Coinbase CEO Says Going Public Helped The Exchange Raise Money Quickly

Brian Armstrong, chief executive officer of Coinbase, has sat down with Ryan Selkis, the co-founder of crypto market intelligence products provider Messari, to talk about the exchange's potential, as well as its significance in the industry.

The two had a chat at the Mainnet 2022 crypto conference, which was held in New York from Sept. 21 to 22. Armstrong stated during the discussion that the goal of the crypto exchange is to "actually go out there and be a champion for the whole industry and defend the whole industry," Decrypt reported.

Armstrong said that prior to going public in 2021, he consulted with various firms' heads who either went public or remained private to weigh the pros and cons.

"[Going public] has put us on the main stage, where we're able to get deals done with BlackRock and companies like Meta," Armstrong explained, as per the outlet. "Now we're the first Fortune 500 company doing crypto, and so we can go do deal with other Fortune 500 companies now, and they treat us more as a more legitimate force out there."

Armstrong added that it becomes very easy for a public company to raise funds while giving an example of when Coinbase successfully raised a debt of $3 million in a single week without having a single meeting.

The downside of going public, according to him, is scrutiny and media coverage.

"I think some of the scrutiny is not that helpful, to be honest," Armstrong said. "It's just people pushing their own narrative or trying to do anti-tech bias pieces, [that] should be labeled opinion pieces, but they're not."

He pointed out that while his company is largely regulated, it will support pushbacks against certain unfair policies if and when necessary. Recently, the exchange criticized the sanctions imposed by the U.S. Treasury on Tornado Cash, a crypto mixer.

"Sanctioning open source software is like permanently shutting down a highway because robbers used it to flee a crime scene," Armstrong wrote in a Coinbase blog post earlier this month. "It's not the best way to solve a problem. It ends up punishing people who did nothing wrong and results in people having less privacy and security."