Editor's Note: This article comes fromBlock beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)

Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)

, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

On March 24, Brian Armstrong, CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, and Alesia Haas, chief financial officer, conducted an online roadshow on the overseas forum Reddit.

Coinbase selected nearly 20 questions from more than 1,300 community users and answered them in detail. Questions covered Coinbase listing criteria, Coinbase product structure, views on the NFT market, and why Coinbase chose a direct listing.

Rhythm BlockBeats organized and translated Coinbase's reply as follows:

Brian Armstrong: Welcome to our Reddit Coinbase Listing AMA. We want to take the time to engage with all types of investors not just traditional investors we meet in our roadshows institutional investors but anyone who wants to participate can read us in an open forum reply. That's our philosophy of direct listings and an open financial system, which is part of Coinbase's mission.

Joining me today is Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase, the main force behind helping Coinbase go public. What I'm trying to say is that we're excited to see so many questions. In total, over 1300 questions were submitted. Due to time constraints, it is impossible for us to cover all of them today. There are also some questions that we cannot answer due to regulations, but we will do our best to answer as much as possible, at least some topics that you want to know.

Alesia Haas: I'm so happy to be here, I'm so excited. I've been looking forward to this reply all week. Many thanks to everyone who asked a question or voted, and we'll answer some of the questions with the most votes. Let's start with the first question.

Q1: What are the standards for listing coins on the platform?

Alesia Haas: First of all, we want to be a platform that can list all the assets that customers are willing to trade. We assume that they (assets) are legal, have good security and compatibility. These are the standards.

We value it (tokens) for security, legal and compliance reasons. After we go through that process and evaluate it, we have a process to lay it out with our engineers and integrate it for our customers. We'd like to do more in this area and hopefully launch faster, but it's a very complex process and we go through many checks and balances to make sure we protect our customers and deliver what we can best asset.

Brian Armstrong：

Supervision

Q2: Do you provide security tokens?

Q3: What is the biggest threat to Coinbase?

Safety

Supervision

There are still huge gaps in people's understanding of what a cryptocurrency is and what risks it entails. What is its potential? We'll have to talk to people. This is a very powerful new technology, just like the Internet. When it started in the U.S., it helped build some really great companies, did a lot of good for the population, grew GDP, created jobs, and more.

innovation

Safety

Second, we always put network security first, and Coinbase has done an excellent job of protecting customer funds over the years. We retain the vast majority of our data, about 99% of which is stored offline and in cold storage.

We separate the private keys and distribute them geographically so that I can sleep more soundly at night. Our funds are always stored on the server to serve the daily flow of funds. We already have networks requiring insurance. There are a lot of things that have helped me, but that doesn't mean cybersecurity isn't a big threat. We must always remember the importance of safety.

innovation

The third point, the last point I want to make is I want to make sure that we continue to be an innovative company. This will continue especially as we become a public company. The cryptocurrency industry is a new one, it's moving very fast, and we have to make sure we don't grow to a size where we start to slow down or become complacent. This is just the beginning and we must continue to innovate. These are the questions I want to think about.

Q4: Do you provide stock pre-emptive subscription rights to early Coinbase fund users?

Brian Armstrong: That's a long question, so we're breaking it up. Do we plan to offer some of the early Coinbase users stock rights like a fund?

We're doing a direct listing. A direct listing allows all investors, institutions, retail investors and anyone in between to participate in our opening order on the Nasdaq platform. It doesn't get any preferential treatment, so no one gets assigned.

Regarding the listing, when I had to go public with this, we saw it as an opportunity to provide more transparency to crypto. Cryptocurrencies have matured at this point, and we hope to be able to share the real progress of this industry with all investors and all the public. Once we've made that decision, we have to decide how to go public. There are many ways companies can go public these days: you can do a traditional IPO, or you can go public directly. Many are going public through special purpose acquisition companies.

We want to look creative. Can we do something on the blockchain? Can we do a security token? What we have to do when we evaluate these options is that the infrastructure of security tokens is not complete, and we have no way to invest in all opportunity. Many institutional investors cannot participate in security tokens. We don't have enough broker-dealers to trade and provide liquidity to the market. We at Coinbase do not have the right authority or the right foundation to provide these services.

As I just said, we're pursuing a direct listing. We believe this is a step towards fulfilling our mission as an open financial system, as everyone can participate in our direct listing. It creates all the transparency we want from Coinbase. Hopefully in the near future, we'll make the right investments, get the right licenses, build the ecosystem we want, maybe security tokens, maybe based on Coinbase or maybe based on other companies.

Yes. I think we want to make it available, hopefully not just for Coinbase, but for any future crypto companies that want to integrate security tokens, raise capital, build their own cap table, and eventually go public that way. I think there will be companies going public this way in the future. Hopefully we can help build some of this infrastructure in the future that doesn't exist yet.

Q4(1): Will you airdrop Coinbase shares to loyal users?

Brian Armstrong: Security tokens might make this easier. Unfortunately, we can't do that just yet in this case.

Q5: The fees of Coinbase and Coinbase Pro are different. Is there any plan to merge platforms or reduce Coinbase fees in the future?

Brian Armstrong: Some people say it's weird to have two platforms, especially when it goes public. I want to talk about our philosophy in the product roadmap.

Coinbase has many different products. We do this as part of our culture of repeatable innovation, and we want to keep building more and more crypto, economics, and infrastructure. One of them is Coinbase Pro, which has a different architecture.

In fact, if people want to do more professional transactions, they can feel different fees on different platforms. I think the answer to that question is that these things get better integrated over time. I think there's a blurry line between people who are getting into crypto and they're just looking to buy their first $5,000 of bitcoin, and these people become more professional traders, even semi-professional traders, There is a gradient between different users.

We are working on integrating them better into one product. So people can, by the way, also have a price gradient. If you buy a relatively small amount of cryptocurrency, the price percentage may be lower than if you buy millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency.

Q6: What are the design decisions behind the launch of independent application services? For example, Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, Coinbase Wallet, why not put them all in one APP?

Brian Armstrong: This question is very similar to the last one, if you look at the history of Coinbase, you can try to integrate everything into one product. Some people call it, you can have a behemoth or people even talk about sharing services in a matrix organization.

Early on, we decided to split up and try out different ideas, and these teams all operated independently. I think that creates some wins in the sense that, for example, Coinbase-based wallets have a completely different architecture based on self-custody, which would be very difficult. But it also created some confusion, like the aforementioned question about Coinbase and Coinbase PRO. Some people want to transfer money operations between these products, but they are not well integrated. So I think there's a tradeoff between speed of execution, creativity, and customer experience.

So then you'll see us put something meaningful, like some professional trading experience, into the main retail application.

Q7: When can ordinary people buy stocks?

Brian Armstrong: We filed a preliminary prospectus. We hope you'll be able to buy shares in the near future, but we don't have an exact date yet. Please visit our website, where we will post updates and you can also go to the SEC's website, where they will also post updates.

Q8: What will happen to fully integrate encrypted payments into Internet services? Do you think there are currently cryptocurrencies that can do this? Are we still waiting for a scalable solution?

Brian Armstrong: A CBDC Central Bank Digital Currency would serve this purpose. So, what needs to happen for the full integration of crypto payments and internet services? I think there are a few things. So you mentioned one of them, scalability. is a very important part of it. I think if you look at how many transactions per second the Bitcoin network can do, it's still orders of magnitude lower than what you can do. You can see PayPal or the Visa network, and in order to become a truly global platform where people can make all kinds of payments, we need to get this far. The blockchain has at least 5000 transactions per second, that's about it. Ideally, it might support more use cases like building, social media apps, and all sorts of things.

This can happen at Layer 2 or at Layer 1. There's a lot of innovation here, and I'm not sure we need new cryptocurrencies, but we do need solutions for scalability. So there are a bunch of lightning network and optimistic people about Bitcoin gathered on a theorem.

There are also new projects or next-generation blockchain teams, such as DFINITY, Polkadot, Cosmos, Alogrand, etc. There are many excellent teams working in this area, and they are trying to do all the work on scalability . Scalability is the first and most important thing that brings together all networking efforts.

I think the other two that came to mind might be usability. We probably need a way for people to be able to send a human readable name like Brian at Coinbase instead of a machine readable name like a random password address that looks like a random string to do another Internet analogy. Scalability is a bit like we went from dial-up to broadband. Availability of the naming part is like we go from IP address to DNS, which in a way reflects the availability and scalability of the Internet.

Finally, I would like to say that privacy, even on the Internet must be the same. We had to move from HTTP to httpsi to get that little lock in the browser icon. Not everyone wants to transact on a public ledger. I think privacy coins are an important thing that more and more people want in the future.

So these features, we need to make the blockchain scalable, more usable, and the privacy features that people want. Central bank digital currency, mentioned here. I think this is also an important trend. Obviously, I'm more excited about a decentralized global cryptocurrency and the innovations it can unlock, but I think central bank digital currencies will be a big deal as well. Almost every major government has started thinking about how to build them. So we will support any cryptocurrency, including central bank digital currencies, stable coins, and even decentralized currencies like DAI. As long as it meets our listing criteria. We think of us as the main financial account for people in the crypto economy or Internet of Value.

So they are likely to store the password with us. Or, if they use one of our self-hosted options, they store the data themselves, but through our product, they can use that data to access a whole suite of products and services in the cryptoeconomy, which would be great. I think it will bring more economic freedom to the world.

Q9: How high do you think the commercial risk of a decentralized currency trading platform is? How do you view DEX? DEXs have shown enormous traction since last summer. Does this give you sleepless nights? :) Will DEXs disappear? Or are you planning to enter the DEX space too?

Brian Armstrong: DEX, such as Uniswap, has recently received a lot of attention. Frankly, we're excited about it, it (DEX) does compete with one of our products. We run a centralized exchange, and these are decentralized exchanges, but we have a lot of different products, and we basically try to make it easier for our customers to access all the different things they might want to do with cryptocurrency, Whether it is one of our products or not. One of the things that we built into our main product is that it has a smart ordering router that guarantees the best price.

My thinking is, we want people to have access to it whether or not we built it. It's like Amazon in the early days, Jeff Basil thought, why don't we allow third-party sellers to put their products there too? People thought he was crazy. Why put a competitor's product next to our own? He realized we wanted to create value for our customers. This will make us a valuable company in the long run. So we always think about what customers want, what to give them, instead of just coming to Coinbase.

We want to make it easier for our customers to access all types of encrypted products, whether ours or someone else's. We want to provide our customers with a more convenient way to access NFT, and now Coinbase Wallet can already support NFT token storage. Maybe every 3 to 6 months, there will be some new content like this, and we need to make sure that any content you want to add is more accessible to people.

Q10: Coinbase's customer service support is very bad recently, and the questions I raised have not been resolved. For other next-gen tech companies, "hands-off" customer support might make sense. But I'm not so sure about a fintech company, especially one with a 12-figure valuation, which brings me to my question. Is there a vision when user support for these new generation of fintech companies is more accessible and customer friendly? If so, what kind of investment is Coinbase making? What is the goal?

Brian Armstrong: First of all I'm very sorry for what happened to you. I wonder why you have had some different experiences lately. Unsurprisingly, there has been a huge increase in the number of people reading about cryptocurrencies and signing up for Coinbase. Just 34 months ago, we were getting approximately 25,000 customer inquiries per week. Within 4 weeks, the number had ballooned to 100,000 or more. As you can imagine this is an unprecedented leap forward.

In fact, the volume we brought this year is larger than the scale of the entire customer service. As you can imagine, it takes a long time to hire these people and train them so they can be really effective in helping customers. So you're going to see some automation and stuff like that to prevent customers from contacting someone. So hopefully we'll earn your trust as we build this capability and respond to the recent crypto cycle.

I just wanted to add that in addition to hiring new customer support agents, we're also investing in product to reduce friction and we're seeing a lot of customers calling in with complaints or complaints. We try to solve this problem in many ways. One on the product side, two more careful handling of call prompts so you get well-trained agents who know how to answer your questions, and then increasing capacity. This is a top priority and we will continue to invest week in and week out.

Q11. Will Debit Card be launched later?

Brian Armstrong: In case you don't know, we have a debit card based on Coinbase. It's been out in the UK for a while now. We offer a weight list in the US Yes, you'll see that shortly. There is a huge demand for these cards and a lot of print creation.

Q12. Why is Satoshi Nakamoto's address mentioned in the prospectus form?

Brian Armstrong: As the first cryptocurrency company expected to go public, this is a big moment for Coinbase. We want to pay tribute to the original founders of the entire crypto economy. It was an endorsement of Satoshi that opened the door to our success.

Q13. Are my bitcoins safe?

Brian Armstrong: Security is one of the most challenging issues in cryptocurrencies. Obviously, some people choose to trust Coinbase to let us store cryptocurrency for them. And then we also offer a self-custody product, based on the Coinbase wallet, for those who want to store it themselves and take more responsibility. So I think both are great options for people who are storing cryptocurrencies on their behalf. We put a lot of effort into keeping our passwords secure. 99% of assets are in cold storage.

I can only tell you that I personally do not have access to it (bitcoins in cold storage). Here's some intellectual property and patterns we've acquired on how to securely store cryptocurrencies offline. We divided the private key. We use consensus mechanisms and hardware security modules, which are distributed in data centers around the world.

Then we will keep 1% of the funds on the server to provide services for the daily flow of funds, which is what we call a hot wallet.

Q14. Coinbase is not the only place to buy Bitcoin, why do you think people use Coinbase instead of other platforms? Who is your biggest competitor?

Brian Armstrong: Luckily, Coinbase isn't the only place you can buy cryptocurrencies. We hope that cryptocurrency can be integrated into the world's traditional financial system, so that people around the world can master it. Coinbase is just one of those companies. So we expect thousands of companies all over the world to integrate encryption. Why do users choose us? There are two things that we strive to do well and take very seriously, and that is trust and ease of use. Trust can come from many aspects of cybersecurity. It can come from compliance, which, by the way, allows us to not only continue to operate, but also to connect convenient payment methods that people want.

We also have a commercial payments business, and we have competitors in every area. I won't name any of them specifically, but I think you can think about how the playing field is in general, there are some other more traditional fintech and financial players starting to use cryptocurrencies. That's fine, but they're not 100% focused on encryption. So we generally have more features, more assets that people want to do. Even if they enter the crypto space through other platforms, they usually open a Coinbase account just in case.

We also have competitors that are pure crypto companies like us, but they don't always follow a regulated approach. They can do things we can't, and they move fast. But we want to make sure we are following the law. We think that's a good thing in the long run, and we don't want to do any enforcement or anything like that. This will waste our time. So, in general, that's how we're 100% focused on encryption, but we're following a trusted regulatory approach to trying to make encryption easy to use.

Q15: Can you talk about how Coinbase operates as both a broker and an exchange? There seems to be some conflict of interest in the current situation.

Alesia Haas: It's true. On our retail side, we operate a full brokerage, including retail brokerage, and custody embedded in the retail trading experience. On the institutional side, we trade middlemen and custodians. But I think the important thing about Coinbase's business model is that we've built that business. There is no conflict. We do not have proprietary trading for clients. This means that we only execute orders on behalf of our clients and seek the best possible execution for them.

Q16: Will Coinbase consider adding a product in the mobile app that allows users to spend cryptocurrencies? An example is the Gemini pay feature of the Gemini app.

Brian Armstrong: Yes, we now of course allow people to spend their cryptocurrencies within the app. Some of us do peer-to-peer payments, paying merchants for goods and services in cryptocurrency.

Q17: Would you change the title of CFO to Finance Master? Does that make sense for a company called Coinbase?