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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

One reason could be because HN is more familiar with Coinbase's mistakes (not getting into the NFT scene earlier and letting OpenSea/MetaMask beat them to the punch, being a crypto company in the first place which ideological quibbles aside is seen as extravagantly unsustainable and thus doomed to fail).

Lattice is in a more mainstream ("useful") industry and its CEO doesn't have a record of courting controversy, so it gets more sympathy. It doesn't come with the downsides of being a ubiquitous brand or association with a controversial sector. Plus it's a smaller company so it's more of an underdog. Also the startup funding offer is neat and intriguing.

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"HN is more familiar with Coinbase's mistakes (not getting into the NFT scene earlier and letting OpenSea/MetaMask beat them to the punch..."

lol, who the heck thinks that not getting into NFT market was a mistake? If anything, they did themselves a favor by not building many NFT capabilities.

NFTs might have a second chance in the future but currently is just a mass graveyard of scams.

NFTs were a short fad (did it even last a year?), but CB being the market leader for crypto wallets meant they should’ve had an NFT feature ready far earlier. This is a “performance” critique of them getting big and complacent and unable to execute while nimbler startups ran circles around them.

How is jumping on every fad a good thing? Focusing on their core business and not getting distracted by small month-long fads happening in their general industry sounds a lot more sensible.

It was a very lucrative fad, and as per that other thread, it sounds like Coinbase bought into it anyway by increasing headcount to build an NFT offering anyway, just after they were late to the party. If that’s accurate, then lose-lose.

How lucrative could it have been when the one major player (OpenSea) was slashing staff as early as July 2022?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/07/15/nft-marketpla...

That's a fair rebuttal, and I will admit that my recollection of last year is filtered through the very strange time compression of the COVID WFH era, and the extent of my perception of this was "What's an NFT? Is that something you can manage with Coinbase? There's another app now?" From an extremely layman view, it just seemed natural that the leading crypto app would support NFTs. But I'm not the only one to voice the opinion that it seemed like Coinbase had missed the NFT wave.

I'm not a fan of big companies xeroxing each other's features, as it seems to be a dominant form of product "innovation" these days, but one could have assumed that Coinbase, being market leader in this space, would have done that for NFTs.

And on the note of it being an extremely short fad- it is interesting that on occasion, the big tech incumbents might actually beat the upstart errant. Clubhouse seems pretty stagnant now, but Twitter Spaces seems to have had more vitality, even if it's just leaning on that site's massive social network as well as some free publicity from the current CEO's public drama. Of course, the NFT market exists independently of what any one company.

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