Coinbase’s Everything Exchange: Agentic Finance, Stablecoins & Tokenization with CEO Brian Armstrong

1. 0:00 – 0:45

   Cold Open Trailer

   1. BABrian Armstrong0:00

      The minimum fee typically on a debit or credit card transaction is about 30 cent fee flat plus the additional percentage. Arguably, it doesn't really work well for anything under a dollar. Certainly, it doesn't make sense to pay 30 cents to send a one-cent payment. And I believe the stats we last saw on this are that about like 76% of the agentic commerce transactions we're seeing are under 30 cents. We don't want the AIs to be unbanked. You know, [laughs] we want to bank the AIs. They deserve financial services as well. The AI agents themselves are gonna have to have their own accounts, and so we've made some simple tools where with a single command, you just prompt, you paste it into your AI agent, it can now have its own financial account. So it'll be interesting to see how the agentic economy evolves. There'll be more agents than humans in the not-too-distant future. It kind of stands to reason that the agentic economy will be bigger than the human economy at some point in the not-too-distant future as well.

2. 0:45 – 1:13

   Brian Armstrong Introduction

   1. EGElad Gil0:47

      [upbeat music] Today on No Priors, we are joined by Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, one of the world's most important and earliest crypto companies. It has also been quite aggressive at adopting AI. Brian is also the co-founder of New Limit, which is a anti-aging and longevity company doing really interesting things in biology, including certain types of high-throughput screening to understand, uh, aging, different uses of AI, et cetera. Brian

3. 1:13 – 5:52

   Coinbase and the Everything Exchange

   1. EGElad Gil1:13

      is one of the most forward-thinking people I know on different aspects of science, technology, art, the world, et cetera, so it's very exciting to have this conversation with him, and we'll be talking about everything from what's happening in the crypto world to what's happening in AI to what's happening in biology to how different individuals can have an impact over time. So it's a very fun conversation. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today on No Priors. It's a pleasure to see you.

   2. BABrian Armstrong1:37

      Yeah, good to see you, Elad.

   3. EGElad Gil1:39

      So I was hoping we could talk about a few different topics. I think there's a bunch of stuff, uh, relevant to Coinbase and crypto and, you know, agentic finance and things like that, but also you started a company called New Limit, which is focused on longevity and aging and biotechnology. So I think it'd be great to sort of cover both as part of this conversation.

   4. BABrian Armstrong1:56

      Yeah.

   5. EGElad Gil1:57

      And maybe we start with Coinbase. So Coinbase has been making some really big moves. You've been floating this concept of the Everything Exchange as you've been building out what I think is a new global payments layer. Could you tell us, you know, at a high level, what are some of the directions of the company and some of the areas you're most excited about right now?

   6. BABrian Armstrong2:13

      Yeah. So we're at a really exciting time in Coinbase's history because on the one hand, uh, every asset class is coming on chain. It's now possible to trade everything in one place with good liquidity and good cross margin. And so for markets and trading and that out there, stocks and commodities and crypto and, uh, derivatives, perpetual futures, like it's all coming to one place where traders can do everything in one spot, including prediction markets too. Uh, and they can do that in more countries now given the regulatory clarity that's emerging, which we can talk about if you want. So the Everything Exchange is, is, uh, kind of our bread and butter and our core business. Uh, the next big area that's emerging is stablecoin payments, which have just been growing like crazy. Um, even when Bitcoin prices are down, stablecoin payments just keep growing. And so we're helping companies all over the world integrate stablecoin payments, which are fast and cheap and global. You can send money at the speed of information, right? It's kinda like under one second, under one cent US, uh, to move money anywhere in the world. And then the, the third big one is something I know you talk a lot about on this podcast, which is how is AI changing? 'Cause AI is changing everything, and so it's all obviously gonna change financial services too. And so we, we call this Agentic Finance or AI Fi, and, uh, we're building this into Coinbase in a m-number of different ways. Uh, w-the first way is that people who have their existing financial account, they're gonna wanna have an AI advisor, kind of like how wealthy people are able to get access to these investment advisors, but everybody should have access to them now, and they can help teach you about, you know, building the right portfolio and dollar cost averaging, tax loss harvesting, and all these kind of things. And, you know, if the market dips, uh, five or ten or fifteen percent, leg into this kind of portfolio over time and try to save, save money on fees and, you know, earn yield while it's sitting in cash. And you can just talk to it like a human, and it'll do all these things, all these things for you. At least that's the vision, and it's getting better and better. So we've, we've launched an advisor in the Coinbase product. Uh, the next thing is that the AI agents themselves are gonna have to have their own accounts, you know, and so we're on a mission to kinda like go out there. We, we want... We don't want the AIs to be unbanked. You know, [laughs] we want to bank the AIs. They deserve financial services as well. Um, and so we've made some simple tools where with a single command, you just prompt, you paste it into your AI agent, it c- it can now have its own financial account. And it's using a self-custodial wallet and crypto rails, so there's no... there's not like a KYC process. You don't h-- Like, our AI agents don't have a government ID. They're, they don't... They can't walk into, like, a bank branch, at least not yet, [chuckles] without their humanoid robot companion. Um, and so now any AI, any AI agent can have its own financial account to do payments, to pay for, pay for goods and-

   7. EGElad Gil4:42

      And is that tied to a account of somebody who's already on Coinbase? In other words, is this sort of like a subsidiary account? Is it an entirely new thing? Like, how do you think about the hierarchy of that?

   8. BABrian Armstrong4:51

      Yeah. So we're doing it both ways actually just because I think there's gonna, there's gonna be demand for both use cases. So there's gonna... It's gonna be possible to create a separate agentic account with segregated funds on Coinbase in the near future, and you can give your agent access to just that to do trading and payments on your behalf. That's kind of linked to your identity as a human. We're also gonna provide self-custodial wallets to any AI, any AI agent out there that wants to hold a balance in stablecoin, or even it could actually raise money. It could, you know, issue a token. And so what's fascinating is that, um, today we often talk to these agents, and, you know, they... It's sort of like one person to one agent, and they go get some work done, but they often get stuck. They get stuck. There's like, "Oh, here's, here's a paywall. Can you put in your credit card? I need to spin up these AWS resources," or, you know, "You wanted me to book this hotel for you, but I... Here's the webpage. Can you go put in your credit card?" That kind of thing. And in the future, I think you're gonna wanna have these agents have their own spend accounts, kind of like having a personal assistant or an employee who has their own, uh, spend account. It's gonna need probably like a stablecoin-backed credit card

4. 5:52 – 10:00

   Agentic Commerce

   1. BABrian Armstrong5:52

      for backward compatibility, but we're seeing a lot of agentic payment now flow over these new protocols like X402, which is one that we incubated at Coinbase that we actually put into the Linux Foundation. So Google and Cloudflare and AWS, a bunch of people are working with us on that now. And so that's been really cool, and we put together like this little- Fun, uh, website called agentic.market where people can go see the stats of how many payments are flowing in this new economy and see all the different services. So we're helping, um, a lot of businesses get enabled into the agentic economy. Like, you know, is your store ready to accept agents as customers? Um, we can... We, you know, we have a product called Coinbase Business that helps companies accept stablecoin payments, and that's good for humans who wanna pay with stablecoin payments, but it's also good for agents, and they kinda get both out of the box.

   2. EGElad Gil6:35

      You mentioned, uh, things like stablecoin or crypto-backed, uh, credit cards. How do you think about what proportion of the future value in the agentic future is gonna be crypto versus, you know, more standardized finance rails?

   3. BABrian Armstrong6:47

      Yeah. So what's interesting is a lot of the agentic commerce that's happening, these are pretty small transaction sizes, sometimes just a few cents. And as you probably know, uh, the minimum fee typically on a debit or credit card transaction is about thirty. It's like a thirty cent fee flat plus the additional percentage. So arguably, it doesn't really work well for anything under a dollar. Certainly, anything under thirty... Like, it doesn't make sense to pay thirty cents to send a one cent payment. And I believe the stats we lo- we last saw on this are that about, like, seventy-six percent of the agentic commerce transactions we're seeing are under thirty cents.

   4. EGElad Gil7:19

      What sort of transactions are those? Or what, what's happening at that low of a price point?

   5. BABrian Armstrong7:23

      So a lot of it is it's, uh, gathering information. Um, and so you could, you could think of it like, um, it's venture firms doing research compiling from, uh, paywalled data, or it's recruiters, uh, who need to scrape data from, um, from LinkedIn. It's... Oftentimes, it's actually agents talking to other agents that are specialized in some, in some way and getting source data from them, almost like a tool call that's happening. Um, and on that agentic.market website, we have a list of the top service providers that are doing, like, search and financial data. And I think what'll be interesting is, in the future, you'll see actually other agents in the market that, that become specialized. Um, like, you know, the, the, the frontier models are trained to be quite good at good generalists, right? And they're kinda good at a lot of things. And we're seeing instances where smaller models that are open weight models can actually be fine-tuned, or through reinforcement learning, they can become-- they can outperform the frontier models on a specialized task within, within the company, right? Like, I'm sure you've talked to lots of startups about this kinda thing, but it's like a compliance review queue. Or if you train it on a hundred thousand compliance cases with- within Coinbase proprietary data, a small open weight model can actually outperform a frontier model. And so I think you're gonna see in this marketplace, um, a bunch of specialist agents. It might be like, "Hey, this agent is just really good at ordering you pizza," if that's, if that's what you want. Or, "This agent is like a really incredible designer." Um, and that's all it's been trained on is, like, tons of proprietary Figma data or something like that. So it'll be interesting to see how the agentic economy evolves, but, you know, it's probably, like, common wisdom at this point amongst your listeners, but I, I... There'll be more agents than humans in the not-too-distant future. It kind of stands to reason that the agentic economy will be bigger than the human economy at some point in the not-too-distant future as well.

   6. EGElad Gil9:11

      Yeah. It's interesting. I think one of the safetyist arguments is the concern that there'll be resource aggregation by AI, and then that'll be used to manipulate society or things like that. It's just always interesting to think through, like, what are the some of the implications of the scale of some of these things and how they work. I don't, I don't share that concern as strongly. I'm just saying that's, uh, that's something that comes up from time to time.

   7. BABrian Armstrong9:30

      Yeah. Well, just actually on that, it's funny. I, I've heard people like Elon say, um, that they think there won't be money in the future, right? And I, I mean, I actually agree with Elon on most things, but that one I was like, "Okay, I think I know what he means." What... He's basically saying, at some point, you start to measure things in energy and mass, and, like, those become the scarce resource. I, I think in the end, like, in the limit case, like [chuckles] he has a point. But the thing is, there's gonna be scarcity for a long time, even if the cost of goods and services really falls. Like, we have price

5. 10:00 – 10:49

   AI and Crypto

   1. BABrian Armstrong10:00

      deflation because ro- robots and AI start to just make commodities and food and housing very cheap. That could happen. The government printing might also create a bunch of inflationary pressure. But I... It's... There's always still gonna be scarcity of certain things like, like, you know, land, especially usable land in various ways. Um, you know, uh, energy, like chips. You know, uh, if dice... Like, there's not gonna... Dyson spheres are gonna be expensive, I think, pretty, pretty far into the future. So I think we're still gonna need a medium of exchange, and, um, the... it's really cool to see that, like, a- as AI emerges, um, crypto rails are just kind of a nice complement for all that stuff to finally work. Like, crypto was... I think crypto was really, really good for humans, and it's gonna be essential for AI.

   2. EGElad Gil10:44

      Yeah. People, I feel, have been talking about this for a while too, particularly, I think, in the,

6. 10:49 – 15:39

   AI Inside Coinbase

   1. EGElad Gil10:49

      um, early AI community. It overlaps so much with the crypto community, right? In terms of you'd see, um, you know, computer science majors coming out of MIT, and depending on the year that they graduated, they would go into crypto, and two years later, they're all going into AI. And it was roughly the same people in terms of people really into certain types of math or algorithms or other things. So there's a, there's interesting bifurcation, I feel too, of people's careers just based on when they graduated, uh, in terms of whether they ended up doing crypto, um, you know, in 2020 or whatever it was versus AI in 2022.

   2. BABrian Armstrong11:18

      Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm reminded of that, that meme, um, you... Have you seen that meme that says, "Por qué no los dos?" Um, [laughs] you can do, you can do both. It's, like, they're gonna, they're gonna intersect here.

   3. EGElad Gil11:29

      Yeah. It seems like they, they, they just might. Um, what, uh, I mean, the other thing that you folks have really been focused on, um, is the use of AI within Coinbase itself. And can you talk about how some of... I, I know there's obviously coding and other things, but what do you think are some of the more interesting projects that y'all have done internally?

   4. BABrian Armstrong11:45

      Yeah. So, like a lot of companies, we started off with the basics. You know, we got some coding tools. Uh, we got it hooked up into our various data repositories. Uh, we, we've, we've been using it for a long time on machine learning for, uh, risk prevention, fraud prevention. Um, customer support inquiries started going through AI. So that was all, like, good table stake stuff. And then the things that we've started to do recently where we're sort of pushing the boundaries here, I think, um, one of them is that, you know, we basically wanna get a- To clo-- as close as we can and actually achieve recursive self-improvement, right? And what does that mean in various ways? Like, so it means that you have a brain, um, for the company. It-- that can be a sub-- a whole bunch of subsets, by the way. You can have a brain for each team. You can have a brain for each service, uh, like repository within the company. You can have a brain for each individual, which by the way, I believe they should be able to take with them when they leave [chuckles] Coinbase, so we're creating some good policies on that. Um, but what it... So let's say you have, um, like a ser- like a service, like a GitHub repository or some backend service that's running. And today we have engineers spinning up agents to make changes to that. What we're just now launching and seeing recently is like every time the agent comes in to make a change to that service, it's actually ingesting the brain for the team working on it and for that repository. And so what is that brain? It's basically, it's a history of all the incidents that have ever happened with that service, all of the financial controls that have to be enforced with that, um, every A/B test that we've ever run on that, of course, like the full GitHub history of a, a pull request that were accepted or rejected. And so the people running that team at any time can kinda go in there and look at it. Today, it's just mark, it's like markdown files, right? It sounds it's kinda simple at the end of the day. Um, but the getting this all hooked up... So okay, so let's say you, you ask the agent, "Hey, I wanna make a change to this service." It ingests the, the brain, it makes that change, and then as a human, you go to review it, and you're like, "Ah, it missed something." Okay? Now, the, the simple thing someone might do in that moment is, okay, m- go make a manual edit to f- to fix it and then ship it. But the key step that we're trying to really enforce now in so- in our software factory or software development life cycle is when you go to make that change and edit the agent's thinking, that, that context has to go back into the brain so that you not only fix it in this case, but in all future cases going forward. And then you basically, what you start to see is like the accept rate for, you know, one-shotted PRs or that kinda thing. It just starts to tick up over time, and you've now got like a recursive self-improvement system. So that's one of the big ideas we've been working on recently and just getting our own internal, um, agent harness, uh, which we call Toshi, uh, just integrated with all these tools. Like it can now, you know, it can now make calls out to external vendors and pay, uh, using the Agentic Finance economy, like over these X402 protocols. Um, if you wanna m- edit the brain a-as you're making a change to that PR, and it goes back into the brain, putting that into the harness, um, asking it to sort of like, okay, you know, like actually just earlier today, I was making, um, a plan for this like relatively complex feature. What's kind of amazing, it's, it's now even allowing people like me, the CEO, to get back in there and ship features. Um, but I asked, I asked one of the, you know, high-end expensive models, "Okay, go make a plan for how this feature might be implemented. Break it down into three phases. Each phase has ten different pieces that need to get built." And I was like, "Okay, go s- go execute phase one. Go spin up ten separate agents to go execute each of those pieces in parallel. And by the way, you know, recommend the right agent to use 'cause they might be cheaper models." And so it, it spun up a bunch of open source. It spun up a bunch of Groq. Um, and it's, and it just like, uh, two minutes before I hopped on this podcast, it just pinged me and was like, "By the way, all ten of those things from phase one are now done and ready for you to review." So anyway, we're j-- I'm starting to get to this place where it's kind of addictive, actually, because in the past, I, I kept, every time I'd have these, like, ideas or bugs, I'd find... And I'm just, like, pinging the team all day long with like, "Hey, can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this?"

7. 15:39 – 17:26

   Productivity and Company Size

   1. BABrian Armstrong15:39

      And now instead of, like, pinging the ting- the team in Slack, I can basically tag an agent in Slack with that comment or drop it into our internal harness. And instead of bugging the team and asking to do something, I just send them a PR for review, and it's already done. Like, and that's a magical moment that I just like... I, it's very addictive.

   2. EGElad Gil15:56

      Yeah, I feel like the people who are, um, best at adopting this who aren't day-to-day engineers, and I know you had a long background working as an engineer at Airbnb and other places, obviously helping start Coinbase. But I found that many folks who do best at this, uh, who are non-technical also, uh, almost treat it like a video game. And you're like-

   3. BABrian Armstrong16:14

      Yeah

   4. EGElad Gil16:14

      ... leveling up in terms of your capability set and how you learn to do things and sort of these recursive loops you start building for yourself and everything else. And so I think it's, I think it's fascinating to watch that adoption. How do you think that impacts, uh, you know, how companies are set up in the future? In other words, some people make the argument that the average company size over time should get much smaller. It could be a startup. It could be existing companies, et cetera, simply because you're able to harness so much of this intelligence and so much of this productivity or, you know, um, ability for people to do so much individually. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's the direction things are heading? Like, is there a timeline where suddenly every company is, like, ten people or whatever, or do you think there'll always be these sort of larger scale organizations?

   5. BABrian Armstrong16:56

      Well, uh, productivity is definitely increasing, right? So that's slightly different, though, than saying the average company size will be smaller. Um, it's kinda like just saying tasks are being automated or eliminated. Um, people are not being eliminated. I think tasks are being eliminated. Um, and so if you take a company like any sort of company today, Coinbase or others that exist today, um, it's not that... I don't think it's like we're gonna shrink down the headcount to ten people or something

8. 17:26 – 20:53

   The Everything Exchange and Tokenization

   1. BABrian Armstrong17:26

      like that. Um, I think that the existing people we have are gonna be able to just get much more done, and the pace of everything will accelerate. Now, it's also true you're gonna see some companies that are two people or five people or whatever, and they're able to do a lot more than what we would've historically thought was possible, and that's also true. So-

   2. EGElad Gil17:43

      So it's increasing the velocity of, like, the existing team and-

   3. BABrian Armstrong17:47

      Yeah

   4. EGElad Gil17:47

      ... making things ship faster, things automated. So basically you're getting more scalability off people. And so if you have a cost basis relative to revenue, then you suddenly have this ability to do dramatically more with that same group of people, which means, uh, to some extent, your margins should start to rise over time if you're effectively growing revenue faster than you grow team, although I guess some people may still grow them at the same pace.

   5. BABrian Armstrong18:08

      Yeah.

   6. EGElad Gil18:09

      Yeah. Oh, super interesting. Um, and then, uh, I wonder if it's worth, um, spending a little bit of time as well on, uh, the Everything Exchange. I just think some of the things you're doing there are fascinating and- Uh, there's perps, there's, um, [lips smack] uh, prediction markets. There, there's all these really interesting directions. What proportion of, uh, Coinbase, either volume or revenue, is sort of those other ancillary areas now outside of crypto?

   7. BABrian Armstrong18:37

      Yeah. Well, we actually shared in our recent earnings deck, um, which are, you know... Those are the only numbers I'm probably allowed to talk about. But, [chuckles] um, you know, actually eighty-eight percent of our revenue is from non-Bitcoin trading at this point, so that's an interesting stat. I think it's funny because if you look at our stock price, it does trade, like, fairly correlated with the price of Bitcoin, but I c- [chuckles] I... And I love Bitcoin. I think it's gonna be around forever. It's digital gold. It's, like, um, sound money for everybody in the world. I think it's amazing, but I also think all these other things are... Like, crypto is updating every aspect of the financial system. So, like, we just, we just announced, um, our tokenized stocks product, uh, which is only available outside the U.S. right now, unfortunately, but we're working with, um, the SEC and others to get a path to do it in the U.S. Um, but it's the first truly tokenized stock product that's not a synthetic or derivative or some debt instrument. It's a, it's actually a security, um, and it's one-to-one represented by the, uh, the actual security held in custody. Uh, and so this is, like, broadly a trend called tokenization, right? Like, stablecoins were the first major use case of this with a, you know, a token that represents one-to-one a dollar in a bank account or a U.S. Treasury. Um, now we're seeing it with stocks, which is really exciting. It's gonna... There's, like, something like four billion people in the world who don't have access to any brokerage, um, or U.S. investment account, so they don't have any ability to invest in, you know, Coinbase, NVIDIA, Apple, whatever. And so, um, much like Tether was very successful ex-U.S. because a lot of people wanted dollar-denominated accounts, there's like four billion people who want, like, access to high-quality investments. They don't have that today. So we'll, we'll do the tokenized stock piece, and then I think you just go on down the list, like private credit and, um, treasuries and bank deposits. Like, everything's gonna get tokenized, and it, it's just gonna mean that financial services is gonna have modern, modern rails to run on. So of course, these can all be traded on the Everything Exchange. They can be sent back and forth. Like, if you wanna gift a share of stock to your, your nephew or something like that, you can just send it to their wallet. You don't have to, like, go through some complex, um, stock transfer process that's antiquated. It's like money can now move at the speed of information, just like a WhatsApp message, and crypto's updating all those rails.

   8. EGElad Gil20:43

      That's pretty amazing. It's basically broadening and modernizing, uh, the financial system, but in a very broad way, right? It includes, to your point, eventually bonds. It includes a subset

9. 20:53 – 23:15

   Prediction Markets

   1. EGElad Gil20:53

      of stocks. It includes all sorts of things that before, uh, had much more friction in terms of using them or purchasing them, and it opens it up for the world, right? And there, there were counter versions of this in China and other places where if something was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, sometimes these funds would almost be set up that people could buy proportions of to be able to participate in some stocks that were listed in other countries. So it'll be interesting to watch how sort of global capital flows change as these things get bigger and bigger. Um, to your point, it feels like the stablecoins and Tether was were the first version of that with USD. Um, so it's kind of fascinating. I remember actually seven, eight years ago, I invested in a company called Harbor that was trying to tokenize real estate.

   2. BABrian Armstrong21:28

      Hmm.

   3. EGElad Gil21:28

      I think that's a little bit too far ahead. [chuckles]

   4. BABrian Armstrong21:30

      Yeah. I think that'll happen too. I, you... I think you were early, but early... Too early, but right, yeah, on that one.

   5. EGElad Gil21:36

      Yeah. So it's kinda fascinating to watch all this play out. How do you think about prediction markets? So, you know, a lot of the use cases we've mentioned in the past seem to have roughly consolidated around sports and a few other sort of areas. Um, obviously there's things in politics. Do you have a view on where in the long run prediction markets have the biggest footprint?

   6. BABrian Armstrong21:54

      Well, I'm very excited about prediction markets. Um, they're growing super fast inside the Coinbase app. I think we shared in our last earnings call within months of launching it, it hit, it hit like a hundred million dollar revenue run rate. It's growing really nice, like, over a hundred percent quarter over quarter, something like that. I'd have to go look at the exact, uh, number again. But, um, so it's true that sports has been a part of it. Um, I think that it's much bigger than that though. And, and that's great. Like, that's a form of entertainment. Um, you know, we, we should, we should celebrate that. I think that it actually has much broader implications, though, from a societal point of view that people maybe haven't fully appreciated. So, um, you know, like, uh, y- elections are something that have already happened in prediction markets, but let's say that you wanna try to understand, like, what policies should be implemented from a, from a government point of view. You could actually, like, say, "All right, if we were to implement this poligy-- policy, what would the unemployment rate be within one year, two years, three years?" And then a prediction market could form on that. It could help inform what policy is out there. It could allow... I think you could also ask people the big, the big questions in life. You know, is there a god? Um, [chuckles] W-were we designed by evolution, uh, or, you know, intelligent design? Or, like, these are-- Some people would call these more like opinion markets. It's not that there's ever gonna be, like, a resolution date where we definitely know for sure on some of this stuff.

10. 23:15 – 34:17

    Introducing New Limit

    1. BABrian Armstrong23:15

       Um, or if we did, it'd be very far in the future and hard to imagine. But, you know, if you ask somebody a difficult, a difficult question, um, and then there's events that are always unfolding in the world that which might shift. Like, maybe sixty percent of the population believes X, but a new scientific paper comes out, or, um, a new, a new terrorist attack happens, or, like, who knows what? And then it shifts from sixty percent to eighty percent. People could still make bets on this. It's kind of like, like when you invest in the stocks. It's-- There's not some resolution date of the stock, um, where it's done and you get your payout from NVIDIA. You're just betting on is it gonna do better or worse in the future. And I think you could imagine a whole other category, for instance, of prediction markets for, like, the big life questions and things like that. It's... We're just at-- We're just scratching the surface.

    2. EGElad Gil23:58

       The other thing that you've been working on is New Limit, uh, which is, I think, um, really fascinating when, uh, great founders do an act two, and you're doing an act one while simultaneously doing an act two. So how did you think about starting a company while running a public company?

    3. BABrian Armstrong24:12

       [chuckles] Yeah. Okay, so this is a really interesting topic because, um, you know, like, like you, I'm interested in lots of different ideas, um- I think that's part of the benefit of being an investor, by the way, is that, you know, you just get to talk to a lot of smart people about a million... So it's very intellectually stimulating. I don't know, maybe the downside of it is a little bit like you don't ever feel like, um, you've got... You're all in on one thing and you're, you know, in the arena sometimes, and you might be sitting there sometimes from the sidelines saying, "Ah, I know exactly what they should be doing. Why don't they just do this?" And then so if you're the CEO, you actually get to decide these things, uh, for better or worse. So anyway, long way of saying I, I like being a builder or, like, an entrepreneur. Uh, I'm probably better as an entrepreneur than I am as an investor. Some of my investments are a little bit more like, "Wow, that would be so cool if that happened," but once in a while, someone has to remind me, "You do realize the point of investing is to, like, to make money, Brian." [chuckles] So anyway, um, I digress. Okay. So I, I... Basically, Coinbase went public in twenty twenty-one. Um, we were, you know, we were very profitable. Like, it felt like ten-year journey. Okay, do I wanna do something different? Do I have another thing, or am I just at the beginning of this? And I realized I'm just at the, at the beginning of the journey with Coinbase. I think our mission of increasing economic freedom is just... It's like we're just getting started. About half of one percent of global GDP is running on crypto. We've got a lot of... The job's not finished, right? But, um, I do wanna have the ability to try some other ideas maybe and help incubate some companies or get them off the ground, whether I run it or not. And what I did was I sat down at some point, and I was like, "Okay, what are the big technology trends that I'm excited about?" And I think, by the way, if you make some money in software, you kind of have an obligation to, like, put it into hard tech and help some of the bigger things that might advance society, uh, which are te-tend to be more capital intensitive-- intensive. And I was a little bit inspired by Elon when these kind of things with, with PayPal. So I sat around with some of my friends, and we were like, "Okay, what are some of the big trends?" It's like, it's space, it's AI, it's fusion energy, brain machine interfaces. I was like, "There's good teams working on those. I don't, I don't have a strong thesis about what I would do that might be different." And when you're coming up with an idea, you want it, you want it to be something that, you know, y-you're like, "This needs to happen in the world," but also there's not... Like, but for me, maybe it wouldn't happen that quickly. Like, you wanna do something that you think you uniquely add value. And I didn't see, like, that many great teams working on, on longevity. I thought a lot of it was, like, kind of snake oil. I mean, you came from a bio background. I mean, I actually... I, I, I cornered you, and I was like, "What's going on with this space? Like what..." And you were like, "Oh, all this, all the science is, like, a little bit, uh, bogus." And like, the, you know, people have tried these things for a long time, like, you know, um, like caloric restriction or whatever. We found a bunch of ways to make mice live longer, and it doesn't work in humans. Okay? So I was like, "All right, well, let's, let's host this dinner and see if we can invite some of our smartest, um, fr- CEOs, scientists." And you, you know, you attended, I think, one of these dinners, uh, which I really appreciate you inviting some people. And we kinda just went around the room, and we asked all of them, "What's the most exciting thing on the horizon from a bio point of view that you think is high potential and underfunded today?" And people had all kinds of ideas, but one of them they came back with was epi-this epigenetic reprogramming idea, which some labs had seen early results with, like Shinya Yamanaka's lab. And it was kinda showing how you could reprogram cells to restore function they had when they were younger. Um, in that case, they were changing the type of the cell, but we didn't wanna do that. And through a series of these dinners, I basically kind of went down this rabbit hole, and I started to like... Sometimes you just can't get something out of your mind, and you just need to keep reading more and more about it and thinking about the implications. It's kind of what happened to me with Bitcoin in two thousand and ten or two thousand and eleven. And I started to feel about epigenetic reprogramming, kind of how I did about Bitcoin at that time, where I just couldn't stop thinking about it for, like, three months. And when that happens, you, you kinda wanna hold on to that moment of inspiration or motivation and, like, try to do something with it so before it fades, 'cause it's perishable. And so, uh, through a series of these dinners, you know, we happened to find the right group of people that came together, which turned out to be, you know, um, Jacob Kimmel, who's now the CEO of New Limit. Blake, Blake Byers, one of the other co-founders. Um, Greg Johnson, who co-founded the company. And, you know, I put some initial money in, committed that, um, helped them with some of the company-building part of it. But the science was, like, totally new to me, and I, I was basically just a sponge of knowledge trying to soak that up as much as I could. And so anyway, long story short, the, the science progressed faster than I thought. We, we've got a lab now in South San Francisco, about, uh, fifty or sixty people running these large scale. It starts with AI, as with all things these days. You know, you can test millions of hypotheses about what sets of transcription factors, which are these proteins that could re-reprogram different cell types. It's a massive search space with like... So we're using AI for that. We've built the, the leading, uh, uh, frontier model for epigenetic reprogramming. That recommends the next set of experiments that we should run in our, in our lab, which are these large pooled screens, and we'd run those at the scale, you know, as big a scale as we can. But it's like at moving atoms and liquids in a lab, not, not at, um, just software. And so we do these large pooled screens to see if we can see... get phenotypic hits for compounds that might be possible to reprogram these cells. The best ones of those we then run through functional assays, which are typically animal models, and those are a little more expensive, a little slower. And the best ones of those we run through, uh, human trials. And so the exciting thing is we've now got a... We've demonstrated successful reprogramming of at least one human cell type, um, in these humanized mouse models. We're now, um, testing that in human primate, non-human primates. Um, and then the first, uh, phase one clinical trial will be launching next year. So... And there'll be, there'll be, I don't know, three, three to ten other drug candidates coming off this platform in the coming years. So that's been an incredible journey just for me to learn about what it takes to try to spin up another company, try to see where I can be helpful, where, you know, I don't... Be, be humble about the things I don't know. And, um, yeah, I mean, I, I, I wanna make sure that I'm focused on Coinbase. That is my full-time job. I'm basically just an investor/board member at New Limit, but, um, I think it's fun and intellectually stimulating to try to create these companies that can advance the world. It's hard enough to get any, any one company to work. So I probably tried like ten different ideas before Coinbase started to, to, to really work, right? And then, uh, I-- You wanna make sure you don't try to go do multiple things too early. Like, the, the distraction can be really dangerous. It's arguably, like, irresponsible to try, try to go do it. But there are some people, I think, you know, you're one of these people, I think you've, you've managed to help incubate a lot of different companies at this point. Um, you know, Joe Lonsdale has done this. Um, Sam Altman has done this. Palmer Luckey has now a, a handful of companies like with Erebor, where- You know, of course, Elon is sort of like the most famous example of this. Um, and so yeah, I, I think there's a blurry line between, like, I'm the CEO of one company and, like, I'm a pure investor. K- you know, in some sense you're both capital allocators. At the, at a certain size of company, you know, you're basically just allocating budgets and capital. There, there's more, there's a bit more to it than that, but, um, I think having like a small handful of things you're trying to do, and, and you don't wanna get overwhelmed where if like a, a couple of these things have a problem at the same time, you're just gonna not be sleeping and probably ignoring your family and stuff like that, which is not balanced and healthy. But you also, if you're just doing one thing forever and you have the potential to help incubate more in the world, then you're just limiting your potential.

    4. EGElad Gil31:10

       Yeah. I, I totally agree, and I think, uh, more and more founders are waking up to your realization and your actions in terms of once you hit a certain scale or point of things just have escape velocity, they're working, there's enormous leverage. You know, sometimes you're able to do incremental things, and I think Daniel Ek would be another good example of that. He's been doing really interesting things in Europe-

    5. BABrian Armstrong31:29

       Yeah

    6. EGElad Gil31:29

       ... um, across a few different areas, so.

    7. BABrian Armstrong31:29

       Agreed. He... Yeah. He's made that successful transition to incubating more companies over time and, yeah, figuring out where he can plug in to help. Um, some capital, but it's really his time is probably the most val- valuable part.

    8. EGElad Gil31:41

       Has New Limit, um, announced where it's starting or what indication areas it's starting with in terms of, uh, what it's hoping to impact biologically or for a patient-centric perspective?

    9. BABrian Armstrong31:51

       Yeah, it has. It's actually, um, on the website. There's, uh, newlimit.com. You can check out therapeutics, so they... We, we've published the roadmap there. So the first three cell types that we've started running our platform against, um, the first is liver cells or hepatocytes. The second would be, um, vasculature, uh, cells, and the third would be im- immunological, uh, immune [chuckles] immunological, uh, ce- cells, um, for your, for your immune system, T cells, uh, most, most specifically. So, you know, we're following a pattern that's kind of similar to, uh, the GLP-1s like Ozempic and all these things, which is, you know, initially in drug des- drug design or drug se- um, search, you're, you're going after an indication which has like a high unmet medical need. It's, it's typically, um, sometimes it's a smaller market, and that's just how drugs are developed 'cause you go after things where people have no, no better options. So for instance, like with our liver, uh, program, the initial phase one clinical trial will be in people with, um, alcohol liver disease or alcoholic liver dis- A- A- ALD. Um, and today they don't really have any other options other than like a, a liver transplant, and most of them, um, don't have that in time. So I think the, the survivability of it within 12 months is like, once you're diagnosed, is very low. Um, so we'll do a phase one in that, and that alone would be like a pretty large market. Uh, sadly there, there is a lot of pe- there are a lot of people in that situation. I think we estimated that, um, yeah, like just that, if, if that w- drug alone works in ALD, it might be worth $20 billion or something. But the, the goal here is not just to make a liver drug for, um, you know, alcohol damage. It's to build, to take, to make a drug ultimately that healthy people, like if you're, if you're 40 and you wanna have a liver that's like you're 20, or your immune system or your vasculature system or eventually, you know, your brain, your muscles, all these different cell types, your skin. That's a big one, right? That, that'll, that, that's probably a trillion-dollar market right there if you can get, um, your skin rejuvenated. But, um, the, the idea is that over time you'd be able to take like a cocktail of these therapies or, uh... And, and they would target probably different cell types with slightly different, um, payloads, but they would all have the same theme of, uh, reprogramming your cells to restore function they had when they were younger. And most of the diseases that take us out are all correlated with age. Like when you're, when you're in your 20s and you get some errant cancerous cell or a little bit of damage to your liver or whatever, um, your body recovers from it because... And then a- and then as you age, they lose this function. And so most of the diseases that take us out, they're all, they're all highly correlated with age.

11. 34:17 – 40:24

    Looking Forward Five Years

    1. BABrian Armstrong34:17

       And so instead of kinda going after each disease, like the symptoms of it, we're sorta trying to go for the meta problem of, well, how do we just restore the function your cells had when you were younger? And maybe that would be a way to take a bite out of a lot of these major diseases, um, attack the root cause of it.

    2. EGElad Gil34:30

       And this goes back to the ammonical factors that you mentioned where they were able to change the imprint for both age as well as cell type, and you're saying just focus on the age component of it. So you're reversing the potency of the cell to something that has more regenerative capabilities. You know, like younger cells or tissues are generally able to rejuvenate or regenerate better than, uh, older tissues, right? You see that with wound healing or injuries or other things like that. Somebody's in an accident when they're older versus young, right, they get better much faster. So, um, it's really fascinating stuff. So I, I think you have this really unique and wonderful mix of somebody who's really grounded and pragmatic, but who also thinks big and goes after these giant shifts or trends. What are you most excited about over the next five years?

    3. BABrian Armstrong35:12

       Hmm.

    4. EGElad Gil35:12

       Either for Coinbase or New Limit or in general, like in the world, you know.

    5. BABrian Armstrong35:16

       Yeah. Well, so I'm always thinking about this. You know, on my free time and my weekends, I'm always thinking about what are the, what are the most important trends? What, what is technology making available now that wasn't available before? What do I want the future to look like? How can I help shape that, create that, uh, for civilizational progress? And so I think it's good for more people to do that, just as an aside. It's not exactly what you asked, but I think, I think that everybody should try to contribute in some way to civilizational progress and think about what they could build 'cause that's, it's actually really hard. It's, it's easy to be a critic. It's easy to poke holes in what other people are doing or to be an activist or whatever. It's kind of a common thing amongst a certain generation. I think it's better to try to be a builder, and you're gonna fall flat on your face, and you'll get an appreciation for how hard it is to contribute sometimes. Maybe, maybe more empathy, but it's actually much more fulfilling if you helped build something in the world that benefited a lot of people. So anyway, to answer your question directly, the, I mean, my main focus is gonna just, is gonna be on agentic finance, right? Like that's what's happening at Coinbase. Um, I think s- you know, and then stablecoin payments and Everything Exchange. Like crypto is really only powering about half of 1% of global GDP right now. Um, there's maybe about 700 million people in the world who have used crypto or hold crypto, but not all of them use it every month, which might be more like in the 50 to 100 million dollar, uh, 50 to 100 million people range. And so we need to get that to a billion or more, and like just that's how we're gonna truly update the financial system. We can do that with humans. We can do it with agents. That's, that's gonna be a big focus. If you... And then of course, like New Limit, um, but I think if you wanna talk about like frontier ideas that I've sort of been contemplating, I mean, um, one idea I've been contemplating a little bit is around, uh, cognitive enhancement. Um, and there, you know, there's been these things people have realized, like if you... I think in d- in development of, uh, children, like if you give them enough, like, folic acid and, like, certain, um, nutrients like that in certain countries, it actually raises IQ. Like they just... They develop better. Um, and there might be, uh, interest... I might host a dinner on this at some point of just, um, you know, what, what are the various ways someone could target therapies, whether in adults, children, embryos, whatever, to try to just, um, level the playing field a little bit of the baseline, uh, sort of cognition and IQ that people are born with or could be born with. I think that, that would just... That's another one of these big meta problems. I haven't found a great thesis about how to exactly tackle that, but if somebody has one, let, let me know.

    6. EGElad Gil37:38

       That's super interesting. It's basically how do you increase the, the collective intelligence of humanity?

    7. BABrian Armstrong37:42

       Yeah, 'cause I mean-

    8. EGElad Gil37:43

       And there's the biological form of that, and then there's, like, the digital or AI form of that.

    9. BABrian Armstrong37:46

       Exactly. I, I, I, I really... We're in a race right now. Like AI is getting smarter and smarter. I think humans need to, at some point, take control of our evolution and get smarter and smarter, and then of course there's the hybrid of the two with brain machine interfaces where we all... Some people will choose to merge, some people will not. But even if, you know, I believe that like you do, there's, there's gonna be probably more AI agents than humans in the not-so-distant future. But humans still need to advance and progress, like that's, that's important. I think there's a lot that we can do with these AI tools to actually benefit humanity and, um, you know, healthier outcomes, live longer if you want, you know, have more energy, um, have less back pain, you know, [chuckles] wake up not tired in the morning, um, and, and yeah, increase our cognition. Just... And just have, you know, have healthier offspring, have children that are free of diseases. Like, um, there's a company I invested in, uh, called Preventive that's doing embryo editing, which is a controversial topic. You know, people have seen these movies like Gattaca and things like that. But actually like 80... If you look at the Pew Research, like 80% of Americans, uh, embryo editing for disease prevention is supported by the population. Um, nobody wants these rare genetic diseases for their children. Everybody wants healthier, better lives for their children. I think that's one of those topics that's like seems controversial today. I think it'll be more normal over time, and at some point it'll be abnormal to, to have children without doing this kind of screening and editing because it's... It'd be like, "What? This is so risky. Like why would you do that?" You know, it's like, it's like driving without a seatbelt or, uh, something like that.

    10. EGElad Gil39:15

        I always wondered, by the way, on that one, whether or not... If you imagine a future where like gene editing is reasonably common, um, there may be like packages that you buy, right? There's the intelligence package, and there's the health package.

    11. BABrian Armstrong39:26

        Yeah.

    12. EGElad Gil39:27

        I sometimes wonder whether your overall... Like if you think about different ways of being intelligent, there's processing speed, there's recall, there... You know, there's like five or six different ways you can imagine different forms of intelligence, and I sometimes wonder whether, um, these packages will effectively, uh, diminish the neurodiversity of humanity because it'll push everybody down the same package. It's almost like you're buying, you know, the Ford Model T of intelligence for everyone or something.

    13. BABrian Armstrong39:51

        Hmm.

    14. EGElad Gil39:51

        So I've always been curious about what are the implications of active editing, uh, relative to just, uh, human diversity and capability set and, you know-

    15. BABrian Armstrong40:00

        Yeah

    16. EGElad Gil40:00

        ... will parents default opt into like the basic package or whatever, which will always be the same thing. So it's kind of a random aside, but there's all these weird downstream implications to some of these things.

    17. BABrian Armstrong40:08

        Yeah. So I've heard, I've heard that argument before, and I actually ha- I actually think it's the opposite. I actually think it could increase diversity. [chuckles] The reason is that there's just unlimited diversity of human preferences, right? I think if it was this simple, and it may not be this simple, um, parents would say, you know,

12. 40:24 – 44:26

    Special Economic Zones

    1. BABrian Armstrong40:24

       "Okay, do you wanna ma- have a great artist, a great general, a great, um, engineer, a great politician?" You know, it's like every parent is gonna have some different favorite thing, and by the way, that sort of assumes that they're mu- mutually exclusive. A, a lot of this might just be like raising the floor, and then the kid is still, still who they are and what they were gonna be. It's just they don't have schizophrenia or depression or something, right? So anyway. I think it... I di- I actually don't think it'll decrease diversity. Um, I think you actually could... I mean, in, in the limit case, you could actually get, uh, diversity that's, that's really out there. Like you could have, um, you know, kids born with, with, uh, gills. They can breathe under, breathe underwater or like, [chuckles] you know, have, have wings and fly or something like... Who, who knows how far it could go if, if you really, um, can take control of your evolution.

    2. EGElad Gil41:08

       So one thing that's long been, um, discussed in crypto circles and libertarian circles and other things are basically different forms of special economic zones, and obviously those have been implemented at scale in some cases, like Shenzhen in China, I think in part exists as a large scale manufacturing region in China because it became a special economic zone of one form. Uh, there's others that have been discussed in the Philippines relative to certain U.S. interests. You know, so there's, there's really interesting things afoot right now there. How do you think about that, or how has your thinking evolved over time, especially since crypto's played a prominent role in some of the underpinnings and philosophies behind some of these things?

    3. BABrian Armstrong41:41

       Yeah. So I'm super interested in special economic zones because again, I, I'm interested in meta problems that o- you know, unlock progress across a whole category of things, and I think if you look at what slows down progress, uh, in many parts of the world, it is overregulation, right? Like Europe certainly is... could be an example of this. Um, you know, the US has its own version of it that is not perfect, and there has been interest at various points, um, in different solutions to this. You know, there's seasteading and Mars and going br- up- brain upload into cyberspace and all these kind of things. There's, um, you know, there, there's, uh, one called Prospera, which is in Honduras, um, and, uh, Coinbase actually made an investment in that just to like learn more about it and, and see what was going on. And they've had, um, a mixed up and down, I'd say, with like the local government there, but they're r- getting closer to a resolution is my understanding that will, um, you know... I think, I think they're gonna make it. I think they're gonna do a good job. But the, there was something... I'd say there was a little bit more interest in this, um, be- before the re- most recent Trump admin, just because, you know, the, the deregulatory environment has created a lot of opportunities here in the US, and that's a nice... that's a great substrate and market to build on. There was actually an idea that was discussed at one point, I think in the campaign, about something called freedom cities. If people Google it, they can kind of see- That idea, and the idea was to try to create some federal land in the U- you know, U- the federal government owns lots of different pockets of land. And if we say, "All right, you know, we wanna... We think it's important strategically for America to get really good at, um, nuclear power, or drug discovery, or, um, you know, having a crypto or drone delivery or what- whatever it is," you could take a piece of land somewhere. The US has a ton of land, right? You could take a piece of this federal land, um, 10 or 100 square miles, and say, "You know what? For, in this area, you, you don't need to, uh, go through all the normal, uh, red tape on EPA and all these things and like, you know, local community. You can build, you can just build data centers there. You can build nuclear power plants there. Um, you can do unlimited drone delivery there. You don't have to get approval from the FAA." Uh, because we wanna create these zones where experimentation can happen in a safe, contained way to see what works and what doesn't. And if something works w- via experimentation, then you can go through the normal process, um, in the rest of the US to see if it's, it's ready to be brought to that location. The problem right now is in many cases, there is no sandbox to go try this innovation. Um, and that is just incredibly stifling. You can't, you can't really solve a problem as an entrepreneur unless you can iterate on it, right? And so anyway, I, I think it'd be really fun, um, to get some p- these pieces, like these freedom cities or special economic zones in the US. Uh, yeah, as you mentioned, like Shenzhen, Singapore,

13. 44:26 – 45:08

    Conclusion

    1. BABrian Armstrong44:26

       Dubai, like s- these have been very successful in many other parts of the world and dr- driven a ton of economic growth. Um, and in some ways, like the US is 50 special economic zones 'cause of federalism and the state system. So that level of competition has, I think, allowed the US to be the leader globally in this d- but it's just we could go even further and do even more.

    2. EGElad Gil44:45

       Yeah. Very exciting. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today.

    3. BABrian Armstrong44:48

       Of course. Thanks for having me.

    4. SPSpeaker44:50

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Episode duration: 45:09