ICYMI: Coinbase is Part of Pledge 1%…

ICYMI is an ongoing series of blog posts memorializing important Twitter threads from thought leaders at Coinbase and beyond. In this thread Brian talks about Coinbase’s dedication to increasing economic freedom in the world through non-profit work in addition to our for-profit work.

A headshot of Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, smiling in a black tee shirt

A Twitter thread from Brian Armstrong on May 24, 2021:

This didn’t get much attention, but I’m proud to say Coinbase is part of Pledge 1%. This means we are allocating 1% of equity, profit, and employee time toward our non-profit foundation [Coinbase Giving]. 1% of equity means this is going to be an enormous foundation…

There was a big push I made for this in 2020, which required full board support (to their credit there was 100% support). We’re actually doing 0.1% equity per year for 10 years. It gives us a ton of resources over time to allocate toward….

  1. Projects like GiveCrypto.org
  2. Open source developers working on the underlying blockchains & protocols
  3. Training more people to work in the cryptoeconomy

The for-profit work we do is still 99% of our efforts and where the vast majority of our contribution to the world will come from. But some efforts are best done through a non-profit (like giving small amounts of crypto directly to recipients in need all over the world).

So the two are very complementary toward achieving our mission as a company.

We’ll also be doing an employee match program, on donations to any charities that employees want to support.

*We’ve added links where appropriate. You can see original thread here.


ICYMI: Coinbase is Part of Pledge 1%… was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.