Coinbase, the most prolific US-based cryptocurrency exchange, has announced that it will close the doors of its former San Francisco headquarters by 2022. This is in order to become a 100% remote company. The company previously announced its intention to move away from the traditional office model, to decentralize its operations and stimulate work as part of its response to Covid-19.
Coinbase will close the former San Francisco headquarters by 2022
Coinbase has announced that it will close its former San Francisco headquarters via its official Coinbase News Twitter account. The company is moving from a traditional business model to a remote business due to last year's Covid-19 outbreak. This move is another action the exchange is using to show its compromise in decentralization, stating that no location is more important than the others.
Coinbase said: “The closure of our SF office is an important step to ensure that no office becomes an unofficial headquarters. This means that the results will be based only on capacity and results rather than on position ”.
However, the company will not leave its workers alone, offering them to open a smaller subset of offices that can be exploited by workers around the world to serve as bases if they so wish.
This seems to mimic what Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been doing for some time. In fact, its CEO Changpeng Zhao claimed to have no headquarters because bitcoin did not even have one.
Explanation of Coinbase's first remote job policy
Although this decision may be seen as groundbreaking by some for a company that just had a direct listing on the NASDAQ (Nasdaq shares) with a valuation of $ 100 billion at its launch, it is just a continuation of a policy it had already defined last year as a consequence of Covid-19.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of the exchange, said this new approach showed interesting benefits, including being able to hire employees in cities and towns where they didn't have a real foothold, hiring interesting talent from around the world instead of just in San Francisco.
Armstrong and the top Coinbase leaders set a good example, as none of them actually reside in the city or go to the offices of the former San Francisco headquarters. According to him: "This is one of the most powerful things we can do to prevent Coinbase from inadvertently reverting to an office culture."
In the future, we may see other cryptocurrency-related exchanges and companies become decentralized and remote after Covid-19, even as this presents a new debate on how disputes with a homeless company will be resolved.
What do you think of the decentralized localization policies implemented by Coinbase? Let us know in the comments section below.
