Crypto with Brian Foster From Coinbase

3 min readOct 19, 2021

On Monday, October 18th, the NEU Blockchain Organization hosted Brian Foster, from Coinbase in a collab event with Disrupt- the Fintech Initiative at Northeastern. Brian spoke to 40 students in person and over 70 students virtually about Coinbase’s institutional practice with market-leading crypto asset custody and trading solutions to financial institutions. And Coinbase Ventures with investments in early-stage startups building the future of the crypto economy.

Resources Brian mentioned:

https://www.coinbase.com/learn

https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/

Careers:

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions

Find the recording here:

JOIN US NEXT TIME

For more resources about future events join our community: https://linktr.ee/NEUBlockchain

OR Contact us at neublockchaingroup@gmail.com

Event Recap

Current challenges: scalability

About IPO: people found a great business structure in a global company and some institutional investors were interested in the company

Governance — IPO forced the company to oblige to policies and governance

First mover advantage being the first crypto exchange to go public

Company’s retail team sending the right message — Coinbase is the financial account for all things crypto

Easy to navigate tools for users
Reported Q2 6 mil users
Retail challenges — ensuring that people can use this new type of technology correctly
Trusts — security toolkits
Ex. Sending crypto to other addresses
Educational side for first-time users

- Quality and supportive services

- Just rolled out a customer service helpline

Concerns, feedback, hearing from users

Deciding what kind of coins to list on exchange:

Reputation and trust associated with the protocol?
Meet user needs — what do they demand
Regulatory profile of the asset

NFT Marketplace

Crypto forward, want to support the latest governance, staking, and other crypto native initiatives
For NFTs, crypto started from storing value to smart contracts to all types of financial activities  now it’s integrated with media, digitizing entertainment aspect, art, media and gaming markets will eventually be tied to crypto & blockchain in the near future

Coinbase in the next 5–10 years

More crypto adoption will hit billion market in the next few years

1. Retail side: Continuing to provide easy-to-use tools for users

2. Institutional side: power other platforms and services, help other startups or platforms scale, looking to collaborate with those who have less expertise in crypto

a. Externalize their educational infrastructure

Continue to push DeFi and NFT — pushing more horizontally Ventures — how the investing evolved
Portfolio of over 200 ventures

Is Coinbase teaching institutions anything?

Able to help institutions and retail who are the next wave of adopters learn about the technology

Advice to work in crypto space:

“Just do it!” — Brian Foster
Don’t get hung up on timing
Monster multi-decade phenomenon
From a career standpoint, zoom out take the long view
Ample opportunity to get in the game
Work at a crypto native firm if you can
If you want to move fast. Spend less time trying to convince people, cause everyone is already all in
Working on great teams w/ people who are long term focused