Fred Ersam

Fred Ersam is an American entrepreneur, co-founder of the Coinbase platform, and managing partner of the cryptocurrency investment company Paradigm.

Education and youth

Born on May 10, 1988 in Boston, Ersam spent his childhood in Concord, Massachusetts. He was a professional gamer in high school and was particularly fond of World Warcraft. This is how he was introduced to the concept of in-game digital currencies in childhood.

In 2006, he graduated from Concord-Carlisle High School. In 2010, Fred graduated with honors from Duke University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science with a minor in economics. During his studies, he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity.

After graduating from university, Ersam first worked in foreign exchange trading at Goldman Sachs. He was also an analyst at BlackRock in New York. Fred learned about bitcoin from an article by a Georgetown University professor, so he started trading it in his spare time.

Coinbase

In 2012, Fred Ersam met Brian Armstrong at a Bitcoin subreddit forum. After that, Ersam left Goldman Sachs and together with his new friend founded Coinbase, a digital platform for cryptocurrency exchange.

The company, founded in Fred’s apartment in San Francisco, went through the Y Combinator startup business incubator. From 2012 to 2017, Ersam served as the company’s president. During this time, the service reached 13 million users and was valued at USD 1.6 billion.

In 2015, Ersam asked his alma mater, Duke University, to invest in Coinbase Series C. He subsequently increased the university’s initial investment a hundredfold.

In January 2017, Ersam announced that he was leaving the company but would remain on its board of directors. At the end of the same year, the company’s co-founder switched from day-to-day operations at Coinbase to building blockchain-based applications.

As of April 2021, Ersam still owned an 8.9% stake in Coinbase. Fred was also a member of the company’s audit committee before its public offering in April 2021.

Paradigm

Fred Hersam remains an active member of the company’s board of directors. In 2018, the businessman, together with former Sequoia Capital investor Matt Huang, founded the cryptocurrency investment company Paradigm. Both founders became its managing partners. As of October 2020, the company has made 28 investments in cryptocurrency-related projects and firms.

On November 15, 2021, Paradigm announced the launch of its largest venture fund to date. The fund raised $ 2.5 billion to invest in new cryptocurrency startups and Web3 projects.

Other information

• Ersam currently lives in San Francisco;
• in 2013, Time magazine included Ersam in the list of 30 Under 30: World Changers. And in 2014, Forbes included him in its ranking of the most influential people in technology;
• in 2014, Ersam, along with Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, appeared in the movie The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin;

• Ersam became one of the main characters in the 2020 novel Kings of Crypto: One Startup’s Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street;
• According to Forbes, IMDB and other authoritative sources, Fred Ersam’s net worth is estimated at USD 2.1 billion in 2022.