Bitcoin [BTC] and altcoins are in a correction period, says CEO of Coinbase

On 8th September, during the TechCrunch conference, Disrupt, the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong spoke about the company’s reaction to the attention cryptocurrency gained in Q4 of 2017. He also discussed the rapid growth of the firm and the issues faced by the platform.

Bitcoin [BTC] and other cryptocurrencies saw a surge in the market in the month of December 2017. This drew a lot of attention from various institutions across the globe and also resulted in the mainstream media covering the topic on a daily basis.

This was one of the main factors that led to the massive growth of the cryptocurrency exchange platform which is now hailed as one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of registered users.

The exchange platform also provides various products to its customers. The most notable ones are Coinbase Pro, Coinbase Prime, Coinbase Wallet, Earn.com and Coinbase Custody, for institutional investors.

On the topic of price fluctuation and the media attention, Brian said that they usually result with two advantages for the company. The first is that media attention results in the free marketing of the cryptocurrency space which eventually leads to cryptocurrency being introduced to more people. This has previously driven a ton of growth for Coinbase.

The second is that the price fluctuations weeds out all the people who got in the space in order to earn a quick buck or for other wrong reasons. Brian continued to say:

“… they just sort of leave and they lose interest and people who are in it for the long term and want to just build good products and go talk to our customers which is what I want the team to do. They stick around. So, we actually get more work done during these kinds of correction period.”

Brian added that at present, the cryptocurrency market is in one of the correction periods. The CEO of Coinbase further spoke about the extreme operational and customer service issues the platform faced.

He said that at one point in time, Coinbase saw almost 40,000 people sign-up on the platform in one day. This was followed by almost 500,000 people signing-up the next month. This led to the platform facing a problem with scaling the customer support team in order to keep all the people who joined the platform to learn and buy cryptocurrencies.

Brian stated:

“… and, you know, one thing we did, we brought in this really amazing leader who had scaled customer supper at Twitter, Tina Bhatnagar. So, she joined and helped us scale that team really quick. And you know, I think we hired about 300 or 400 new customer support reps in about 1 quarter just to meet that demand.”