Welcome everybody to our Reddit AMA for the Coinbase Direct Listing. We wanted to make sure that we took some time to engage with every type of investor out there, not just traditional investors that we would meet with on a roadshow, institutional investors, but also anybody who wants to participate on Reddit in more of an open forum. This is part of our ethos about the direct listing and the open financial system, which is part of Coinbase's mission. I'm joined here today by Alesia Haas, the CFO for Coinbase, who's been a major force behind the scenes helping this direct listing come to light. I just wanna mention that we were thrilled by the number of questions on Reddit. We had over 1,300 questions submitted. We're not gonna be able to get to all of them today, obviously, just due to time constraints, and some of them we aren't allowed to answer due to regulations. We're gonna do our best to get through as many as we can. Alesia, anything you wanna add? I just wanna say I am delighted to be here, and I'm so excited. I was looking forward to this call all week. I really appreciate everyone who's read our S-1, spent time on Reddit submitting a question or upvoting, and we will be answering the most upvoted questions, and happy to kick that off and dive right in. Should I start with question one, Brian? Awesome. Let's do it. All right. Question one, top voted question from Zap Fifty-four: What is the Coinbase criteria for adding altcoins to be exchanged on the platform? Maybe I'll kick it off with couple thoughts and then Brian, please jump in here. First of all, we look to be the platform that lists all of our assets that the customers would like to trade in, assuming that they're legal, assuming that we feel good about the security and that they are compliant. Those are the criteria. We recently launched a product called Asset Hub, where issuers have the opportunity to submit a request to be listed on Coinbase. There are so many assets that are seeking to be listed that we would like to be in a position to list all of them, but it does take a little bit of time. We evaluate it for security, for legal reasons, and for compliance reasons. After we get through this process and rate it, we then have a process to list it with our engineers and get it integrated for our clients. Hope to be doing more of this, hope to be launching more quickly, but it is a very complex process in that we go through a lot of checks and balances to make sure we're protecting our customers and offering the best assets that we can. All right, let's move on to question two. Would we be able to buy Coinbase stock on Coinbase? This is from Fantastic Seat 5290. Alesia, what do you think? Gosh, I wanna say yes, but the answer is no. We are listing a stock on the Nasdaq Global Market platform. It's a traditional security. Coinbase is a crypto-only platform where we only list security tokens. Unfortunately, the stock that we are offering will not be available on Coinbase. We have a later question that talks about maybe doing a security token. I'm gonna hold further thoughts until we get to that question. All right. Question three: What would you say is Coinbase's biggest existential threat, i.e., the one that most concerns you? Thank you, Lotus Mode, for this question. Brian, I think you should share your what keeps you up at night. Absolutely. A couple things come to mind. One is our policy efforts and our engagement with government and regulators. I think luckily, there's a lot of people out there that are very excited about crypto and government, and they're very excited about the opportunity this can bring to people all over the world, not just in the United States. There's still a lot of education to do. We encounter a lot of misunderstanding out there. There's still a huge gap in understanding about what is crypto? What are the risks of it? What is the potential of it? Of course, we need to be out there talking to people about, hey, this is a really powerful new technology, just kind of like the internet, when it got started in the U.S., and it helped build some really amazing companies that brought a lot of benefits to the population and GDP growth and job creation and everything like that. We need to keep doing a lot of that education and advocacy work. I'd say a second one that's that's big, we always wanna keep cybersecurity top of mind. Coinbase has done a really awesome job over the years of securing customer funds, and we keep the vast majority of it, about 99%, actually entirely stored offline in cold storage, and we split up keys and distribute it geographically in a way that's, you know, helps me sleep well at night. Of course, the funds we do keep live on the server to service the day-to-day flow of funds. We've got a cybercrime insurance policy against that. There's a lot of things that have helped me, but it doesn't mean that cybersecurity is not a big threat we have to keep in mind all the time. I guess the third one, the last one I would say is, you know, I just wanna make sure that we continue to be an innovative company that continue to move quickly, especially as we become a public company. This industry, the cryptocurrency industry, is just so new and it's evolving so quickly that we gotta make sure that we don't get to a certain size where we start to slow down or become complacent. This is just getting started, and we've got to continue to innovate. Those are a few of the things I like to think about. I think those are right. That's what we talk about internally all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Let's go to question four. All right. Is Coinbase planning on doing any of the following? Maybe we can take these one at a time and just break it up. It's a longer question. This is from DCP ROG 1. Number one, are we planning on providing any sort of early preferential access to shares for Coinbase customers similar to the Fundrise IPO model? Alesia, what do you think? We're doing a direct listing. A direct listing enables all investors, institutions, retail investors, anyone in between, to participate in our opening order on the Nasdaq platform. It does not have any preferential treatment, so nobody is getting an allocation. There's no opportunity to invest in the company at this time prior to that direct listing. Absolutely, yeah. Okay, are we planning on offering direct access of purchasing Coinbase via the application natively? I guess that means inside the Coinbase app itself. This kind of touches on that prior question. Yeah. I think we should share a little bit of the history here, don't you think, Brian? Yeah, let's do it. Should we talk about how we ended up with a direct listing? All right. When Coinbase decided to go public, we thought it was an opportunity to provide more transparency into crypto. Crypto has matured to a point where we wanted to be able to share with all investors and all the public actually how far the industry has come, and we thought one way we could do that was by going public. Once we made that decision, we had to decide how we would go public, and there's many routes a company can go public today. You can do a traditional IPO. You can do a direct listing. You could probably see in the headlines that many people are going public via SPAC, which is a special purpose acquisition company. We looked really creatively, could we do something on the blockchain? Could we do a security token? As we evaluated those options, what we came to with the security token was the infrastructure is not quite there, that we didn't have the opportunity for all investors. Many institutional investors can't participate in security tokens, and we didn't have enough broker-dealers that could trade it to provide liquidity to the market. We, Coinbase, didn't have the right licenses or the right foundation to be able to offer that. It was really important that we were able to offer a security token that was native to crypto and could be treated like an ERC-20, could be used in DeFi, and have all of the features of crypto that we all have come to love. Until we can offer something that we feel like meets the customer or investor, in this case, experience that we want it to have, we've found that we couldn't pursue that at this time. We are pursuing the direct listing, as I just shared, and we believe that that takes a step forward to meeting our mission as the open financial system because everyone can participate in our direct listing, and it creates the transparency that we're hoping to bring to Coinbase. Hopefully someday soon, we are going to make the right investments and get the right licenses and build the ecosystem that we want, that there can be security tokens, maybe on Coinbase, but maybe on other companies. Yeah, well said. I think, you know, we wanna make this available and hopefully not just for Coinbase, but any crypto company in the future that wants to create a security token, raise money, build their cap table, eventually go public that way. I think there's companies in the future that will go public that way, hopefully we can help build some of that infrastructure in the future. It wasn't quite here yet today. I guess the third part of this question is about, you know, are we planning to airdrop any Coinbase shares to loyal customers over the last few years, similar to the ICO model? I mean, I think having a security token would've made that easier, we unfortunately weren't able to do that in this case. Then, yeah, this last part, it says, "Question number three seems critical to me in effectively asking how Coinbase is changing the dynamic of cryptocurrency investing and the ownership model versus a traditional legacy IPO. Why build a centralized exchange in a legacy model and issue public equity for a company that has been critical in changing the world of finance? Depending on legality and feasibility, it seems like the right thing to consider and do for the millions of customers who took a massive risk on the industry and have been long-time investors in your platform. Thank you." Yeah, we, I think we sort of touched on this already, but look, we agree with you. I think the future is what you're describing, and it's the same thing that we're thinking about in our head. There's a path to get there, and it involves a regulatory licensing challenge there that's not in addition to some of the technology pieces. I think really it fits squarely into the mission of the company to help build that in the future, and unfortunately, we weren't ready today to do it with the direct listing, and we didn't wanna delay things further. Sounds like we're thinking about the same things at least. All right, question five: "The fees on regular Coinbase versus Coinbase Pro are one of the worst-kept secrets on all of the exchanges. Are there any plans to merge the platforms or reduce the fees on Coinbase?" Then lastly, there's just a part that says, "Having two platforms is odd, especially going into the public listing where the fee discrepancy will get talked about even more." Thank you, Dizanne, for this question. Brian, do you wanna talk a little bit about our philosophy here and the product roadmap? Sure. The question is exactly right. We have a couple different products at Coinbase, and we did that as part of our culture of repeatable innovation. We wanted to keep building more and more pieces of the crypto e-economy infrastructure. One of those turned out to be Coinbase Pro, and it had different fee structure. You're right, it's not a very well-kept secret. We're trying to advertise that, in fact. If people wanna go do more professional trading, they can, you know, they can get different fees there. I think the answer to your question is yes, you'll see these things be better integrated over time. I think there's a blurry line between people who come into crypto, and they just wanna buy their first $50 - $100 of Bitcoin, to someone who becomes a more professional trader or even, like, a semi-professional trader. There's a kind of a gradient here of different users, and we are working to better integrate those in one product. And by the way, there'll be a gradient of pricing tiers as well, right? If you're buying a relatively small amount of crypto, the price as a percentage might be less than if you're buying millions or, you know, even hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto. You'll see better integration of those over time, and it's a great question. All right. What were the design decisions behind launching independent app services like Coinbase Pro, and Wallet instead of having a unified all-in-one experience from B Dangles? I guess similar to the last question. Yeah, this was an interesting one if you look back at Coinbase's history. You know, you can try to basically build everything into one product. Some people call this, you know, like you can have a monolith, or people even talk about having shared services like in a matrix organization. Early on, we decided to kind of split up and try a lot of different ideas, and those teams were operating pretty independently. I think that created some wins in the sense that, for instance, Coinbase Wallet has a totally different architecture that's based on self-custody. That would've been really hard to do in an all-in-one experience. It also created some confusion, like the prior question noted about Coinbase and Coinbase Pro, and there's people who kind of wanna move between these products, but they're not super well integrated. I think there's a trade-off there between, like, speed of execution and how much creativity you get and kind of the customer experience. Over time, you'll see us merging some of those that make sense, like some of the Pro trading experience into the main retail app, et cetera. That's what it was. It was a trade-off we made around how do we create more products? How do we be innovative? How do we make sure we're building what our customers want? All right, let's move on to question seven. Question 7: "When can us normal folk finally buy shares? Thank you, Be Resourceful." All right. We filed our preliminary prospectus. We are in the process of educating investors, and we hope that it is going to be in the relatively near future that you can buy shares, but we don't have an exact date to share with you yet. Please visit our IR site, which is investor.coinbase.com, and we will post updates there, as well as you can log on to the SEC website, and there'll be updates posted there as well. Sounds good. All right, question eight. What needs to happen for full integration of crypto payments into internet services? Are there cryptocurrencies around at the moment that you think could do that, or are we still waiting for a scalable solution? Are CBDCs, central bank digital currencies, going to serve that purpose? What part will Coinbase play in the internet of value? This is from Sojourner 8293. Okay, what needs to happen for full integration of crypto payments into internet services? I think there's a few things. You touched on one of them. Scalability is a really important part of that. I think, if you look at how many transactions per second can happen on the Bitcoin network or the Ethereum network, it's still several orders of magnitude below what you're seeing in, say, the PayPal or Visa networks right now. For this to be a truly global, you know, platform for people to do every kind of payment out there, we need to get this, the blockchains to be on the order of at least 5,000 transactions per second, something like that. Ideally, it could be even more. It would probably enable even more use cases like building social media apps and all kinds of things. Now, of course, that can happen on Layer 2, or it could happen on Layer 1. There's a lot of innovation happening here. I'm not sure we need necessarily new cryptocurrencies, but we do need scalability solutions. There's a bunch of those with Lightning Network on Bitcoin and Optimistic Rollup on Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0. Of course, there's a whole suite of other next-generation blockchains, you know, Dfinity, Polkadot, Cosmos, Algorand. There's so many great ones coming out and great teams working on this that EOS, they're trying to all work on scalability. Scalability is one of the big first ones that'll get this working and integrated into all internet services. I think the other two that I think about, the second one is probably usability. We need a way for people to be able to send to a human-readable name like Brian at Coinbase instead of to a machine-readable name like a random crypto address, which looks like a random string of characters. To make another internet analogy, well, you know, the scalability is kind of like us going from dial-up to broadband. The usability, the naming piece would be like us going from IP addresses to DNS, right? It's kind of mirroring the usability and scalability of the internet in some ways. Lastly, I would say privacy, right? The internet had to do this, too. We had to move from HTTP to HTTPS, get that little lock in your browser icon. Not everybody wants to be doing transactions on a public ledger. I think privacy coins are actually an important thing that more and more people are gonna want in the future. These features, you know, we need to get the blockchain scalable, more usable and the privacy features people want, and I think that'll get integrated into all these internet services. Central bank digital currencies, which are mentioned here, I think that's an important trend as well. You know, obviously, I'm more excited about the decentralized global cryptocurrencies and the innovation that that can unlock, I think central bank digital currencies are gonna be really big as well, pretty much every major government out there is starting to think about how they're gonna build them. You know, at Coinbase, we're cryptocurrency agnostic, we're gonna support any cryptocurrency, including CBDCs and stablecoins and even decentralized ones like Dai as long as they meet our listing standards. I guess in terms of what part Coinbase will play in the internet of value, we think of ourselves as the primary financial account that people have in the crypto economy or the internet of value. They're likely gonna, you know, store their crypto with us, or if they're using one of our self-custody options, they're gonna store it themselves, but through our product. They can use that to access the whole suite of products and services out there in the crypto economy, which is gonna be great. I think that'll bring a lot of economic freedom to the world. All right. Let's go to question nine. All right, question nine. How high do you see the business risk for Coinbase decentralized exchanges, DEX? What do we think of DEX is the first one? DEXs have shown tremendous traction since the DeFi summer. Is this something causing you sleepless nights? Will they vanish, or are you planning to move into that space as well? There's an additional question: What do you see as your major USP in comparison to DEXs? Thank you, Lou_dog. All right, Brian, do you wanna start and talk about DEX exchanges versus our centralized exchange, and I can add on? Yeah, sure. Decentralized exchanges, like Uniswap and others, have gotten a lot of traction lately. You know, frankly, we are thrilled about that. We wanna see more and more adoption of crypto out there. The question is correct, which is that it does compete with one of our products. We run a centralized exchange. These are decentralized exchanges. You know, we have many different products, we're gonna basically try to make it easy for our customers to access all the different things they might wanna do with crypto, whether it's one of our products or not. One of the things that we've built in the Coinbase Prime product, is that it has a smart order router that guarantees kind of best pricing. What that means is that if a customer comes in and says, "I wanna convert this asset into this one," we can actually go out and connect to a number of different exchanges to get them the best pricing, even splitting up that order into a bunch of pieces. Those exchanges could be Coinbase Exchange, but it certainly doesn't have to be. It could be any other exchange, and in the future, it could be a decentralized exchange. We kinda wanna roll those all up and maybe even abstract that, so from the customer's point of view, they don't always care. Now, we would love to also, by the way, provide direct access to the decentralized exchanges, and we do that already today on Coinbase Wallet. You can imagine us making it easy to access decentralized exchanges and every other kind of decentralized app, by the way, there's thousands of them out there now, through our main retail product. The way I think about this is, whether we built it or not, we want people to be able to access it. It's like, you know, Amazon in the early days, Jeff Bezos thought, "Hey, why don't we allow third-party sellers to put their products on there as well?" You know, people thought he was crazy. Why would we put a competitor's product right next to our own? He realized that, well, we wanna create value for our customers, and in the long run, that's what's gonna make us a valuable company. We always try to think about what does the customer want and give them that, not what does Coinbase want. All right. "What is Coinbase's stance on NFTs?" Does the company have interest in incorporating them in the business model? This is from Logical Stop. Well, I'll start it off. You know, NFTs are having a moment right now. It's pretty exciting, the amount of activity going on. You know, like I said previously, we wanna make it easy for our customers to access every kind of crypto product out there, again, whether it's ours or others, and that shouldn't matter. Yes, we would like to provide our customers easier access to NFTs. People can do this already today, again, through Coinbase Wallet, which is our self-custody wallet. It's kind of a bit easier to integrate those, and people are already storing NFTs. They've been doing it for, you know, at least couple of years through Coinbase Wallet. We wanna make it even easier in the main app, now that it's started to take off and get real traction, and people are starting to understand it better. NFTs are exciting, and I think there's just gonna be more and more trends like this in crypto. Probably every three or six months, there'll be some new thing like this that we need to make sure people can get easier access to. Alesia, anything you wanna add? I think it just brings us back to the concerns about our existential threat. Like, we are very focused on supporting where our customers wanna go and look forward to supporting NFTs in the future. Yeah. I mean, one of our product strategies, we always try to think about how do we make products that are the most trusted and the easiest to use. Today, NFTs are getting a lot of adoption, but it's still so many clicks. I think I tried it, you know, a week or so ago. It was, like, 25 clicks or something to go figure out for someone how to buy an NFT. It's so difficult. You know, I feel like if we could make that down to five clicks or something like that, we could probably broaden the number of people using these things by an order of magnitude. Hopefully we can help do that. Question 11: " Hi, Brian and Alesia. I think this is a unique, and dare I say, courageous way to reach out to retail. Hopefully, more teams will follow your lead. I've been a Coinbase user for four years now, and my experience was extremely positive until last month when I had to re-raise a support request, which hasn't been resolved yet. I was an advocate of Coinbase before the incident, and now I'm at a point where I wouldn't recommend Coinbase. My problem is with the fully hands-off-the-wheel support strategy, where there is no way for customers to access support specialists. In a world with extreme volatility, it is important that customers are able to resolve issues in a timely manner. It almost feels like Coinbase wants customer support to hide behind layers of ineffective automated workflows. For other next-gen tech companies, this hands-off-the-wheel customer support might make sense, but I'm not so sure about fintech companies, especially for a company with a 12-digit valuation. Which brings me to my question: Is there a vision to make Coinbase support more accessible and customer-friendly? If so, what sort of investment is Coinbase making for the same? What are the goals, and when can we issue a resolution SLA of less than two days? Thanks in advance for your time and response. PS, emulating Amazon customer support by asking one simple question, 'Do we solve your problem?' doesn't necessarily mean your customer support has high standards. Customer obsession needs to be part of the company's DNA, which doesn't seem to be the case at Coinbase." Thank you, ReversedEngineer24. This is a really important question. I'm glad you raised it. Brian, do you wanna take the first stab at this? Yeah, sure. Thanks again for the question, and just wanted to apologize off the bat that you're not having a good experience recently. You know, I'm not surprised. There is a run-up in the price of crypto and just the general awareness of it recently, which is affecting this. Before I maybe share some context on it and what we're gonna do about it, just wanted to acknowledge that we agree with your philosophy that in fintech, when you're storing people's money, people need to be able to get access to a real human being to solve issues. It can't be completely automated, and the SLA needs to be something reasonable, which, you know, just wanted to mention that we agree with the philosophy. I think some context on maybe why you're having a slightly different experience recently, unsurprisingly, the number of people, you know, reading about crypto and signing up for Coinbase has jumped dramatically. Just probably three, four months ago, we were getting about 25,000 customer support inquiries a week, and within, say, four weeks, it jumped to 100,000 or more. You can imagine that's a pretty unprecedented jump that traditionally companies maybe would only see if you're in e-commerce, you might see that at the holiday season or something, but that's a predictable thing that you can build capacity planning for. In our case, we can't really tell when these crypto cycles are gonna happen. When we saw it start to happen, we started to invest more in customer support, and we've since the beginning of really this run-up, we've quadrupled our capacity. We've brought on at least 600 or more customer support agents this year alone. Actually the number we've brought on this year is more than the entire size of the customer support team prior to 2021. You can imagine it takes a long time to both hire those people and also train them so that they can be really effective in helping customers. You are seeing some automation and things like that, but we never wanna prevent customers from contacting somebody. Hopefully we will earn your trust back as we build up that capacity and respond to this most recent crypto cycle. Thank you for the question. Thank you. I just wanna add, in addition to hiring new customer support agents, we're also making investments on the product side to reduce the friction that we see a lot of customers call in and offer complaints about. We're trying to solve it in many ways, one, at the product side, two, by more thoughtfully addressing the call queue so that you're getting a trained agent who knows how to answer your question, and then adding capacity. It is a top-of-mind issue that we continue to invest in every single week. All right, question number 12: "Will we soon see that debit card? Will it still offer XLM rewards?" This is from J-O-I-S-I-L, Joisil. I'm not sure how you say it. This is a great question. We have a Coinbase debit card, for those of you who don't know. It's been out in the U.K. for a while, and we've offered it up on a wait list in the U.S. Yes, you will see it soon. There's been a large amount of demand and a lot of printing and creation of those cards. Yes, it will still offer rewards, like we talked about in the blog post when we launched it, for Stellar, XLM, and, you know, I think it was at 4% that we talked about. Hopefully you'll be seeing those ship out soon. Thanks for the question. This is one of my favorites. "Why is Satoshi Nakamoto's address included on the prospectus Form S-1? Thank you, Nah, not buying it." This was such a big moment for crypto, in addition to Coinbase, us being the first, hopefully, publicly listed crypto company, and we wanted to make a nod to the initial founder of this entire crypto economy. This is a homage, a nod to Satoshi for opening up the door and enabling our success. Absolutely. Thank you, Satoshi. Whoever, you know, he, she, or they are, it's helped create this whole industry and certainly been We stood on the shoulders of giants, you might say, building Coinbase. None of this would've been possible without that computer science breakthrough. Thank you. All right, question 14. "Dogecoin or cat?" From Adabaed. I mean, Are you a dog or cat person or a Dogecoin or cat person, Alesia? I think I'd have to go with Dogecoin. Actually, I'm probably a Dogecoin person too, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes. All right, question 15. How secure is my Bitcoin? 99% is in cold storage. Is that a hardware wallet in Mr. Armstrong's pocket? Would a mugger have access to $ 1 billions in Bitcoin? Specifics would be nice, although I understand specifics can compromise security. What is the specifics on the insured Bitcoin, not FDIC cash balances? Will a percent be returned to me in case of compromised cold storage Bitcoin? This is from Ernesto Alexander. All right, Brian, is it in your hardware wallet in your pocket? Luckily, no. Thanks for the question, Ernesto. You know, security is one of those really challenging things to get right in cryptocurrency. Obviously, some people are choosing to trust Coinbase by asking us to store their crypto for them. And then we also offer a self-custody product, Coinbase Wallet, for people who wanna store it themselves and take more of that responsibility. I think both are good options. For the people who we're storing their crypto on their behalf, there's a ton of work we've put into the security of that crypto. The 99% that's in cold storage, you know, I'll just tell you, I do not personally have access to it. It is something that we have gotten some intellectual property, some patents around how we store cryptocurrency securely offline, and we split up keys. We use consensus mechanisms that are in hardware security modules that are distributed in geographically data centers around the world. I'll keep it as high level as that. You know, having a consensus layer like that is really important 'cause it means, first of all, there's no one or two or three, a small group of people who can run off with funds. It also means that you can lose some of the pieces and not lose, obviously, the key. People, you know, pieces of these things can be lost periodically. Natural disasters happen and all kinds of crazy situations that we run drills and kind of test against. That's the cold storage piece. We do keep about 1% of the funds live on the server to serve day-to-day flow of funds, and that's what we call our hot wallet. We hold a cybercrime insurance policy on the amount that exceeds the amount in the hot wallet. That gives us some comfort, obviously. You know, we work really hard to make sure that that hot wallet is secure as well. We don't wanna lose it just 'cause there's insurance there. We run a lot of, say, penetration testing, for instance. We have third-party firms come try to break into that and tell us about, you know, how far they got or how close they got. There's many layers to that security, so that, ideally, you know, even if a small amount could be lost, like a bank teller might have an issue, but the majority of the funds are not lost. There's a lot of work we put into that. Alesia, yeah, anything you wanna add here? I just wanted to share that there was a really nice article in Wired about our cold storage technology that I would point you to, Ernesto, to read a little bit more, where we do give a little bit more specificity to what we do to protect these assets. Awesome. All right. Let's go to question 16. "Coinbase isn't the only place to buy Bitcoin. Why do you think people use Coinbase over other platforms? Who are your biggest competitors?" This is from Dean Chukka. All right, I'll start off. Yeah, I mean, luckily, Coinbase is not the only place to buy crypto. We want crypto to be integrated into the traditional financial system all over the world and just get it in the hands of everybody all over the world. Coinbase is just one company. We can't do that. That's kind of the power of crypto, is that it is this open standard and open platform. We want there to be thousands of companies around the world integrating with crypto. Now, why would they use Coinbase over other platforms? Two of the things that we try to do really well and focus on are trust and ease of use. Trust can come from a variety of things. It can come from cybersecurity. It can come from, you know, regulatory compliance, which by the way, allows us to not only just stay in business, but connect, you know, convenient payment methods that people wanna put in there. Trust can come from great design. It can come from doing what we say we're gonna do. It can come from, you know, being a public company even creates a lot of trust 'cause there's a lot of standards and things we need to have in place to be a public company. The other one is ease of use, right? I like to think that crypto still is pretty hard to use on average, I would say, for the average person. I mean, I think about that a lot. How do we get the next 100 million or 1 billion people using crypto so we can make a true global crypto economy, you know, we need to make it even simpler, right? The average person doesn't know how electricity works, but they can still flip on a light switch, or they don't know how TCP/IP works, but they can still use an internet browser or their cell phone. I think in the future, we need to get it so easy that people, they're just doing what they wanna do in their life. They don't even necessarily need to know that it's cryptocurrency happening underneath. They're just getting done whatever they need to get done, whether that's earning a living or paying for the things in their life or helping launch their company and basically all the things that economic freedom, you know, is enabled by crypto. We have a number of competitors out there across all the different products where we operate, 'cause of course, Coinbase is we're a retail, you know, app where people have their primary financial account. We have an exchange underneath that. We have a custodian under that. We have an institutional business. We also have a commerce merchant payments business. We have competitors in each of these categories, so I won't name any of them specifically, but I think the general way you can think about how the competitive landscape is that, you know, there's some other more traditional fintech and financial players out there that are starting to do stuff with crypto, and that's great, but they're not 100% focused on crypto. We often have more features, more assets, things that people wanna do. Even if they get introduced to crypto through one of those other platforms, they then often will also open a Coinbase account to be able to do the next thing they wanna do in crypto or buy that other asset or do some other use case. We also have competitors that are pure crypto companies like us, but they're not always following a regulated approach. They're able to do some things we aren't and move quickly. You know, we wanna make sure we're following the law. We think that that's a good thing for the long term of this industry, we don't wanna get any enforcement actions or anything like that that'll set us back. Generally, that's our approach. We're 100% focused on crypto, we are following a trusted, regulated approach, trying to make crypto easy to use. All right. "Coinbase plays the role of both broker, executing trades on behalf of clients, as well as an exchange, matching buyers and sellers. This is a unique situation. In other markets, i.e. equities, a broker would be required to be legally independent of an exchange. Could you talk about how Coinbase operates as both a broker and an exchange? It seems like there are some conflicts of interest in the current situation." This is from Tidewater, Virginia. Thank you so much for this question. It's true. On our retail side, we operate a full broker that includes the retail brokerage piece as well as custody embedded in that retail trading experience. On the institutional side, we operate an exchange, a broker, and then a custodian. What I think is important about the Coinbase business model is that we have set up our business such that there's not a conflict. We do not proprietarily trade against our clients. What this means is that we're only executing orders on our customer's behalf and seeking for the best execution on those customers' orders. When an institutional customer engages with our broker, for example, we're routing that order across multiple liquidity venues, many trades on our own exchange, but oftentimes that it trades outside of Coinbase as well, wherever the best price may be for that customer. In doing this, it is an agent-only model. There is no conflict of interest for us operating both the exchange and the broker because we are ensuring that we're acting in our client's best interest at every point in the transaction. Brian, is there anything you'd like to add to that? No, I thought that was great. All right. Let's move on to question 18. Would Coinbase consider adding a product to the mobile app to allow users to spend their crypto? An example would be the Gemini Pay feature from the Gemini app. I am sure the backend they used, powered by Flexa, can be easily integrated into your application. Okay. This is from Crypto Bub. Yes. We certainly allow people to spend their crypto today in the app. We have a number of people doing peer-to-peer payments and paying merchants for goods and services with crypto. We wanna make that even simpler to use in the future. I think there's a lot of things that need to start working better there in terms of, you know, you can imagine, like, speed of confirmation times and things like that matter a lot for commerce because you don't wanna be sitting there a long time waiting for something to confirm. There's all kinds of solutions that can go into place for that, and we wanna keep making payments even easier, but you can already do it today and many people are. Question 19: "Will you change the CFO title to Master of Coin? Makes sense for a company named Coinbase." Thank you, Jivy from Two. Coinbase innovates in many ways, but we are not innovating on titles today, and even if we were, I don't really consider myself a master of anything, so probably not is the answer. Yeah. We, we threw a couple of fun things in the S-1, like the homage to Satoshi and whatnot, but gotta hand it to Tesla on that one. That was pretty funny. All right. Should we move on to the next question? "Hi, Brian. A few years ago, 2017, Coinbase had a hackathon for the then-named Toshi Browser, which of course later became Coinbase Wallet. I made a Chinese language learning app and won a few Eth for it. I just wanted to drop by and say thank you for that. It ended up paying for my master's degree, and it really transformed my life. I'm really grateful to you for that. I am still here poking around with Ethereum, writing code, generally having fun watching the white papers of the past become reality. It's all pretty wild. As it is an AMA, what is the silliest thing you've done in crypto recently? Mine would be mia.bet." This is from Isaac SI. Well, cool. First of all, that's really cool to hear. I'm glad that you were able to make such good use of the Eth that you got, and it's cool that you're continuing to write code and help build this industry, which is kind of what this is all about. There's so many cool companies and products and ideas being built. It feels like kind of like a golden age or something of innovation right now in financial services with all the stuff that's happening. In terms of the silliest thing that I've done in crypto recently, I mean, one thing is that there was a musician who I met who gave me some kind of free lessons on how to do music composition, and we worked on this song together. To be clear, they did all the hard work, and I just tried to, you know, not sound silly. Anyway, they're gonna be putting out an NFT of the song, and so I'm trying to figure out how to help them with that. That's one funny thing. By the way, I checked out your website here, mia.bet. If I understand it correctly, you have hooked up hamsters to create a randomized marble game that gets encoded in the blockchain. If I have that correct, let me know. It looks like a pretty cool project. You know, we wanna keep hiring people like you at Coinbase that are helping build cool stuff. For you or anybody else out there, please check out our site if you're thinking about doing something in the crypto space. All right, before we wrap up, I just wanted to take a minute to address couple of other themes that we saw in the questions. There was a number of individual questions that we saw that sort of were tied to some of these. One of them was around site reliability, and we've had some downtime recently. What are we doing to make sure that the site stays up, especially during periods where the price of crypto or some individual crypto is moving? I think this is a really important question, and similar to what I mentioned previously with how we're scaling customer support during this kind of unprecedented period of the price run-up. We're also taking a lot of effort to scale our engineering resources, our architecture of our site to ensure that it can handle these entirely new, high levels of volume that are coming in. There's a lot of work that goes into something like that, and I'll try not to get into make it too technical, but two concepts. You know, there's a concept of horizontal scalability in our architecture, and some of our components today are already built with that, but not all of them. If you have a single point of failure, then things can tip over. We're addressing that throughout every system that we have. We also, you know, we're looking into models in the future, things like active-active models, active-passive models, if you wanna look into that. It's basically a way to have all of your traffic fail over to a copy of your infrastructure in the event something goes wrong. The last thing I'll mention is that we did, in this period of this run-up, we called what's called a code red internally, which means that we tapped everybody in the company that we needed and said, "Drop what you're doing. You're gonna come work on scalability right now." We've had incredible progress there by repeatedly testing the site with a testing framework that sends, you know, basically new levels of traffic and see where the bottlenecks are. Go fix the bottleneck, then send even more traffic. Fix the next bottleneck. It's been kind of all hands on deck, I want to just say a big shout-out to the team inside Coinbase that are working on that to get our scalability to the next order of magnitude and beyond, 'cause this industry is just getting started. The second question that I just wanted to address that we saw bits and pieces of, we saw various people ask about certain assets. When are these going to be available on Coinbase? The answer is that, you know, we want to add every asset to Coinbase that meets our listing standard. I think there's going to be, you know, dozens of different blockchains we need to support, millions of different assets out there in the future. There's gonna be some crypto assets that are used for payments and medium of exchange, some that are used as security tokens and stablecoins, and some that are, you know, for NFTs and all these things that we can barely even imagine. There's gonna be millions and millions of tokens out there that we need to support over time, and it's one of our big focuses is accelerating the pace of asset addition. Those were some of the themes that we saw, and just wanted to address those proactively. All right, we're out of time. That's gonna be our final question. Just wanna say a big thank you to everybody who submitted questions and who's been following our progress and our direct listing. Many of you are out there helping make the crypto economy a reality, and you've been amazing customers at Coinbase and championing our support along the way. Not that long ago, we were a tiny little startup with a crazy idea, and here we are getting ready to go public. It's a pretty incredible journey, and we couldn't have done it without all of our customers, all the hard work of the employees at Coinbase, our incredible board, our investors. It took a huge group of people to come together, and hopefully, we've helped accelerate progress in this industry and helped bring cryptocurrency to millions of people around the world. For more updates, you can check out our investor website, investor.coinbase.com. Just wanted to say a big thank you to everybody, and have a great week. Alesia, anything you wanna finalize with? I echo all of that. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Bye.