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In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Scott Shapiro, Senior Director of Product Management at Coinbase, talks about current trends in advanced crypto trading, options trading in crypto, and tells stories from working at FaceBook and Google.
About Scott Shapiro
Scott Shapiro is the Senior Director of Product Management at Coinbase, where he leads a team that builds Coinbase’s trading products for consumers. Crypto has been a passion since he first discovered bitcoin in 2013. This drove him to leave almost a decade of building advertising products at Facebook and Google to join Coinbase in 2019.
Scott Shapiro gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- How Advanced Trade on Coinbase is different from other advanced trading platforms
- Current trends in advanced crypto trading
- Options trading in crypto
- Coinbase Advanced trade features
- Stories from working at FaceBook and Google
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, and I’m super pumped out today’s guest on the show. Today we have Scott Shapiro, the Senior Director of Product Management at Coinbase, where he leads a team that builds Coinbase Trading Products for consumers. Crypto has been a passion since Scott first discovered Bitcoin in 2013, and this drove him to leave almost a decade of building advertising products at Facebook and Google ever heard of them? To join Coinbase also ever heard of it in 2019? Super pumped to have you on Scott, welcome to the show, my friend.
Scott Shapiro
Thanks for having me.
Matt Zahab
Scott, you are located in beautiful, Utah, the one of the best snow capitals of the world. You guys also just hosted All Star Weekend for the NBA the which used to be the best-on-best defense and showing the world what it’s like now it’s just a let’s throw threes from everywhere on the court and do some crazy dunks that must have been a tree. What is life like living in Utah and how it was All Star Weekend?
Scott Shapiro
Utah is awesome. We’ve been here about two years full time, we had visited plenty and every time I visited I asked myself like how can I live here permanently. I love it. Love the mountains, kind of the ease of getting around relative to the great skiing and hiking and mountain biking with there’s lots of places in the US and Canada where you can do that but a lot of them are hard to access and hard for people to come visit and don’t have infrastructure like schools and health care that you’d want, and so this just checked a ton of boxes for us, and once Coinbase where I’ve been now almost four years, went fully remote. This was like a mid 2020 decision by the leadership team to make all in person work optional. My family we started discussing like where might we go. Now we’ve been in California pretty much our whole lives both of us, and this was one of those places that popped back up because we had such great memories from visiting, and so early 2021 we made the full time move and had been here since and had been loving the combination about doors and the city life in Salt Lake City and you know the proximity. We’re only about 1000 miles from California. So it’s an easy short flight.
Matt Zahab
What’s it like? And again, I’m a big city boy, I was born and raised in Toronto, and I’ve only spent very small stints in places like Utah, where you have literally a stone’s throw away from just incredible nature, forest hikes, skiing, biking, you name it, what’s it like being able to just wake up in the morning, hammer out some work and be probably like a 20 minute drive away from just infinite nature possibilities.
Scott Shapiro
It’s amazing. Every time I do something new, explore a new trail, skiing resort. I’m just like, the disbelief that this is all here. We have gigabit fiber to our house. So we’re like fully plugged in. You know no matter the weather, it’s you know as good a connection as we have in San Francisco where we lived for over a decade, and it’s even better than 20 minutes. So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff within a 20 minute range. But even in our neighborhood, there’s world class trails, and we’ve had so much snow this year, we’ve been able to ski backcountry touring ski, a lot of the hills, behind our house and in the neighborhood and the other thing you find is you know, what are the memories I have in San Francisco as you’re out at a restaurant or a coffee shop, and everyone’s talking about their term sheets, or the latest finding when some of the start up, but that’s just the kind of culture you go to the rock climbing gym. I used to go to Dogpatch Boulders and in San Francisco and everybody would be wearing their like tech swag shirt from their startup or from you know big company. In here it’s kind of like the kind of identity people have is like, where are they ski where they mountain bike, you know, what is the last like adventurous thing that they do, and so it kind of permeates everything and we actually do have like a fair amount of people here for work full time. We’re also working tech and some of them working Crypto, and there’s a nice little tech community here. So it’s a different kind of balance than you know, I had in the bay area for a long time. But it’s one that I’m really enjoying.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Probably not as many crazies on the streets as well. I’ve never been to San Fran but I’ve only heard stories from my friends who are there and they say it’s absolute bananas in San Fran like the human feces on the ground and needles, the craziness. That’s, I’m sure there’s none of that in Utah or at least very little of that.
Scott Shapiro
There’s different parts of the state in Salt Lake City is like a very urban area, and I think you know, faces some of the same challenges as you know, New York and San Francisco and now like urban areas. I was back in San Francisco. We had a great team off site there in mid December and I hadn’t been for about a year to the Bay Area. So that was like the longest stretch that I can remember of not being in the area, and I loved it. It was great being back like there was great energy, and I think a lot of the stuff that’s on Twitter and kind of the.
Matt Zahab
Not as bad.
Scott Shapiro
Not at all, it was quieter, like you didn’t feel with this same kind of buzz of people walking around downtown, but I felt safe. I went for runs and you know, did a lot of dinners out and like, there were lines out the door and bars and restaurants and it was great.
Matt Zahab
Let’s, we definitely ought to talk about your days at Facebook and Google. But before that, you got to tell me about your Crypto Inception story. You discovered Bitcoin back in 2013. I wish I did the same. Well, I guess I did as well. But I didn’t utilize that back when I was in I want to say first year uni and 2013. I would bet on Bodog which is just like you know, a classic betting site and I had hundreds of Bitcoin in because at one point a friend was like, hey you should maybe you know they give you a crazy multiplier where it’s you can get paid out in Bitcoin or you can get paid out in Canadian or US dollars, and I listened to him once and then I ended up transferring all of that Bitcoin back to CAD so you can’t win them all. Everyone has a story like that, but walk me through your sort of Bitcoin Inception story in 2013.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, you know I was at Hacker News reader back then and still am, and I remember people would be posting about Blockchain and Bitcoin, I just didn’t get it. Like I would see those headlines, it would just kind of like go over my head. I was more focused on like, what are people saying about Facebook Ads to my day job, that’s what I was looking for, and a colleague who sat across from me like we were kind of face to face the way that the open desk floor plan was set up there. Facebook was one day just like rambling about Blockchain and hashing and mining and Bitcoin, and finally you know had the dialogue where I could actually understand something about this, and you know, he said, go to Coinbase, you can buy Bitcoin I did. I bought a Bitcoin for $20 on my bank account. I only got one in early 2013. So this is now just over 10 years ago was February 2013, which is hard to believe. So it’s been a decade, and didn’t really do much, I would just, you know, kind of trade in and out of positions. I had always been interested in trading, I was trading stocks in high school and rubber doing and like Junior High those, like paper trading competitions, where you would pick stocks and see whose portfolio was at the moment, looking at the newspaper right, because that’s where you got stock quotes. But already there was online, you know, back in the 90s, early 90s, and he actually wasn’t, you know, he kind of poopooed, who’s kind of too smart for Crypto, and he’s actually now doing a Web3 startup. So this kind of comes full circle, but for a while, it was like you know Cryptos, this kind of thing that’s not until I fell enough. But I went down the rabbit hole and discover later said, and the thing that really spiked for me was in the fall of 2013, Russell Brooke who was you know, allegedly behind the Silk Road and was gonna, you know, ultimately convicted, was arrested at the Glen Park Library in San Francisco, which is somewhere that I’d been in was around the corner for me in San Francisco, I was living in Bernal Heights, and Glen Park is like the next neighborhood the next, you know, train BART station over. At that point, it was like, wow this is real, and that’s actually the moment when the 2013 rally kind of kicked off.
Matt Zahab
Wait. That was the event that sort of kicked it off?
Scott Shapiro
From what I remember it was like October it was like fall 2013, and that was one of the you know several bull runs that you know Bitcoin has experienced, and I think it just brought a ton of awareness right even, you know, the kind of no press is bad press kind of thing of like, this was one of the first like major worldwide headlines about Crypto, you know for nefarious purposes, but had, you know kind of made some splashes. The thing that really caught on to me was I remember reading the DOJ complaint against Ross and the parallel with my day job was that the way that he was effectively doxed was through joining different identities that he had used across different forums and you know, in the Silk Road and that was something that we were working on at Facebook at the time and advertising around joining identities across Cryptospaces and PII with the time I was working on a product called Facebook Exchange FBX and it was an sister product called Custom Audiences and these were always to join identities. Before you know privacy was what it was you know, with GDPR and everything today. So that really like struck several chords with me at the time. A couple years later Ethereum came out I was also trying to do some mining at home we had solar power on our roof in San Francisco, we weren’t using all our powers I can maybe do something with this but quickly you know global hash rate got too big difficulty got too high and my USB miner was useless, you know very quickly but it was fun those early days of kind of messing around and trying different things. Hardware wallets you know, came out soon after the DAO hack. That was my first experience being exploited and you know the recovery wasn’t too bad. The Mount Gox hack was I got an email this morning, you know for the one Bitcoin that it had on the Mount Gox Exchange that one day maybe we’ll you know we’ll see some return from that, hopefully this year. So those early days were pretty fun and wild.
Matt Zahab
That’s crazy. So if you’re sort of teammate at Facebook, perhaps would have never discussed Bitcoin, I’m sure with you being in the Bay Area working at Google and Facebook, like you probably would have been exposed in some other capacity. But without him, you never know what could happen.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, that’s definitely true. Even in 2017, I left Facebook at the very end of 2017 and there was a big bull run in 2017. There was really not that much interest, like a lot of the colleagues I had working at Facebook and Google and you know, some of the biggest tech companies in the world are focused within those ecosystems like very specifically and are not how to looking outside at newer things, but ultimately left to join Coinbase in 2019. I’ve just got the strangest looks on people’s faces, like Crypto died a few years ago, like how are you joining 2019? Because it died in 2018.
Matt Zahab
They probably thought you were a looney tune doing that.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah.
Matt Zahab
That’s too funny. So working on Facebook and Google again, that’s like you don’t, half of university grads want to join a world class, company like that you don’t like those guys tech company, rather and we’ve all heard the stories, I have friends who work at Facebook and Google, they always talk about the free lunches, and the craziness and the training, and sort of the EQ tests and all that kind of stuff, and I’d love to get into some of that. But more importantly, as a marketer myself you built some of the biggest products that the everyday consumer uses all the time. I’d love if you could walk me through some stories about what you built there and one little just caveat on my end, coming from an e-commerce background, a stat that I find so intriguing, that’ll never forget there’s never been an e-commerce unicorn that has scaled to a billion dollar company without using Facebook ads which I’ll never get over that one single product, Facebook and Instagram ads. Without that there will never there has never been a billion dollar e-commerce company. Like it’s crazy to think that some of the products that you built that you and your teams built are so friggin bloody important. Like did you ever think that what you were building at Facebook would have such power and implications like it does today?
Scott Shapiro
You know, we had clues of this I remember in 2012. So I joined Facebook in 2010 as an intern and then converted in 2011, its full time and done into just grad school, and in 2012 that was the emergence of a lot of these really interesting targeting products that today are just foundational for e-commerce. Things like remarketing, retargeting, like that didn’t exist, really at any scale, Google was kind of kicking things off, but that ecosystem flourished in like the early 2010s, and it’s kind of gone through a couple of cycles. But in 2012 we were trying to convince everybody in direct response advertising which is where you know, e-commerce and other verticals play, and they just did not take Facebook seriously, and I remember talking to one large travel advertiser in 2011 and just trying to learn about how they budget and how they spend and they’re like, yeah Facebook is like the office in the basement next to the parking lot. Like that’s kind of where we think of Facebook ads right? And you know, did hear what you hadn’t heard that statistic before, but wouldn’t be terribly surprised. That’s true because today it’s just so table stakes for large e-commerce businesses.
Matt Zahab
Were there any crazy stories or like aha moments where there was one instance in particular where you’re like holy shit, this is really working.
Scott Shapiro
So I think the thing that I remember like kind of eye popping the most was we were living in a very web desktop world you know, in 2010, like that decade started where like the internet was a desktop phenomenon and you know, big full screen browser and mobile grew faster you know, there was the infamous q1 2012 quarter at Facebook where we just saw a huge shift to mobile on our mobile ad product was not ready, and this was you know, gearing up for the Facebook IPO, and that was like the first time the company had like, not experienced a level of growth that it had experienced in its lifetime in that core, so we pivoted you know so much energy and to make mobile work where I kind of you know, experience my eye poppin moment there was we had been doing retargeting right, so you’re looking at a pair of shoes and that pair of shoes is now showing up in ads on different websites. That was kind of the original like retargeting, you know anecdote, and but it would always happen in the same browser, right? So you would be on your laptop and your Chrome tab, and you’re ready to get there, and because people are logged into Facebook on their phone, their tablet, computer one, computer two you know, personal computer, work computer, we were able to stitch all those identities together and say, We know you were browsing on laptop one, we can actually show you an ad for something you were browsing on there on your mobile phone. Today this is table stakes. But the first time we did that we just saw like the craziest click through rates and conversion rates and advertisers who were trying this, I remember piloting this in different countries around the world just like heads explode, because this was so novel, and again today it’s you know, we have this identity graph that is just incredibly powerful. There are lots of other companies now have to and it’s mattering less and less today, because people are generally mobile only in the way they experienced you know, digital things. But at the time it was you know, phenomenal.
Matt Zahab
I love that. The thing that freaks me out today is when all you know, talk about a you know, no free ads, but shout-out BlenderBottle, you know, we’ll talk about a shaker cup, and 10 minutes later, I’m on, you know, whatever, Twitter, Facebook, Insta, my laptop, and a BlenderBottle ad shows up. I know, there’s this big sort of rumor mill going around that you know, our phones are listening to us. When did this start happening? Because I don’t really remember this until I want to say three, four years ago, perhaps it was present longer than that. But the general pop just wasn’t cognizant. But what’s the whole deal with that? And if you can’t answer this we can we can skip over this. But I know this is something that everyone is curious about.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, I think what we don’t realize is that our kind of digital footprint of the things that we search for the things we click on in all the different surfaces that we’re engaging not the things we’re like saying out loud, and like random rooms all those are developing intense signals that all these machine learning models at Facebook and Google and Twitter and you know the largest you know, ad platforms are using to figure out what you are most interested in and what you will want to see and so oftentimes, if you really you know, if it’s your the ad for the ball that you’re getting chances are that you did something explicitly in digital context that expressed some intent, and that platform was able to infer, and show you know, some or all the content based on that. So this happens to me to where I’m like, wow, how did they get a Facebook ad for that? And I like tried to reverse engineer like, what did they do up to this point, that as something that I liked, click on an email marketing newsletter for something that I like, engage with some you know, tweet in an interesting way, and then sell something on Twitter, like it’s all very tied to that there is definitely, at least when I was working in this industry know of listening and kind of like you know, tapping into you know, the microphone or anything like that.
Matt Zahab
Oh, I could talk about this forever. Let’s get into Crypto. Let’s get into the fun stuff, the space where you and I are currently working, and your work at Coinbase probably the biggest blue chip Crypto company in the world, very reputable, safe, publicly traded just to Kreme de la Kreme doesn’t get more blue chip than Coinbase. You obviously left to the most famous companies in the world, Facebook and Google to join Coinbase. I would ask you why. But we all know why it’s great opportunity. But what you and the team are building at Coinbase is super cool. You and the team are running up Advanced Trade tons of crazy tools. What are some of the most fun tools that you’ve built so far on Advanced Trade? And I guess to start off just for our listeners, to give us the sort of the you know, the quick spiel on what exactly is Advanced Trade as well.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, the almost four years I’ve been acclaimed as I’ve worked on all sorts of different retail products, and one of the things across you know, our portfolio of products where you can spend like Coinbase Card products where you can earn, yield, and rewards like our staking products and USTC. What are the things we’ve heard is that we have this audience of advanced traders, right of people who want to be simple and analytical, who want to have six different screens with different price charts and move in and out of positions you know, very quickly, maybe even build their own applications using API and you know, automate some of the you know, quant trading, we’ve heard that we weren’t doing enough for that there was more that we could do, even though they were satisfied. It’s kind of a base level, there was more than we could do. So over the past few quarters, we’ve really tried to dial up our investment in Advanced Trading, and products for advanced traders, and so we launched Advanced Trade last year, which is our future direction and kind of where we are today for serving that audience. Some people might remember Coinbase Pro before that it was called GDAX, and that was a product that was very standalone very separate from the rest of the Coinbase experience, and so you had to download a separate app or log into a separate website you had separate balances not all the payment methods work where you’ve had you know, deposit and withdraw Fiat, it was just a very focused minimalist experience, and so what we heard from people was that they wanted this to be more integrated with the rest of the Coinbase experience. They wanted for example, to be able to stake Tezos or Solana, which made to have her stackable assets or rewards on those and be able to trade in and out of those positions, and because of the dynamic that we had been in with a Coinbase app and Coinbase Pro app, you had to make a choice and say, I want to either trade that currency or I want to stake that currency you could do both, and so we’ve solved that problem by merging all the functionality to the one you know, Coinbase blue app that you can have. Also, you know for us, like we don’t have two apps competing in the same category, the finance category at the App Store, right? Why would we want to compete with ourselves, where we could just deliver one great product where you can do everything, using that same login, same balance, same payment methods, same portfolio of you know, a couple 100 tradable assets that you can deposit and withdraw.
Matt Zahab
One thing that I always find so interesting and again, I have not built products to the extent and scale that you have. But whenever you build an incredible product, like Advanced Trade, you’re always going to get people up you’re you know what being like Scott, I want this feature, I want that feature. How do you in the team decides like, you know what, we’re going to actually give you this one, but we’re not going to give you this one like is there a specific framework or workflow? Or, like how do you decide what to give? And what not to give?
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, that’s a great like product management 101 question. You know they’re working in product development for many years, and it’s tough, right? Because your team right, we work with engineers and designers our researchers, and we have all sorts of signals, right? We have users on Twitter from the Twitter’s very popular you know, in this world those are very lovely folks. We have, you know a Reddit community that’s very active. We’ve developed an internal what we call Customer Council, where we’ve kind of hand selected some really savvy customers of Coinbase, who we think can provide really high signal they’re kind of like a sounding board, and then we also have like in product surveys. So if you’re using Coinbase you might see something pop up that says you know rate your experience one through five, what can we do better? You know, what are you satisfied with? What are you dissatisfied with? We’re always looking at how we’re trending on that one through five scale, and what is the actual feedback saying, and to really try to take all these signals very seriously, and then as product managers, working with our designers, and engineers try to pick the things that are going to help make people the happiest. So what are the features that are going to lift the tide for the most number of customers and solve very specific problems for them and again, that’s the Product Management 101 in a Coinbase Trading context, we try to look at our really our core segment and saying, Okay, we’re focused on very active analytical traders, we want to move in that direction. We need a product that’s intuitive, but super powerful, like it can never be too powerful. But it also needs to be reliable. It needs to be performant. It needs to be low latency, and how do we then juggle, like improvements to latency improvements, reliability, brand new features, you know improving existing features like that is the challenge there’s never a right answer. It’s much more of an art form, there’s not some formula, we can just throw everything and we get the answer. But we try to use all those signals that we’re getting, we do a lot of internal dogfooding as a kind of a Silicon Valley concept of like, if you’re selling dog food, you should be able to eat your own, it should be tasty enough for you. So when we’re at whenever we’re building products before we release it to the world, we use it internally and say, Okay, we’re traders, like we’re allowed to use the product to trade, like, do we enjoy this? Do we think it’s bug free? Is a high quality enough to actually give to you know, all the Coinbase users out there? So that’s a kind of quick answer on the process angle of prioritization.
Matt Zahab
I love that. It’s something that I feel like there’s still no universal blueprint for in regards to what features to you know, how do you listen to your customers like some companies do it better than others? Coinbase being one of them, but there’s still I wish there was a universal blueprint that just said, you know here’s the workflow, this is what you should do. Scott, we got to take a quick break. When we get back we’re gonna talk about a couple more features that traders are looking for and any trends in the space but we got to give a huge shout out to our sponsor the show. This podcast is brought to you by RSTAKING the decentralized staking platform which creates its own liquidity pools. The overall liquidity pool of RSTAKING is already more than 1 billion USD. There’s a fixed 25% per year on more than 200 tokens, and Crypto coins and nine networks. Rewards get paid very quickly every three hours in USDT or BUSDT tokens. Since 2019 RSTAKING is considered to be one of the most secure Blockchain companies in the world, as the company created a standalone and secure product that strictly is focused on staking. Speaking of stability RSTAKING offers 25% per year with the possibility of self closing and rewards every three hours, and two phenomenal coins in USDT and BUSD, anyone and everyone can register with RSTAKING receiving 10 RHIN tokens free of charge, where you can open your first stake. RSTAKING is the platform where everyone will find a suitable token or Crypto coin for themselves. Register and start studying RSTAKING right now at our rstaking.com. Again, that is rstaking.com. Huge shout out to RSTAKING and now back to the show with Scott. Another thing that I find incredibly interesting is the number of trading platforms that there are, I would say there’s probably 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s. I have friends who use like niche platforms that have never heard of just because they got in early and perhaps get extra bonuses and yields with their native coin. When it comes to sort of the blue chip companies, the Coinbase, the Binance and of course all the other Asian Exchanges. How do you guys sort of stand out? Right? Not on the brand. Obviously, you’ve heard of the brand, which is huge, right? Everyone knows that if you have your coins on Coinbase, you’re going to be safe, you are not going to get hooked. This isn’t some crazy, non regulated exchange, it is the most regulated Crypto product and service in the world. But brand aside, how do you guys sort of compete and differ and provide extra utility from the other massive exchanges?
Scott Shapiro
That’s a great question. That’s something that we asked ourselves all the time is like, how do we stand out? What is our niche? How do we differentiate and I think at the foundation of you know, start to the what you said is that, you know we think we’re the most secure, we’re the most trusted, we have a lot of the infrastructure that a lot of other exchanges might kind of gloss over, we don’t do things like Lyndoch user funds or use them for industrial purposes, and I think that’s something that was maybe underappreciated prior to, you know 2022 and it’s something that we take very seriously, we have a world class security team or world class finance team, world class compliance team, oftentimes some of those experiences might feel challenging for users but they’re really there to keep everybody safe and everybody, you know compliant so that Coinbase and all of our users can succeed. So it really starts with that. That’s a huge differentiator, that when you want to withdraw your funds you know, those are backed one to one and you can withdraw them and they will be there, and again that’s something that is easy to take for granted, when you’re looking at like the app at the surface level, that there’s such a huge iceberg underneath the surface that we invest a lot of, I think second of that is what do you think about the landscape of assets and liquidity in order books is, you know we leaned into listing assets that we think are interesting to people, and so this varies around the world, right? What is a new asset in one country might not be a new asset or a new order book in another country, but we have tried to lean in that direction and give people the tools for them to understand what those assets are, we launched a feature last year called Experimental Label, and so you will see if an asset is brand new, and it’s less proven, and we’re not sure you know, where it’s going to go we will put the Experimental Label on that asset to give people some information. We’ve also experimented with things like reviews on assets, letting users describe what they think of assets, so users can learn from each other. But that kind of principle of offering lots of different assets, and having that diversity particularly for advanced traders is something that we’ve taken seriously and so looking at some of our competitors in areas where we are, you know compliant, you know with everyone else who’s also confined to those areas we think that, you know we have some world class liquidity, and depth and a lot of different assets, and then I think the other areas around payment methods, and a lot of people take for granted the ability for example, in the US to be able to instantly deposit you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars, depending on your personal limits be able to trade that and be able to withdraw that and use it DeFi or something else all platform you know very quickly. So those are the kind of the next layer of thing, and then I think with Advanced Trade we’re truly trying to build a world class product where people have access to very advanced charting we have over 100 indicators in our charting library and several different types of candlesticks and lots of abilities to, you know to annotate and draw and share those charts and you know, to do that across multiple monitors to do that in a very you know performant mobile app on the go. That’s been very important for us, we still have a lot more that you know, is in the pipeline that we’re going to add there, you know, over this year, to be able to use, you know different order types. We have three over types, market limit, stop limit and Advanced Trade, and there’s more that we’re hearing from users that are interesting and more that we know can be valuable until we’re figuring out you know, how and why we want to do that, and so innovating at that top of the stack is something we’re working you’re having to but we also spend a lot of time on those layers underneath that are kind of less visible and harder to appreciate until you really need them.
Matt Zahab
Yeah, the fundamentals. No, that’s so true. What trends are you seeing in sort of the advanced trading space? Because like me as a very average trader like, can I draw on charts or can I use some TA of course but you know I’m a pretty simple guy. If I think coin goes up, I’ll ask for it to go up and if I think coin goes down, I’ll short coin, it’s very simple. But for a lot of the pro traders, which I can’t really relate to, are there any trends that you’re seeing like not even really features that they’re asking for but just sort of actions they’re taking or not taking? Like? What trends are you seeing in the advanced trading space at the moment?
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, you know I think just to zoom out from that question for a second, we started as a platform, first of all traders do this before I joined Coinbase, and that’s always been kind of our core audience, and so it’s totally fair for somebody to be you know, someone who just wants to buy and hold who wants to do dollar cost averaging using recurring buys, who wants to exit positions, you know want to they kind of fixed price quote, sell order, who wants to convert for Bitcoin to an Altcoin, we don’t we want to make that very easy. And we’re definitely not trying to force people into becoming advanced traders at all. So we want that functionality to be there for people who seek it, people who might graduate into it, but by no means is that the default or that the we’re trying to force people into, and when I look at some of our competitors, like they are sometimes more that direction, and they look at the kind of easier experience as the exception. So we’re kind of, you know, inverted and sometimes, in terms of the trends for advanced training that we’re seeing, I think one thing is we are just seeing a lot of people graduate from, you know, basic buying, selling, converting to advanced trading, and so figuring out how do we help guide them when they’re ready, and give them the tools, not lock them in again, because your balances are portable and unified across all of Coinbase now you could dabble that Advanced Trade and say you know, maybe that’s too much for me, I want to go back or no, I want to go all in and you know, your funds are already there, you don’t have to do anything to go and use that. So that’s that kind of unification, and no portability is really important to us. There’s obviously the assets that we’ve been talking about and I think we’re also seeing a shift towards just overall like technical sophistication, too. So we’re seeing lots of people who are interested in not necessarily building their own trading bots, using API’s, but some people want to maybe build their own dashboard and want to pull data on you know, transaction history or order status and see or their orders filling in their own kind of dashboard using their own scripting and so we’ve been investing more in our API to be able to help them do that too. We’re also seeing, you know, more interesting things like algorithmic order types and this is something we’ve invested on our institutional product Coinbase Prime, so that you can do what’s called time weighted average price to app or V app, volume weighted types of orders that you’re moving positions on books that are less liquid relative to the size of your position. So that’s something we’re exploring and to try to understand the needs of the retail consumer advanced traders that we’re working on too. So lots of different angles here. But I think overall, we’re seeing like interesting secular growth in advance traders.
Matt Zahab
My buddies and friends, who are advanced traders, the one thing that they’re all beyond fired up for is Options trading and I know we’re a lot of people are saying that it’s going to happen this year, where the whole sort of Options trading and Crypto will go mainstream. What’s your two cents on that and me personally Scott, I’m sort of I don’t want to say it scares me shitless. But like, I think that with the amount of risk and leverage in Crypto offering another incredibly high risk and levered, you know option in the mix, just adding more bananas to the mix. I just think that I don’t know, perhaps it’s no bueno. But what’s your two cents on that? And what’s your timeframe when you think we’re going to see Options trading go mainstream and Crypto?
Scott Shapiro
That’s a good question. It’s been both in centralized decentralized platforms, something that has been around for a while actually like, it’s not bad news. I think one of the coolest products in DeFi is Ribbon Finance, they’ve been doing Options, Vault strategies, kind of structured finance approach. You know, super interesting. You have I think they’re using Opyn, they might be using something else now to kind of build on top right to the composability of divide is really interesting there. Some of our you know, other centralized exchange competitors have Options. I think one of the challenges is that this exists in like Equity Options market as well or Futures Options market is, you know getting critical mass of liquidity is really hard, and so UPS is a Bitcoin sure, like Bitcoin is kind of like the S&P index it where you have like the or the NASDAQ, and we have like lots of liquidity, but then you start to go towards individual stocks, and you look at Options markets there and you have like pretty wide that asks, and you have all sorts of expiration dates and all sorts of strike prices, and so how can you build like healthy, illiquid markets in Options trading? Like that’s definitely a big question. We’ve seen in the derivative space, a lot more growth and Futures and perpetual swaps, mostly in an unregulated context, because it’s easier to consolidate liquidity there and even so, most of the liquidity consolidates around you know, Bitcoin and ETH and then maybe Um, you know, a handful of other, you know kind of torso sized assets. So Options are you know, to your point they are high beta, and a lot of contexts and also be used as like very good, you know covered calls like an interesting hedging strategy that people can use selling naked options is a much more risky strategy in general not Crypto, but just you know, the Options world in general, and you know how you handle margin and how you handle risk and how you handle liquidations, those are all really important things, you know, for trading products to figure out. So it’s something that we’re looking at we think is really you know, fascinating. We have nothing, no plan specifically to share it with any derivatives, but it’s something we’re watching very closely.
Matt Zahab
Oh, come on, Scott, you’re not gonna break some news on the Cryptonews Pod?
Scott Shapiro
I might.
Matt Zahab
Now, the PR team would kill you. Tell me what’s next for Advanced Trade, and you guys are whipping out new products, it seems almost weekly. What do we consumers have to look forward to this episode will air early March 2023. What do we have to look forward to, you know, next couple of months? And sort of for the rest of the year?
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, one of the tracks we’ve really been investing in is, since we launched Advanced Trade, towards the end of last year, we’ve really been focused on just making it better, and how do we take the jobs people are trying to do with Advanced Trade and make it a lot smoother. One of the things we launched a couple of weeks ago was a feature called Sticky chart settings. So what we found is that people want to customize their indicators very carefully the you know, the candlesticks, they’re using the intervals that they’re using and they want to repeat that for the five markets that they’re looking closely at, and whenever they change, they want to see the exact same settings, and so before we launched that feature, where people would have to like, reconfigure their chart settings every single time might take 10 clicks, and so we’ve removed all those 10 clicks so that the people can scale this out, and that’s just one example of like quality of life improvement that we think people are really happy about. We’ve seen some great feedback on that feature. Specifically, there’s a lot of other things. You know, another one that I don’t think I’m sharing too much here, but that we’re rolling out right now is it dark mode by default. So we heard from a lot of advanced traders they’re like, I just want dark mode at night, when my system settings kick it on, I want Coinbase to be dark mode for Advanced Trade all the time, because that helps me with contrast and charting, and you know looking at the order book, and a depth chart and everything else, and so we are in the process of rolling that out so that it will be dark mode by default, and then if you don’t want dark mode, you can easily toggle into light mode and move away from that. We’re also trying to this a little bit of foreshadowing for you trying to make it a more immersive experience. So we’ve heard from advanced traders, that they one of the things they liked about Coinbase Pro was the amount of focus and minimalism that it had even though that came at the expense of other things. So we’re trying to bring some of that back to give a more focused experience to advanced traders and we’re still working out exactly the details on how that’s going to land but we think that’s gonna be a lot of fun for people to be able to just like feel more immersed in Advanced Trade while still being able to access all the other things that Coinbase offers you know to single out the website.
Matt Zahab
Love that. Scott you’ve absolutely crushed this man this has been too much fun we’re running a little tight for time last question and our last segment on the show the hot take factory you and I put her shit kicking boots on we jumped in the hot take factory and we let a couple of hot takes fly give me a couple Scott hot takes things that you believe in whereas most other people don’t. Doesn’t have to be Crypto or finance or Blockchain related can be health, wealth, happiness, food, space, AR, VR, AI, you name it, but give the listeners what they want. Give us a couple of Scott hot takes.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, I think the biggest one this is kind of a trend I’ve been on for a long time as around you mentioned health was I think the first type of hot take you mentioned is I’ve done a lot of like health experimentation and where I’ve landed is really around like kind of a more ancestral paleo type of diet as being optimal, and it’s been interesting seeing, you know over the last decade or so different trends emerge that are kind of pushing on that, and there’s an interesting overlap with the Crypto Community too. You have like some Crypto people who are like very outspoken about like ketogenic or carnivore diet which is the, you know this isn’t me that I’ve done, you know before Crypto existed. So it’s funny to see those trends kind of converge, and you also have things like this kind of set of you know narratives around like seed oils being dangerous is something that I’ve you know, embodied for a long time and now it’s kind of become mainstream but not really mainstream more of like Twitter didn’t mainstream so it’s been funny watching that evolve. But still, whenever I speak to healthcare folks about diet and look at you know, the government recommendations.
Matt Zahab
Bananas. It’s absolute insane.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah and I’m like very inverted on so.
Matt Zahab
It’s crazy how much you can learn if you put in, you know a good hour on Twitter, excuse me every single day. Like when I was in high school I started curating my Twitter feed and, you know it’s one of the things Twitter’s probably the platform that I would pay the most for. I probably pay 100 bucks a month for Twitter if not more, just from all the things that I’ve learned it’s not even so much for the news curation, and like I don’t go on to any, you know traditional news sites or watch the news. It’s all it all comes from Twitter. But just having the ability to tap into the minds of experts for free is just like it’s absurd in my opinion, and how people how everyone doesn’t create less and their Twitter feed to optimize their health, wealth and happiness. It’s just like I personally don’t get it. But again, I’m preaching to the choir here.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, Twitter, it’s a great tool, I think that there can be misleading information, and like anything it’s like a free open ecosystem that one has to apply their own lens to and there’s some really interesting stuff happening in Web3 that I think is going to apply some of the kind of solutions to some of that, will 1/3 of all things really interesting. I’ve been using a lot of Sparkcaster, started by next Coinbase set of books, and they’re kind of you know, really embodying like the protocol and client disintegration in a way that I think is going to enable some really powerful use cases just kind of more open type of environment that it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. You know the next few years.
Matt Zahab
Scott, what a treat man had so much fun. Really appreciate you coming on and I would love to have you on for round two. Before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you? And Coinbase everyone knows where to find Coinbase but for the plug, you might as well where everyone can find you and Coinbase online and on socials.
Scott Shapiro
Yeah, so the website It’s scottshapiro.com and I’m also @scottshapiro on Twitter, on Reddit, and on Instagram, I think it’s @scott.shapiro, but all my links are on my website and obviously Coinbase is coinbase.com, @coinbase on Twitter.
Matt Zahab
Amazing. Scott, thanks so much man truly a treat super pumped for you in the team and thanks for making us all look good because you know we need a couple more Coinbase’s in the space to sort of crank up that reliability trust and goodwill Crypto narrative so appreciate what you guys are doing and like I said pumped to have you on for round two in the future.
Scott Shapiro
Awesome. Thanks so much Matt.
Matt Zahab
Folks with an episode with Scott Shapiro from Coinbase dropping knowledge bombs left, right, and center and some great stories back from the Facebook and Google days if you guys enjoyed this one please do subscribe it would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking to the team love you guys thank you so much for everything. Justas my amazing sound editor appreciate you as always and to the listeners love you guys keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
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