Asking for a friend who says: "Of the teams that were on the handout the recruiter gave me, I’ve included their names and the included (shortened) descriptions. Custody - builds and maintains the most secure crypto storage service in the world - storing billions of dollars worth of crypto assets. Crypto - builds and maintains the shared infrastructure to make Blockchains and Crypto assets available for investing and interacting on Coinbase. Payments Risk - accelerates Coinbase’s mission of building an open financial system by keeping the platform safe from fraud and enabling delightful experiences for our customers." (Please comment reasoning) #coinbase
Crypto is divided into 3 teams - assets, blockchain, and custody. These are all backend heavy teams with some interesting scaling issues. I’d say that’s the most important team in 3-5 years as CB builds out a brokerage service. Right now Commerce and other App teams are probably more important since they factor directly into CB’s expansion plans 1-2 years from now.
Unrelated but I'd personally short coinbase. A lot of crypto is driven by scammers. Bitcoin is the only thing that has some genuinity. Rest of them are snake oil. Brian Armstrong had demonstrated ethically questionable behavior several times. If someone's really interested in crypto, they're far better off joining Square
I wouldn't go that far. Even we don't know wtf to do with crypto that isn't a way to scream "please download the cash app".
Yeah, the cryptography strategy is a whole different thing. However from an engineering POV the basic online concepts are the same 1. You're storing and moving the coins from hot wallets to cold wallets etc. 2. Of-course the payment infra. for processing Bitcoin based payments 3. Apparently they're also doing a trading platform. So, what else I believe coinbase shot themselves in the foot by listing several worthless securities. IMHO this is where Square has clarity, where they've clearly said Bitcoin is the only security that they will list and Jack Dorsey is a huge proponent of BTC.
Coinbase has around 10b in crypto in custody. Improving the security and features there sounds incredibly important and interesting. Crypto is coinbase’s bread and butter - there are various blockchain technologies out there and integrating with each of them adds value to the company at scale. Payments risk sounds like it could be very interesting though I’m not sure what it means in the world of cryptocurrency. Building this software is extremely valuable for Stripe, which is in the credit card processing industry (very different from cryptocurrency, e.g. there are no chargebacks on bitcoin). Of the teams listed here I’d say it’s hard to pick. If they’re hiring for all 3 it means they’re all going to be impactful. Ask your recruiter. I’d pick Payments Risk if it interests you, since it’s a skill that is valuable at many companies outside of just Coinbase.
DM me if interested in learning more about Coinbase!
How's the morale at coinbase now after a year long bear market for crypto?
Higher than ever. A lot of innovation in the space; institutional interest is at an all time high.
It depends on what kind of work you want to do. Coinbase is a product focused company so, while all of those teams are important, I would join Custody to be able to work directly on product. Crypto and Payments are critical to the company and do awesome work but it may not be as easy to have the impact you would have on a product team like custody, consumer, or pro.
Depends on what you mean by impact. While the work they do doesn’t have a direct visible impact on a product feature, obviously launching a new asset wouldn’t be possible without their work, so that’s impact. Similarly the team has taken on projects that have seen clear impact on the blockchain itself by reducing fees or congestion by optimizing the wallets. This is true if any “services” team though for sure (infra, sec, payments, crypto), you can’t really download the app and point to the exact feature you built, and if you want that those aren’t the teams for you
Some clarification, the crypto team stores ALL of Coinbase cryptocurrency, including Custody’s. Custody’s funds are stored in the same system that stores Coinbase’s cold storage, which is owned by the crypto team. Custody builds on top of it and uses the APIs provided to build their product.
Which category does Coinbase Pro org fall into?
Custody sounds like it would have the usual security problem where if there's not an active issue it's difficult to demonstrate impact. Payments Risk sounds boring to me, but there's probably potential there to have an impact. Crypto seems like the most obvious place to innovate, but if it's all infra stuff again could be harder to demonstrate impact.