Coinbase has a unique issue on its hands – how to cater effectively to its rapidly expanding user base amidst an uptick in cryptocurrency industry demand. The exchange has taken steps towards addressing this with the hire of former Twitter vice president Tina Bhatnagar, who will now be heading its customer service operations.
Last year, Coinbase was throttled with a bottleneck of hundreds of signups in a short window of days, which correlated with an abrupt jump in Bitcoin prices. As such, Coinbase’s infrastructure was heavily taxed, resulting in periodic outages that have proven to be quite unpopular.
To help prevent these, the exchange hired Ms. Bhatnagar, an individual who is used to handling digital infrastructural operations. Her new role is as Coinbase’s VP of Operations and Technology, which places her in a familiar setting. More specifically, her mandate will be to lead all operational teams related to Coinbase and GDAX customers.
Her arrival is expected to coincide with a number of support team hires as well – the team is slated to double by Q2 2018. Coinbase appears to be banking on her talent and prowess in growing out teams, as seen during her tenure at Twitter when she built out a unit of 20 individuals that was responsible for managing over 20,000 customer support tickets.
“When deciding to join Coinbase, I was not blind to the challenges ahead of me. But when I met Brian and the team, I knew it would be a truly joint effort to run our customer operations how we envisioned it,” explained Ms. Bhatnagar.
It will be interesting to see how her arrival will influence Coinbase in 2018 as her footprint will immediately be made obvious in terms of new appointments and personnel additions. Coinbase has reportedly netted over $1.0 billion in revenues in 2017, which reflected the massive popularity swell in cryptocurrencies.
With cryptos expected to take an even larger role in 2018, the future of the company under the direction of Ms. Bhatnagar appears to be charting a stable course.
