Coinbase: 89 million users in 100+ countries. A behemoth in crypto.
Coinbase NFT: Announced 6 months ago with a 4 million user waitlist. An onramp for users familiar with crypto, but new to NFTs.
The beta product launched on 4/20 to those highest on the waitlist (basically influencers) and here are my early thoughts as a non-user.
HERE’S SOME ALPHA: we’re in beta
If Coinbase can figure out the bad and ??? points thoughtfully, we have a real Opensea competitor.
The Good
Scale - Millions of users getting introduced to NFTs, what’s not to like about that! Coinbase can send out one push notification, one e-mail, one Tweet, and the NFT adoption will grow by a multiple.
Strengthening the Coinbase ecosystem/moat - Eventually, Coinbase users won’t want or need to go to another marketplace to buy/sell their NFTs and can live within the CB ecosystem. Want to do anything crypto related? Coinbase has it all as a crypto superapp.
Addition of a social layer - Many NFTs have an inherent social layer to them and Coinbase is building upon that. Comments, liking, up/down voting. A lot of Instagram comparisons.
Coinbase didn't launch an NFT platform... they launched Web3 Instagram
The Bad
Speed - It’s been 6 months since the announcement and Coinbase just released the beta version of their NFT product. I’m not here to downplay the monumental effort and kudos deserved for the building they’ve done, but this space moves fast.
How will the CB NFT product scale, optimize, and stabilize their platform in a space that moves faster than Usain Bolt? Not to mention Coinbase is a public company and has more regulatory eyes on it than smaller players.
Numbers aren’t a fair comparison of course but $64k volume in 2+ days is not looking great.
I believe that the people who really push volume in the NFT space either don’t use CB or they already use Opensea. There is likely little incentive (for now) for them to switch. And even if there’s incentive for them to switch, old habits die hard. Opensea is hard at work ensuring they maintain the #1 spot too.
The ???
The social layer of course! - This is innovative and may create a unique moat that others won’t be replicating. It might even move the NFT and art niches on Instagram over to CB NFT!
However as we know, social media + NFTs is the Wild West.
This has been my Coinbase NFT experience so far...
(these users know each other btw and are trolling, but if you didn’t know that context, this is a toxic interaction)
CB is a crypto company, not a social media company. Meta, Snap, Tiktok, Twitter have teams of thousands of content moderators. Maybe it’s been all thought out, but building a social layer on top of anything is tricky. With great power features comes great responsibility.
There will be bad actors using social engineering to achieve the results they want, whether it’s scamming or creating price movements for financial gain.
Is CB ready to build an Operations and Support team on the levels of an Opensea and a small (low 7 figure MAU) social network? I hope so.
Personalization - Straight from the horse’s mouth
So, is CB creating a crypto + NFT social graph? Will the social graph be cross-platform (NFT platform + exchange + wallet)? Will ‘promoted collections’ become a thing?
I guess we’ll find out in the coming months :)
