Three years after closing its headquarters and mostly abandoning San Francisco, Coinbase may be poised for a boomerang return.
The headquarters-free cryptocurrency exchange is shopping for more than 100,000 square feet of offices in San Francisco, including 130,000 square feet at 185 Berry Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing unidentified sources.
The company led by Brian Armstrong is in talks with Berry Street owner McCarthy Cook, based in Costa Mesa, about a potential lease. The 885,600-square-foot building in China Bay, whose landlord is a unit of New York-based JPMorgan Chase, is the corporate home to Lyft.
Coinbase declined to comment to the newspaper about its office search, and didn’t respond to emailed questions.
In March 2021, the largest cryptocurrency exchange announced it would vaporize its corporate connection to San Francisco in closing its headquarters at 430 California Street. Soon afterward, the company listed its 191,000 square feet of offices leased from WeWork for sublease, leaving its heart somewhere outside San Francisco.
The decision to become a “remote-first company” was considered a power move, a branding element for a company that traded digital money. It filed for an IPO as a placeless company.
“Closing our S.F. office is an important step to ensuring no office becomes an unofficial HQ,” Coinbase said in a statement, posted on the platform then known as Twitter. “Instead, we will offer a network of smaller offices for our employees to work from if they choose to.”
Coinbase went public in the spring of 2021 via direct listing at $381 per share. The price of bitcoin surged to $64,000 from $56,000 in anticipation of the public listing.
The company now has a 25,000-square-foot office at a WeWork coworking office at Salesforce
Tower in San Francisco, an unidentified source told the Business Times.
The “remote-first” firm has also expanded its number of commercial offices.
In April, Coinbase leased 67,000 square feet in an 11-year deal at One Madison Avenue in New York. In July last year, the company leased 40,000 square feet of offices at 391 San Antonio Road in Mountain View, according to Savills.
— Dana Bartholomew
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