Coinbase Leases 150,000 Square Feet in San Francisco

Coinbase is coming in hot in San Francisco four years after shuttering its local headquarters.

The cryptocurrency exchange leased 150,000 square feet of office space at Mission Rock’s bayside Building B, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The company is moving into the new digs at 1090 Dr. Maya Angelou Lane after a lengthy search for more than 100,000 square feet, and almost signing a lease for 130,000 square feet at 185 Berry Street last year.

Physical offices are once again part of the Coinbase structure after the company closed its Financial District headquarters at 430 California Street in 2021 and opted for a remote-first approach. Still, even with the new digs, the company doesn’t plan on recalling all of its employees into the office or forcing them to move to the Bay Area, a spokesperson for Coinbase told the Business Times.

“While we will continue to provide offices for employees who prefer to work in them, we remain committed to remote-first and have no physical HQ,” the representative said. CEO Brian Armstrong said as much in a 2021 announcement.

Coinbase didn’t abandon in-office work entirely for its Bay Area employees, however. The company has maintained a roughly 25,000-square-foot footprint in a WeWork at Salesforce Tower.

San Francisco is struggling to overcome a 36 percent office vacancy rate, though analysts at CBRE believe the growing AI sector in the city could create tens of thousands of new jobs — and in turn, demand for office space — in the next five years, potentially slashing the vacancy rate in half.

Tishman Speyer and the San Francisco Giants opened the 295,000-square-foot Building B last year as one of the few new office properties in San Francisco to be delivered since the pandemic began. In October, the Golden State Warriors signed a lease for 70,000 square feet of offices there. The building is part of the first phase of the new Mission Rock mixed-use waterfront neighborhood development across Mission Creek from Oracle Park.

— Chris Malone Méndez