Profile: Coinbase / Coinbase
Authors
- Kocsen Chung kocsen/kocsenc@gmail.com
- Andrew Schott snapschott/afs7827@rit.edu
- Will Paul dropofwill/whp3652@rit.edu
Rationale
Fairly arbitrary, but Will is a Coinbase user so we went for it.
Coinbase Organizational Details
Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?
Yes, Coinbase is a corporation.
What type?
When was it founded?
2012
By whom?
Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam
Original founder(s) still active?
Yes
Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?
N/A
Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?
- Blockr.io - Raw transaction processor
- Kippt - Design firm
Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.
No
Number of Employees?
101-250 Employees, 52 Team members, 3 adisors
Where is HQ?
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Does it have any other offices or locations?
Several [headquarters across the world][7] with smaller offices and retail stores throughout.
Website?
Wikipedia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinbase
Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)
No
Communications
Social media for Coinbase
They have a extended social media presence.
Facebook: 17,270 likes
Twitter: 50,700 Followers
Communications channels for Coinbase
IRC Channel: freenode #Coinbase
GitHub Repository Link:
[https://github.com/coinbase/toshi]
Email: through inquiry - https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/emails/new
Blog/Website: Blog - https://blog.coinbase.com
Website - https://www.Coinbase.com/
Conference Participation
Coinbase has decent amount of conference participation. Such as Money2020 and other BitCoin related conferences.
Community Architecture
History
Coinbase started when the bitcoin surge came about. It raised a lot in venture capital through Y-Combinator and it became an easy way to deal with your bitcoin wallet, and one of the early ones as well. It all started by the original founders in San Francisco, CA. Coinbase grew quick to about 1 million users in 2014 and has ever since gotten strong momentum
License(s)
Toshi - MIT Most other repos - MIT
###Getting commit/review access The people in charged of commit access of coinbase are found here: https://github.com/orgs/coinbase/people
Getting Messy with Code
This process is done through their GitHub organization repo.
Git by a bus?
Passes, because there are a handful of people that own the repo.
Overview & Product
Coinbase is a company that builds great apps to interface with the bitcoin world. It’s major product is the bitcoin wallet they create which is a place where you can buy and sell bitcoin. It facilitates the process and basically slaps on a beautiful UI on the bitcoin system.
How this company relates to open source is unique, but also relevant since its one of the ‘young’ companies that integrate and revolve around open source. So they have an organization on github. This organization has a ton of projects, one of the largest ones being toshi. This repo is an implementation of the Bitcoin protocol in Ruby. It is what powers coinbase and they help drive the project forward. There are currently 6 owners of the coinbase org in GH, so that leads me to believe they are the lead devs. The company is also making money and hires people to keep major development.
Its a great example of a company that is literally paid to create and support FOSS software. Now I’m sure there are ‘secret puddings’ in the company that they keep private which is where the trick comes in. Similarly they are the ‘data holders’ of all the user base and all of peoples transactions which makes them valuable.
Business and Revenue Model
Coinbase got most its funding mostly from venture capital. Once the product was created, Coinbase created a similar service such as Visa. Where 1% of all charges that go through are charged as a fee.