Zak and I founded our company in 2022 over a shared belief that technology is at its best when it directly empowers individual people. We were excited by the potential we saw for this in crypto, and felt that our backgrounds understanding new technologies to build products for consumers could help us bring a fresh lens. We’ve been lucky to have amazing partners in our investors, like Tom Schmidt at Dragonfly, Melody Koh at NextView, and many others, whose perspective helped us hone our thinking.
Our initial products focused on helping creative people find new ways to monetize their work on their own terms, and then with products that help crypto power-users coordinate around trading. But last year, we noticed a confluence of changes in the crypto ecosystem that created a unique moment that led to Sensible:
- Tech. Improvements in custody and blockchain infrastructure meant we could build applications with familiar login experiences where users could transact for free without giving up control.
- Ecosystem. DeFi and Stablecoins matured, and there were legitimate, battle-tested utilities publicly available onchain.
- Consumer attitudes. As one Sensible user put it: “I used to see crypto as a lottery ticket, now I view it more as a long-term investment”
We started Sensible with the hypothesis that we could use these tailwinds to help people get more of what they already want by helping them earn compounding interest on their assets. We built a product for everyday people that focused on the why rather than the how, and took care of the details in the background. What we found excited us: new users could go from signup to earning in 30 seconds, and the overwhelming majority of people who tried us out came back to deposit more.
When we connected with the team at Coinbase — initially Aklil Ibssa, Max Branzburg, and Ben Shen — we learned that they shared our ambition, and the prospect of being able to bring this vision to bear alongside an amazingly talented group of people was too much to ignore.
So, we couldn’t be more thrilled to announce that the Sensible founders are joining Coinbase to continue making crypto something that people can use, not just own. Sensible will shut down in October (learn more here), but the work continues.
Jacob Frantz & Zak Salmon
Co-founders, Sensible
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