Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

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So they scaled from 1000 to 2000 employees in a year because ...

    There were new use cases enabled
    by crypto getting traction practically
    every week. We saw the opportunities but
    we needed to massively scale our team to
    be positioned to compete in a broad
    array of bets.

...yet they have not enabled their users to use the Lightning Network?

I wonder why. The LN would enable all Coinbase users to do nearly instant and nearly free transactions. Wouldn't that help crypto adoption big time?

They make their money from the large cryptocurrency trading market and focus on allowing more speculative tokens to be traded. They probably correctly assess that the market of people who want to use Bitcoin for daily transactions is comparatively insignificant.

Out of my circle, the only people I know that actually spend BTC as BTC for transactions, usually for things like personal domains, hold their own wallet and don't touch exchanges.

The people that heavily use exchanges hold it purely for speculation and/or gambling and have never once "spent" BTC.

Coinbase has over 5000 employees. They hired 1200 employees in the first three months of this year. That's about the number they had in total just 2 years ago.

Probably because they see that the vast majority of their users never withdraw their coins, and they probably prefer it that way.

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