ResearchCoin jumps 15% on Coinbase listing; exchange says it is unaffiliated despite CEO Brian Armstrong’s involvement

ResearchCoin, the community governance and rewards token of the ResearchHub platform, jumped 15% following Coinbase's announcement late Wednesday that it would list the asset on the Ethereum Layer 2 Base network it incubated.

RSC was trading for around $0.67 ahead of the announcement, rising to a peak of $0.77 before correcting slightly, according to CoinGecko data. RSC's price is now up 99% since Coinbase first disclosed that ResearchCoin was being added to its listing roadmap on July 25, and is currently changing hands for $0.76. RSC trading is set to begin on Coinbase at 9 a.m. PT on Thursday, if liquidity conditions are met.

RSC/USD price chart. Image: CoinGecko.

ResearchHub is a project founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and scientist Patrick Joyce in 2019 that rewards scientists with ResearchCoin for publishing content. The amount of RSC earned is determined by the community's perceived value of the content, and the crypto can then be used to reward other scientists for completing research-related tasks such as peer reviews, answering scientific questions, and providing feedback.

ResearchHub argues that scientific research is too important to be hidden behind paywalls and advocates for an open-source software-style model that fosters collaboration and rewards valuable contributions in an "academic town square."

The startup raised $5 million in a 2023 seed round led by Open Source Software Capital, with participation from Boost VC, RedHat's Bob Young, Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, Replit's Amjad Masad, Y Combinator’s Garry Tan, among others. Another $2 million investment from BoostVC, announced in February this year, took ResearchHub's total funding to $7 million.

Addressing conflict of interest concerns

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's role as co-founder and CEO of ResearchHub opens up alleged conflict of interest concerns following the listing, something he and the crypto exchange strongly deny.

"ResearchCoin (RSC) is an independent research organization and not affiliated with Coinbase," the crypto exchange said on X as part of the listing announcement thread. "ResearchHub is funded and co-led by Brian Armstrong in his personal capacity, separate and distinct from his responsibilities at Coinbase."

"Brian is not a reviewing or approving member of the Coinbase Digital Asset Support Group, which reviews and approves assets for listing at Coinbase," the exchange added, pointing to its listing prioritization process and standards.

Notably, Coinbase is the first tier 1 centralized exchange to list the asset, with RSC also currently available on CEXs like Gate, KCEX, XT.COM, and CoinEX, as well as DEXs such as Uniswap and the Base-native Aerodrome, per CoinGecko.

Armstrong himself also weighed in on the concerns following the initial listings roadmap announcement, outlining the precautions he put in place to mitigate any conflicts of interest. "All assets that get listed on Coinbase go through our Digital Asset Support Group. The DASG reviews every asset that gets listed on Coinbase from a legal, compliance, and cybersecurity perspective," Armstrong said. "Most important point: I am not a member of the DASG, and so have no voting authority on which assets get approved for listing."

Armstrong added that his affiliation with ResearchHub was disclosed to the Coinbase board, as is standard practice, and said that RSC was created by the ResearchHub Foundation before ResearchHub then adopted it to help reward members of the community and to facilitate moderation.

"The mission of ResearchHub is to accelerate scientific research. My hope is that ResearchHub and ResearchCoin will be good for the world in terms of helping accelerate scientific research, and that I can help set it up for long-term success," he said.

Armstrong's commitment not to sell RSC

The Coinbase CEO also pointed to a March 2022 blog post where he made a public commitment not to sell RSC for at least four years, saying that this hasn't changed. However, that is now just eight months away. In the same post, he also said, "If ResearchCoin is listed on Coinbase or other exchanges, the value of it may change considerably. Due to the small supply, it may even be quite volatile or reach prices that do not reflect its true value."

Not all community members were satisfied, however. "Isn't DASG part of Coinbase and ultimately reports to Coinbase's CEO? How is this not a conflict of interest?" one said in response to Armstrong.

In January, Armstrong said Coinbase needed to rethink its listing process. "There are ~1m tokens a week being created now, and growing. High-quality problem to have, but evaluating each one by one is no longer feasible. And regulators need to understand that applying for approval for each one is totally infeasible at this point as well (they can't do 1m a week). It needs to move from an allow list to a block list, and utilize customer reviews/automated scans of onchain data, etc to help customers sift through," he stated at the time.

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