According to CoinMeta, the co-founder of Coinbase and CEO Brian Armstrong revealed in an exclusive interview that when the Coinbase application was first launched in 2012, in order to attract users to try it out, they gave a Bitcoin to everyone who was willing to do so. At that time, each Bitcoin was worth about $5 to $10, and there were approximately 1,000 recipients. Armstrong mentioned that many years later, some of those recipients came back to tell him that the Bitcoins they received back then are now worth $60,000 to $100,000. He also recalled that in the early days, almost no one took cryptocurrencies seriously, whereas today the U.S. government already holds strategic Bitcoin reserves, which was something he could not have imagined at that time.