CEO: Coinbase is signing up 50,000 users per day

PORTLAND: Coinbase Inc, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, was signing up 50,000 new customers a day last year, chief executive officer Brian Armstrong ( pic) said at the Bloomberg Players Technology Summit in San Francisco.

While plenty of speculators have been attracted to cryptocurrencies, particularly during the price run-up last year, many haven’t made money. Bitcoin’s price of about US$6,120 price is now almost 70% off its December high, and most other coins are in steep decline as well.

“This technology is going through a series of bubbles and corrections, and each time it does that, it’s at a new plateau,” Armstrong said Tuesday.

“People’s expectations are all over the map, but real-world adoption has been going up.”

Coinbase helped customers trade US$150bil worth of cryptocurrency over the past year, he said. Armstrong didn’t say how the company’s current rate of new customers compared with a year ago. He estimated that about 10% of digital coins are used in real life, in games and other purchases online.

“I think it will be quite some time before you cross the street to Starbucks in the United States and pay with crypto,” he said.

Still, San Francisco-based Coinbase continues to grow. The company has about 1,000 employees, and one-third of them – and a third of the company’s leadership team – are women, he said.

“Now it’s getting harder and harder to be a crypto sceptic,” Armstrong said. — Bloomberg