about me / buildinpublic / nexustrade
They Knew About My Trading App From Day One. Then Coinbase Fired Me.
I joined Coinbase in September 2025 and I told them I was running NexusTrade. It was on my LinkedIn, my GitHub, and my resume. I talked about it in the interviews. When I signed the offer I emailed People Ops, per the contract, and said I was running the app. Everyone I talked to knew.
In December, Coinbase released Coinbase Advisor and retroactively called NexusTrade a conflict of interest. They gave me 30 days to shut it down or resign. They fired me before the deadline. My manager found out the day it happened. I was on P0 work, including the institutional futures signup flows on coinbase.com. I was not fired for performance. I was fired for an app I disclosed from day one.
Transcript
0:00For those that know me, you'd know that I was really proud to call myself a software engineer
0:05at Coinbase, but as of yesterday, April 6th, I'm no longer with the company,
0:12and here's exactly what happened. So when I joined Coinbase in September of 2025,
0:21I let them know that I was running a side project, an app called NexusTrade, and I didn't hide it.
0:29It was on my LinkedIn profile. It was on my GitHub profile. It was on my resume. I talked
0:34about it during the interviews. Everyone I talked to knew I was running this app on the side,
0:40and when I signed my offer letter, I also sent an email to the people ops team in accordance with my
0:48offer contract saying that I was running this app, and it was all good. Everything was good.
0:54Everyone was happy. There were no issues, but it wasn't until December when Coinbase released
1:00an app called Coinbase Advisor that they retroactively deemed my app to be a conflict
1:07of interest. They gave me 30 days to either shut down or resign over the app, and then they fired me
1:16before the deadline. Everyone on my team was shocked. My manager didn't even find out
1:22until the day it happened. It would be one thing if there was some sort of performance issue. I
1:29wasn't doing the work I was supposed to be doing, but I worked extremely hard, oftentimes over 80
1:35hours per week. I was entrusted with the organization's P0 priorities. If you go on
1:42a Coinbase website right now and you try to sign up for futures trading as an institution,
1:47I built out all of those flows. It directly increased Coinbase's revenue by billions of
1:55dollars, and yet because of an alleged violation of their outside activities policy, I was terminated,
2:03and I'm just pretty bummed out, you know, and I feel like a white man in my circumstances,
2:10they'd be asked to head to Coinbase Advisor. In fact, I've had teammates say,
2:15why didn't they just ask you to lead the division? You obviously are an expert here,
2:20but you know, I don't know either. But yeah, you know, I'm currently, I guess, looking for work.
2:27I have interviews with OpenAI, and I also have an interview for Meta, and I hope to hear back
2:34from everyone ideally this week, but yeah, that's my life update.
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