Coinbase Offers $5k Egg-Freezing Benefit in Bid to Retain Talent

Silicon Valley cryptocurrency unicorn Coinbase has taken an unusual and expensive step to recruit and retain diverse employees.

Since the summer, Coinbase has quietly offered to cover up to $5,000 a year for treatments like egg-freezing through the fertility benefits startup Carrot.

The benefit puts Coinbase in an elite category of employers with Google, Apple, and Facebook, which also offer egg-freezing benefits.

"Only high paying, wealthy companies would even consider adding a benefit like this. Regarding crypto companies, many of them are just figuring out how to provide basic benefits to their employees."

"With possibilities for egg freezing, IVF , fertility preservation, surrogacy, and more, our fertility benefits can serve a wide range of use cases for our diverse group of employees," Nat McGrath, Coinbase's VP of people, told CoinDesk.

Queer employees can use these benefits to help them conceive, while all others can also apply the same benefits to their partners.

Some smaller crypto companies, like the ethereum-centric wallet startup MyCrypto with around 20 employees, already offer paid paternity and maternity leave, a benefit roughly a third of American finance and tech jobs offer.

MyCrypto CMO Jordan Spence told CoinDesk the company's policy on family-planning benefits will "Evolve" as more employees decide to have kids.

Given that egg-freezing often costs up to $22,000 from extraction to implantation several years later, even Coinbase employees who take advantage of this annual benefit may find the out-of-pocket costs to be steep.

"Offering these types of benefits helps us attract a wider and more diverse talent pool."