Could Coinbase have done an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise money for their investors and employees instead, where the coin tracks revenue or something?
That was attempted by many companies during the ICO craze a couple years ago. It took quite a while for the FTC to issue guidance on just how they expect such offerings to work and remain on the FTC’s good side. What they eventually came up with was useless. Basically, you could pre-sell coupons for service discounts. Pretty much anything else would get you in trouble. And, so we don’t hear so much about ICOs any more.
They would need to invent a whole new protocol and make sure the token value somehow stays up - which is independent from how much money they earn from fees.
