Coinbase updates investment policy to increase investments in crypto assets

By Alesia Haas, Coinbase Chief Financial Officer

We believe in the cryptoeconomy, a future where economic transactions — buying, selling, spending, earning — will be based on crypto assets. Our products strive to make that vision a reality by making crypto trusted and easy to use for customers around the world.

Today, the majority of Coinbase corporate financial transactions, such as how we pay our vendors, employees, or invest corporate cash, remain heavily weighted in fiat. We’re in a strong position to lead by example and double down on how we can enable crypto adoption and utility, starting with how we operate our business.

Towards that goal, we are announcing a change in our investment policy. We have committed to invest $500M of our cash and cash equivalents. Going forward, we will also allocate 10% of quarterly net income into a diverse portfolio of crypto assets. This means we will become the first publicly traded company to hold Ethereum, Proof of Stake assets, DeFi tokens, and many other crypto assets supported for trading on our platform, in addition to Bitcoin, on our balance sheet.

Our crypto asset investment allocation will be driven by our aggregate custodial crypto balances — meaning our customers will drive our investment strategy. Our investments will be continually deployed over a multi-year window using a dollar cost averaging strategy. We are long term investors and will only divest under select circumstances, such as an asset delisting from our platform. All trades will be executed via our over the counter desk or away from our exchange to avoid any conflict of interest with our customers.

We may increase our allocation over time as the cryptoeconomy matures. We believe that in the future, more and more companies will hold crypto assets on their balance sheet. We hope by incorporating more crypto assets into our own corporate financial practices, we can take another step towards building a more open cryptoeconomy.

Coinbase updates investment policy to increase investments in crypto assets was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.