Coinbase is starting to look a lot like a traditional big tech company
The popular American cryptocurrency exchange is growing up fast—and becoming more like the kind of company that cryptocurrency was supposed to circumvent.
Two big news items: Coinbase has announced that it is “exploring the addition” of five new crypto-tokens—Cardano, the Basic Attention Token, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, and 0x—which would join Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum Classic. Just as important, Bloomberg reported yesterday that Coinbase has the “green light” from US securities regulators to make three acquisitions that will pave the way for it to become one of the first licensed platforms for trading “tokenized” versions of traditional investments, like company shares.
A contentious backdrop: Landing on a big exchange like Coinbase boosts a crypto-token’s perceived value, so a lot of money is on the line. But there are very few rules governing the process, and the debate over which coins the exchanges should be allowed to list is just beginning. Complicating things is a lack of clarity from regulators in the US and many other countries regarding which coins are commodities, which are securities, and which may be something different altogether.
This looks familiar: Coinbase, which may be worth as much as $8 billion, has been in rapid expansion mode lately. Some have called it a budding “Google of crypto.” But isn’t that antithetical to the decentralized ideal to which so many cryptocurrency enthusiasts adhere? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Pictured above: Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.