The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 59 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Armstrong: SEC settlement offer required delisting all cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin
“The settlement option on the table was to essentially delist everything other than Bitcoin, and so that would have been the end of the industry in the US.”
Armstrong: Undoing the GENIUS Act is a red line for Coinbase
“I think there's the bank trade groups, which I believe are trying to undo the genius act. Got it. It just got passed into law four months ago. And for us, that's a red line.”
Lonsdale: Coinbase and Winklevosses refuse to hire Gensler's SEC staff
“They won't even hire anyone who worked with Gary on any of this stuff they were doing.”
Chamath: Carvana is a bankruptcy risk, but Coinbase has a fortified balance sheet
“Now, one is probably, you know, a legitimate bankruptcy risk, which is Carvana. That's what the market would think. Whereas the other one, you know, I think it has a very fortified balance sheet and could weather the storm Coinbase.”
Chamath: Coinbase banning workplace political activism was a profound cultural milestone
“The substance of what Brian Armstrong did was incredibly profound, one of the most important things that actually happened in the last few years in Silicon Valley culture.”
Chamath: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was right to create an apolitical workplace
“I'll say this about Brian Armstrong. I have a lot of respect for him for making a stand. I think every CEO has that, right? And I'm glad that at the end of the day, the employees at Coinbase were given A humane way of making a decision to be on the same page w…”
Chamath: Brian Armstrong's Coinbase memo showed naivety and stupidity
“I think that he showed a lot of naivety and frankly, like you know, a little bit of stupidity, really. It was really poorly written and that's why it's been so misunderstood and misconstrued.”
Armstrong: All assets are coming on-chain for trading
“So anyway, we're long, I think that, yeah, the biggest trends are all assets are coming on chain for trading. Prediction markets are growing like crazy, and stablecoin payments are growing like crazy. Those are the, probably the three biggest trends in crypto …”
Armstrong: Companies will eventually go public entirely on-chain
“I think eventually, like, you'll actually just be able to go public totally on-chain too.”
Palihapitiya: Future direct listings will top tick on day one and drop
“I think that the Slack and Coinbase particularly will be the example going forward. You'll top tick day one, and then the thing will spear down, find a bottom”
Chamath: SEC loss in Ripple case handcuffs actions against crypto exchanges
“Yeah, and it really handcuffs the SEC. What are they going to do about Coinbase and every other exchange? I mean, if they're not selling securities, I think Coinbase and everybody else has always maintained they're selling tokens. This was the fulcrum argument…”
Calacanis: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong will move the company offshore
“So we don't have Brian Armstrong move his company to the Middle East or, ah, you know, an island in the Caribbean, which is what he's going to do, I predict.”
Gerstner: Coinbase reported stock-based compensation equal to 70% of revenue
“Coinbase, I think just reported SBC, which Hold your hat, Saks, was 70% of revenue. Not 70% of their earnings. 70% of their revenue.”
Armstrong: 5% of Coinbase employees took exit packages during culture transition
“About five percent of the company opted into the exit package package.”
Sacks: Only 5% of Coinbase employees took severance over apolitical policy
“Well, only five percent took the policy.”
Friedberg: Coinbase policy will successfully filter for culturally aligned talent
“I think he'll do exactly what he's hoping to do, which is to get people to leave and to attract other people that better fit with that cultural model.”
Bill Maris: All six Section 32 funds are performing in top decile
“And over the course of my time at Section one 32, we've had six funds. We've invested in companies like CrowdStrike and Cohere and Coinbase and all six of those funds have averaged about four hundred million in size, and all are performing in their top decile,…”
Stephens: Missing single category winners usually leads to net investment losses
“If you're a space tech investor and you didn't invest in SpaceX, you probably lost money. If you're a crypto infrastructure investor and you didn't invest in Coinbase, Probably lost money. If you're a social media investor and you didn't invest in Facebook, yo…”
Armstrong: Five of top 20 global banks use Coinbase infrastructure
“Five of the top 20 global banks are now using Coinbase to build their crypto infrastructure into their products.”
Armstrong: Coinbase deployed internal AI agents connected to all company data
“One of the big pushes we made in the last year was we got our own internal hosted AI model that was connected to all of our data sources, right? So it's like every Slack message, every Google doc, every Salesforce data confluence, you know, so now this is all …”
Armstrong: Four billion adults globally are unbrokered without investment access
“There's actually four billion adults who are unbrokered as well, which means they don't have any ability to invest in these high quality assets.”
Armstrong: Coinbase launched Coinbase Tokenized for funds and real estate
“Coinbase launched a product actually called Coinbase tokenized. So we're helping any fund or real estate project or anybody who wants to tokenize their products”
Calacanis: Retail gambling and prediction market platforms will be 2026's top asset
“My pick for best performing asset will be the Robinhood Polymarket prize picks, gambling, wagering space because people will be able to have a little cash around to make some bets. You could buy Coinbase in there too, I guess.”
Chamath sold his Coinbase holdings on day one of its direct listing
“When I had the Coinbase thing, I sold it the first day”
Chamath: I sold my Coinbase shares on day one at $335
“I sold that on day one at 335 bucks a share.”
Chamath: VCs distributed Coinbase stock to LPs right before direct listing
“Going into the Coinbase IPO, what all the venture investors did was distributed literally the day before and the day of the direct listing. So that you would get delivered your stock at the highest price so that you could sell.”
Armstrong: Coinbase allocates 5% of resources to legal issues, 95% to products
“Five percent of our resources is gonna go deal with that and make sure that's not an issue. 95% of us are here to build products.”
Armstrong: About half of active Coinbase users engage in non-trading activities
“Now about half our active customers do something other than trading, and it runs the gamut, you know, they're spending crypto with Coinbase card, they're earning staking rewards they're starting to engage in some of these dApps and doing payments with stableco…”
Armstrong: Coinbase's launch in India was shut down after three days
“I've, we launched, and it got shut down three days later, and we're gonna try to relaunch it again, so we need to get it there in emerging markets, too.”
Armstrong: Sub-cent, sub-second crypto transactions will trigger explosion of new use cases
“I, the metric I've been tracking internally, and I kind of push our team on, is we need every transaction to get under one cent in 1:02. If that, that feels like a threshold where we'd see an explosion of new use cases.”
Sacks: Coinbase is the gold standard of corporate compliance
“Coinbase was the gold standard in terms of doing everything right.”
Armstrong: Coinbase customer funds are segregated and backed 1-to-1
“We're a public company. We're regulated. Our financial statements are audited. They can show that, you know, customer funds are segregated. They're backed one to one. We're not investing customer assets without their explicit direction.”
Armstrong: Coinbase eliminated open-mic Q&A sessions at company town halls
“So we got rid of the open mics.”
Sacks: Every company must eventually choose between Coinbase or Disney model
“I think every company eventually is going to have to either be Coinbase or be Apple. You're going to have to be Coinbase or be Disney.”
Balaji: Assets added during his tenure drive >50% of Coinbase revenue
“And the other assets that we added after I joined Coinbase are more than 50% of Coinbase's revenue, again, in their filings.”
Calacanis: Cancel culture is ending and the Overton window will expand
“I think the pirates are assembling themselves, whether it's Coinbase saying we're not going to have politics at work or Antonio, and the end of cancel culture, the end of taking the hysterical left or the historic or the trolling right seriously, I feel like t…”
Chamath: Brian Armstrong's Coinbase memo is among the most important CEO writings
“I think there have been a couple of CEO memos in the last two months that I think honestly should be in the Hall of Fame in the Smithsonian. One is the Toby Lutke memo that the internal email he wrote, and the second one is this one that Brian wrote, because I…”
Chamath: Reputation management will get easier as media disintermediation accelerates
“So in many, in some ways, I'm actually pretty optimistic that that reputation management and truth will be easier to do in the future when this intermediary layer doesn't exist, but it'll take. Many other companies to do what Coinbase is doing and recent us in…”
Sacks: Coinbase reached $85B valuation despite political ban and NYT refusal
“Apparently, Coinbase's ban on politics in the workplace and their refusal to submit to New York Times interviews did not prevent them from creating an eighty-five billion dollar company.”
Sacks: Andreessen Horowitz generated about $20B in returns on Coinbase
“Andresa, but Andresa made like twenty billion of returns, of which, you know, they're probably getting 25, 30%. So they made the most money.”
Sacks: Coinbase's preemptive blog post successfully neutralized The New York Times
“It was a really brilliant PR tactic by Coinbase because what it did is it almost like released a spike protein, you know, by sort of a pre-announcing New York Times story, it created this spike protein that trained the immune system of Silicon Valley to be rea…”
Chamath: Brian Armstrong's post on political activism was pathetically poorly written
“The whole Brian Armstrong thing, again, just to say, one of the most pathetically poorly written, you know, pieces of English prose I've ever fucking seen, you know.”
Sacks: Company value stems from products, not CEO political platitudes
“The societal value of a company doesn't come from whatever platitudes or political statements its CEO makes, but rather from the quality of its products and the impact of its products.”
Armstrong: On-chain capital formation will be massive for private companies
“But anyway, I think on-chain capital formation is going to be massive for private companies.”
Coinbase passes ~100% of stablecoin yield economics to active rewards users
“So when customers do that, we actually pass along about a hundred percent of the economics to them for holding those stable coins with us.”
Armstrong: Coinbase lists any legal crypto asset meeting minimum cybersecurity standards
“So what we try to do is have minimum listing standards. So if we believe that there's a cybersecurity risk to it the developer could, you know, rug everyone, or if it's certainly, it's illegal from a compliance point of view, you know, there's a few different …”