Coinbase, Inc., the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, was signing up 50,000 new customers a day last year, says CEO Brian Armstrong.
Crypto ‘Bubble’
Armstrong spoke at Bloomberg’s Players Technology Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday. Cryptocurrency had a huge rise last year, more particularly towards the second half of the year, but most investors who entered the game late have lost money.
From its all-time high of almost $20,000 back in December, Bitcoin has dropped nearly 70 percent. All of the other altcoins have followed suit, in a wave of panic selling. Most individuals, especially those signing up to the Coinbase platform, were brand new to the cryptocurrency market and some had no prior investing knowledge.
When coins started seeing slight losses in December, a large group of these new investors didn’t know what to do – so they folded and sold. Individuals with investing experience understood that market correction was a part of the game, but from mid-January to mid-February the crypto market took a rough beating. $500 billion were wiped from the crypto market and some analysts claimed that the crypto ‘bubble’ finally popped.
Coinbase Continues to Grow
“This technology is going through a series of bubbles and corrections, and each time it does that, it’s at a new plateau,” Armstrong told Bloomberg on Tuesday, “People’s expectations are all over the map, but real-world adoption has been going up.”
Armstrong told the panel at the summit that Coinbase helped customers trade more than $150 billion worth of cryptocurrency over the past year. The CEO didn’t elaborate on the company’s current rate of onboarding new customers though. Still, the San-Francisco-based exchange continues to grow. Currently, Coinbase has around 1,000 employees.
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Armstrong estimates that about 10% of the digital coins out there are used in real life.
“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.
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