Inc magazine has a nice history of the Coinbase story
Coinbase sprang to life after Armstrong presented his business plan at the Y Combinator Demo Day in 2012. His original idea, hatched while he was working at Airbnb, was a hosted Bitcoin wallet as easy to access as email. Seed investors such as Union Square Ventures bought in. But the business didn't click until, after talking with customers, he created a crypto exchange. By making crypto trades as easy as stock trades, the technical details of Bitcoin and blockchain became irrelevant, the way the technical details of electricity and Wi-Fi are now irrelevant. Stuff just works. It also solved the value exchange issue that had dogged his tutoring company, because traders got everything they wanted immediately.
Armstrong's co-founder was also enamored of the concept. Fred Ehrsam was a professional gamer as a high schooler, which introduced him to the notion of virtual currency. He went on to study computer science at Duke before moving to Wall Street. Ehrsam fled a trading desk at Goldman Sachs after failing to convince the company's hierarchy--the same one that had bet big on the risky collateralized debt obligations that contributed to the Great Recession--of crypto's looming importance in global finance.
This video below provides more of a perspective
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