Member of Coinbase Institutional. Manage the firms largest VC relationships. Views my own.
San Diego, CA
Joined February 2012
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Matt DaCosta retweeted
Tony Gwynn got the Hall of Fame call at his home in Poway, California on January 9, 2007.
Gwynn was elected with 97.6 percent of the vote alongside Cal Ripken Jr., and Padres video captured the emotional family reaction. That's what makes the footage better than a press conference.
Cooperstown became official in the same house where his family could experience the news with him.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
We've been busy.
→ Deribit, the world's largest crypto options exchange, is now part of Coinbase
→ Soon, a first: US + global derivatives in one regulated liquidity pool
→ Next: options, spot margin + unified portfolios
And Coinbase Pro returns later this year.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Words of wisdom (from both sides), as the Tradfi/Crypto “great crossover” accelerates.
Here’s what’s we heard at @blockworksdas
@thBookOfMatthew @sethginns @perkinscr97 @iandebode
Matt DaCosta retweeted
The Fed is citing stablecoin demand as an offset for China selling Treasuries.
The entire stablecoin ecosystem is going much, much higher.
A new Economic Letter highlights that stablecoin issuers' Treasury holdings have grown more than $200B in five years, helping offset the decline in China's holdings. sffed.us/4rG1Ure
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Today, I joined @POTUS, @VP, my fellow Cabinet members, and leaders of American industry for the launch of America.gov. This new platform gives Americans a single, streamlined place to access federal information and resources.
For 250 years, American innovation has pushed the boundaries of the possible. By bringing that same spirit of ingenuity to the federal government, we are modernizing how it serves the American people and ensuring our institutions keep pace with the extraordinary technological progress taking place across our economy.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
We're bringing stablecoins into the banking system with @Citi.
That means instant stablecoin acceptance for institutions - all on bank-grade, regulated infrastructure.
The next step for stablecoins becoming everyday money.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 $2.8 trillion Citi partners with Coinbase to enable stablecoin payments for institutional clients.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Oura is going public.
Eligible Coinbase users can now request an allocation in the @ouraring IPO at the offer price, before public trading begins.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Perhaps the greatest celebrity story ever here, about ROGER MOORE. Give yourself a treat if you've not read it.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Today, despite the global population surpassing 8 billion, fewer people live in extreme poverty than 200 years ago, when the global population was just over 1 billion.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside.
Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.
Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed.
Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged.
After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people.
So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway.
8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out.
He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here."
9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming.
He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life.
Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out.
2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde.
He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up.
The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
All of Hugging Face’s founders - three French friends who once built a teen chatbot - are now multi-billionaires after Nvidia’s $13 billion acquisition.
Their story is one of the most fascinating in tech:
→ 2016: Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf launch a sassy AI “friend” for teenagers, named after the 🤗 emoji
→ The app peaks, then stalls. The NLP tools they built to power it are better than the product.
→ 2018: Wolf spends a weekend wrapping Google’s BERT in PyTorch.
Researchers go crazy for it.
→ They kill the chatbot, open-source the stack, and birth Transformers - the library that becomes the default way the world uses modern AI.
→ Hub follows. Then BLOOM, Spaces, datasets, enterprise tools.
3M+ models, 18M developers.
→ Raise ~$400M, hit a $4.5B valuation in 2023, stay lean.
→ Closed labs own the frontier AI models. Nvidia wants the open distribution layer and the developers who live there.
→ Jensen skips the slow path and buys the whole platform for $13B - Hub stays open, no Nvidia-chip requirement.
→ Each founder is now worth ~$1.8B. The 12% employee pool plus a $1B retention package turns early hires into millionaires. The first wave is looking at roughly $2-50M+.
This is the beauty of startups at its finest.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Such a heartwarming moment, I love when athletes take the time to do things like this
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.
What I should have said:
There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.
On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.
On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.
On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.
On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.
On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.
On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.
Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.
When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.
I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.
Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Franklin Crypto is hiring! 🚀
Our team is looking for a Senior Administrative Assistant — a chance to sit at the intersection of a leading, global asset manager and the exciting and dynamic digital assets space.
This person will be a crucial member of the Franklin Crypto organization: supporting senior leaders across multiple functions, managing complex calendars and global travel, coordinating events, tracking budgets, and helping onboard new team members as we grow.
Who thrives in this role?
✔️ Experienced EAs/admins who’ve supported senior leadership in hedge funds, private equity or asset management
✔️ Proactive problem-solvers who anticipate needs before they’re asked
✔️ Detail-obsessed multitaskers who stay calm in a fast-paced environment
✔️ Strong communicators with extraordinary attention to detail
If this sounds like you — or someone great in your network — apply here:
franklintempleton.wd5.mywork…
#Hiring #ExecutiveAssistant #Crypto #DigitalAssets #NYCJobs #FranklinTempleton
Matt DaCosta retweeted
🚨 Franklin Crypto is hiring!
We are searching for a Head of Capital Formation, who will own capital raising across the entire Franklin Crypto platform — liquid, venture, private credit strategies; open- and closed-end vehicles.
They will build bridges between cryptonative allocators and the world’s largest traditional institutions including: pensions, endowments, sovereigns, fund of funds, family offices and strategics.
We have entered crypto’s institutional era, and @FTDA_US is leading from the front.
What are we looking for?
💪 Tenacity and Grit. We need a senior partner who is all in and 100% committed to the team and the mission—to build the leading active crypto investment management platform in the world.
🔥Passion. Someone who is passionate about the crypto asset class and promise of frontier technologies.
🤝 Relationships. A differentiated network across both TradFi and crypto allocators, built on trust and delivery.
If you’ve spent 10+ years raising institutional capital, and you want to help shape the future of finance at one of the world’s great asset managers — we want to hear from you.
Apply here 👇
franklintempleton.wd5.mywork…
Matt DaCosta retweeted
Two of my favorite universities for their academic and athletic excellence are Notre Dame & Michigan. I just read Michigan is going to pass/fail for liberal arts and sciences for freshman year. This is to alleviate the pressure put on students. What is happening to us? Pressure brings excellence. Don't get soft Michigan, it's not what you’re about.