Airbnb CEO congratulates former employee Brian Armstrong on Coinbase success

TL;DR Breakdown

• Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, is really proud of their employee’s success with Coinbase. 
• Brian Armstrong left the company to found Coinbase, which is currently worth over $90 billion.

Following the launch of Coinbase stocks on NASDAQ, the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, has congratulated their former software engineer, Brian Armstrong, who left the online home-rental marketplace to establish Coinbase, a leading crypto exchange based in the United States.

Coinbase has become a household name in the cryptocurrency industry. It’s one of the oldest exchanges and the first-ever crypto company to debut on the stock market.

Chesky says he’s “really proud” of Armstrong

Armstrong was one of the first software engineers to work for Airbnb, although he didn’t spend much time working with them. He left the San Francisco-based company in 2012 to found the crypto exchange with the former Goldman Sachs’ former foreign exchange trader, Fred Ehrsam. Coinbase has seen immense growth in user, trading volumes, and revenue since its inception. 

On Wednesday, the exchange set a record in the cryptocurrency space as the first publicly traded crypto company. At the moment, Coinbase has a market valuation of over 91 billion, ranking as the 170th largest company in the world. 

In an interview with CNBC on Friday, the co-founder of Airbnb congratulated their former employee, following the exchange’s historic stock market debut. 

“Brian actually is one of the original architects of our payment platform and our fraud detection system. So I’m really proud of what he’s doing,” Chesky said. 

Airbnb is interested in crypto 

The online home-rental marketplace is also interested in cryptocurrencies. Chesky spoke fondly of Bitcoin, adding that the company has been considering plans for crypto adoption. I don’t “have anything to announce right now. But I can tell you that we’ve been certainly looking at this,” he said.