In the year since the site first launched, Coinbase has come to be one of the most important and influential companies in the US Bitcoin economy. The company was originally founded by Brian Armstrong in the summer of 2012, and started out with a simple mission: make Bitcoin as easy to use as possible for the masses. At first, the company offered little more than basic merchant tools and a Bitcoin wallet. Even still, however, Brian Armstrong’s past as a fraud-prevention engineer at Airbnb earned the company credibility, and in September it received a $600,000 funding round from a number of high-profile investors, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Fortunately, the original investors’ confidence proved to be well-founded. In October 2012, the company launched a new service, allowing anyone in the US to buy and sell bitcoins straight from their bank account with a few clicks of a mouse. As soon as the service was announced, volume picked up quickly. By January 2013, the company was processing $1 million in buys and sells every month, and weeks after that volume became so high that the company was shutting down daily because it simply could not come up with enough bitcoins to sell.
