From Tipperary to Silicon Valley: how Stripe became vital cog in digital economy Alex Hern © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Getty Images
The latest fundraising round by the digital payments firm Stripe has boosted the net worth of its co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, to about $11.5bn (£8.3bn) each, catapulting them into the top bracket of the world’s millennial billionaires. Not bad for two brothers from the tiny Tipperary village of Dromineer, population: barely 100.
In little more than a decade the Collison brothers have developed Stripe, which has headquarters in Dublin and San Francisco, from a tech startup into a vital cog in the global digital economy, providing customer payment and other e-commerce services to brands ranging from Google, Amazon and Uber to Deliveroo, Spotify and Peleton.
From Tipperary to Silicon Valley: how Stripe became vital cog in digital economy
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The Diff
Understanding Coinbase
Is Coinbase an exchange, a broker, a hard-money bank, or a for-profit branch of a religion?
In one sense, Coinbase is an exchange: it s a venue where people buy and sell cryptocurrencies. One of the calls-to-action on their site is View Exchange, and if you click you get this hypnotic real-time look at the Bitcoin market.
In another sense, Coinbase is a broker. It s a custodian for assets, including cash and more speculative assets. Like many such custodians, it also prefers that you use a cash-like asset with a little more pizazz for a broker, that would be a money-market fund; for Coinbase, it might be USD Coin, a blockchain-based dollar substitute. Coinbase, like large broker-dealers, expedites transactions for customers and sometimes takes the other side in order to provide them with liquidity.