 | |
| Company type | Software |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software and technology services |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Founder | Neil Bergquist and Michael Smyers |
| Headquarters | Seattle, Washington |
Key people | Neil Bergquist, CEO |
Coinme is a cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The company offers technology for bitcoin ATMs and kiosks, which allow users to convert cryptocurrency into cash. The company launched one of the first licensed bitcoin ATMs in the U.S.
According to co-founders Neil Bergquist and Michael Smyers, after learning about a Canadian bitcoin ATM, they purchased three bitcoin ATMs from a manufacturer in 2014. [1] The two began working with the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions to revise state finance laws and secure a license to operate a kiosk. [2]
Three pilot bitcoin ATM kiosks were situated in the greater Seattle area. One in Spitfire Grill [3] in Belltown, another in Startup Hall at the University of Washington, and the third at Southcenter Mall south of Seattle. [1]
Coinme was formally established in 2014 with Bergquist as CEO [4] and Smyers as vice president of engineering. [1] They deployed and operated nearly 70 Bitcoin ATMs across the Western United States before developing an application programming interface (API) for converting ATMs and kiosks into cryptocurrency exchanging machines. [5]
The first state-licensed Bitcoin ATM in the United States was installed by Coinme at the Spitfire Grill in Seattle, Washington in the spring of 2014. The company later installed a bitcoin-enabled ATM in the Spokane Valley Mall and became the first licensed company in the state of Washington to offer digital currency through ATMs. [6]
Coinme takes a 4 percent transaction fee for every dollar exchanged through its network of ATMs. [7]
By June 2021, Coinme employed 58 people and had raised more than $30 million in investment capital. Coinme investors include Xpring, Blockchain.com Ventures, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group and MoneyGram International.[ citation needed ] At the end of 2021, the company was in the latter stages of completing the necessary filings to operate in all U.S. states as a money transfer license (MTL) holder. [8]
In January 2022 the company named Tom Davis, a former IBM executive and FBI special agent, as its first general counsel. [9] [10] [11] In February 2022, Brian Reisbeck joined the company as chief compliance officer. [12]
In 2023, Coinme was fined $4 million by the SEC for allegedly being involved in unregistered security offerings with UpToken. [13]
Robert Villaseñor joined Coinme in June 2024 as chief legal and compliance officer. [14]
Coinstar, an operator of coin-converting kiosks, signed an agreement with Coinme in 2019 to enable consumers to purchase bitcoin at existing Coinstar machines. Coinme-enabled Coinstar machines expanded to a number of states including Connecticut, where more than 90 machines were placed in Stop & Shop and Big Y supermarkets. [15] Coinstar and Coinme announced in October 2021 that Walmart would be putting 200 of the Coinstar-enabled bitcoin kiosks in its stores. [16] By January of 2022, more than 7,000 Coinme-enabled Coinstar kiosks were operating in the United States.. [17]
According to Kent & Bain in Bitcoin for Dummies (2022), purchases made through Coinme's Coinstar kiosks charge both a 'transaction fee' and a 'cash convenience fee' which combine to add an additional 12% fee to the cost of any bitcoin bought via the service. [18]
Payments and money transfer company MoneyGram signed an agreement with Coinme in 2021 to allow customers to load cash into, or out of, bitcoin wallets. [19] from select MoneyGram retail locations in the U.S. [20] In 2022, MoneyGram purchased a 4% stake in Coinme. [21]
MoneyGram International, Inc. is an American interstate and international peer-to-peer payments and money transfer company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It has an operations center in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and regional and local offices around the world.
Coinstar, LLC is an American company operating coin-cashing machines.
A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees.
A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.
Litecoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Inspired by Bitcoin, Litecoin was among the earliest altcoins, starting in October 2011. In technical details, the Litecoin main chain shares a slightly modified Bitcoin codebase. The practical effects of those codebase differences are lower transaction fees, faster transaction confirmations, and faster mining difficulty retargeting. Due to its underlying similarities to Bitcoin, Litecoin has historically been referred to as the "silver to Bitcoin's gold." In 2022, Litecoin added optional privacy features via soft fork through the MWEB upgrade.
Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States in terms of trading volume. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. In May 2020, Coinbase announced it would shut its San Francisco, California, headquarters and change operations to remote-first, part of a wave of several major tech companies closing headquarters in San Francisco in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bitstamp is a European cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2011. It is the world’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange. It allows trading between fiat currency, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, such as USD, EUR, GBP, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Algorand, Stellar, and USD Coin. Business operations are conducted from its registered headquarters in Luxembourg City, with a satellite office in Ljubljana.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020. It also operates a cryptocurrency exchange and provides institutional markets lending business and data, charts, and analytics.
A Bitcoin ATM is a kiosk that allows a person to purchase Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by using cash or debit card. Some Bitcoin ATMs offer bidirectional functionality, enabling both the purchase of Bitcoin and the sale of Bitcoin for cash. In some cases, Bitcoin ATM providers require users to have an existing account to transact on the machine.
Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
A cryptocurrency tumbler or cryptocurrency mixing service is a service that mixes potentially identifiable or "tainted" cryptocurrency funds with others, so as to obscure the trail back to the fund's original source. This is usually done by pooling together source funds from multiple inputs for a large and random period of time, and then spitting them back out to destination addresses. As all the funds are lumped together and then distributed at random times, it is very difficult to trace exact coins. Tumblers have arisen to improve the anonymity of cryptocurrencies, usually bitcoin, since the digital currencies provide a public ledger of all transactions. Due to its goal of anonymity, tumblers have been used to money launder cryptocurrency.
Quadriga Fintech Solutions was the owner and operator of QuadrigaCX, which was believed to be Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange at the time of its collapse in 2019, with the exchange ceasing operations and the company filing for bankruptcy with C$215.7 million in liabilities and about C$28 million in assets.
Digital Currency Group (DCG) is a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market. It is located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company has the subsidiaries Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno. It also formerly owned CoinDesk.
A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or an online service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract, a cryptocurrency transaction, identification, or legally signing a 'document'.
Bitmain Technologies Ltd., is a privately owned company headquartered in Beijing, China, that designs application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips for bitcoin mining.
Tether is a cryptocurrency stablecoin, launched by the company Tether Limited Inc. in 2014. As of January 2024, Tether's website lists fourteen protocols and blockchains on which Tether has been minted.
Cryptocurrency and crime describe notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies that have been used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.
Erik Tristan Voorhees is an American cryptocurrency entrepreneur and founder of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift. He also co-founded Satoshi Dice and was the Director of Marketing at BitInstant. He has been referred to as a crypto-libertarian and has advocated for "the separation of money and state".