Blockchain Books
Kings of Crypto
One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and onto Wall Street
Jeff John Roberts on Coinbase — the rise of the company that more than any other made crypto buyable for ordinary Americans.
Roberts is a reporter at Fortune and previously Decrypt, and Kings of Crypto is essentially the corporate biography of Coinbase from founding to roughly 2020 — Brian Armstrong's grim insistence on building a regulated exchange while his rivals partied through the ICO boom, the slow grind to compliance and an eventual public listing, and the cultural fight inside the company over whether crypto was a political project or a financial one. It is the most detailed account of Coinbase's pre-IPO years currently in print.
Who it's for
Anyone who wants to understand how crypto actually became accessible to retail Americans, which is mostly a Coinbase story. Useful for founders, operators, and policy people trying to figure out how to build a crypto company that survives contact with US regulators, and useful for skeptics who want to know why a single exchange ended up so central to the American crypto experience.
What it does well
Roberts has good access — to Armstrong, to Fred Ehrsam, to many of the early hires — and the inside view of the company's early product decisions, its constant tension with the Bitcoin core community, and its long flirtation with Ethereum is real reporting. The chapter on the 2017 retail surge, when Coinbase's app spent days at the top of the App Store and the customer-support backlog became a national news story, is one of the better corporate panic scenes you'll read.
He's also fair-minded about Armstrong himself. The CEO is presented as awkward, ideological, and frequently right about things his industry was wrong about — but also as a difficult manager whose insistence that Coinbase not be a "political" company became, eventually, a political stance of its own.
Where it falls short
The book is structurally a 2020 artifact and stops before the IPO, the SEC enforcement wave, the Coinbase-versus-FTX rivalry, and the subsequent staking lawsuits. A lot of the story it tells now reads as prologue.
It's also unmistakably a single-company book. The wider US exchange ecosystem — Kraken, Gemini, Bittrex, FTX US — appears mostly as scenery. If you want a panoramic account of the American crypto industry you'll need more than this. As a focused company history, though, it's solid.