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3X as many crypto figures make it onto Forbes 2021 billionaires list as last year

Forbes released their annual billionaires list on April 6, with Amazon overlord Jeff Bezos and his $177 billion topping the list for a fourth consecutive year.

The “digital gold rush” has seen nine new crypto billionaires join the Forbes list, pushing the total up to 12 (depending on whether you count the Winklevoss twins as one or two entries.) That’s up from just four in last year’s Forbes World’s Billionaires list

Sam Bankman-Fried – Newcomer

Sam Bankman-Fried is the wealthiest crypto-billionaire, with a net worth of $8.7 billion. Bankman-Fried founded trading firm Alameda Research and popular derivatives exchange FTX. The 29-year old has made waves in the crypto space, with FTX recently winning the naming rights to Miami Heat’s home stadium for 19 years. Cointelegraph recently ranked Bankman-Fried as the third most influential figure in crypto for 2020.

The Winklevoss Twins – Newcomers

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have a net worth of $3 billion each and started investing in Bitcoin in 2012. The brothers famously sued Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for IP theft in 2004 and won a $65 million settlement which they used to invest in Bitcoin. They started the crypto exchange Gemini in 2014, and they purchased Nifty Gateway in November 2019.

Chris Larsen – Returnee

Larsen, the co-founder of Ripple Labs saw his net worth grow from $2.6 billion to $3.4 billion over the past year.

Larson and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse have been fighting an ongoing dispute with the SEC in relation to XRP and unregistered securities offerings. However, the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple hasn’t appeared to affect its token too badly, with XRP increasing by 387% in the last 12 months.

Jed McCaleb – Newcomer

McCaleb is another co-founder of Ripple, and reportedly holds 3.4 billion XRP and 1 billion Stellar Lumens — the cryptocurrency he founded after leaving Ripple — with his holdings adding up to a net worth of $2 billion. Cointelegraph reported that McCaleb sold off $400 million worth of his XRP holdings in 2020 alone.

Michael Saylor – Newcomer

Saylor is the CEO of listed company MicroStrategy and co-founded the software giant in 1989, and now has a net worth of $2.3 billion. Saylor has become the leading advocate for corporations holding Bitcoin on balance sheets. Since its first purchase of Bitcoin in August 2020, Microstrategy has invested $2.226 billion, taking its tally up to 91,579 Bitcoins at an average cost of $24,311 per Bitcoin.

Brain Armstrong – Returnee

Armstrong is the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase and his net worth has gone from $1 billion to $6.5 billion within 12 months. Coinbase also had a successful year, generating $1 billion in revenue, and it’s set for a direct listing in a week. That will value Armstrong’s shares somewhere north of $14B, meaning he may well top the crypto billionaires’ list next year.

Fred Ersham – Newcomer

Ersham co-founded Coinbase with Brian Armstrong in 2012 and left the firm in 2017. He is now a board member of the company, and his 6% stake has an estimated worth of $1.9 billion.

Changpeng Zhao

Zhao is the founder of the largest crypto exchange Binance and owns an estimated 30% stake in the company. Zhao’s net worth is $1.9 billion, and the digital gold rush has been good to the Binance founder, with Binance Coin becoming the second-largest altcoin by market cap. Zhao revealed earlier this week that he holds close to 100% of his portfolio in crypto.

Matthew Roszak – Newcomer

Roszak is the Chairman and co-founder of blockchain technology firm Bloq and is a leading crypto and blockchain investor. Roszak is also a founding member of Tally Capital a crypto-focused private investment firm and has a net worth of $1.5 billion.

Tim Draper – Newcomer

Draper is a crypto evangelist with a net worth of $1.5 billion. He bought $18.7 million worth of Bitcoin in 2014 after it was confiscated from the Silk Road black market. Draper was also one of the primary investors in the Tezos project and co-founded Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading investment firm in early-stage tech startups.

Barry Silbert – Newcomer

Silbert founded the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group in 2015 and has a net worth of $1.6 billion. The DCG owns asset management firm Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which currently has $46 billion worth of assets under management.

3X as many crypto figures make it onto Forbes 2021 billionaires list as last year

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Coinbase’s first quarter revenue hits record $1.8B ahead of its Nasdaq listing

Coinbase has announced impressive first quarter results one week before the exchange’s direct listing on the Nasdaq, estimating that trading volume is up 276% and quarterly revenue has hit $1.8 billion.

The bountiful revenue, revealed in the company’s Q1 earnings call, dwarf its $190 million revenue from the same time last year with the company attributing a portion of this explosive growth to Bitcoin’s bull market.

The U.S exchange estimated net income between $730 million and $800 million and an EBIDTA of approximately $1.1 billion.

The bull market has also seen monthly active users grow to more than six million users, up from 1.3 million in the first quarter, with crypto assets on the platform rising 1200% year-on-year from $17 billion to $223 billion.

The U.S.-based exchange’s CEO Alesia Haas said:

“We have seen all time high crypto prices drive elevated levels of user activity and trading volume on our platform.”

Boasting 56 million verified users, Haas suggested that active monthly users could rise to seven million at most this year, although he warned this could drop to four million if a bear market hits this year.

The company is spending big to acquire new customers. Following next week’s listing, Coinbase intends to increase its sales and marketing expenditure to between 12% and 15% of this year’s net revenue in an effort to drive “meaningful growth in 2021.”

“Looking to full year 2021, in order to scale our operations and to continue to drive product innovation, we expect our technology and development expenses and our general and administrative expenses to be between $1.3 billion to $1.6 billion, excluding stock-based compensation, in 2021.”

The report results are preliminary and unaudited, however, the exchange wanted to release a detailed report prior to the Nasdaq listing set for April 14. The company will register nearly 115 million shares of Class A common stock, under the ticker symbol COIN. As a direct listing, the exchange won’t be selling new stock and can only register existing stock, allowing existing stakeholders to sell their shares to new investors.

Coinbase has received multiple valuations ranging from $68 billion based on private market transactions to more than $120 billion.

Investment research firm New Constructs CEO David Trainer had his doubts about the lofty expectations. “Coinbase’s expected valuation of roughly $100 billion is far too high,” he said in a note to clients Monday.

“It’s hard to make a straight-faced argument that the firm can justify the lofty expectations baked into its valuation given increasing competition in a mature cryptocurrency trading market and the lack of sustainability in its current market share and margins.”

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried took to Twitter to congratulate Coinbase on its impressive quarterly figures and upcoming IPO listing, and compared it to his own, much newer exchange’s figures.

Coinbase\’s first quarter revenue hits record $1.8B ahead of its Nasdaq listing

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Coinbase Reveals it’s Now Recruiting Skilled Tech Professionals in India, Despite Nation’s Lack of Regulatory Clarity on Cryptos

Digital asset marketplace Coinbase has revealed that it’s planning to hire in India, a country that has been attempting to ban “private” cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. However, the nation’s authorities recently clarified that they’re not going to shut off crypto activity completely, meaning digital currencies may be used as a form of investment but not an officially approved medium-of-exchange (or legal tender like the Indian Rupee).

The Coinbase team writes in a blog post:

“Following our recent announcement that we are now hiring in Canada, today [March 25, 2021] we’re happy to announce that Coinbase is establishing a business presence in India. By housing some IT services, including engineering, software development and customer support operations in India, we will benefit from its huge pool of world-class engineering talent.” 

Coinbase added that India has a well-known reputation for being a major global hub for engineering and tech innovation. Coinbase also mentioned that they’re looking forward to “finding that world-class talent” to help them create “new ways” for their customers “to interact with the cryptoeconomy.”

Coinbase further noted that they had announced earlier this year that they’re “committed to being a remote-first company, which means that new hires in India, Canada, and elsewhere will have the option to work across various locations in their country of hire.”

Coinbase added:

“We expect to open a physical office, initially in Hyderabad, for Indian employees as COVID-related conditions allow. Along with active hiring in the US, UK, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Canada and the Philippines, establishing a presence in India is another important step to building more geographic diversity in our remote-first workforce.”

In a separate update from Kayvon Pirestani, Head of APAC Institutional Coverage at Coinbase, the company revealed that one of the latest firms to “diversify” their corporate balance sheets with crypto-assets is Meitu, Inc.

Coinbase confirmed:

“The Hong Kong-listed (1357-HK) consumer tech company, known for its wildly popular selfie and photo community apps used by millions around the globe, recently purchased both Bitcoin and Ethereum.”

The Coinbase team further revealed:

“Coinbase Institutional was selected as the sole partner for both trade execution and custody on both their initial and second allocations, for a combined total of US$90m of BTC and ETH. Meitu was able to utilize our sophisticated algorithmic execution and smart order routing tools, along with the execution planning services of our high-touch agency-only OTC trading desk to execute these transactions across multiple marketplaces with minimal market impact.” 

(Note: for more details on this announcement, check here.)

As covered recently, the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) hit Coinbase with a $6.5 million penalty for wash trading.

The penalty arrives just in advance of an anticipated initial public offering for the largest digital asset exchange in the US that should help to define the digital asset sector for the United States.

Wash trading has been an ongoing issue in the crypto exchange industry, most typically in exchanges that operate outside the US.

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Avanti Financial raises $37 million to launch institutional crypto bank

The Avanti Financial Group has announced that it has raised $37 million in a Series A round, bringing the company closer to launch as a digital asset bank.

In a March 25 announcement, Avanti stated that it will use the proceeds to fund the required regulatory capital needed for launch, in addition to funding development and other operating expenses. The round brings the total amount raised to $44 million.

Participants in the round are a who’s who of institutional investors including Coinbase Ventures, Binance.US, Morgan Creek Digital, Madison Paige Ventures, AP Capital, and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, in addition to individuals including Trace Mayer and some of Avanti’s executives and directors. The University of Wyoming Foundation also contributed to the funding round.

Avanti was founded in 2020 as a Wyoming bank engineered to serve as a regulatory compliant bridge between U.S. dollar payments systems and digital assets. The firm first gained bank charter status from the state of Wyoming in October 2020 and was the second crypto company to become a bank after Kraken Financial which received the bank charter in September of the same year.

Founder and CEO of Avanti Financial, Caitlin Long, stated that the firm has received more than 2,500 inbound customer inquiries since announcing its bank charter approval and looks forward to starting to serve clients later this year. She did not reveal any details about a launch date but mentioned that a fully regulated dollar-pegged stablecoin was in the pipeline.

“Our roadmap includes offering API-based U.S. dollar payment services for wires, ACH and SWIFT; issuance of our tokenized, programmable U.S. dollar called Avit; and custody and on-/off-ramp services for bitcoin and other digital assets.”

In an interview with Cointelegraph in September 2020, Caitlin Long confirmed that Avanti has no intentions of becoming an exchange and will be for institutional investors only.

Early Bitcoin adopter and entrepreneur Trace Mayer, who formed the consortium that led Avanti’s Series A, stated that Avanti is extremely well-positioned to address the need for legally compliant operators in the digital asset industry as markets mature.

Avanti Financial raises $37 million to launch institutional crypto bank

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Paysafe Seeks US Market Expansion With Coinbase Partnership

Paysafe has sealed a partnership with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, as it seeks market expansion in the U.S. Paysafe owns and maintains popular digital wallet Skrill.

Skrill Digital Wallet For US Customers

According to the partnership terms, Coinbase will provide a white label solution for Skrill to aid the digital wallet’s growth in the United States. This will see customers from over 30 US states and territories trade cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin with their digital wallet.

Head of Institutional Trading at Coinbase, Brett Tejpaul, said:

“As we focus on building the crypto-economy, we look to partner with leaders like Skrill who can white-label our turnkey solution to provide and support digital assets to their clients without having to learn the nuances of building a crypto exchange.”

Following the announcement, the payments company said the expansion program would commence immediately. Skrill says it will look into strengthening its digital wallet’s features for the American consumer.

Skrill had previously launched its Skrill Visa Prepaid Card. It also brought to market Skrill Money Transfer remittance solution and Skrill Knect loyalty and rewards program.

Coinbase Adds Another Feather To Its Cap

Coinbase has had a prosperous year so far. The company, which is reportedly eyeing an initial public offering (IPO), is worth more than $100 billion.

Brain Armstrong, who is the company CEO and co-founder, has successfully navigated the crypto exchange into occupying the enviable position of being the largest Bitcoin exchange in the United States.

Rising institutional demand following crypto upsurge has seen Coinbase become the ultimate destination for companies seeking exposure to the volatile asset class.

Coinbase has high-value clients like intelligence company MicroStrategy, electric car company Tesla, and recently added Chinese tech company Meitu to its list.

Aside from giving exposure to cryptocurrencies, Coinbase has been adding many crypto projects to its platform. In a March 19 post, Coinbase announced that it was adding ADA to its platform. The announcement that quickly propelled the proof-of-stake blockchain protocol to the third position will see Coinbase facilitate buying and selling Cardano’s ADA.

The San Francisco firm also said it is preparing to build a business presence in India. The company said it would initially house IT services, including engineering, software development, and customer support.

New hires will work from home before a physical office is opened in the engineering hub of Hyderabad, subject to the covid-19 protocols.

For now, the company has not posted any vacancy on Coinbase India’s career page.

Paysafe Seeks US Market Expansion With Coinbase Partnership

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