The Future of Crypto | Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase | Ep. 21

people shouldn't, like, seek out a specific moment to do something super contrarian. But if you're in a position of leadership, it will care-- occasionally become necessary for you to do something really difficult, which will piss off some large group of people, but it's the right thing to do-

Yeah

... for the company. And so these moments present themselves to you, and, and when I, when I did it, I had no idea I would be talking about it five years later. [upbeat music]

Brian, thank you so much for doing this with me. I am extremely excited for this.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So last week, you posted on X that Coinbase is becoming the everything exchange, and you basically said all assets are basically inevitably going to be on chain. I want to start by asking, why is that inevitable?

Well, the short answer is that it's faster, cheaper, and more global, right? And so if you just zoom out, I mean, crypto, we think of as a technology to update the financial system broadly. It's happening with payments, it's happening with trading, it's happening with borrowing and lending, uh, even some non-financial use cases, which we can talk about later if you want. But we do think trading is all going to come on chain, all these different asset classes. And, you know, I'll give you a couple examples. Like, today, people have been trading crypto for a long time. Um, what if we could trade stocks that were tokenized and brought on chain? Well, that would allow you to-- anybody in any country of the world to have access to these US assets and securities, which there's high demand for, but only usually, like, rich people in some of these countries, like in Argentina, to get a US brokerage account or something, you have to be kind of wealthy. So it sort of democratizes access to, from international point of view. Um, it also allows twenty-four-seven trading, which, you know, the traditional financial system has been slowly getting there, but they haven't gotten all the way there. Uh, fractions of shares. Um, you can launch new types of order books, like there's these perpetual futures order books, which are very popular in crypto, but you could bring that to traditional securities. And I think eventually you'll see even more novel stuff that we haven't really explored yet. But the way that voting happens and governance, um, can all happen on chain, you know, you could even create novel types of structures where, like, let's say, you only want long-term holders of your stock to be voters, so you don't have someone buy, buy a few shares and turn into an activist or something. You could say, "All right, you need to have held these shares for more than a year to actually vote in the next governance vote," or something like that, to incentivise long-term holders. So yeah, it's... Crypto can make all these things more efficient, so I think eventually we'll get every asset class coming on chain. Not just stocks, but also, you know, prediction markets, commodities, like the way startups raise money. All capital formation could be a lot more efficient on chain.