Name: Coinbase’s Adam White: “We Want Coinbase to Be the Google of Crypto”
Uploaded: 2018-05-18
Duration: 3 min 31 s
Description: Coinbase just launched a lineup of apps geared for institutional investors.

[ MUSIC ] Turning to your news, Adam, Coinbase is opening up its office in Chicago? That's right, yeah, we're really excited that we have an office in San Francisco, an office here in New York and an office in London. And just announced, we're opening up an office in Chicago. What's really unique about it is it's an engineering office, right. What we're looking to do is scale that office from right now to about six or seven employees To upwards of 100 employees over the coming year or so. And that will be primarily engineers that are helping work on kind of new institutional- grade infrastructure for the products we offer. Wr think Chicago, we think derivatives market, and also High frequency trading, is this what you're sort of designing it for? I think when we think about the institutional space we think there is core products that they want to have access to. First and foremost is custody, they need the ability to safely and securely store cryptocurrencies. Especially the kind of history of the space which is wraught with thefts, and hackings, and lack of safe storage. So that is a core product that we're offering. The second one Coinbase markets. And that is the matching engine or the centralized pool of liquidity for all the different Coinbase products, be it Coinbase. com or [ UNKNOWN ] And that team is gonna be based at Chicago and there is an exceptional access to kind of talent there that comes from kind of deep- exchange architecture experience. So obviously the CME, the CBO You have a number of exchanges that are there. And we're really fortunate to have that. GDAX is really your baby, right? Yeah, so I look after GDAX. That's our kind of institutional rate exchange. And what we've done is, GDAX used to allow both individuals and institutions to sign up, right? It would allow direct market access. And it was either the active crypto trader that said, hey, I really wanna be able to trade directly on a central limit order book, and they would do that through G- X. But it was also very large institutions, right, that would trade primarily programmatically via our API, they would also come through G- X. What we realized over time is that those two customers had very different needs, right? Individuals wanna kinda be walked through the onboarding experience. They wanted a very easy- to- use interface. Whereas institutions kind of wanted more powerful tools and kind of features that only institutions could have access to for legal and regulatory reasons. That's why we're really excited this week to announce a new product we just launched called Coinbase Prime. And Coinbase Prime, as the name evokes, is kind of there to provide the prime brokerage services that institutions are missing. Things like lending, algorithmic orders and access to market data and even research one day. So a lot of this stuff sounds like a little bit like banking services where they had Goldman Sachs announce they're going to start trading BitCoin derivatives and maybe eventually BitCoin. Does Coinbase see itself as a bank or what's the vision here? I think very kind of simply said we want to be the Google of crypto right? That said we're spending most of our time and our resources right now helping to build the infrastructure. So that's the ability to safely store cryptocurrency. The Ability to safely kind of trade it. But that will not be successful long term if we don't also move into this utility phase. How do our customers, if not the whole world, start utilizing crypto currency to solve real problems, to provide real service. So we've already started making a few investments there, we've got a product called Toshi, which is a user controlled wallet, kind of decentralized application store that you can use services on. We also have Coinbase commerce, which allows our customers and businesses to be able to send and transact crypto- currency for business. So we do not see ourselves as necessarily a crypto- currency bank Right, that's a core part of our offering, and especially as we appeal to institutions. But long term, we really want to be diversified, supporting not just the investment phase, but also the utility. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Coinbase just launched a lineup of apps geared for institutional investors.

Coinbase’s Adam White: “We Want Coinbase to Be the Google of Crypto”

Finance

They cater to both institutions and investors. 