Cryptocurrency platform Coinbase was founded in 2012 in the United States. However, its CEO Brian Armstrong stated a year ago that the company would completely abandon its headquarters in San Francisco in 2022.
Coinbase is a cryptocurrency platform founded by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam in 2012. Initially, this company was registered in the city of San Francisco, California (United States).
However, after nine years of providing its services from the world's leading power, its founder and current CEO Brian Armstrong said that the company would no longer have a central headquarters.
In February 2021, Armstrong explained that Coinbase was adopting a new culture and would become a decentralized company, no longer requiring a headquarters from which to operate.
The news was not well received by the crypto community, who argue a messy and chaotic customer service by the company.
Why is Coinbase abandoning its headquarters?
In a letter published last yearArmstrong explained that the impact of the Covid pandemic worldwide forced the company to deploy its employees across the country and even to various parts of the world.
As of February of last year, 29% of Coinbase employees in San Francisco were working remotely, Armstrong said. In his letter, he detailed that 150 employees had moved out of the city and another 250 had left the country, working remotely from their new homes.
In addition to abandoning its headquarters due to complications from the pandemic, the company also believes that not having a headquarters better aligns with the decentralization principles of the crypto industry, although it also noted that it would maintain a small network of physical offices in various countries for those workers who wish to attend work in person.
New headquarters in Japan
In August 2021, six months after announcing it would be abandoning its San Francisco headquarters, Coinbase announced it was expanding into a new jurisdiction, Japan, where it aims to be the country’s most trusted cryptocurrency exchange.
Although the company maintains that it will close its offices in San Francisco this year and will operate only from its network of general offices, without calling any of them “official.”
According to Armstrong, the idea of giving up a physical location has nothing to do with avoiding regulatory and legal obligations, as some think; but rather with the need to adapt to the new remote work environment.
Coinbase clarified that its vision is to show its workforce that no location is more important than another, no matter where they are.
Coinbase Support
Although the case of Coinbase is not the same as that of its rival Binance, whose CEO Changpeng Zhao has given rather vague answers about the location of the exchange, the news of the closure of the headquarters in San Francisco was not well received by a part of the crypto community, who began to complain on Twitter after Coinbase's official announcement.
Despite being one of the most important exchanges in the cryptocurrency industry, many users complain about the customer service offered by the company and They fear that this will get worse upon the closure of its headquarters.
Some people are also wondering where to go if they need in-person assistance from Coinbase employees.
In his letter, Armstrong mentioned that since the company made the decision to work remotely and be decentralized, “the executive team has no plans to be in the office on a regular basis” and that none of them currently live in San Francisco.
