is coinbase in trouble?

"If you or your engineer friend is bored at BigTechCo, get in touch."

The tweet, sent out by Coinbase vice president and general manager Dan Romero, represented a rare request from the San Francisco-based exchange. Despite building on various cryptocurrency protocols for years, it was perhaps the first time the company had signaled it would offer financial support to someone working directly on open-source code.

As such, the tweet drew its fair share of confusion among bitcoin and ethereum's largely volunteer developers.

That's not to say that they aren't interested in taking sponsorships from companies in an effort to make money from their passions - they are. But the trouble is many developers see larger industry startups like Coinbase, which made more than $1 billion in revenue last year, as a prime example of the "big tech companies" that Romero positioned as antagonists.

In fact, some would go so far as to say there's a quiet struggle being waged in the blockchain industry between the coders who develop these open-source protocols and those who mainly sell related products or services for commercial interest from their corner offices in Silicon Valley.

This was on full display when Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr tweeted a disgruntled reply to Romero after private conversations clarified that the role wouldn't focus exclusively bitcoin or ethereum, nor would it give developers autonomy to focus on projects they see as beneficial.

Instead, Coinbase executives would be directing the work, potentially requiring the developers work on cryptocurrencies that might run afoul of their own personal tastes. (As an example, in the case of Dashjr, the long-time bitcoin coder, was loathe to devote time to rival bitcoin cash).

Coinbase acknowledges a kind of disconnect, yet thinks the lines between industry and open-source will continue to blur.