Thanks, Brian. My number one priority for Coinbase is providing our customers with a great experience. We have been failing at this and it is totally unacceptable. It’s no excuse but we think we owe you an explanation of what happened in 2017, what we’ve done and what we are doing to fix the issues.

The Coinbase customer base grew significantly last year and we began substantial efforts to scale all of our teams and systems to meet this growth. Brian publicly committed to focusing on the fundamentals and to significantly scaling and improving our customer support. And looking at the data, I was optimistic this would be solved at the end of the year.

But I was wrong! — we experienced even more growth in the last 2 quarters of 2017 than our most aggressive forecasts. For example, in November and December, we grew our support capability more than 60% which was meant to be sufficient based on peak 2017 support volumes we had experienced. But transaction volumes in November and December grew by 295%. This led to many customers experiencing long wait times from hearing back from our customer support team. The team was left feeling like we were bailing out a sinking ship with pots and pans — but we are now even more motivated than ever.

The good news is this growth means digital currency continues to expand and mature into the transformational technology we all believe it is destined to become. The bad news is many customers have had a poor experience with our product. This is unacceptable and the team and I will continue to work day and night to shorten response times to support inquiries, reduce payment delays, process limit increase requests, and improve identity verification. Brian has given our team all the resources we need to get the job done.

Realistically, this will take some time — but we are sparing no expense and are committed to making these improvements as fast as humanly possible. Below is some additional context about our priorities for ensuring a great customer experience, what we have done to improve it recently and what we are doing next. I plan to update our customers regularly on our progress.

Thank you for being a customer.

–Dan Romero, Vice President & General Manager of Coinbase