When the largest crypto exchange Coinbase opened its India office in April, it looked like it had big ambitions for India. Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency powerhouse called the country ‘a magical place’. A few days later, the company had to ironically suspend its rupee-to-crypto transactions using the UPI interface. The partnership was announced and wrapped up within a span of a few days after UPI stated that Coinbase did not have the authorisation to use the payments network. 

This was only an indicator of the times to come. Up until then, Coinbase had been expanding aggressively in India. Its India office then had 300 employees and was looking to hire 1,000 more this year. The company ended up hiring at an even faster pace. But by mid-June, things looked bad. 

Rough seas for Coinbase

Armstrong announced it would lay off 18% or around 1,100 of its employees due to battered macroeconomic conditions – of these, 8% would be from India. Despite the huge number of firings, Pankaj Gupta, the company’s vice president of engineering, assured that the India market would remain a ‘top priority’ for them. 

Coinbase announced it would hire Arnab Kumar as director of India market expansion. Kumar, who was previously India’s director of strategy and fintech at Prosus and had also worked on NITI Aayog, was assigned to “to start building foundational partnerships and operations in the country”. 

On October 11, it appeared that the needle was moving in favour of the company. Coinbase announced a partnership with Google Cloud indicating the search engine giant’s stamp of approval for the Web3 technology. The deal will help Google Cloud customers pay for cloud services with a bunch of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Dogecoin and Solana. As a part of the agreement Google Cloud will also become the official cloud provider for Coinbase. 

Impact of the Coinbase and Google Cloud partnership 

The deal bodes well for Coinbase and might be the beginning of a new chapter for the crypto industry. Experts from the Web3 industry believe the crypto winter is forcing companies to build a more concrete business model. 

“Infrastructure has been vital to all kinds of technological evolutions we have seen in the past. I think that the partnership between Google Cloud and Coinbase will help redefine the Web3 perception and boost the confidence further for the ecosystem to start building even more freely. Payment in crypto is not new, however what it enables one to do matters a lot. I welcome this new partnership and will look forward to seeing the contributions it will make in the Web3 adoption. 

“I believe it would require more infrastructure leaders like Google to come in, as well as blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service providers to join hands to catalyse the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem. We, at Zeeve, believe in more and more collaborations while we integrate all the clouds into Zeeve’s platform to enable Web3 deployments and configurations to take place in a heterogeneous infrastructure environment,” said Ghan Vashishth, co-founder and CTO at blockchain infrastructure platform Zeeve. 

Raj Kapoor from India Blockchain Alliance explained how the partnership was a signal that crypto companies would form more partnerships to solidify themselves in the market. “Crypto companies like Coinbase were massively overstaffed when Bitcoin prices were at their highest at around USD 60,000. They were very relevant then so didn’t really care to build their base. They were busy making money then but now deals like these will help them stay in the limelight and remain relevant. Now that crypto is taking a beating, they are forced to form solid partnerships with other core tech businesses. Strategically, it is a sensible decision,” he stated. 

Kapoor believes that developments like these will force these companies to reinvent themselves which is a good thing if they want to last for a long time. “Since Coinbase is a market leader, this will push other crypto startups to move in a similar direction. Indian companies may have a FOMO moment and will be scrambling to get into partnerships and diversify,” he added. 

According to Kapoor, this signals a maturing of companies like Coinbase. “These companies were mostly nascent and didn’t really have a strategy in mind. This rough patch has made them focus on building themselves more mindfully. A partnership with Google Cloud will also mean that others will be less likely to decouple themselves from Coinbase,” Kapoor said. 

Owen Lau, another senior analyst with investment firm Oppenheimer shared similar views in an interview on CoinDesk TV’s ‘All About Bitcoin’, saying that the partnership was a sign of ‘validation’ for the crypto industry. “Many crypto-native companies will go after these white-labelling paths, which is to provide the back-end crypto technology surfaces to traditional players so that they can expand their TAM,” Lau said.