Coinbase Hires Facebook, Twitter Vet As Communications VP

Coinbase has hired a new vice president of communications, the cryptocurrency startup announced Monday.

Rachael Horwitz joins the company from Spark Capital, a Coinbase investor. She previously held high-level communications roles at Facebook and Twitter.

"Incredibly grateful and excited to join Coinbase as the company's Vice President of Communications," Horwitz wrote on LinkedIn. "An amazing company with a terrific story to tell. Time to get to work."

Horwitz told Recode that the size and buzz around Coinbase reminded her of Twitter, which she first joined in 2011. She acknowledged that the role could be challenging, however, given that the public - and even some Coinbase users - is largely mystified by cryptocurrency.

"The range of audiences who are probably reading about this stuff, seeing it in their feeds and seeing it in headlines but don't totally grasp where we're at in the history of all this," Horwitz said. "There's a huge educational challenge."

Horwitz is the latest executives to join Coinbase's ranks in recent weeks.

The firm hired Emily Choi as vice president of corporate and business development in March - strongly hinting that the company was eyeing acquisitions - and Eric Scro as vice president of finance the same month. Tina Bhatnagar joined as vice president of operations and technology in January in order to beef up the startup's customer service resources.