Steven Ferdman/Getty Images; Antonio Masiello/Getty Images; Insider
- Crypto fervor, paired with the remote-work boom, could lead to more startups ditching HQs.
- Coinbase and Binance are two industry leaders that have already done so.
- It's a deviation from Silicon Valley's Web2 era, when Apple and Meta erected glitzy home bases.
Binance is one of the largest players in the crypto world, an exchange estimated to be worth up to $300 billion, but you'll notice something unique about the company: it doesn't have a physical headquarters.
The company's lack of established headquarters has gotten the startup into hot water with regulators, who say it makes oversight more difficult. But the exchange isn't the only crypto company that has deemed an HQ unnecessary — Coinbase also recently got rid of its San Francisco home base in favor of going fully remote.
In recent months, crypto companies have started paving the way for a departure from the sprawling, perk-heavy, glitzy headquarters of Web2 companies like Apple, Google, and Meta, which have devoted billions to Silicon Valley command centers.
But their Web3 successors, imbued with the remote-first tenets of the decentralized movement — and bolstered by the rise of remote work during the pandemic — could spell the death of the HQ, which has always served as a physical beacon of the booming tech world.
Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken make the case for nixing HQs
Christie Hemm Klok for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Coinbase may have gone HQ-less, but it wasn't always that way. The exchange called a San Francisco high rise its home base starting in 2014, complete with Silicon Valley-esque perks like "a game room, nap room, free meals, and a fully stocked fridge," per a company blog post at the time.
But, a year or so into the pandemic, Coinbase announced it was permanently closing its San Francisco office to go "remote-first" and would no longer have a physical headquarters. The company further reiterated these plans in its S-1 before going public in April 2021.
"We've committed to having no HQ, and it's important to show our decentralized workforce that no one location is important [sic] than the another," Coinbase tweeted in May 2021. (The company is incorporated in Delaware.)
—Coinbase News (@CoinbaseNews) May 5, 2021
Fellow crypto exchange Kraken followed suit in doing away with its HQ in April, and while CEO Jesse Powell said the closure was specifically a response to incidents of crime impacting its employees on the way into the San Francisco office, he added Kraken has "no plans to establish a new, formal global HQ."
And then there's, of course, Binance, which has notoriously dodged questions since well before the pandemic around where exactly the company hangs its hat.
"Wherever I sit, is going to be the Binance office," he said at a conference in 2020.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has run into snags with regulators in China as well as with officials in Malta, who said Binance didn't have the proper licensing to conduct its business there — and that's just part of its regulatory woes, which stem in part from the fact that the company isn't registered anywhere.
Currently, Binance's parent company, Binance Holdings, appears to be incorporated in the Cayman Islands, where authorities told the Wall Street Journal the exchange isn't registered to operate.
Zhao acknowledged in September 2021 that if Binance wanted to get along with global regulators, the company would probably need to establish some sort of physical home base and become a centralized entity.
"As the largest player in the industry, we need to prepare ourselves for the shift," Zhao told the South China Morning Post at the time. "We are making changes to make it easier to work with regulators."
He told Fortune in April that Binance will be announcing a location for a true HQ "very soon." He has yet to disclose where.
The 'spirit of crypto' is remote-friendly by default
This isn't to say major crypto players don't maintain physical HQs. Bahama-based exchange FTX just opened its new HQ in Chicago, NFT marketplace OpenSea has a New York home base for its 93 employees, and Ripple still has its HQ in San Francisco.
But the industry's decentralized ethos and the remote-work boom taking over the business world at large is a perfect storm for Web3 players wanting to nix a global hub if they choose.
For some companies like Coinbase, they've found that the concept of a headquarters "feels counter to our culture," according to the company's CEO Brian Armstrong.
"Forgoing a formal headquarters is also more in line with the spirit of crypto, built on the inherent benefits of decentralization," Armstrong said in early 2021.