As cryptocurrency mania continues at the end of 2017, with bitcoin up 160%, ether up 115%, and litecoin up 440% in the past 30 days, Tuesday brought two more signs of cryptocurrency going corporate.
David Marcus, the current head of Facebook Messenger, has joined the board of Coinbase. And Indiegogo, one of the world’s leading crowdfunding platforms, has opened its site to initial coin offerings.
The moves are significant. Here are two established tech companies, neither of which currently has any involvement in crypto, dipping a toe into crypto.
Marcus bridges Facebook to Coinbase
Facebook Messenger has more than 1.2 billion users, and David Marcus is the face of the product, recognizable to anyone who has watched Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference. Coinbase is the No. 1 mainstream brokerage for buying bitcoin, with more than 13 million customers. It is so popular right now that last week it briefly became the No. 1 app in the US App Store.
Facebook has yet to dive into cryptocurrencies in any real way, and while this is just Marcus joining Coinbase’s board, a top exec like him certainly has to get permission from Facebook to make a move like this. It’s easy to imagine this as step one in an eventual Facebook-Coinbase partnership.
Coinbase already has an existing partnership with PayPal, where Marcus was president until he left for Facebook in 2014. Marcus, in a Coinbase blog post, says, “I’ve been involved with, and fascinated by cryptocurrencies since 2012, and I’ve witnessed how Coinbase has started democratizing access to this new asset class.”
It’s generally known that Facebook wants to get more into banking. Last year it launched Marketplace, a Craigslist-like platform for selling things, though it has not taken off yet. Might Facebook want to add a plug-in that allows its members to buy bitcoin without leaving Facebook? It could be done through Coinbase. Square, after all, is testing a bitcoin-buying button in its app.
Indiegogo takes a risk with ICOs
Indiegogo is one of the leading crowdfunding platforms online, founded in 2008 and typically mentioned in the same breath as its competitor Kickstarter. Both companies are credited with igniting a boom in the crowdfunding space, where regular people can contribute money to a cause they like (anything from a small theater production to a new tech device), often for a reward if the project meets its funding goal.
On Tuesday, Indiegogo opened up its site to initial coin offerings (ICOs), also called “token sales,” in which an internet company raises money by selling its own token, for use on its own ecosystem, in exchange for dollars or a different cryptocurrency, like bitcoin or ether. (Most ICOs are carried out over the blockchain network Ethereum.)