Coinbase’s venture capital arm has been quietly investing in over 500 startups throughout the past seven years. Now, some of those ventures are poised to pay off. Shan Aggarwal, vice president of corporate and business development at Coinbase Ventures, revealed that he expects the venture capital firm to begin contributing to the company’s overall revenue in the coming months, despite ventures being a “long-term game.”
“It typically takes five plus years for those companies to mature and to see material exits,” said Aggarwal on Wednesday at the Messari Mainnet Conference in New York.
“We’re getting to that point now where, especially as we start to diversify some of the positions that we have and recycle that capital, we’ll start to see it show up in our income statement and then become a larger portion of our balance sheet,” he added.
While the Coinbase executive declined to disclose which specific ventures have proven fruitful, he did say that the firm has begun to “selectively exit” positions that they’ve held for five or more years. “We’ve had a handful of exits. We haven’t really disclosed them publicly as of yet, but I’m confident that they’ll start to show up in our publicly traded financials,” he said.
Coinbase Ventures has invested in more early-stage crypto and blockchain start-ups than any other crypto VC, typically making initial investments of $1 million to $5 million. The second most prolific is Digital Currency Group which had a deal count of 251 as of August 30, according to PitchBook.
Coinbase Ventures launched in 2018 as a branch of the largest crypto exchange in the U.S. with the goal of boosting crypto and blockchain startups. The VC has played a role in developing a number of familiar crypto names, including Bitwise, Consensys, Dune, Securitize, OpenSea, Polygon, and Zora.
Aggarwal says Coinbase Ventures offers more to crypto start-ups than other VC firms because of its over ten years of experience in the crypto industry. “We can bring something different, because we can connect founders or portfolio companies with the heads of our different products. We can help facilitate partnerships,” Aggarwal said.
Besides venture profits, Coinbase has diversified revenue with products like Base, an Ethereum-based layer 2 network that attempts to make transactions quicker. Their other products include USDC stablecoin, their non-custodial Coinbase Wallet, and their quintessential crypto exchange.
