Partnered With:

A populist line? Coinbase chose Reddit, an offshore forum, for a roadshow on the front lines of its IPO

Read this article in 8 Minutes

Coinbase will use votes to choose which questions to answer.

Original headline: "First of all! Coinbase Opts for Reddit Roadshow Before Going Public"

The original translation: deep tide

On March 18, crypto trading platform Coinbase announced that it will launch a roadshow on Reddit to answer questions from investors.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote in a Reddit post:

Hi Reddit, I'm Brian Armstrong, CEO and co-founder of Coinbase. I believe that ordinary investors should have access to the same information as institutional investors. Over the next 3 days, my executive team and I would like to hear your questions about our business, the crypto economy, etc. Any questions are welcome!

As some of you may know, we're planning to go public soon, and as part of that process, we're going to spend a lot of time educating large institutional investors about Coinbase and encryption in general, which is standard procedure, but I don't think it's appropriate.

We hope that in this process all investors, regardless of their affiliation or size, will have equal access to information and the opportunity to engage with us.

So we're trying new things. For the next three days, ending Friday at 7pm Pacific Time, we will be accepting questions from anyone about our business, the crypto economy, and our vision, and like any other AMA, we will choose which questions we will answer through the votes cast. Once the questions are selected, my executive team and I will try to answer as many of them as possible.

Answers are based not just on votes, but also on value to the community and relevance to our upcoming IPO (i.e., topics like our business model, management team, and products are discussed). While we'll try to answer as many questions as possible, there will also be some that we can't answer (legal stuff!). .

These questions include:

Questions swirl around Coinbase's valuation, expected stock price or non-public financial data.

Inappropriate or irrelevant questions

Speculation about future financial performance, growth trends or expansion plans.

Questions about listing or exploring new assets

Issues not related to the public listing process or to investment decisions.

As much as we'd like to, we can't answer questions in real time because of SEC rules. Instead, we will record our responses and post the video to this page. In addition, I encourage you to check out our latest Company Prospectus (Form S-1) and this series of educational videos on our Investor Relations website if you are interested.

Armstrong's post has sparked a flurry of questions and comments, with more than 800 comments so far.

In both its offering and its publicity, Coinbase has taken unusual steps, such as a traditional initial public offering that is not only too expensive, but benefits the big Wall Street firms first, with brokers and banks in the middle charging hefty fees and wealthy investors first, followed by retail investors.

Coinbase jumps over not only the traditional IPO, is trying to break the traditional rules of listed roadshow: renting expensive luxurious office, about the value of the company in front of the rich, like encryption world promote decentralization concept, through the Reddit roadshow, seems to be a kind of decentralized "rebellion", the question to the general public, but this kind of behavior is also easy to recruit to the SEC's regulatory risk, and see how the follow-up.

The following is the popular question of the netizen:

1. What are the criteria for adding shanzhai coins to Coinbase?

2. What do you see as Coinbase's biggest existential threat, the one that's uppermost in your mind?

3. Can we buy Coinbase shares on Coinbase?

4. When will we ordinary people finally be able to buy stocks?

5. What was the decision behind launching separate apps/services (Coinbase, Coinbase Pro and Wallet) rather than having a unified, all-in-one experience?

6. What would happen if encrypted payments were fully integrated into Internet services? Is there a cryptocurrency that you think can do this right now, or are we still waiting for a scalable solution? Will CBDC achieve this purpose? What role will Coinbase play in the Internet of Value?

7. How high do you think the business risk of decentralized exchange (DEX) to $Coin is? Dex has shown great strength since the Defi craze, is this something that is causing you to lose sleep, are they going to disappear, or are you going to act in this area as well?

8. Why is Satoshi Nakamoto's address included in the prospectus (Form S-1)?

9. Most brokers in traditional stock markets have switched to commission-free trading. So far, I'm only aware of one crypto broker offering commission-free trading, but it seems inevitable that this will become more common in the future. Given that Coinbase earns most of its money through fees, is there a contingency plan to continue operating on a commission-free basis?