Coinbase has announced its plans to shut down its headquarters in San Francisco from 2020 and let employees continue to work remotely. This shift to the new model is not surprising and comes almost a year after the exchange’s CEO Brian Armstrong had revealed the intention of making the platform remote rather than having a specific headquarters.
According to Coinbase, closing its SF office is an important step toward ensuring that no office becomes an unofficial headquarters, and that career outcomes are based on capability and output rather than location. The platform also stated that it will provide a network of smaller offices for its employees to work from if they so desire.
The main objective behind this move was to ensure decentralization with respect to cryptocurrency businesses. Several employees of the exchange are spread across the globe and would want to dodge regulation. Binance, which also happens to be one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges, also does not have any official headquarters.
Talking about embracing the “remote first” move, Coinbase further noted,
“We’ve committed to having no HQ, and it’s important to show our decentralized workforce that no one location is important than the another.”
Coinbase’s Transparency Report
In addition to the remote working model, Coinbase also unveiled a transparency report for the second half of 2020. The document informed about the requests from government agencies and law enforcement, for customer information between 1st of July, 2020, and 31st of December, 2020. The exchange had reportedly received a total of 2,313 information requests during this period.
Around 90% of requests originated from the US, UK, and Germany. The Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] and Homeland Security Investigations [HSI] accounted for the majority of US law enforcement information requests at approximately 50.9.
On the other hand, 51% of total requests during this period came from the country’s agencies. Moreover, was an increase of roughly 20% in requests from France.