Review was included in this piece on the Coinbase IPO: https://diff.substack.com/p/understanding-coinbase

KINGS OF CRYPTO

As books about startups go, Jeff John Roberts’ Kings of Crypto is fairly tame by comparison.

It’s a book about Coinbase, the Silicon Valley-funded cryptocurrency exchange that made it convenient to acquire and trade Bitcoin. The company’s history is rote startup fare: a pioneering business idea; two founders, Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, who put in the hours to build the company; fundraising; the myriad challenges encountered once the company started to scale; and the need for the management team and business model to evolve in the face of changing market realities. Roberts presents a very evenhanded account of all of the above, which surprisingly lacks much of the toxicity often associated with blockbuster startups.

Which is not to say there are no tense moments in Coinbase’s history; there are some notable ones. Armstrong, for instance, notoriously parted ways with Ben Reeves, with whom he had worked on a proto-Coinbase, right before entering the incubation program of Y Combinator and long before teaming up with Ehrsam. A management shakeup at the company many years later would also cause a lot of friction, happening at a time when many of Coinbase’s original employees began to depart. Additionally, the company had to fend off many existential challenges along the way, such as those posed by hackers on one end of the spectrum and government regulators on the other. Altogether, these and other episodes go to show that Coinbase has had a colorful history, albeit one that Roberts opts to cast in terms of “just another day at the office.”

That said, what animates Kings of Crypto is the important detail that Coinbase is essentially a successful cryptocurrency startup, and Roberts makes excellent work of detailing the recent history of cryptocurrency itself. This necessarily entails wading into technical explanations of the technology that underlies “crypto”—blockchain, encryption, and the like—as well as the legal gray area it occupies for now (many legal regimes consider cryptocurrency neither as currency nor as a security but as property). Indeed, by the end of the book any reader will be conversant about the subject and reasonably familiar with leading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin.

In many ways the jury is still out on whether crypto will be as transformative as many of its proponents consider it to be. The wild fluctuations in valuation of various cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin chief among them, arguably demonstrates this. Kings of Crypto recounts how Coinbase has managed to ride out crypto’s booms and busts so far, and the book imparts many important lessons along the way about both crypto and business.

This book showcases the story of Coinbase, a bitcoin startup turned billion dollar firm. It is fascinating to see how the its founders Brian and Fred poured their hearts and soul to build something despite the skepticism of many people around them.

This is also a story of teamwork, the ups and downs, the challenges, and thriumphs of the team involve in this company.

I like the way the story was written in this book. It feels like I am watching a movie with the way the author described the “characters” in this book.

This is a great book. The lessons in every story will help teams and organizations deal with their own challenges.

Enjoyed this book a lot. Not one dull moment. Been going through Y combinator essays about how to find the right co-founder.. moving into this book, it seemed like a continuaiton of to dos and donts of startups. Jeff John Roberts has done good compariisons to give an idea of stages of crypto and comapring it with the early days of other technological changes to understand the scenario. Very accessible book for anyone interested in the timeline of Crypto world.