Coinbase publishes first-ever details on its coin listings, employee transactions, and venture capital arm

Coinbase Ventures has never sold any of its invested tokens, is run by an independent team, and has no influence on Coinbase’s listing decisions. The Asset Listing Voting Committee does not include Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and other Coinbase global board members.

Summary

Coinbase is committed to providing users with a fair, transparent, and equal trading product experience. To this end, we have taken a number of measures to ensure this, including:

We do not coordinate asset listing decisions with any party that is not directly involved in our review and listing process. This includes members of our management team who do not serve on our asset listing committee (most of Coinbase’s leadership team do not serve on our listing committee), board members, venture capitalists, and outside investors.

Coinbase Ventures has never sold any of its invested tokens . It is operated by an independent team and has no influence on the Coinbase platform's listing decisions .

We do not control the plans of early digital asset backers and do not have their proprietary information, including their buying and selling activity for listed assets.

As always, we are looking for additional mechanisms to further align with our customers, starting with allowing users to more easily track changes in Coinbase’s digital asset portfolio based on their information needs.

Details

Coinbase is committed to providing a fair and efficient market for users. As mentioned when we launched Asset Hub, our goal is to list as many compliant assets as possible. In our ideal world, Coinbase will list every asset that meets relevant legal and cybersecurity standards , while also providing customers with as much information as possible so that they can make informed investment decisions. We do not endorse any of the tokens listed, it just indicates that the asset meets our listing standards.

The problem is that it takes a long time to list an asset from a technical and legal perspective; because of its scarcity, it is considered valuable; because of its value, it is considered by some to be an endorsement. It is similar to the dynamic generated by Twitter verification, which was originally just a measure to avoid imposters, but inadvertently developed into a status symbol.

As part of our commitment to transparency, we wanted to further shed some light on our current listing process and share the steps we take to ensure our listings are independent of our venture capital teams. Finally, we will share some insights into the crypto assets on our balance sheet.

As we just discussed, let's first explain how it works.

Asset Listing

Coinbase makes listing decisions through a formal process run by a committee called the Digital Asset Listing Committee , which follows routine procedures documented in formal policy documents and reviewed and approved by relevant regulatory authorities.

The Digital Asset Listing Committee votes on which assets are allowed to be listed by evaluating the compliance, legal, and information security issues of the assets through a rigorous review/review process.

The voting committee does not include Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and other members of Coinbase’s global board of directors .

The voting results will not be influenced by whether Coinbase Ventures or our investors own the asset, and Coinbase Ventures will be transparent about disclosing our interest in the project.

Coinbase’s conflict of interest policy will be used to prevent board members or Coinbase employees from participating in listing decisions in which they have a financial interest.

The vast majority of assets reviewed by the Digital Asset Listing Committee are submitted directly by asset issuers through our Asset Hub .

This review process is rigorous and the majority of properties submitted for evaluation are rejected.

Employee Transactions

Coinbase restricts all employees from trading in tokens that the company is reviewing for listing, ensuring that no Coinbase employees (including those who do not work on the asset listing team) participate in front-running transactions.

Early Investor Deals

Coinbase will not coordinate token listing decisions, listing timing, or share information about other tokens under review with early investors in the project (including venture capitalists).

We have no control over and no knowledge of the token sale activities planned by early token investors (venture capitalists, founding teams, etc.).

Because trading typically occurs across many exchanges (not just Coinbase), and because the largest token holders and even the issuers of the assets are often unknown, we have a limited role to play in any lock-in type mechanism.

Coinbase Venture Capital

Coinbase's investment department has never sold any tokens it invested in, nor has it ever interfered with the Coinbase platform's listing decisions.

We are long-term investors. We may liquidate some assets in the future, but we have no plans to sell at the moment.

Our investment department and coin listing team operate completely independently of each other, with no overlap in personnel or information sharing.

Company balance sheet positions

Coinbase holds the majority of the assets supported on our platform on its balance sheet, which helps ensure that our interests are aligned with those of our customers.

As with our venture investments at Coinbase, we will hold these assets for the longer term and have no immediate plans to sell.

While it is impractical to hold large positions in less liquid assets, our goal is to increase exposure across the range of supported assets.

Provable Alliance

As mentioned above, we are always looking for new ways to more clearly communicate our position with our customers. While the Coinbase Ventures portfolio is already public and we disclose our crypto holdings in our 10-Q, we plan to make our holdings more transparent in the future .

We will be updating our asset disclosure in a more visible way soon, which will show (a) assets held by Coinbase, and (b) assets backed by Coinbase Ventures (regardless of whether they are currently listed or not).

We are not claiming that our portfolio is the best, nor does it constitute investment advice. However, we will make it clearer in the user interface which assets are held by Coinbase and which are supported by Coinbase, so that users can make more informed decisions about whether to align with Coinbase's crypto holdings. Of course, you can also choose a completely different strategy. In short, our goal is to provide users with a fair and efficient market where participants participate in decision-making.

By: Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer, Coinbase