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 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Rosenthal: Braintrust reached an $11.5 billion market cap on $30 million raised
“Braintrust is a great example. Super, super interesting company. My fund invested a little bit in it. When they listed on Coinbase about a month ago, they shot up to about an 11 and a half billion dollar market cap. And this is a real company. They've got tens…”
Rosenthal: Andreessen Horowitz made $11 billion on its Coinbase investment
“Well, it turns out they invested in Coinbase and made eleven billion dollars on it.”
Forman: Polymarket Saw Double Coinbase's Web Traffic in November 2024
“Polymarket.com in November was one of the hundred most popular websites in the world. Had about two X the website traffic as Coinbase.com.”
Craib: Numerai's native cryptocurrency is more liquid than some stocks
“In fact, our cryptocurrency is more liquid than some stocks, and so people will earn some of it, maybe they'll earn 10,000 dollars by staking on Numurai, and then they'll go to Coinbase and sell it into dollars, or they'll keep staking it on their model.”
Dixon: a16z invested in all 15 Coinbase funding rounds pre-IPO
“So Coinbase, as an example, I was on the board and we invested in but they did 15 rounds of financing before they went public and we invested in every single one of them.”
Startup systems break every 90 days during hypergrowth, making refinement futile
“So if you create some sort of system And you're going through that type of growth. That system, 90 days later, is probably going to no longer be working. So if you spend a month trying to refine every system you have, it's never going to work.”
Coinbase's banking partner threatened to close its account over fraud rates
“The bank said that they were going to take away our bank account if we couldn't get the fraud rate down in 30 days.”
Startup operators in hypergrowth must aim for passing grades, not perfection
“Get a passing grade on everything instead of trying to get an A-plus in any particular category, and you have to be very comfortable with just chaos.”
Coinbase erred strategically by launching peripheral products in 2014 and 2015
“I think one thing that we screwed up a bit at Coinbase is throughout 2014, 2015, we tried to launch all these new products. We were launching like a tip button that you could embed and tip people on Reddit. We were very focused on merchant integrations for peo…”
Lamont: Paxos provides white-label infrastructure that enables any entity to be Coinbase
“Pax is effectively makes everybody Coinbase. They've got the fully regulated white labeled infrastructure, so any entity can be Coinbase.”
Ari Paul: BlockTower holds crypto baskets based purely on exchange accessibility
“So as an example of a bet that we have on right now, we've created baskets based entirely on accessibility. So we have a basket of Coinbase coins, a basket of Binance coins, a basket of Korean and Japanese retail coins, where it's the assets that are easiest f…”
Peters: Coinbase operates as a pure agency desk without principal risk
“They have an agency desk, meaning I was able to interact with their institutional trading desk. They don't have a proprietary trading desk. They don't take principal risk”
Peters: Running Both One River and Coinbase Asset Management
“We built out a crypto asset manager. Coinbase acquired that about a year and a half ago, which I saw that as a once in a lifetime opportunity. So I actually run two firms right now.”
Dixon: Coinbase Maintained a Four-Year Cash Runway Early On
“Coinbase did this well early on. They always ran things at a four-year runway, and if you look at it, that was very, very smart.”