Editor’s note: A longer, more in-depth version of this piece first ran on Notes on the Crises, a paid newsletter.
Last month, a big controversy blew up when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced in a tweet that the SEC had threatened to sue the company if it moved forward with its planned Lend product. Less than two weeks later, Coinbase shuttered the product.
The earliest versions of the Lend marketing language on Coinbase’s site are no longer publicly available but can be found using the Wayback Machine. These show that the program was going to work by matching lenders of the USD Coin stablecoin (USDC) with “qualified borrowers.” The lenders could feel safe lending their USDC, because Coinbase would guarantee the principal creditors “lend out.”
It’s unclear whether in this earlier version they literally meant they were going to match borrowers to lenders directly, or simply create a pool out of which they would undertake cryptocurrency-collateralized lending.
In Arms
We współpracy z: https://decrypt.co/84339/coinbase-lend-security-issuance
