Coinbase crypto exchange to close San Francisco headquarters in 2022

Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is going completely remote and closing its head offices in San Francisco.

Coinbase announced Wednesday that it will shut down its former headquarters in the Golden Gate City in 2022 as part of its commitment to “being remote first.”

“We’ve committed to having no HQ, and it’s important to show our decentralized workforce that no one location is [more] important than the another,” Coinbase noted. According to the company, the upcoming closure will be an important step in ensuring that no office becomes an unofficial headquarters. “Instead, we will offer a network of smaller offices for our employees to work from if they choose to,” the firm stated.

Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong officially announced the firm’s intention to become remote-first and decentralized in February 2021. At the time, 52% of Coinbase employees were those who joined the company in a post-office world, the firm said. Coinbase stressed that about 95% of its employees will still have the option to work at home.

“We now have employees, many who originally worked in San Francisco, all over the country and world. Since January 2020, nearly 250 employees have relocated worldwide, and more than 150 have left San Francisco, representing about 21% of our global and 29% of our San Francisco workforce during that time,” Coinbase wrote.

Coinbase’s move into being remote-first echoes a similar no-headquarters stance by competitor Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said back in 2019 that office and headquarters are “old concepts like SMS and MMS.”