Inside Coinbase’s Acquisition of Echo | Shan Aggarwal
Episode publishedPodcast: EmpireEmpire
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Our vision or our mission at Coinbase has always been to create more economic freedom in the world, and we we believe that crypto and blockchain protocols allow you to have more open and accessible financial services. And so Echo really gives us the components to actually do this compliant fundraising on chain in a way that we think better connects capital or investors with investment opportunities.
This episode is brought to you by Blockdaemon. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. Alright, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. Today is an acquisition day. There's a big acqu
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Good to see you, Yano, and glad to be here.
Yeah. So I feel like a lot of people know the Coinbase exec team for maybe it's Emily or Paul or Brian, but I feel like you've done a nice job of staying a little bit behind the scenes. True. But you've led, like, a lot of the, you know, venture stuff and m and a stuff and corp dev stuff in general comes through your team. So I'd love to just get, like, your backstory and, like, what you've yeah. Your your journey over the last several years, and and then we can get into Echo, the M and A strategy of Coinbase, all that fun stuff.
Yeah. For sure. I started at Coinbase in May 2018. Company was about 150 people at that time, working out of a a relatively small office in one front, and, you know, I first got into crypto before Coinbase when I was at a venture capital and early stage growth firm called Graycroft, and I was investing in a lot of fintech and media. I was always interested in kinda like what was up and coming, and so I read the Ethereum white paper in early twenty seventeen and a light bulb went off because it kinda reminded me of, the early App Store era where there was sort of this, like, new developer playg
a parabola with with no chance of succeeding.
You do it the old school way. Right? Yeah. So starting from scratch. Yeah. And then recently, I've been leading all of our efforts across partnerships, m and a, investments, and then now also business operations and strategy. So at the high level, I think about my role as helping guide the company's strategy and ensure that we're operating as efficiently as possible.
Nice. And congrats on the promotion, chief business officer. Exciting. Okay. Well, first of I wanna talk about Echo, but, you guys tried to coin you guys tried to tokenize Coinbase in stock. I didn't know that. Tell me about that.
Yeah. We did. We had a whole internal effort around it called, Project Clementine. And, you know, the focus was really we wanted to list Coinbase, obviously, on Nasdaq and have kind of a digital twin that was list that we could list on Coinbase and make, tradable, on chain. And at that time, you know, it was a different SEC, different regulatory environment. So and also just education around crypto and tokenization was much earlier than it is today. So we had really good discussion and healthy debate on that trying to to get it through, but, ultimately, we couldn't really find a regulatory pat
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