Coinbase is a digital asset exchange company headquartered in San Francisco, California. They broker exchanges of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and other digital assets with fiat currencies in 32 countries, and bitcoin transactions and storage in 190 countries worldwide.
Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. Armstrong is a former software engineer at Airbnb and Ehrsam is a former Goldman Sachs trader. As of December 2017, Coinbase had 14.
8 million registered accounts, making it the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world at that time. In October 2018, Coinbase announced that it had reached a valuation of $8 billion after receiving a $300 million investment from Tiger Global Management.
Coinbase has been the subject of extensive scrutiny due to its role as the leading US-based cryptocurrency exchange. In January 2018, Coinbase was accused by The Wall Street Journal of insider trading after it was revealed that employees had been given advance notice of large Bitcoin Cash trades made by an account belonging to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
The same month, GDAX, another cryptocurrency exchange owned by Coinbase, was also accused of insider trading after it was revealed that staff had been given advance notice of large Ethereum trades made by an account belonging to Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam.
In March 2018, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched an investigation into whether Coinbase had violated securities lAWS in its operation of GDAX. In December 2018, the SEC charged two former employees of Coinbase with insider trading.
Despite these controversies, Coinbase remains one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in operation today. As of September 2019, Coinbase has over 30 million users and processes $1 billion worth of transactions per day.
Yes, Coinbase has been hacked before. In June 2016, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the Ethereum platform to steal over $50 million worth of Ether from accounts on the Coinbase platform. This was one of the largest hacks in the history of cryptocurrencies at that time.
However, Coinbase has since implemented multiple security measures to prevent such hacks from happening again. Overall, while no exchange is completely safe from hacks, Coinbase is considered to be one of the more secure exchanges in operation today.