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 12 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
Pollak: Coinbase and Shopify condensed payment systems into 1,000-line smart contract
“And what we did over a nine month period was exactly that. We went into their systems, which are literally millions of lines of code where they're doing things like escrow they're taking taxes they're doing, you know, fees, tariffs they're doing refunds, charg…”
Caldwell: Brian Armstrong's original Coinbase YC pitch wasn't about buying Bitcoin
“Another thing I want to note is even Brian and his YC application Didn't really believe in his own idea because what he basically applied to YC with was the P to P transfer parts. It wasn't buying Bitcoin and holding it. It was the idea that he could build som…”
Xie: Bitcoin is very easy to trace via counterparty metadata
“And so Bitcoin is very easy to trace and a lot of people give information away about other people. So even if you're being really smart and someone transacts with you, they give away, away information about you.”
Pollak: Developers Are Bringing Stocks, Bonds, and Debt Onto Base
“And that's what we're seeing every day on base right now. It's like people are bringing stock, they're bringing bonds, they're bringing more stable coins, like I talked about earlier, they're Actually, you know, bringing collateralized debt positions. Like, ev…”
Seibel: Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe beat dominant incumbents by being 10x better
“For each of these companies, there was a pre-existing product. Pre-existing competitor, dominant, you might say, but there was an opportunity to make something that was 10 X better than what existed.”
Seibel: Investors initially thought Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe were horrible ideas
“Most people, founders and investors thought these ideas were horrible, either because they were too hard to execute or because they just were bad ideas.”
YC and Coinbase Partner on Joint Request for Crypto Startups
“Y Combinator and Coinbase are together putting out a joint request for startups building in crypto.”
Pollak: USDC took several years to reach $1 billion in issuance
“The first two to three years of USDC, we had launched it, but it didn't grow that much. Like, it took us a while to get to a billion dollars of issuance.”
Epstein: Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex are three top-10 YC companies
“It also turns out that three of the YC top 10 are transactional businesses too. So these are companies like Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex.”
Seibel: Brian Armstrong had an impossible time raising on YC Demo Day
“He had an impossible time raising money on Demo Day. And so if he had taken the Demo Day signal, the investor's signal of, oh, we don't want to give you money and quit, we don't have Coinbase.”