Brian Armstrong – The Future of Crypto

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:16)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:41)
My guest this week is Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. The topic of our conversation is the future of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. It's been a while since I checked in on the world of crypto and while prices are still below the 2017 highs, there's been a ton of additional work and infrastructure laid.
We discussed the major events of the past decade and what might happen in crypto in the 2020s. Perhaps most interesting, we covered the potential benefits of a modernized financial system, which Coinbase hopes to help usher in. As I'm trying to do more in my conversation with CEOs, we also discussed the lessons he's learned building his business. Please enjoy my conversation with Brian Armstrong.
Brian, thanks so much for doing this with me today. I thought a neat place to begin since I used to spend a lot of time talking to people in the world of cryptocurrency would be sort of as an update. Many people were intimately familiar with what was going on in crypto in sort of 2017 and 2018, probably less intimately familiar with what has happened most substantially since. So it would be really neat to begin with your take on the most important developments over the last couple of years.

**Brian Armstrong** (3:46)
Well, there's a lot to catch up on. And actually, I wrote a blog post at the beginning of 2020 that sort of talked about what happened in 2019 and then what I think will happen in 2020
A number of things happened. DeFi started to actually work and get a lot of traction, I should say. We saw Central Bank Digital Currencies, which is kind of a fancy name for certain types of stable coin. That started to get a lot of interest. So we saw China started to digitize the yuan and the US started to get interested in digitizing the dollar after Libra kind of created a big hornet's nest, started up a hornet's nest over there in DC. So there was a number of things like that that started happening. And then I would say there's probably five or six really good teams that are working on what I call next generation blockchain.