Coinbase leans on brand trust after FTX crypto ‘earthquake’

A top executive at Coinbase sees an opportunity for the company to lean into brand trust in the wake of FTX’s extraordinary collapse and the resultant pall cast across the wider crypto industry. 

“I think it's hard to avoid the news, given what a major earthquake this was to the overall crypto economy,” said Alesia Haas, Coinbase's chief financial officer, at the Oppenheimer Blockchain & Digital Assets Summit.

“This is just a sad day as none of us from the outside saw this coming,” she added. 

Why it matters

Coinbase, which does not have material exposure to the FTX collapse, has prevously been bullish: it advertised at the Superbowl in 2022, for instance. But the crash of FTX has severely damaged trust in the wider crypto industry, with Coinbase shares recently collapsing to their lowest point since the exchange's market debut in April 2021.

Trust as a core brand proposition

In Haas’s view, there are now opportunities for Coinbase to level up on brand trust and leverage the company’s transparency as a publicly listed company, to distance itself from “bad actors” such as FTX.

• “When we really step back and look at how this moment has changed for us, really what I think is we have a new, important opportunity to be a louder voice on the international market, [where] our value proposition has long been to be the most trusted and easiest to use,” Haas said.
• “In light of what's happened to FTX and their concentration in non-US market share, I think there's an opportunity that opens up for a brand like ours [as] the most trusted to think about how it wants to approach these international markets.”

Building the foundations of web3

Haas also wants Coinbase to put brand trust at the center of building Web3 foundations, which many brands are looking into as a future game-changer. 

Coinbase sees opportunities for its crypto wallets in various areas of Web3, such as:

• Decentralized social media
• Gaming
• The metaverse
• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (which is like a new corporate LLC)
• Owning and paying for digitally native items inside the Metaverse or inside various Web3 games

“A lot of the crypto journey starts with custody, and that value proposition starts with trust,” Haas argued.

“What we're trying to do is make sure these things get easier to use over time and easier to access. That is what we're building with products like our Coinbase wallet, it's just the power of these new and emerging use cases … A self-hosted wallet is like a passport. It allows you to go anywhere in Web3.”

Sourced from Seeking Alpha, CNBC, Yahoo Finance