Coin
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Coin was a San Francisco payments startup founded in 2013 and backed by Y Combinator. It unveiled the Coin card in November 2013: a universal card replacement that stored the magnetic-stripe data of up to eight credit, debit, loyalty and gift cards, switchable with a button on the card. After nearly two years of delays it began shipping in April 2015, having raised about $15 million.
02 / Coin FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Technical trouble consumed the lead. Coin kept 10,000 users waiting two years over engineering problems, and by the 2015 ship date the market had moved on: Apple Pay (2014) shifted payments to NFC wallets, dating the magnetic-stripe clone. Without a scaled user base, the card business had no path forward. Fitbit acquired Coin's wearable-payment platform, key personnel and IP in May 2016 for an undisclosed sum — not the card — operations ceased that June and services shut down in February 2017.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Acquisition reported
A retained source records an acquisition.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
One card to replace eight: unveiled November 2013
- 02
Technical delays; cards ship only in April 2015
- 03
Apple Pay shifts the market to NFC wallets in between
- 04
Fitbit buys the payments platform in May 2016; card services end Feb 2017