He has issued shitcoins, acted as a whistleblower, and is now being acquired by Coinbase for $375 million.

Written by: David | Deep Tide TechFlow

Original link: Disclaimer: This article is reprinted, and readers can get more information through the original link. If the author has any objection to the reprint form, please contact us and we will modify it according to the author's request. The reprint is for information sharing only and does not constitute any investment advice, and does not represent the views and positions of Wu Shuo On October 21, 2025, Coinbase announced the acquisition of Echo, an on-chain investment platform, for $375 million. Just the day before, Coinbase had just paid $25 million for an NFT to resurrect a podcast program. Two days, two deals, totaling $400 million, all pointing to the same person: Jordan “Cobie” Fish. Who is Cobie? If you follow the English crypto circle, there are too many labels behind the name. 800,000 Twitter followers, founder of Echo, host of the UpOnly crypto podcast, co-founder of Lido Finance … Or the “whistleblower” who once tweeted exposing Coinbase's insider trading. In the crypto world, he is one of the few OGs who has survived since 2012 and is still active in the market. After the acquisition was announced, Cobie wrote on X: "I really didn't expect Echo to be sold to Coinbase. It sounds like a scene, but anyone who regularly watches his social media knows that it's probably true. Because when he founded Echo two years ago, he also said, “I think there's a 95% chance it's going to fail.” A man who always shouts about failure ended up with an investment of nearly $400 million. As a regular investor in all kinds of crypto project investments, Cobie doesn't seem to be short of money. But that's not how the story begins. Similar to every crypto player who dreams of getting rich, according to his own account, he bought some bitcoin for $200 in 2012 when he first entered the circle as a student. From an unknown student to a crypto OG, the path Cobie has traveled is almost a microcosm of the 13-year history of the crypto industry: early idealism, ICO madness, DeFi rise, FTX collapse… He was there. The point is that he is not only present, but also survived the bull and bear change to the present. In this industry where everyone is eager to get rich quickly, surviving for a long time is a kind of luck that most people can't ask for, and it is an extremely difficult persistence to implement. $200 into the circle, development zero celebrity coin (2012-2014) In 2012, Jordan Fish studied at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. A computer science major, he bought his first batch of bitcoin for less than $10 each. According to his later self-statement on Twitter, he only had a $200 principal when he entered the crypto industry. At a price of $10, this was roughly equal to 20 bitcoins at the time. He also gave himself a screen name: CryptoCobain, which was later changed to Cobie. In 2013, Bitcoin rose from $13 to $1,000. In January of the same year, Cobie landed a job at a British startup called CYOA as Director of Technology. It wasn't until a serendipitous opportunity arose that Cobie developed a “celebrity coin” that changed the trajectory of his development. In 2011-2012, when there was almost no coverage of Bitcoin in the mainstream media in the West, the Keiser Report was one of the few media programs that continued to discuss cryptocurrencies in the early years, and played an important role in the formation of early community perceptions. And the host of this show is called Max Keiser, who was also a bitcoin adviser to the president of El Salvador. Keiser himself became a “crazy missionary” in the crypto world at the time because of his accurate prediction that Bitcoin would rise above $1,000, coupled with his exaggerated performance style, such as tearing dollar bills on the show at every turn. At that time, Keiser half-jokingly posted on Twitter that if a coin named Max Keiser could rise to a market value of 1 billion, he would appear naked on the show. Cobie and another partner, Luke Mitchell, actually made a coin called Maxcoin and forked it based on Bitcoin at the time, which may be the first celebrity coin in crypto history to appear on TV, more than 10 years before this wave of presidents and celebrities issued coins. On January 28, 2014, the 555th episode of the Keiser Report was titled “Launch of Maxcoin.” In front of a global audience, Keiser dug up the genesis block of MAX. On Valentine's Day, Feb. 14, Maxcoin rose to $3.11 with a market cap of $8.5 million. Cobe and Luke were also invited to discuss technical details on Keiser's show. And then reality came. Aside from Keiser shouting orders on the show, Maxcoin has no practical use. No merchant acceptance, no application scenario. To make matters worse, in February 2014, Mt. Gox went bankrupt and the entire crypto market collapsed. By December 31, 2014, Maxcoin closed at $0.00666, down 99.8%. The code stopped updating, and even Keiser himself stopped mentioning the coin. Cobie continued to work at the tech start-up company in the UK until April 2015. As a developer, he himself tweeted that he had never held Maxcoin. At this point, Bitcoin had fallen from $1,000 to $200, and most of those who entered the market in 2013 may have left the crypto world for good, but Cobie chose to stay in a different way. Doing growth in Web2 and being a KOL on Twitter (2015-2020) In April 2015, Cobie left her position as Head of Technology at CYOA to join a coding education startup called Enki as Head of Growth. At this time, the crypto market was deadly. Bitcoin is trading sideways between $200-$400, with most altcoins at or near zero. Maxcoin has been completely forgotten. Cobie could have treated the previous few years' coins as a youthful adventure, as most people do, and then returned to normal life. In fact, on the face of it, he did. In August 2017, he moved to Monzo, then the UK's hottest fintech unicorn. At the time, the digital bank was promoting a mobile-only banking experience in an attempt to disrupt traditional banking. That summer, Bitcoin had just topped $2,000 and an ICO craze was brewing; By December 2017, Bitcoin would have risen to nearly $20,000, and the entire crypto world would go into a frenzy. But Cobie was still in Monzo's office at this time. Outside the office, from 2017 to 2020, the crypto market went through a full bull and bear cycle. The madness at the end of 2017, the crash in 2018, the sideways in 2019, the COVID crash in March 2020. In the past three years, public reports have revealed that he “made enough money during his time at Monzo to invest in crypto full-time.” At the same time, he never stopped speaking on Twitter, commenting on the price of Bitcoin, ridiculing ICO projects, analyzing DeFi protocols … He became a regular member of Crypto Twitter, the always-on, ever-opinionated voice in the community. By March 2020, in an interview, he revealed his asset allocation: only 5% in cryptocurrencies and 95% in cash and other traditional assets. This number surprised many people, and as a well-known KOL in the crypto circle, he barely held cryptocurrency. That probably explains why he was able to stay at Monzo for three years. He does not need to make a living by speculating in coins, and has a stable income and career development. In the summer of 2020, everything changed. DeFi has exploded. Compound issues COMP tokens to enable liquidity mining. Uniswap airdropped UNI to make early users rich overnight. Suddenly, those who have persevered until now find that a new opportunity has arrived. In September 2020, Cobie left Monzo. He has been lurking in traditional tech companies for more than 5 years. This time, though, he's no longer just a rookie programmer, and he's working in a product and growth role with both income and experience, and more importantly, knowledge of the financial industry. The Maxcoin developer, who was once zeroed out, is on the verge of becoming one of the most successful early investors in the DeFi era. Bet on Lido, do the podcast (2020-2022) In October 2020, Cobie made a fateful investment a month after returning to crypto full-time. At the time, two Russian programmers were working on a project called Lido, and the solution was liquid staking: users stake any amount of ETH and get stETH as a credential that can be freely traded. Most people probably don't understand what this is for. But Cobie apparently got it. Not only does he invest, but he also helps projects find audits, write tweets, and introduce them to other investors. He became one of the earliest and most active supporters of Lido. By the end of 2021, Lido became the largest staking service provider on Ethereum. By 2024, Lido has over $30 billion in assets under management and an LDO token market cap of over $2 billion. This early ROI for Cobie is more than 1,000 times. According to several overseas media reports, this investment alone has earned him “millions of dollars”. But what really made Cobie go from being a Twitter KOL to an industry influencer was a podcast. In April 2021, Cobie co-founded the UpOnly podcast with another crypto KOL, Ledger. The timing is also clever. It was the height of a bull market, and everyone wanted to learn about cryptocurrency, but most podcasts were either too technical or too shallow. UpOnly strikes the right balance: a light-hearted way to talk about in-depth topics. Industry bigwigs such as Vitalik, Michael Saylor, Do Kwon, SBF, and CZ have all appeared on his podcasts. These people are willing to chat with the two podcast hosts for an hour or two. Cobie and Ledger don't pretend to be on the show, they ask stupid questions, they joke, they admit they don't understand. This has put the bigwigs who are used to serious interviews at ease and say a lot of things that they wouldn't say on other occasions. At the same time, the business model of podcasts is also interesting. They issue NFTs (UpOnly NFTs), which are equivalent to membership cards, where holders can participate in recordings, ask questions, and get access to exclusive content. The NFTs later surpassed 10 ETH on the secondary market. The other day, Coinbase spent $25 million on the acquisition of this NFT collection. It's worth mentioning that UpOnly's most ironic sponsor is actually FTX. SBF's exchange sponsored UpOnly for a long time until it suddenly crashed in November 2022. On the day of the crash, Cobie was livestreaming, tracking $400 million in suspicious money flows in real time. He looked at the on-chain data and explained what was happening. This livestream later became an important record of FTX's collapse. Another ironic event is that Cobie became a whistleblower on Coinbase's insider trading. In December '22, Cobie tweeted that a wallet address was buying a large number of tokens before listing on Coinbase. It's not a coincidence, it's a continuous pattern. Within hours, the tweet was retweeted tens of thousands of times. The media began to report. Regulators intervene in the investigation. Eventually, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi, making it the first cryptocurrency insider trading case in U.S. history. Coinbase had to respond publicly to improve the listing process. The industry as a whole is starting to talk about transparency. And Cobie, the developer of the once zeroed celebrity coin, is now an overseer of the industry. By the end of 2022, his influence was at its peak. Now with more than 800,000 followers, Twitter is one of the most influential voices in the English-language crypto community; UpOnly is also one of the most popular crypto podcasts. More importantly, he has established a unique character: he is not only an insider with an early player, technical background, and investment success background, but also mocks hype, exposes shady scenes, and maintains a sense of distance. In his own words: “I'm still a Cobain, but now I'm rich.” But Cobie herself may also know that KOLs have a short lifespan and podcasts can be outdated. He needed to build something more durable. Echo, may be the last venture (2023-2025) At the beginning of 2023, the crypto market is still at the bottom of the bear market. As the aftermath of FTX's bankruptcy lingers, Cobie tweeted meaningfully: “The best time to build is when everyone feels hopeless.” A few months later, the Echo quietly went live. Unlike the high-profile development of Maxcoin, a celebrity coin in the early years, Echo has no press conference, no white paper, or even an official announcement. It's a simple website with a much simpler function: to help projects raise funds from early-stage investors. Specifically, the Echo does two things. First, let crypto projects sell tokens to accredited investors through private placements. Second, through a tool called Sonar, it will allow ordinary users to participate in certain public sales. The entire process takes place on-chain, non-custodial, and transparent. Initially, it hardly looked like a product. With a single interface and functions, it is a tool to help project parties and investors sign SAFT (Token Purchase Agreement). But the first project was not long in coming: Ethena. Why did Ethena choose an unnamed platform that had just launched? The answer is simple, or because of Cobie. Ethena's founder, Guy Young, is a regular guest on the UpOnly podcast and has a good personal relationship with Cobie. What's more, Cobie doesn't just provide a platform, he's voted for Ethena himself, and he's publicly supported it on Twitter. For a new project, Cobie's endorsement is worth a fortune. Ethena closed a seed round through Echo. A few months later, when Ethena became one of the hottest DeFi protocols in 2024, Echo's credibility was instantly established. Subsequently, big projects such as MegaETH, Initia, and Plasma have launched financing on Echo; By mid-2024, Echo's operating model is ripe. A typical process is as follows: the project team finds Echo, the Echo team does basic due diligence, and the project team sets the financing terms and issues tokens through Echo's smart contract. Investors (institutions or individuals) invest through the platform, and funds and tokens are transparently circulated on the chain. The point is, Echo itself doesn't custodian funds, doesn't make investment advice, just provides tools and connections. Cobie's role is much more than just the founder of this funding platform. He's actually Echo's biggest BD. Every time he interviews the founder on a podcast, he could turn into a potential customer for Echo. Every time he comments on a certain project on Twitter, he invisibly advertises Echo. He doesn't even need to be an active pitcher. When you're one of the most influential voices in the crypto world, people naturally come to your door. By the time it was acquired in October 2025, Echo had processed more than $200 million in transactions involving about 300 investments. In a sense, Coinbase is not just acquiring the Echo platform, but the entire ecosystem built by Cobie. This also explains why Coinbase is willing to pay $375 million, and they are buying the keys to this network. The deal structure shows that this is not an all-cash acquisition and contains Coinbase shares, meaning that Cobie is now also a shareholder of Coinbase. The Echo team will join Coinbase, but the brand will remain independent for the time being. Sonar tools will be integrated into Coinbase's product stack. From Coinbase's perspective, the logic of this acquisition is clear. In July 2025, they just acquired LiquiFi, a token management platform. And now with the acquisition of Echo. LiquiFi manages the post-launch of the token, Echo handles the fundraising, and together with Coinbase's own exchange business, it forms a complete chain from the primary market to the secondary market. The reaction from the community after the announcement of the acquisition was interesting. Some people say that Cobie sold out early and that Echo could have been a separate unicorn. Some say that this proves the viability of KOL entrepreneurship. Some people dug up old posts from 2014, comparing Maxcoin's zeroing and Echo's exit, and lamented that “ten years of sharpening a sword”, you will always have a chance at the table. And Cobie herself doesn't seem to have stopped to rest. He immediately announced that he was joining Paradigm as an advisor with a “focus on liquid markets, trading, and DeFi trends.” The Last OG In the crypto world, 13 years is an incredibly long time. Most of the early participants in 2012 were either retired or disappeared after a certain cycle went to zero. The exchange has changed several generations, the public chain has changed several generations, and even the definition of decentralization has changed several times. But Cobie is still here. He has witnessed every cycle, participated in every bubble, and survived every crash. He is not the most profitable, certainly not the most famous, or even the most successful entrepreneur in the cryptocurrency circle; But he may be the most complete crypto practitioner: he has speculated on coins and lost money; Created a business, failed; Invested, successful; I have been a KOL, I have influenced the market, I have built a product, and I have completed an exit. From Jordan Fish to CryptoCobain, from a college student who bought $10 in Bitcoin to an entrepreneur who was acquired by Coinbase, the story took a long 13 years. What has kept him alive until now? In his own words, perhaps he knows the difference between luck and strength, and the ability to navigate between the two: “I was lucky early on, and I did some good altcoin trading early on, which put me in a profitable position. I thought I was really good at this kind of thing called cryptocurrency trading. But anyone who feels like they're good at it at the beginning is wrong. If you're lucky enough to join the bull market and successfully trade altcoins, it doesn't mean you're good at it.”