Coinbase Announces San Francisco HQ Shutdown by 2022

Coinbase, the most prolific U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, has announced it will close the doors of its former San Francisco HQ by 2022, in its push to go 100% remote. Earlier the company had announced its intention of ditching the traditional office-based model to decentralize its operations and instead impulse work from home politics as part of its response to Covid-19.

Coinbase to Shutdown Former San Francisco HQ Office by 2022

Coinbase has announced today it would shut down its former San Francisco HQ office via its official Coinbase News Twitter account. The company is transitioning from a traditional work model to a remote-first company since the Covid-19 epidemic last year. This move is yet another action that the exchange is taking to show its compromise with decentralization, stating that no location is more important than the others. Coinbase stated:

Closing our SF office is an important step in ensuring no office becomes an unofficial HQ and will mean career outcomes are based on capability and output rather than location.

However, the company will not leave its workers stranded, offering to open a smaller subset of offices that can be leveraged by their workers around the world to be used as bases if they choose to do so.

This seems to mimic what Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange, has also been doing since time ago, with its CEO Changpeng Zhao declaring they had no headquarter because bitcoin didn’t.

Coinbase Remote First Work Policy Explained

While this decision can be seen as revolutionary by some for a company that just had a direct listing on NASDAQ with a valuation of $100 billion at its launch, it is just a continuation of a policy it had defined last year as a consequence of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Brian Armstrong, CEO of the exchange, declared this new approach had interesting advantages, including the possibility of hiring employees in cities and countries where they didn’t have a real foothold, getting interesting talent from all over the world instead of just in San Francisco.

Armstrong and Coinbase’s top brass are leading by example, as none of them actually reside in the city or commute there to the former San Francisco HQ offices. According to him:

This is one of the most powerful things we can do to keep Coinbase from inadvertently returning to an in-office culture.

In the future, we might see other exchanges and cryptocurrency-related companies go decentralized and remote-first after the Covid-19, even when this presents a new debate about how disputes will be solved with a headquarters-less company.

What do you think of Coinbase’s decentralized location policies? Let us know in the comments section below.