I see many comments about: The company internal culture being political vs. apolitical as a place to work, what kinds of stands the company makes in public (or doesn't), or with regard to inclusivity for diverse views at work, or simply about productivity and what kind of place people like.

I'd like to mention something I haven't seen in other comments:

Coinbase's mission to produce a new global financial system is itself a kind of political activism.

One that some people believe will make the world a better place for people.

When designing something as fundamentally underpinning as the future of money, that can only work if it is able to underpin the activities of just about everyone.

Rather like cash money today only works because everyone knows it behaves the same regardless of who you vote for, and bank money (for the most part) also behaves the same regardless of your political views.

This analogy is a stretch, because employees at a card services firm aren't the same as users of a card services firm. But let's try it:

Imagine what the country would be like if, say, Visa and Mastercard (and all other payment infrastructure providers) required you to agree, and keep showing you agree, to support a particular collection of present-day political stances and voting affiliations before you could even spend any money on a card.

By that, I don't mean imagine "Visa Democrat Support" card requires you to show your affiliation. I mean, imagine if all Visa card services of every kind, and all the other services, all required the same affiliation.

Unless you're happy with that affiliation, you'd have to lie just to use ordinary services. You'd be at a significant disadvantage in life, and what people say in public would be very different to what they believe.

Some might say at least just causes would be supported. But it's quite an Orwellian prospect.

It's the sort of thing many people associate with China and too many other "less democratic" countries, where (it is said; I don't know for sure) you have to basically pretend to agree with the Party line, keep political views to yourself, and there's no democracy to speak of.

A healthy democracy needs a strong underpinning of common infrastructure, of which cash and money are part, which are available to everyone in a more-or-less apolitical manner, enabling people to hold and express a range of conflicting, divisive views layered "on top" of those basic life-supporting services.

(You could say cash and money, and payment services, are inherently political, as is capitalism, but that's not what I mean here. What's meant here is that a healthy democracy needs to provide some common infrastructure upon which everyone can depend regardless of affiliation. Otherwise it won't be much of a democracy for long.)

Now, I said it was a stretch of an analogy, because users of a company's services aren't the same as employees.

But still, imagine the chilling effect on trying to build up "a possible future of money, strong and unbreakable, available to everyone for the common good" if it was well known that the companies underpinning that future money all displayed public activism along strongly partisan-aligned views, or campaigned on big issues on which it's thought about half the population disagrees.

I've said all this, even though I personally see money itself as rather political, and that's because it doesn't have the innate properties which are commonly assumed. It's possible to engineer types of money to have different properties, and if adopted, these engineered properties have a profound effect on people's lives as well as aggregate behaviour and the economy at large. So I'm not necessarily personally aligned with an "apolitical" stance on a design of future money.

Nonetheless, I can see, and respect, why someone trying to build what they see as "the future of money for a better world for people" might feel that a firm, consistently "apolitical" public stance is an essential ingredient to perform their mission. To ensure the service is not just available to all who want in, but also seen as reliably available, now and in future, to all people regardless of their political affiliations.

(I don't know if Coinbase or its CEO holds this view, but I thought it was a relevant idea worth sharing, having noticed other comments tending to focus only on internal culture and productivity.)