Guide to San Francisco Bay Area – Cointelegraph Magazine

This “Crypto City” information seems to be on the San Francisco Bay Area’s crypto tradition, its most notable initiatives and folks, its monetary infrastructure, which retailers settle for crypto, and the place you could find blockchain training programs. You actually would possibly go away your coronary heart in San Francisco with all of the initiatives within the Bay Area.

Fast details

City: San Francisco

Country: United States

Population: 887,711

Founded: 1776

Language: English

Understand

Though not essentially the most populated a part of California or the capital metropolis, the San Francisco Bay Area is well-known for its iconic cable vehicles, views of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Silicon Valley — each the tv sequence and the real-life tech hub. Originally a Spanish colony and later a part of Mexico earlier than changing into a metropolis within the U.S. state of California, many residents dwell in buildings greater than 100 years outdated.

San Francisco is thought for its proximity to the San Andreas Fault, answerable for a few of the most devastating earthquakes in U.S. historical past, together with one in 1906 that brought on fires that burned down giant sections of the town over a number of days. Another magnitude 6.9 quake hit the Bay Area in 1989, damaging the ​​Bay Bridge between the downtown space and Oakland.

Because many historic buildings and picturesque locations have endured regardless of the earthquakes — and close by Napa Valley and its wineries might assist — San Francisco attracts many vacationers from all around the world and has been the filming location for films too quite a few to point out, together with The Rock, Mrs. Doubtfire and The Matrix Resurrections. The metropolis additionally consists of the oldest Chinatown in North America, the previous army base-turned-park Presidio, Golden Gate Park and the Mission District.

Neighboring cities are separated by the bay however are related with a community of public transportation. Overall, greater than 7 million folks dwell within the space between the wine nation within the north and Silicon Valley within the south. The metropolis faces challenges, together with one of many nation’s largest populations of unhoused people, the rising price of residing and different points frequent throughout giant city areas within the United States.

Crypto tradition

A tech hub lengthy earlier than the appearance of cryptocurrency in 2008, the Bay Area was a pure residence for one of many earlier Bitcoin conferences. In San Jose in June 2013, now well-known crypto personalities together with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Bitcoin educator Andreas Antonopoulos spoke to attendees serious about crypto at a time when the area was thought-about by many to be fringe. 

One of the earliest Bitcoin Meetups within the Bay Area occurred in January 2013, when organizers Ryan Singer and Jered Kenna — who would go on to co-found Chia Network and turn into the CEO of the Tradehill change, respectively — proposed setting apart the primary Tuesday of each month to focus on the crypto asset. Other attendees reportedly included Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, Ripple Labs co-founder Jed McCaleb, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, and Coinbase’s Fred Ehrsam and Armstrong.

“There were a lot of cypherpunks at those early Bitcoin meetups that I went to,” mentioned Armstrong in a 2021 interview with Initialized Capital founder Garry Tan. 

2013: San Jose Bitcoin convention the @coinbase sales space was manned simply by @brian_armstrong

2021: Coinbase goes public at a $100B market cap pic.twitter.com/wmGyHCb2u5

— Dan Held (In NYC) (@danheld) April 14, 2021

As a predominantly Democratic U.S. state, albeit one containing many conservative voters, California has had its share of lawmakers proposing each pro- and anti-crypto insurance policies because the area evolves. In 2022, the state’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation issued stop and desist orders towards BlockFi, Voyager Digital and Celsius Network associated to allegedly providing unregistered securities. 

California’s Fair Political Practices Commission additionally lifted a ban first imposed in 2018, stopping candidates operating for state and native workplaces from accepting donations in crypto. State Senator Sydney Kamlager launched a invoice in February proposing that lawmakers amend the state’s code to permit for the acceptance of cryptocurrencies for sure funds. 

At the state stage, Governor Gavin Newsom introduced in May 2022 that he had signed an govt order aimed toward harmonizing a regulatory framework for blockchain between the U.S. authorities and California, in addition to spurring innovation within the area. The govt motion constructed upon President Joe Biden’s govt order on digital belongings signed in March.

CA is the primary state within the nation to start making a complete & harmonized framework for accountable blockchain expertise to thrive.⁰⁰We’re aiming to create a pipeline of expertise for the rising trade & make the most of the expertise for public good. https://t.co/6Um0lJ9p1y

— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) May 4, 2022

The state appeared to be a battleground to watch within the 2022 midterm elections as pro-crypto candidates tried to unseat these opposed or impartial concerning the area. However, each pro-crypto candidates, Democrats Aarika Rhodes and Greg Tanaka failed to win their primaries to symbolize California’s thirtieth and sixteenth Congressional Districts within the U.S. House of Representatives, respectively.

“So many of our elected leaders don’t support or understand technology,” Tanaka advised Cointelegraph in April. “They throw rocks in the road in front of it.”

The Bay Area has additionally hosts San Francisco Blockchain Week, blockchain convention d10e and the Converge22 Web3-focused convention in September.

Projects and firms

One can be hard-pressed to title a significant tech agency that didn’t get its begin within the Bay Area or Silicon Valley. The space is residence to three headquarters out of the large 4 tech corporations, together with metaverse-adjacent social media agency Meta, which rebranded from Facebook in October 2021. Social media platform Twitter and blockchain-focused funds agency Block even have their headquarters there, as do PayPal, Visa and Cash App.

In addition, many main cryptocurrency or crypto-adjacent initiatives likewise started within the tech hub, presumably due to the excessive density of expertise. Coinbase made an early look on the San Jose Bitcoin Conference in 2013, the place CEO Brian Armstrong personally attended to friends approaching the sales space. The Bay Area can also be residence to the headquarters for Ripple Labs, Chainlink Labs, Robinhood Markets, Compound Labs, decentralized music streaming service Audius, crypto hedge fund supervisor BitBull Capital, dYdX, Brave Software, Lightning community developer Lightning Labs, Hyperledger Foundation, Andreessen Horowitz, Abra, Earnity, Anchorage Digital, Layer1, crypto and blockchain-focused funding fund Pantera Capital, NuCypher, blockchain ecosystem Rally, Aptos Labs, Scalar Capital, BitGo, Stellar Development Foundation, BlockCypher, Framework Ventures, Securitize, Oasis Labs, Near Protocol, Protocol Labs and CipherTrace in addition to native branches of Galaxy Digital, Gemini, Bitfury, Nium, MakerDAO, Solana Labs and crypto miner Crusoe Energy Systems.

20Mission, a co-working area in San Francisco’s Mission District, opened one of many earliest retail shops that accepted Bitcoin in 2015 known as Nakamoto’s electronics. Still in use at present, the artwork and expertise creator hub was residence to many crypto-related startups, together with Block-Chain.data, 37Coins, Tradehill, Piper Wallet and Purse.io. Crypto Castle, an workplace and co-living area that was as soon as residence to crypto​ entrepreneur Jeremy Gardner, was positioned within the metropolis’s Potrero Hill district and hosted quite a lot of crypto and blockchain initiatives.

Bitcoin ATMs

In case you have been questioning what a #Bitcoin ATM seems to be like, right here’s a peek of the one at @hackerdojo. pic.twitter.com/eeiBf8C9VB

— Mountain View Voice (@mvvoice) March 29, 2014

Financial infrastructure

In March 2014, a group tech heart named Hacker Dojo put in the primary Bitcoin ATM within the San Francisco Bay Area in Mountain View. The set up of the ATM, operated by Robocoin, was adopted by one other on the Workshop Cafe of San Francisco’s Financial District later that yr. According to knowledge from CoinATMRadar, there are roughly 469 crypto ATMs within the San Francisco Bay Area, operated by corporations, equivalent to Coin Cloud, CoinFlip and Bitcoin Depot. 

Where can I spend crypto?

Crypto as a medium of change hasn’t reached mainstream ranges of adoption within the U.S., however there are greater than 100 companies in San Francisco that settle for Bitcoin and different tokens for funds in accordance to Coinmap. These embody eating places, bookstores and even optometrists’ workplaces. 

Across the Bay Area, retailers together with Starbucks, Whole Foods and others settle for crypto funds by way of third-party apps. In addition, residents and staff in Silicon Valley can spend their crypto at greater than 50 companies within the space. Though seemingly providing solely funds in fiat and thru third-party apps, Meta opened a brick-and-mortar retail retailer in Burlingame in May, which gives {hardware} for its metaverse ambitions.

Education

San Francisco State University gives a “blockchain bootcamp” by way of its Lam Family College of Business and lately collaborated with Ripple Labs and the Warsaw University of Technology to permit college students to develop blockchain-based options to initiatives, together with provide chain tracing and the commercialization of paintings. 

Across the Bay, the University of California, Berkeley at present has a student-run blockchain innovation hub for consulting, training and analysis. Stanford’s Center for Blockchain Research held its fifth blockchain convention in August 2022. The Palo Alto-based college gives programs on blockchain and cryptocurrency by way of its School of Engineering for the autumn semester, whereas within the metropolis, the University of San Francisco lets college students find out about blockchain by way of its College of Arts and Sciences.

“The potential application for Bitcoin-like technologies is enormous,” says the Stanford course description.

Controversies and collapses

In 2013, authorities arrested Ross Ulbricht, creator of the notorious darknet market Silk Road, at a San Francisco Public Library. Federal Bureau of Investigation specialist Christopher Tarbell led the group, which tracked down Ulbricht utilizing VPN server information corresponding to an web cafe within the metropolis the place he had additionally logged into his Gmail account. The data in the end led to the arrest of the “Dread Pirate Roberts” and the eventual finish of Silk Road. Ulbricht is at present serving two life sentences with out the potential of parole.

Though not compelled to shut down by extreme laws or orders from legislation enforcement, crypto change Kraken unexpectedly shuttered its San Francisco workplace in April 2022. CEO Jesse Powell mentioned the corporate’s headquarters on Market Street was closed following complaints that “numerous employees were attacked, harassed and robbed on their way to and from the office.” Coinbase additionally introduced plans to shut down its San Francisco headquarters in 2022, however as a part of an effort to go distant fairly than due to threats whereas commuting.

Notable figures within the San Francisco Bay Area

Bitcoin core developer and Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko; Audius CEO and co-founder Roneil Rumburg; BitBull Capital CEO Joe DiPasquale; Pantera Capital head of investor relations Kerry Wong; Pantera CEO and Bitstamp chair Dan Morehead; Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev; Ripple Labs chief technical officer David Schwartz; Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse; Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen; Coinbase chief working officer and president Emilie Choi; Framework Ventures co-founder Michael Anderson; Crypto Council for Innovation CEO Sheila Warren; Rally co-founder Kevin Chou; Coinbase co-founder and Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam; Brave Software CEO Brendan Eich; Scalar Capital co-founder and managing director Linda Xie; Earnity co-founder and CEO Dan Schatt; Coinbase board member Kathryn Haun; former Twitter CEO and present “Block Head” Jack Dorsey; dYdX founder and CEO Antonio Juliano; BitGo CEO Mike Belshe; Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen; Oasis Labs co-founder and CEO Dawn Song; Compound Labs founder Robert Leshner; Protocol Labs founder and CEO Juan Benet; PayPal co-founder and crypto investor Peter Thiel; Ripple Labs and Stellar Development Foundation co-founder Jed McCaleb; Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon; crypto and tech investor Tim Draper; Visa head of crypto Cuy Sheffield; Abra founder and CEO Bill Barhydt; CipherTrade CEO David Jevans; former Tradehill CEO and present CEO of 20Mission Jered Kenna; Cointelegraph group members: Rachel Wolfson.

The whole @Ripple C++ group is in San Francisco. Here’s @JoelKatz, together with some new $XRP swag. pic.twitter.com/eMxlPkEzwT

— ? ? ? ? (@nbougalis) December 13, 2017

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