A month after becoming the first crypto “unicorn,” U.S. Bitcoin exchange Coinbase has reached 10 million registered users.
The San Francisco startup has seen tremendous growth in 2017, adding thousands of users per day and handling increasing levels of trading volume. Last month, CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company had raised $100 million during its latest funding round, giving the company a valuation of $1 billion to make it first “bitcoin unicorn.”
Now, Coinbase has surpassed 10 million registered users. In the last three weeks of August, the bitcoin exchange added an astonishing 800,000 users as the bitcoin price soared close to $5,000 (it passed $5,000 on several exchanges, but peaked at $4,962 on Coinbase). According to data from the Coinbase website, the exchange and wallet service has also recently surpassed $20 billion in total volume.
Commenting on the company’s achievement, social media users stated that the community needs “more exchanges that offer what…Coinbase has.” Reddit user elemexe praised the exchange for its accessibility to new users:
CB is so well done. As much as I initially found the fees to be higher than normal fiat, I’m still too much of a newbie (also pending Kraken verification) to venture too far into exchanges….CB makes it so easy. The app looks great too.
User btcltc77 agreed, referring to the exchanges as the “McDonald’s of Bitcoin banking.”
Coinbase is still the most mainstream way of buying Bitcoin. It’s the McDonald’s of Bitcoin banking.
Coinbase faced several challenges as it marched toward this impressive goal. Throughout the year, it has been embroiled in a legal dispute with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over whether it should have to release personal client information to the agency.
It has also struggled to scale its business operations as fast as it has gained users, resulting in multiple outages throughout the year during periods of extreme market volatility. Moreover, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has received a 4,700% more complaints about Coinbase so far in 2017 than it did in all of 2016. Consequently, the company pledged to devote Q3 to focusing on operational excellence, scaling, and improved customer experience.