Compare / Coinbase vs Pinterest
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Coinbase
BUSINESS MODEL
Coinbase
Coinbase makes money from transaction fees. Every time someone buys or sells crypto on the platform, Coinbase takes a cut — typically around 1.5% for regular users, lower for high-volume traders on its advanced trading tier.
For a company that processes billions in daily volume, that adds up fast. In the 2021 bull run, Coinbase generated $7.8 billion in revenue.
Beyond trading fees, Coinbase earns revenue from staking (users earn yield on their crypto, Coinbase takes a commission), USDC interest (Coinbase co-created the USDC stablecoin with Circle and earns interest on the reserves), custodial services for institutions, and its cloud platform for developers building on-chain apps.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Coinbase
Brian Armstrong was working as a software engineer at Airbnb in 2010 when he read Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper. He became obsessed.
At the time, buying Bitcoin meant navigating sketchy exchanges, wiring money to anonymous accounts, and hoping your coins didn't get stolen. Armstrong thought: this is never going mainstream unless someone makes it dead simple.
In 2012, Armstrong got into Y Combinator and co-founded Coinbase with Fred Ehrsam, a former Goldman Sachs trader. Their pitch was straightforward — be the easiest, safest, most regulated way to buy and sell Bitcoin.
While other crypto exchanges were operating in legal gray areas, Coinbase went out of its way to get money transmitter licenses in every US state. It was slow and expensive, but it meant Coinbase was the one exchange your bank wouldn't block.
The first version was bare-bones. You linked your bank account, bought Bitcoin, and Coinbase held it for you.
That custody model — Coinbase holding your crypto — was controversial with crypto purists who preached "not your keys, not your coins." But for normal people who didn't want to manage private keys, it was exactly what they needed.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Coinbase
Coinbase grew with the Bitcoin price cycle. Every bull run brought a wave of new users who heard about crypto from the news or their friends and Googled "how to buy Bitcoin." Coinbase was almost always the first result.
The company spent heavily on brand advertising including a legendary Super Bowl ad in 2022 that was just a bouncing QR code — it crashed the app from the traffic surge.
The regulatory strategy was the long game. While Binance and FTX grew faster by ignoring regulations, Coinbase spent years and millions getting licensed.
When the regulatory crackdown came, Coinbase was the last exchange standing. Being "the regulated one" went from a competitive disadvantage to the only thing that mattered.
The direct listing in April 2021 was a landmark moment. Coinbase went public via direct listing at a $85 billion valuation — the largest direct listing in history at the time.
It legitimized crypto as an asset class in a way that no Bitcoin price chart ever could.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Coinbase
The crypto winter of 2022 nearly broke the company. After the collapse of FTX, Luna, and Three Arrows Capital, crypto trading volume fell off a cliff.
Coinbase's revenue dropped from $7.8 billion in 2021 to $3.1 billion in 2022. The stock went from $342 to $35, a 90% decline.
Armstrong laid off 18% of the company in June 2022 and another 20% in January 2023.
The SEC lawsuit was existential. In June 2023, the SEC sued Coinbase alleging that it operated as an unregistered securities exchange.
The lawsuit claimed that at least 13 crypto assets traded on Coinbase were securities. If the SEC won, it could have fundamentally broken Coinbase's business model.
The SEC dropped the case entirely in February 2025, dismissing it with no penalty and no admission that any token was a security.
Revenue concentration is a structural risk. Coinbase's revenue swings wildly with crypto prices and trading volume.
In bull markets, the company prints money. In bear markets, revenue evaporates.
This makes it nearly impossible to plan long-term or maintain consistent growth — Wall Street hates unpredictability.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Coinbase
Coinbase is the consumer trading platform — buy, sell, and hold 250+ cryptocurrencies. Coinbase Advanced Trade (formerly Coinbase Pro) is the lower-fee, more sophisticated trading interface.
Coinbase Wallet is a self-custody wallet where users control their own keys. Coinbase Prime is the institutional platform for hedge funds, family offices, and corporations.
Base is Coinbase's own Layer 2 blockchain built on Ethereum, designed for cheap, fast transactions. USDC is the stablecoin Coinbase co-created with Circle — pegged 1:1 to the US dollar with over $30 billion in circulation.
Coinbase Commerce lets businesses accept crypto payments.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Coinbase
Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital, IVP
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.