Coinbase CEO confirms development of a service for launching tokens
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has confirmed that the exchange operator is working on an initial exchange offering (IEO)-like service, months after first hinting at such plans last year.
In a podcast hosted in mid-August with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, Armstrong said Coinbase is working on a product called "Coinbase Launch or something like that."
"It's a way for anybody who wants to do a crypto start up to come in and say, 'All right, I want to issue a token. Maybe I want to raise money. Maybe I just want to use it to build my community,' and just hand hold people through that process and help them with the custody of it, help them create the smart contract, help them with the governance issues, vesting of these things if you need to distribute those to employees," said Armstrong, according to a published transcript.
He went on to say that the product can be seen as a combination of Stripe Atlas, a platform for forming a company, and AngelList, a website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers looking to work at startups.
Overall, the Coinbase Launch product would be aimed at expanding the adoption of crypto, said Armstrong. "It could be a huge unlock for the crypto economy as well, to get a thousand new startups built like that," he added.
Coinbase first revealed a product of this nature last fall. "In a nutshell, Coinbase is carefully exploring not only the IEO space but also STOs [security token offerings]," Kayvon Pirestani, head of institutional sales in Asia at Coinbase, said at the time.
