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A lot of people are interested in Coinbase. Now the company has a chief messenger.

Rachael Horwitz joins as the company continues to fill out its C-suite.

Coinbase COO Asiff Hirji (left) and Rachael Horwitz
Coinbase

Coinbase continues to fascinate outsiders and journalists who see the company as the startup at the heart of the current cryptocurrency craze. And now the company is finally adding personnel to help it deal with the barrage of interest.

Rachael Horwitz, who most recently led marketing at Coinbase investor Spark Capital, is joining the company as its first vice president of communications. Horwitz previously served in top PR roles at both Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which she feels will trigger similar emotions and challenges to her current role.

“It has so, so much about what drew me to Twitter when I joined the company,” she said of Coinbase — a similarly sized, similarly buzzed-about private company as Twitter in 2011. “It just feels like this is a very exciting company at a very critical moment. That’s cool for me personally, but that’s very, very interesting from a communications perspective.”

After years of operating quietly and without much fanfare, Coinbase became a sensation in the media amid a bull run in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin in late 2017. The company has been aggressively adding to its C-suite to keep up with consumer demand and to scale the company, recently hiring vice presidents for M&A and finance. The company is also searching for a CFO.

That’s especially key given a looming, well-financed battle that Coinbase is soon to wage with Robinhood, which has expanded into cryptocurrency trading.

Given Coinbase’s centrality in the current rush of attention to the hard-to-understand crypto space, Horwitz will at times have to serve as an ambassador for the asset class in general, explaining what exactly it is that Coinbase offers consumers.

“The range of audiences who are probably reading about this stuff, seeing it in their feeds and seeing it in headlines but don’t totally grasp where we’re at in the history of all this,” Horwitz said, “there’s a huge educational challenge.”

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