Crypto's Mainstream Media Touchdown 🏈
with Coinbase President Emilie Choi
In this Brackets episode, we talk about crypto’s news coverage and transition into the mainstream. Specifically, this edition is aimed at journalists and non-crypto people (like me) that want to cut through all the hype and technical jargon to truly understand this emerging space at its core.
Cryptocurrency hype, for months, has been splashing into the mainstream and pilfering our digital attentions. Perhaps, the pinnacle of crypto fever exploded at the super-bowl 🏈 which featured a queue of crypto ads ranging from a time traveling LeBron James to comedian Larry David missing out on every major innovation throughout history including crypto.
But by far the most memorable ad, the talk of the town, was Coinbase spending 7 million dollars for a floating QR code, that gave users a sign up bonus on their site. Coinbase’s website temporarily crashed on February 13th due to too many visitors.
This semester, Princeton professor and parallel computing expert J.P. Singh and former director of multimedia research at Bell Labs, Dr. Robert Fish, teamed up to design a new special senior computer science class on web3 and cryptocurrency, offered for the first time to students. Desperate to learn the first thing about crypto, and tired of pretending to my friends I knew what NFTs are, I smashed the enroll button. Three weeks later, I’m excited to share with Brackets some exciting takeaways and highlights from taking a course on Web3.
In today’s class, we had an incredible and electric guest speaker — Coinbase President and COO Emilie Choi.
The rest of this post is split into two. The first portion is a condensation of Choi’s insights and Q&A thoughts ranging from Coinbase’s Superbowl ad, Coinbase venture investments, weathering crypto “winters”, and the tipping point of crypto’s mainstream acceptance. Then, for your reference at the bottom, I’ve added a pocket guide on some hot crypto terms referenced by Emilie. 🔥 There’s so much jargon in industry that perhaps, at times, we all need a personal crypto dictionary.
Emilie Choi on Crypto Winters, Touchdowns and Tipping Points
Q: What were your thoughts on the Coinbase Superbowl ad, and would you have done anything differently?
I think we crushed it with the Superbowl!
We found an ad that was very much unique to Coinbase. There was no people in it, no gimmick in it, no bad humor, and no celebrities. The music was web3. The vibe was web3. We were trying to get away from the Superbowl campaign that’s trying to be too earnest or too funny. If you didn’t know it was a QR code, you were trying to figure out what it was. It obviously grew so much traffic that it was more traffic than we ever handled.
Q: Do you think Web3 technology is at the tipping point or ready for mainstream adoption? What do you think is Coinbase’s role in promoting or pushing crypto into the mainstream?
Here’s one thing I’ve learned about crypto. In crypto there’s this really weird thing that happens. Some trend starts to look promising, and then it will die off and is dismissed. Then, one to two years later it will come back spectacularly.
Here’s an example. Coinbase ventures invested in OpenSea in the seed round. This whole thing about NFTs, it was a concept back then, and it sounded interesting, so we put some money in. Now if you look at the trajectory of OpenSea, or any of the early NFT companies, they probably at some point had around 10 users. It was really not very promising. There were some small spikes here and there, but they died later. And then, it grew like this — vertical.
I can talk about many different places where similar things have happened in web3, including decentralized exchanges, and wallets, and so on. The lesson here is that web3 is not like a SAAS company, where growth is linear and neat. It means that if you have conviction about a trend, you must have the fearlessness to see it through a winter. Because we have winters and we have summers in crypto.
The thing that is holding us back right now is usability. Getting a user to figure out and use one of the NFT marketplaces is challenging, and is not a mainstream use case yet. And that’s what I think Coinbase’s value prop is, in general we try to figure out how to make things much more usable to the mainstream.
This is just a longwinded way of me saying, I think we are at a huge tipping point. But I still think in the short term we will still see a bunch of cliffs where things look like they are dead.
Q: How do you approach your marketing, from appealing to crypto enthusiasts to the mainstream. And what role does social media and twitter play?
Going back to the Superbowl ad, I would argue that it was targeted towards anyone.
One of Brian’s beliefs is not to dumb down anything we do for the mainstream. Yes, he wants our products to be usable by the mainstream, but he doesn’t want to dumb down our content.
For example, our around the block podcast, which is a marketing mechanism in some ways, he doesn’t want it to be just for the mainstream. He wants it to be something that he would listen to, which is then elevated to a larger audience. We think about our marketing the same way. What that typically means, in the nuance, is that we want our marketing to be focused around the products, instead of an earnest campaign around the Coinbase brand.
Twitter is a great place we’re using. Discord as well. But we have a lot more to do on the social media side. We just hired our first CMO three months ago. This is all brand new to us, and it’s cool that historically everything we’ve gotten has been from organic word of mouth and paid acquisition marketing.
Dictionary of Hot Terms
(don’t worry, a few days ago, I had no clue what these words meant either :)
NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens): A unique digital code that represents some kind of digital item. It could be digital art or music. “Non-fungible” means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced by something else; your’s will be the only copy of the asset. Proof of your ownership of the NFT is stored on a “blockchain”, a digital ledger of sorts that is secure and publicly accessible to everyone.
OpenSea: One of the largest marketplaces for NFTs. A crypto startup. Coinbase Ventures was a seed round investor.
Coinbase Ventures: Coinbase’s investing arm started by Emilie in 2018; according to her, there is no full time staff on Coinbase ventures; the team is all “night to weekend” investors made of interested Coinbase employees. Portfolio includes OpenSea, Cointracker, and crypto wallet startup DeBank.
Wallet: A digital wallet that allows users to store and manage their passwords and assets for all their cryptocurrencies. A one stop serves all location for users to interact with web3.
DAO (decentralized autonomous organization): an internet-native business that’s collectively owned and managed by its members. Powered by blockchain technology. Has potential applications in digital voting and enabling “web3 democracies.”