Alex Rodionov

Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong (CEO) and Fred Ehrsam. It enrolled in the 2012 Summer Y Combinator startup incubator program. In October 2012, the company launched a marketplace to buy and sell Bitcoin through bank transfers. Coinbase allows Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin trading on their platform. As of 2020, the company has more than 1,000 employees and more than 35 million users.

A consortium consists of parties with a limited set of shared goals. Currently this means that an intermediary is required to ensure that access to and manipulation of the shared data is subject to the correct set of rules and restrictions. A consortium database like Postchain offers the redundancy of a replicated data store, potential resistance to ‘natural’ faults, and the ability to tolerate outright malicious actions by consortium members.

A blockchain is a type of digital ledger where transactions grouped into blocks are replicated across a network of participants. Blockchains can enable a decentralized ledger system of transactions which does not rely on any central authority or trusted third parties for transaction validation. All participants in the peer-to-peer network are known as nodes, and maintain a full record of all transactions on the blockchain communicating directly following a protocol that forms a distributed consensus on the next valid block in the chain.

As of February 2015, over 100,000 merchants and vendors accept bitcoin as payment. According to a research produced by University of Cambridge in 2017, there were 2.8 to 5.9 million unique users actively using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin.