Five years after co-founding Coinbase, one of the most well-funded Bitcoin ventures, Fred Ehrsam has decided to leave the company.
The former Goldman Sachs trader revealed in a blog post Wednesday that he would resign from his day-to-day role at the company at end of the month. He plans to remain on its board.
Having raised a total of $117 million in venture capital funding at a private valuation approaching half a billion dollars, Coinbase was one of the first well-designed Bitcoin wallets to enter the scene. Since its debut, the company has transformed into more of a brokerage for people to trade digital assets that exist on a blockchain, the public ledger system that undergirds digital currencies like Bitcoin.
(Read about one of those digital currencies and the network behind it here.)
Ehrsam isn’t the only key employee to leave Coinbase recently. Last year, Olaf Carlson-Wee, the company’s earliest hire, went off to found a cryptocurrency hedge fund.
In an interview after announcing his planned departure, Ehrsam discussed Coinbase’s battle with the IRS over obtaining information about its customers (he feels confident in the company’s stance) and the growing professionalization of the Bitcoin trading world (he’s all for it). The following is an edited transcript.
Fortune: Everybody seems to be leaving Coinbase. What’s the deal?
Ehrsam: Starts out with a heavy hitter [laughing]. First of all, everyone is not leaving. The reason I feel comfortable leaving now is because the company is doing really dang well. And I think the industry is doing really dang well, to the point where it’s actually feasible for the first time, in my opinion, to start building other ideas.
Why now?
We’ve accomplished a lot of things in the last six-to-nine months that made us feel like it was a good time. The business grew more than two and a half times by revenue in 2016. So the business is doing well. The second part is the executive team has grown quite stronger. We hired a VP of engineering this year. We just hired a chief risk officer, a guy named Mike Lempres, who was the CCO [chief compliance officer] at another Bitcoin company called Bitnet, the GC [general counsel] at Silicon Valley Bank, and a U.S. attorney, amongst other things. He’s starting next week.
The last point is we finally got the dang BitLicense [a certification for Bitcoin companies to operate in New York] after what feels like an eternity. It’s a sign that the company is maturing and…