44% of their revenue? The section on Applications talks about DeFi as peer-to-peer financial agreements, which implies there's some underlying economic activity going on, as opposed to just speculation, but I haven't been able to find anything else that digs deeper into that piece.

43 million users yet the narrative is cryptocurrency is still in its 'infancy.' I wouldn't be surprised if at least 10% of all Americans have dabbled in buying crypto.

I thought that the point of crypto is low fees? Nice that crypto has a $~1T market cap. But just one broker is going to have a market cap of one tenth of that. Makes no sense.

It's interesting that on the first page under the copies to section they reference Satoshi Nakamoto and the genesis block of BTC.

> Hodl: A term used in the crypto community for holding a crypto asset through ups and downs, rather than selling it.

I appreciate the glossary

They define hodl in the S1. Amazing times.

Argentina is a great example. I am an American and have been there many times. They have extreme inflation and regressive policies against USD or foreign currency. Take a look at https://bluedollar.net. Official rates are buy at 89.98 and sell at 94.98 (ARS). Unofficial rates are buy at 138 and sell at 143. That's a massive spread saying that the people on the street are willing to spend 35% more because they know the Peso will eventually blow up and the USD is more stable which they can sell down the line for more ARS. This is sketchy in country. You might be walking a slightly illegal line. Possessing cash makes you a target for theft. Owning bitcoin makes this money transfer and storage of equivalent money easier.

Is BTC still a hedge if it's 50k+? I don't know whether it's a good speculation or one to hedge against. I've avoided it all this time and with banks and corps getting on board, I feel left out.

> Address Not Applicable ^1

> ^1 In May 2020, we became a remote-first company. Accordingly, we do not maintain a headquarters.

Total tangent here, but every time I fill out a really old-school form (e.g. loan stuff), it asks for my company's address and phone number. It gets harder every job to figure out what the hell that number should be. In my last job I has to give out one of the founder's cell phone numbers for it.

I use coinbase as it was the easiest and least sketchy way to buy a couple of years ago. I feel though that a lot of the big gains for a particular coin are made before coinbase authorizes that coin for trade on their platform. Can anyone provide some insight/ ELI5 as to why the coin selection is curated vs a free for all?

numbers are very good, $1.27B revenue with $322M net income for 2020

I'm not a fan of crypto as it exists today, but setting that aside, I feel like coinbase is at an unstable equilibrium as a business. If bitcoin becomes more mainstream, the high fees will not fly indefinitely, and margin drops. If bitcoin falls, then there's no growth proposition.

Maybe it will collapse before going public as WeWork did? Hopefully not, it will be interesting to watch.

Wonder why the first picture with an app shows BTC going down, with the actual price covered up.

I wouldn't be surprised, and by that I mean I actually believe, that organisations like Coinbase are directly manipulating the price of BTC in order to create a big hype and excitement before their IPO.

Does anyone please know where to find the cap table? I assume it should be public by now — am I wrong? Couldn't find it under the document's "Capitalization" section. Thanks

So when is the listing?

The compensation table looks interesting. $1M in salary and $56M from stock options. 2-3x higher base salary and 10-25x higher than in the case of DigitalOcean.

Could Coinbase have done an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise money for their investors and employees instead, where the coin tracks revenue or something?

Well the bubble is official now... hang on everyone!

Maybe with some public accountability they can finally solve the issue of their servers “going down” every time there is a rush to sell.

Not a single mention of Monero or privacy coins? Thanks, but I'll be sticking with Kraken where the CEO actually has a spine.

So, how long is the employee lockup period?

I don't know much about the future of crypto, but I do know that for now, people love to buy and sell it.

What does the "Satoshi Nakamoto 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa" on page 1 means?

It's so weird to me that here, on hacker news people have such a hatred of coinbase.

Coinbase is a YC company, and if some of the predictions are accurate, will be the highest valued YC company so far.

answer: the word 'fiat' appears 40 times in the comments of this kind of hn thread

Waiting patiently for HashiCorp! I tried through EquityZen but no luck.

Satoshi Nakamoto (page 1)

So setting aside the merits of Coinbase as a business or the philosoeconomic significance of cryptocurrency, should I buy Coinbase stock? I want to make easy money by buying stock. Think it'll go up after it's listed?

Coinbase is a stain in cryptocurrency's history and will be remembered as that in the future. It still has a chance to change and help, but for now its against everything bitcoin stands for.

Coinbase is extremely lucky that BTC seems to have established a new floor.

I’m curious how bullish they were after the crash a few years ago.

in a gold rush sell shovels

Do they have a moat? What’s to stop 100 other US exchanges popping up?

Good for them. But am I the only one who finds it slightly ironic that the brainchild of distributed ledger tech and crypto currency capitalism is now filing for IPO in what is the hallmark of old capitalism (regulated markets)?

I am somewhat disappointed that they don’t do an ICO.

They don't let you buy dogecoin. I sleep.

when is coinbase going to IPO?