Last year was a year of several record-breaking events in the cryptocurrency industry. But the deluge of mainstream interest in tokens didn’t come with Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), despite being one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world wasn’t spared from this chaos. In December, shortly after CME’s announcement stating it was including BTC in its futures trading platform, Coinbase was flooded with 100,000 user registrations within 24 hours. This deluge prompted Coinbase, among other big exchanges like Bittrex, Binance, and Cex.io to call for a temporary time-out from new registrations until they are able to upgrade their systems to accommodate the volume.
At the Bloomberg Players Technology Summit in San Francisco, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said they were getting 50,000 sign-ups on the daily last year, Bloomberg reports. Commenting on the current downward state of cryptocurrency market values, Armstrong said these are bubbles and corrections—which are correlated with the company’s growth.
“The way I think about it is that this technology is going through a series of bubbles and corrections,” Armstrong explained. “Each time it does that, it’s at a new plateau. And it’s kinda matched the growth of the company.”
“If you go back to 2012-13, when we started, we had maybe 500 people a day signing up. And then after the next bubble and correction, we had like 5,000 people a day signing up. And now, it’s more like 50,000 [people] a day signing up.”
But despite their massive growth, Armstrong says Coinbase’s platform will remain limited in terms of the cryptocurrencies it offers.
“We only list five today because a lot of them a lot those things are brand new and higher risk. Some of them, frankly, are scams. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a very curative approach,” Armstrong said. “We’re not trying to list everything under the sun.”
“It’s kind of like not every company can get listed on the New York Stock Exchange. There’s some minimum requirements before you can go public there.”
Armstrong adds that mainstream adoption has been growing, although it may take some time before adoption comes to the long-awaited “coffee” point.
“People’s expectations are all over the map, but real-world adoption has been going up,” he said. “I think it will be quite some time before you cross the street to Starbucks in the U.S. and pay with crypto,” he said.
“It’s organized chaos. Certainly for me, as an entrepreneur, it’s been a crazy journey. We now have about a thousand people in the company.”
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