It's always better to sell shovels

Not quite. I'm sure both the company and owners have tons of crypto in their portfolio. But I'm also sure they'd love to be able to diversify that into boring fiat dollars and dollar based holdings too.

This is not even selling the shovels... This renting a room to cash for gold traders...

Coinbase is the brainchild behind cryptocurrencies? How? They were not the first, they are not the biggest, they don't have the most cryptocurrencies/platforms, they are not the fastest/cheapest/best support and so on.

In fact, I can't figure out a single thing that Coinbase is the best at in the cryptocurrency industry. So what do you mean with brainchild here?

Note that GP stated they are "brainchild of cryptocurrencies". I don't think that the meaning you imply is what they had in mind.

"brainchild of distributed ledger tech and crypto currency capitalism" sure sounds like they are implying Coinbase almost invented cryptocurrencies. But English is not my native language so maybe I misunderstand it wrong.

Well yeah, nobody uses crypto on its own, it's always in reference to fiat and Coinbase enables that.

See DeFi

There's just more money that you can raise if you go down the traditional IPO way. ICO tokens can be very lucrative too (check out BNB) but there's a lot more regulatory uncertainty around them. Plus fund raising is crazy at the moment on Wall Street so this makes perfect sense.

Maybe, but I feel like that was always part of the point of Coinbase, providing the bridge between those worlds, and for some, bringing a sense of legitimacy and security to the proceedings. It’s not surprising they would look for a conventional exit.

It makes complete sense. You need a fiat ramp to get into the crypto ecosystem. You want the fiat ramp to be regulated.

Is it ironic that Coinbase takes fiat deposits and withdrawals? Many in the community view the existence of centralized exchanges as a necessary evil that is temporarily needed to bridge the old world of finance to the new one. It's hardly the brainchild of distributed ledger tech.

Ironic… or inevitable? In many ways Coinbase is that Bitcoin wasn’t supposed to be: a centralised authority that is responsible for a ton of activity on the platform. Not that it matters that much but I’d argue Coinbase wasn’t in the “spirit” of crypto currencies from the start.

(but hey, I still used it! Couldn’t be bothered to work out how to buy Bitcoin a few years ago and they made it easy)