Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke Will Join Coinbase's Board of Directors
Tobias Lütke will join the board of one the world's biggest crypto exchanges.
Key Takeaways
- Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke will join Coinbase's board of directors, according to an announcement from Coinbase.
- Shopify previously adopted BitPay and Coinbase Commerce as payment gateways beginning in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
- The company has begun to test NFT features in recent months and explored other cryptocurrency projects in the past.
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Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke will join Coinbase’s board of directors, according to an announcement from the crypto exchange.
Coinbase and Shopify Will Focus on DeFi
Lütke will help Coinbase offer its crypto services to more users and businesses around the world.
Lütke said that Shopify and Coinbase have a “like-minded vision,” noting that “[DeFi] and entrepreneurship exemplify the promise of Web3 where opportunity exists for the many, not the few.” Coinbase expressed its plans to work with DeFi last summer, while Lütke explored DeFi possibilities on Twitter in April 2021.
Lütke will serve on the board alongside Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong and co-founder Fred Armstrong.
Other members of Coinbase’s board of directors include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) members Katie Haun and Marc Andreessen, Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson, DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram, and former Cisco CFO Kelly Kramer.
Coinbase is currently the third-largest crypto exchange, with $3.5 billion in volume handled over the past 24 hours.
Shopify Is Highly Interested In Crypto
Coinbase noted that Shopify was an “early adopter of crypto through [its] integration with Coinbase Commerce.” In fact, the company began to support Bitcoin payments via BitPay in 2013, several months before it adopted Coinbase Commerce in 2014.
Those various integrations mean that merchants on Shopify can accept cryptocurrency payments via their storefront.
Shopify also joined Facebook’s Diem project in 2020 and is still listed as a member on Diem’s official website. However, its role is unclear now that Diem appears to be failing.
The company more recently announced support for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) last summer and launched beta access in December.
Incidentally, both Coinbase and Lütke are using Twitter’s NFT feature to display their profile picture, with Coinbase using a tokenized version of its logo and Lütke using a CryptoPunks token.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies.
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