Coinbase hiring plenty of wall street employees

Coinbase one of the largest crypto supplier has huge plans for its newly opened New York office, which caters to wall street clients.

They have plans to expand the operation to 150 employees next year, from their current 20 employees. According to the company, the drop in cryptocurrency prices this year has not scared institutional demand for this asset class.

"When we saw the market begin to correct, which we all expected, institutions didn't lose interest," Adam White, general manager of Coinbase Institutional, told CoinDesk. "It was exactly the opposite."

He added:

"They look at it as an opportunity to enter when things are not too frothy."

Numerous of the local staff members were hired from traditional financial institutions such as the New York Stock Exchange, Barclays, and Citigroup.

New York "is an incredibly deep pool of talent," White said during an event Thursday celebrating the opening of its first permanent location in the city (it previously had employees working out of a WeWork there).

"We have to create a bridge between financial services and technology," he went on. "In order to do that, we need to pull from some of the best and brightest minds that have worked their whole careers in other kinds of traditional financial firms."

Institutional and retail
To make corporate clients feel at home when they visit, the office has a security staff comparable to the NYSE's, according to Coinbase's head of institutional sales, Christine Sandler, who previously worked at the Big Board.

And yet, Sandler said Coinbase's institutional custody, asset management, and trading services shouldn't be seen as conflicting with its previous focus on retail investors. To the contrary, in her mind, institutional distribution is the key to mainstream adoption.

"We want to partner with appropriate institutions to help the whole ecosystem grow," "It's not 'institutional or retail,' because a lot of these institutions will be distributors."

Stepping back, Coinbase as a company has been employing plenty of new hires all throughout the 2018 bear market, and now has more than 500 employees worldwide. And New York isn't the only new office attracting institutional clients and recruits.

Coinbase is looking to "light up more countries and more fiat rails" with an eye on expansion in Asia and Latin America "pretty quickly," White said. Coinbase already started establishing an office in Tokyo this summer, hiring a small team and applying for a Financial Services Agency certification in Japan. "We're committed to not being a U.S. company," White said. Coinbase`s plans to bring institutional investors into crypto will bring mass adoption into the space. Even tho this was eventually going to happen are you a fan of institutional investors coming into the space or are you against it? We would love to hear your thoughts below.