| Author | Message | ||
     Entrepreneur Kurra Bewarse Username: Entrepreneur Post Number: 3404 Registered: 05-2011 Rating: N/A |
How coinbase was started? Like many within this select circle, Ehrsam seemed perfectly poised to adopt the new digital world. He played video games professionally in high school, then studied computer science at Duke University before becoming a foreign-exchange trader at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York. Yet he grew bored at the bank and as he looked for things that interested him after work, he discovered Bitcoin through a Georgetown professor’s blog. He was instantly fascinated. “I would literally trade Bitcoin in the bathroom on my phone at Goldman,” Ehrsam said in an interview. Bitcoin was going for about $6 at the time, compared with a record $58,000 last week. Back then, the main way to buy it was on the now bankrupt exchange Mt. Gox or through intermediaries, and Ehrsam realized there needed to be an easier way to buy and sell crypto. After meeting Armstrong on the Bitcoin subreddit forum, they started Coinbase in 2012 out of an apartment in San Francisco. Armstrong declined to comment. Morehead remembered the early days of Coinbase as he was creating the Pantera Bitcoin fund in 2013. He’d been an investor for a while, taking huge macro risks on things like Russian privatization and farmland in Argentina, bets with very steep downside potential but that could also pay off enormously if successful. “I was first attracted to Bitcoin as an investment, it was something really interesting to learn about,” Morehead said. In 2013, however, amassing a large stake in the new digital currency wasn’t easy. “I sent $2 million to Coinbase, and I started trying to buy $2 million of Bitcoin,” Morehead said. “My daily trading limit was $50.” Pantera has grown into one of the largest holders of cryptocurrencies and has invested in over 50 startups, including Circle, Bakkt, Polychain Capital, Shapeshift and Zcash, according to its website. In the early days, though, Morehead had to contend with the drugs and criminals narrative that dogged Bitcoin. He went to every major university endowment in 2015 when Bitcoin was at $100 to tell them they should have it in their portfolio. “The conversation was all Silk Road, drugs, whatever,” he said, referencing the early black-market exchange shut down by U.S. authorities. That dark element to Bitcoin didn’t deter Wilson at Union Square and DCG’s Silbert, both of whom were series A investors in Coinbase. The company’s shares changed hands in recent private transactions at levels that would value Coinbase at close to $100 billion, a person familiar with the matter have said. Union Square has focused its cash on about 15 firms in two main areas, infrastructure providers like Protocol Labs and Helium and in other crypto investment funds like Polychain Capital and Autonomous Partners. Wilson declined to comment. |