During the California Gold Rush of 1849, the prospectors ended up ruined while the few to make a fortune were the traders of shovels and pickaxes. So it may be with the bitcoin rush, which is poised to make cryptocurrency exchange platforms rich. The Coinbase company, which was valued at $ 8 billion (6.7 billion euros) in 2018 during its last fundraiser, must to go public on April 14 for an astronomical value, close to 100 billion dollars.
His recipes? The transaction fees, of 0.5% minimum, levied on its 43 million users in 100 countries, including 7,000 banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions, when they buy and sell cryptocurrencies.
Founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, the company has benefited from the boom in the market, whose total asset value has increased 1,500 times in eight years, to reach $ 780 billion by the end of 2020. The company has a peculiarity: it itself keeps the precious cryptocurrencies of its customers, to the tune of $ 90 billion, and provides them with security thanks to with a double lock: the place where the cryptocurrencies are stored is “off line”, disconnected from the Internet, and there is a confidential means of finding the security codes if the customer loses them.
This decisive choice was made when the company was launched, when the Internet is full of stories of people potentially billionaires having lost the access code of their bitcoins. “If you go to my mother and tell her: ‘Here is your account, but if you lose the password, all is lost ”, that’s not a good way to start ”, explained in 2013 Mr. Armstrong, who wanted to expand a sector then reserved only for insiders, fanatic bitcoin geeks constantly explaining to you that you had not understood anything. He felt that the front door went through the safety of his clients.
Messianic accents
The young engineer born in San José, in Silicon Valley, had started in the sector with an unfortunate project of electronic wallet on smartphone, afflicted with a compelling flaw: if you lost the phone, you lost your money. With this strategic choice, Coinbase now occupies more than 10% of the market. It is not strictly speaking an exchange, but more of a broker or broker, like Schwab.
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