Isildur.eth

The straight of Hormuz is closed. Oil tankers are clogged up. The price of everything is going to skyrocket. You can thank trump and Israel.

I give full credit to Brian Armstrong for jumping on Bitcoin early when nobody believed it was a thing. He stuck with it and persevered through the toughest of times. I also think anecdotally he seems like a nice and likeable guy. But I don’t think he’s making good decisions as CEO. Coinbase is all over the map. The company has a massive and bloated payroll considering how little it actually delivers outside of exchange ops. And it seems to make puzzling acquistions every week. The fact is, no Coinbase product since the original exchange has really taken off. The NFT platform was a huge bomb that reportedly cost half a billion dollars. It bought Echo for hundreds of millions of dollars, which it should have been able to build in a weekend. And then it used it’s own half assed launch platform tech to run the Monad ICO. And this didn’t go very well. Investors are down significantly and not likely to pariticipate in more of these sales. It spent billions on Deribit, yet hasn’t really done well in the derivatives market. It isn’t competitive. There has also been constant data breaches and customer service issues since inception that have reached meme status due to the severity and frequency. In the past few months alone, Coinbase is buying multiple very simple to create point solutions like Liquifi, Spindl, Roam, Iron Fish and Opyn. Nobody can possibly integrate all of this so quickly. Like what do people do at Coinbase? It should actually be able to build these things itself. I’m counting 30 recent acquisitions in total. Which is crazy. I’m not sure we’ve seen any company do this many acquisitions so quickly. Its Base Protocol is being run by a nutcase (also probably a nice guy) that crypto people seem to vehemently despise due to his provacative candoe. Tokenizing every post. It’s insanity and has only financially hurt users that have participated. Today it announced another acquisition. This time of a prediction market. Only days after launching its Kalshi backed prediction market platform. As a tech investor I know that there’s serious costs to all these pivots. Meanwhile the core exchange business (in a market where fees are in terminal decline) is still most of the revenues and it’s busy creating DEX products with lower and even no fees to compete against itself. Puzzling really. Not great for shareholders. And its custody business it invested so heavily in is commoditized and will face margin pressures as well. I don’t see too many bright lights here from the business that still makes up most of its earnings and pays for all this experimentation. Coinbase has just gotten very lucky with the recent bull market and being in the right place at the right time with regulatory benefits of Binance and other exchanges not being able to operate effectively in the US. But if you recall in 2023, when transaction volumes fell, the stock quickly lost 90% of its value. It rebounded not due to operational excellence, but simply a fomo market where it was impossible for it to not make money. Being in the right place at the right time isn’t a sustainable business model however. And while I feel Armstrong is a gifted crypto (and tech) visionary, he really needs to turn the reigns over to somebody more operationally focused. Otherwise I fear that Coinbase is going to just blow up (in a bad way) in the next few years. You simply cannot make this many bad decisions without any real wins and expect to prosper in typical market conditions. Let alone in bad market conditions.

We have zero tolerance for bad behavior and will continue to work with law enforcement to bring bad actors to justice. Thanks to the Hyderabad Police in India, an ex-Coinbase customer service agent was just arrested. Another one down and more still to come.

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