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 23 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
Armstrong: Elizabeth Warren is a socialist who wants government running financial services
“Well, ok, so Elizabeth Warren is you know, in my view, she's a socialist. She believes the government should be running all financial services.”
Armstrong: Around 300 Coinbase employees staged a walkout over BLM stance
“This erupted in Slack and basically 300 employees did a walkout. In protest.”
Armstrong: Coinbase stays strictly apolitical unless an issue impacts crypto mission
“Outside of work, people can do whatever they want. You can go protest. You can be left or right or whatever. But just inside the workplace, we're not going to be political. We're just going to focus, unless it has to do with our mission, crypto and economic fr…”
Armstrong voted against building USDC before it generated ~$800M in revenue
“There's actually been examples where I voted no on something and it turned out to be a massive success. And an example of that is like USDC, which is the stable coin. I actually, Embarrassed to admit, I voted no on that idea. Luckily, somebody else funded it o…”
Armstrong: Coinbase paid zero fines and won SEC lawsuit
“Oh, and I should mention we won that case. It was, so we didn't pay a single dollars, a single dollar in fines. We didn't have to change a single thing about the company. The judge Actually, the SEC withdrew it under this new administration, and several judges…”
Armstrong: Five percent of Coinbase staff took exit package after blog post
“We put out the post, and I said, anybody who's not aligned with this new direction, we'll give you a good severance package. You can fill out this form and accept it by Friday or something. And five percent of the company took the exit package.”
Armstrong: Five GSIB banks are working with Coinbase on crypto integrations
“Five of the, you know, GSIB banks in the world, the largest banks are working with us now on crypto integrations.”
Armstrong: Over 50% of Coinbase's code is written by AI agents
“More and more of code is being written by these agents, more than 50% now.”
Coinbase uses internal VC pitch process where a single executive can greenlight projects
“Twice a year, any employees can come pitch and say, hey, I think we should be doing this, and I have the team to go do it... What we've tried to set up internally is we call these next bets, but you can come in and pitch. So each of the product group leaders h…”
Coinbase requires pre-submitted town hall questions and excludes off-topic issues
“We had this culture of this open mic thing, but I realized that later we actually don't really do that. We just have people pre-submit questions. And if we think we take hard questions, but if they're like just way off topic or someone's pet issue, we just don…”
Armstrong: Coinbase would not have survived without co-founder Fred Ehrsam
“And I actually don't think Coinbase would have succeeded without Fred, like, if you look at the subsequent three, four, or five years, There was a lot of, like, near-death experiences, and he's just an absolute killer.”
Armstrong: Coinbase spent $50M–$100M fighting the SEC
“I think the total amount we spent
On legal and all that was maybe in the 50 to a hundred million range as a result of that law.”
Armstrong: Coinbase met with the SEC approximately 30 times after going public
“We did maybe 30 times. We met with the SEC after becoming a public company where they allowed us to become a public company.”
Armstrong: Coinbase's first employee hire was former lumberjack Olaf Carlson-Wee
“Actually the very first hire at Coinbase was this guy Olaf Carlson Wee, outside of Fred and I as the co-founders, and we were trying to hire this customer, someone to come in to run customer support, because of the backlog I mentioned, and I remember it came d…”
Armstrong: Calling domain experts is faster than reading books for insights
“Calling people, I think it's faster if you have access to them, especially. Earlier in my career, I didn't have access, but now I feel like I can get access to more people, and it's often just a shortcut. Like, if you know the right person to call who's been t…”
Armstrong: About 60% of Coinbase support inquiries are answered by AI
“Customer support inquiries, I think, is about 60% answered by agents now.”
Armstrong: 99% of people consume company news via social clips, not shareholder letters
“I think our shareholder letter is brilliant. I get a lot of good feedback on it from, like, the biggest funds at Fidelity and all these kind of folks, so I'm glad we're putting out a shareholder letter, but 99% of people aren't going to read our shareholder le…”
Armstrong: Coinbase built tools allowing any AI agent to hold stablecoins
“We built a couple of, ah, tools that allow any agent to get a stablecoin wallet inside of it.”
Armstrong: Early Coinbase faced a 10,000 support ticket backlog
“Anyway, so we had like a 1002 1005 1010 thousand backlog of these customer support tickets and people were getting Very angry about all of this.”
Armstrong: First Coinbase version lacked Bitcoin buy or sell features
“Believe it or not, the first version of the Coinbase app, actually, you couldn't buy or sell Bitcoin. I thought we were making a wallet for payments on the internet. And so you could store Bitcoin, you could make Bitcoin payments, and this prototype went out, …”
Armstrong: Fred Ehrsam discovered Coinbase lost money on every trade
“And so when he came in and started to analyze all of the flow of funds on every trade, he was able to map that out. And due to like certain time risks and things, things, he actually was correct that he'd mapped that out. And it was just a set of conditions, w…”
Armstrong: Coinbase was not a hot Y Combinator company, raised $600k seed
“Like we were not a hot company at Y Combinator. We went to the demo day that they do, where we raised like the six, raised the 600 K seed round. And but there was lots of companies that raised like multi-million dollar rounds and beyond. Like we were kind of m…”