,Contents
A Note on Sources
PART ONE
From Open Secret to Civil War
1. Brian Has a Secret
2. The Outlaw Currency
3. Running through Brick Walls
4. Bust
5. Hard Times
6. Civil War
PART TWO
From Boom to Bubble to Bust
7. Enter Ethereum
8. Wall Street Comes Calling
9. Brian Has a Master Plan
10. Uncle Sam Comes Calling
11. Initial Coin Insanity
12. Coinbase Crackup
PART THREE
From Crypto Winter to the Crypto Future
13. Hangover
14. “Getting Our Asses Kicked”
15. Power Struggle
,16. Bitcoin Triumphant
17. The Future of Finance
Epilogue
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Note on Sources
I first encountered bitcoin and Coinbase in 2013. I was a reporter at the tech blog GigaOm, where
I reported on collisions between law and technology—including the then-novel phenomenon
of cryptocurrency. On a hot July day, I set out to investigate an event called Satoshi Square, which
took place in a corner of New York’s Union Square. Believing I would need a bitcoin to participate,
I bought one for $70 from Coinbase, intending to expense it. Happily, I forgot to do so and ended
up holding on to it—and sold half of it later that year when the price hit what seemed to be an
absurd high of $800.
Since then, I have been fascinated with cryptocurrency and the role Coinbase has played in
bringing it to the general public. I have written about the company numerous times since 2013
for GigaOm and for Fortune magazine.
In researching this book, I drew on my earlier work and also conducted numerous additional
interviews with Coinbase executives and board members. I also interviewed many other influential
figures in the cryptocurrency world, including academics, investors, and those close to Coinbase’s
competitors. Most of the accounts in this book, including nearly all of the quotes attributed to
people at Coinbase, are from those interviews.
I have also drawn extensively on secondary material, including news reports
from Wired, the New York Times, Forbes, and Coindesk. The reporting in Kings of Crypto also
makes use of the excellent first generation of cryptocurrency histories, including Digital Gold, The
Age of Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Revolution. When I have relied on material directly from
these sources for my own narrative, I’ve made every effort to identify them accordingly.
Finally, this work represents a more polished version of the audio version of Kings of Crypto,
which came out in May 2020. The book you now hold in your hands includes more recent news
surrounding Coinbase and corrects several minor errors.
1
, Brian Has
a Secret
Brian Armstrong stepped out of his car, felt soft California sunshine on his bald head, and smelled
eucalyptus. He gazed at the façade of Y Combinator: the one-story building, just five miles from
Google’s Mountain View campus, looked more like a sleepy suburban office park than a famous
startup school that had educated the founders of Stripe, Dropbox, and other billion-dollar
companies. Brian didn’t care about the place’s humdrum appearance. He knew who had gone there
before him. The founders of Airbnb, a company he’d just left, had come out of Y Combinator, and
so had the CEOs of other Silicon Valley stars like Doordash, Twitch, and Reddit. Brian, pale and
shy-looking at first glance, exuded a quiet confidence from his trim frame and wasn’t bothered
that he’d broken up with his would-be cofounder just days before, making him the rare
entrepreneur to do the program alone. It was the summer of 2012, and Brian was brimming with
certainty that he would build Y Combinator’s next famous startup.
It wasn’t always this way. Twelve miles to the south, in San Jose, is where Brian had spent his
early teenage years in the 1990s, restless and vaguely unhappy. San Jose is the tenth-largest city
in the country and the hub of Silicon Valley, but it could still feel—then and now—like a lifeless
parking lot where many people have nothing to do. Brian felt like that a lot. Until the internet.
As it had for so many other intelligent but introverted kids, the appearance of the World Wide
Web brought friends to Brian as well as a flood of exciting ideas. Being stuck in poky San Jose
didn’t matter now that he had a global community of hackers and philosophers at his keyboard.
By the time he arrived at Rice University in 2001, Brian knew he wanted to use the internet to
remake the world in the way an earlier generation of tech visionaries had done with microchips
and desktop computers.
But there was a problem.
“I always had this thought, ‘I wish I was born a bit sooner.’ By the time I graduated from college
and I was starting to work, I worried maybe I was too late,” Brian recalls. “The formative internet
companies had been built, and the revolution had happened.”
He was wrong, of course. The internet revolution is still blazing, and entrepreneurs, for better
and worse, are using it to remake our homes and our lives. And in late 2008, a mysterious person
using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page white paper on the web that would bring
that same revolution to money. Brian discovered that paper a year later.
It was Christmas, and Brian was in his old room back at his parents’ house in San Jose, reading
tech news on the internet, as usual. Someone had posted Satoshi’s paper on a computer discussion
forum. Right away, he was rapt. He read and then reread what the paper described: a new type of
digital currency known as bitcoin that operated outside the realm of any bank, company, or
government. Bitcoin kept track of who paid whom just as a bank did, but the transactions were
recorded by random people on computers scattered around the globe. It was real money without
A Note on Sources
PART ONE
From Open Secret to Civil War
1. Brian Has a Secret
2. The Outlaw Currency
3. Running through Brick Walls
4. Bust
5. Hard Times
6. Civil War
PART TWO
From Boom to Bubble to Bust
7. Enter Ethereum
8. Wall Street Comes Calling
9. Brian Has a Master Plan
10. Uncle Sam Comes Calling
11. Initial Coin Insanity
12. Coinbase Crackup
PART THREE
From Crypto Winter to the Crypto Future
13. Hangover
14. “Getting Our Asses Kicked”
15. Power Struggle
,16. Bitcoin Triumphant
17. The Future of Finance
Epilogue
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Note on Sources
I first encountered bitcoin and Coinbase in 2013. I was a reporter at the tech blog GigaOm, where
I reported on collisions between law and technology—including the then-novel phenomenon
of cryptocurrency. On a hot July day, I set out to investigate an event called Satoshi Square, which
took place in a corner of New York’s Union Square. Believing I would need a bitcoin to participate,
I bought one for $70 from Coinbase, intending to expense it. Happily, I forgot to do so and ended
up holding on to it—and sold half of it later that year when the price hit what seemed to be an
absurd high of $800.
Since then, I have been fascinated with cryptocurrency and the role Coinbase has played in
bringing it to the general public. I have written about the company numerous times since 2013
for GigaOm and for Fortune magazine.
In researching this book, I drew on my earlier work and also conducted numerous additional
interviews with Coinbase executives and board members. I also interviewed many other influential
figures in the cryptocurrency world, including academics, investors, and those close to Coinbase’s
competitors. Most of the accounts in this book, including nearly all of the quotes attributed to
people at Coinbase, are from those interviews.
I have also drawn extensively on secondary material, including news reports
from Wired, the New York Times, Forbes, and Coindesk. The reporting in Kings of Crypto also
makes use of the excellent first generation of cryptocurrency histories, including Digital Gold, The
Age of Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Revolution. When I have relied on material directly from
these sources for my own narrative, I’ve made every effort to identify them accordingly.
Finally, this work represents a more polished version of the audio version of Kings of Crypto,
which came out in May 2020. The book you now hold in your hands includes more recent news
surrounding Coinbase and corrects several minor errors.
1
, Brian Has
a Secret
Brian Armstrong stepped out of his car, felt soft California sunshine on his bald head, and smelled
eucalyptus. He gazed at the façade of Y Combinator: the one-story building, just five miles from
Google’s Mountain View campus, looked more like a sleepy suburban office park than a famous
startup school that had educated the founders of Stripe, Dropbox, and other billion-dollar
companies. Brian didn’t care about the place’s humdrum appearance. He knew who had gone there
before him. The founders of Airbnb, a company he’d just left, had come out of Y Combinator, and
so had the CEOs of other Silicon Valley stars like Doordash, Twitch, and Reddit. Brian, pale and
shy-looking at first glance, exuded a quiet confidence from his trim frame and wasn’t bothered
that he’d broken up with his would-be cofounder just days before, making him the rare
entrepreneur to do the program alone. It was the summer of 2012, and Brian was brimming with
certainty that he would build Y Combinator’s next famous startup.
It wasn’t always this way. Twelve miles to the south, in San Jose, is where Brian had spent his
early teenage years in the 1990s, restless and vaguely unhappy. San Jose is the tenth-largest city
in the country and the hub of Silicon Valley, but it could still feel—then and now—like a lifeless
parking lot where many people have nothing to do. Brian felt like that a lot. Until the internet.
As it had for so many other intelligent but introverted kids, the appearance of the World Wide
Web brought friends to Brian as well as a flood of exciting ideas. Being stuck in poky San Jose
didn’t matter now that he had a global community of hackers and philosophers at his keyboard.
By the time he arrived at Rice University in 2001, Brian knew he wanted to use the internet to
remake the world in the way an earlier generation of tech visionaries had done with microchips
and desktop computers.
But there was a problem.
“I always had this thought, ‘I wish I was born a bit sooner.’ By the time I graduated from college
and I was starting to work, I worried maybe I was too late,” Brian recalls. “The formative internet
companies had been built, and the revolution had happened.”
He was wrong, of course. The internet revolution is still blazing, and entrepreneurs, for better
and worse, are using it to remake our homes and our lives. And in late 2008, a mysterious person
using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page white paper on the web that would bring
that same revolution to money. Brian discovered that paper a year later.
It was Christmas, and Brian was in his old room back at his parents’ house in San Jose, reading
tech news on the internet, as usual. Someone had posted Satoshi’s paper on a computer discussion
forum. Right away, he was rapt. He read and then reread what the paper described: a new type of
digital currency known as bitcoin that operated outside the realm of any bank, company, or
government. Bitcoin kept track of who paid whom just as a bank did, but the transactions were
recorded by random people on computers scattered around the globe. It was real money without
