Brian Armstrong: “Capitalism Lifts Everyone Up”

**Brian Armstrong** (0:00)
There's actually about 4 billion people in the world today who are unbrokered, half the planet. Can't get access to any high quality US companies to invest in. If you survey Americans, 83% of them say that the financial system is not currently working for them.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:10)
There was a tweet that you put out that got over 24 million views. You essentially said that Coinbase is rebuilding around intelligence.

**Brian Armstrong** (0:18)
There's actually about 1,200 full-time agents working at Coinbase now, but in the future, you're increasingly gonna talk to one agent. That agent is gonna orchestrate hundreds of thousands of other agents. People are gonna use things like Coinbase Advisor right in their Coinbase account to just manage their financial life. That's probably the coolest thing on the frontier that we're announcing today.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:46)
Brian Armstrong, welcome to Sourcery.

**Brian Armstrong** (0:48)
Thanks for having me.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:49)
Thank you for having us here. We are, where are we? We're backstage right now. We have a big event tomorrow.

**Brian Armstrong** (0:54)
Yeah, the Coinbase system update. We do this twice a year where we go out and talk about everything we built in that half of the year. And we've got some really exciting announcements.
I can go through a couple of them if you want. I mean, one of the big ones is tokenized equities. That's something we've been working on for a long time. So just like, you know, stable coins got the tokenized money, you know, dollars, and it got democratized access for everybody. We're now doing that with stocks for the first time, which is really exciting. We built out a lot of infrastructure for AI agents to actually get their own financial accounts and connect them into your own, you know, your Coinbase account. And then we've started to actually, we finally got the approvals in the US to unify our global liquidity. Like most people don't know that 80% of the trading volume went offshore for crypto because of the lack of clarity in the US. And we've just finally gotten some approvals where we can now get our international customers and our US customers on the same order book. And liquidity is a network effect. So that's really powerful.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:47)
Exciting. Well, first I have to apologize. I don't have a throne for you or a big marble Bitcoin. But I do want to talk about some of those product releases. So first is tokenized stocks.
There have been some companies that have said they're going to release this. There's also exchanges that wanted to release this. Why has that not worked before? And how are you going to make it work?

**Brian Armstrong** (2:08)
Yeah, so lots of people have been talking about this for a while. And there are some products that are out there today. But they're actually not one-to-one backed by the stock itself. They are a derivative or a synthetic. So there are ways to get exposure. But you're not actually owning the underlying asset. And that's what was powerful about stable coins, what caused them to take off so much is, once there was a trusted stable coin, like USDC, where you could say, all right, I know and believe that there is a dollar underlying every single one of these tokenized dollars, then it really took off in a massive way. And we saw with regulatory clarity, like the Genius Act, that now hundreds of large US companies are adopting it. And so we think that the same thing is on the cusp of happening now, especially with the market structure legislation or the Clarity Act is sort of the next piece of crypto legislation that we think is right on the horizon.
So Coinbase is the most trusted brand in crypto. I think we're the ideal company to actually be that trusted, that bridge, you know, where we have the underlying stocks, a one-to-one token minted on top of it. And then the benefits of that are that people all over the world can trade it. There's actually about 4 billion people in the world today who are unbrokered. They don't have access to any high-quality US investments.
They can trade it.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:20)
4 billion?

**Brian Armstrong** (3:20)
Yeah, 4 billion, half the planet. Basically, can't get access to any high-quality US companies to invest in. And so they're stuck just holding cash and like lower quality investments. And then you can do 24-7 trading with tokenized stocks. So that's going to totally change the world on that dimension. And then lastly, one kind of cool feature is that you can just really easily send these stocks just like any other token. So you can gift it to your friends.