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Coinbase
Coinbase Global, Inc. is an American cryptocurrency exchange. It was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. Coinbase has over 100 million users, and is the largest U.S. based cryptocurrency exchange as well as the world's biggest bitcoin custodian, as of 2024. The company operates in more than 100 countries and holds over $400 billion in assets, including nearly 12 percent of all bitcoin in existence and 11 percent of all staked Ether. Coinbase offers a range of cryptocurrency products and services tailored for retail investors, institutional clients, businesses, and software developers. It operates as a remote-first company with no physical headquarters. History 2012–2019: founding and early years Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a former Airbnb engineer. Armstrong enrolled in the Y Combinator startup incubator program and received a US$150,000 cash infusion. Fred Ehrsam, a former Goldman Sachs trader, later joined as a co-fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brian Armstrong (businessman)
Brian Armstrong (born January 25, 1983) is an American business executive, billionaire, and investor who is CEO of cryptocurrency platform Coinbase. He received media attention for his policy of keeping the workplace free of political activism. Early life and education Armstrong was born on January 25, 1983, near San Jose, California; both of his parents were engineers. He attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Catholic, all-male, private secondary school. Armstrong attended Rice University in Texas, where he earned a dual bachelor's degree in economics and computer science in 2005, followed by a master's in computer science in 2006. While at Rice, he started a business matching tutors to students, and after graduating, spent a year in Buenos Aires working for an education company. Career Armstrong's early career included working as a developer for IBM and a consultant at Deloitte. In 2010, he came across the Bitcoin white paper published under the alias Satoshi Nakamot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fred Ehrsam
Frederick "Fred" Ernest Ehrsam III is an American businessman, and the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the venture investment firm Paradigm. Education and early life Ehrsam was born on May 10, 1988, in Boston, growing up in Concord, Massachusetts. He played video games professionally in high school, and was an avid World of Warcraft player, which introduced him to the concept of in-game digital currencies. In 2010, Ehrsam graduated with distinction from Duke University, earning a B.S. in computer science with a minor in economics. At Duke, he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Career After graduating from Duke, Ehrsam became a foreign exchange trader at the investment bank Goldman Sachs in New York City. He learned about Bitcoin from a Georgetown University professor's paper, and began trading in his free time. Coinbase In 2012, Ehrsam and Brian Armstrong co-founded Coinbase in an apartment in San Francisco, as a way for cryptocurrenc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership records are stored in a digital ledger or blockchain, which is a computerized database that uses a consensus mechanism to secure transaction records, control the creation of additional coins, and verify the transfer of coin ownership. The two most common consensus mechanisms are proof of work and proof of stake. Despite the name, which has come to describe many of the fungible blockchain tokens that have been created, cryptocurrencies are not considered to be currencies in the traditional sense, and varying legal treatments have been applied to them in various jurisdictions, including classification as commodities, securities, and currencies. Cryptocurrencies are generally viewed as a distinct asset class in practice. The first cryptocu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
One Madison Avenue
The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower (colloquially known as the Met Life Tower and also as the South Building) is a skyscraper occupying a full block in the Flatiron District of Manhattan in New York City. The building is composed of two sections: a tower at the northwest corner of the block, at Madison Avenue and 24th Street, and a shorter east wing occupying the remainder of the block bounded by Madison Avenue, Park Avenue South, 23rd Street, and 24th Street. The South Building, along with the North Building directly across 24th Street, comprises the Metropolitan Home Office Complex, which originally served as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (now publicly known as MetLife). The South Building's tower was designed by the architectural firm of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons and erected between 1905 and 1909. Inspired by St Mark's Campanile, the tower features four clock faces, four bells, and lighted beacons at its top, and was the tallest buildi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source software, open-source implementation. In 2021, Bitcoin in El Salvador, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. It is mostly seen as an investment and has been described by some scholars as an economic bubble. As bitcoin is pseudonymous, Cryptocurrency and crime, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to Legality of cryptocurrency by country or territory, its ban by several countries . Bitcoin works through the collaboration of computers, each of which acts as a Node (networking), node in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Each node maintains an independent copy of a public distributed ledger of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reddit
Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down ("upvoted" or "downvoted") by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are unpaid volunteers. It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco. As of February 2025, Reddit is the List of most-visited websites, ninth-most-visited website in the world. According to data provided by Similarweb, 51.75% of the website traffic comes from the United St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, Flurry, and Carta. History Union Square Ventures (USV) was founded in 2003 by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham. They created USV with the intent of investing in and fostering the development of early-stage companies. Their investments are "mostly U.S.-based Internet and mobile companies considered to be ‘disruptive’". Since its establishment, USV is one of the companies that are regularly included in Red Herring’s lists of top venture capital firms. As of 2016, USV had 7 billion dollar exits, including Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cryptocurrency Exchange
A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees. Some brokerages which also focus on other assets such as stocks, let users purchase but not withdraw cryptocurrencies to cryptocurrency wallets while dedicated cryptocurrency exchanges do allow cryptocurrency withdrawals. Operation A cryptocurrency exchange can typically send cryptocurrency to a user's personal cryptocurrency wallet. Some can convert digital currency balances into anonymous prepaid cards which can be used to withdraw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software. Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. Other founders include Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin. In 2014, development work began and was crowdfunded, and the network went live on 30 July 2015. Ethereum allows anyone to deploy decentralized applications onto it, with which users can interact. Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications provide financial instruments that do not directly rely on financial intermediaries like brokerages, exchanges, or banks. This facilitates borrowing against cryptocurrency holdings or lending them out for interest. Ethereum also allows users to create and exchange non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are tokens that can be tied to un ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Y Combinator
Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 5,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, Scale AI, Deel, Helion Energy, and Twitch. History Founded in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Tappan Morris, and Trevor Blackwell, Y Combinator (YC) initiated operations with concurrent programs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mountain View, California. However, operational complexities arising from managing two programs prompted a consolidation in January 2009, resulting in the closing of the Cambridge program and the centralization of activities in Silicon Valley. Although often overlooked in early accounts, Jessica Livings ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Airbnb
Airbnb, Inc. ( , an abbreviation of its original name, "Air Bed and Breakfast") is an American company operating an online marketplace for short-and-long-term homestays, experiences and services in various countries and regions. It acts as a broker and charges a commission (remuneration), commission from each booking. Airbnb was founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia. It is the best-known company for short-term housing rentals. History After moving to San Francisco in October 2007, roommates and former schoolmates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with an idea of putting an air mattress in their living room and turning it into a bed and breakfast. In February 2008, Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky's former roommate, joined as the chief technology officer and the third co-founder of the new venture, which they named "AirBed & Breakfast". They put together a website that offered short-term living quarters and breakfast for those who were unable to bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blockchain
The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a Trusted timestamping, timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree, where Node (computer science), data nodes are represented by leaves). Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a ''chain'' (compare linked list data structure), with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are resistant to alteration because, once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be changed retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks and obtaining network consensus to accept these changes. Blockchains are typically managed by a peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer (P2P) computer network for use as a public distributed led ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
