Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase went public on Wednesday in a direct listing that opened at $381 per share, valuing the company at $99.6 billion. In anticipation, bitcoin hit a record high of over $64,000 Wednesday morning, according to data from Coin Metrics.
But when Coinbase co-founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam first started the company in 2012, "a bitcoin was worth $6 and only known by a few nerds on the internet," Ehrsam tweeted on Wednesday.
At the time, "bitcoin was the crazy idea that the world could have a digital money for everyone," he said.
Get South Florida local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC South Florida newsletters.
Armstrong and Ehrsam first met on Reddit and shared a bullish view on bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space as a whole, Ehrsam said on Twitter. In turn, they decided to launch Coinbase with the "mission" to "make crypto easy to use."
Although the company currently has a multibillion-dollar valuation, its beginnings were "not glamorous," Ehrsam said. "Coinbase launched out of a two bedroom apartment we shared with another company."
Over the first two years in business, Coinbase grew to a company with over 1,000 employees.
But between 2014 and 2017, Coinbase faced "serious hardship," Ehrsam said. "In the 3 years ... the outside world thought crypto was dead."
For example, after rallying to nearly $20,000 in 2017, bitcoin's price collapsed and lost a third of its value in a single day, and in 2018, it dropped to as low as $3,122, wiping out billions of dollars from the total cryptocurrency market value.
Money Report
"Over a third of employees left," Ehrsam said.
Despite the hiccups, Coinbase continued to grow.
Ehrsam left Coinbase in 2017, but remained on its board and owns an estimated 6% of its stock, according to Forbes.
The company recently reported an estimated $1.8 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2021 and up to $800 million in net income. Coinbase now has 56 million users, up from 43 million at the end of 2020.
Although some investors are calling Coinbase's market debut a "watershed" moment for the cryptocurrency industry, as CNBC reported, many also note risks to come, including volatility and potential government regulation, to name a few.
Looking back, Ehrsam is not only proud of Coinbase, but of the growth of the cryptocurrency space.
"Today, almost 10 years later, crypto is a sprawling ecosystem quickly redefining money, the financial system, and, ambitiously, the internet itself," he said on Twitter. "Institutions have adopted, including banks, asset managers, fintech companies, and even non-financial services companies."
Ehrsam currently has a net worth of $1.9 billion, according to Forbes.
Check out: Meet the middle-aged millennial: Homeowner, debt-burdened and turning 40
Don't miss: This 36-year-old Brooklyn artist made over $46,000 in six weeks selling NFTs
