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

Brian Armstrong (0:00)

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 76% of the agentic commerce transactions we're seeing are under 30 cents. We don't want the AIs to be unbanked. 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, 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.

Elad Gil (0:50)

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. He has also been quite aggressive at adopting AI. Brian is also the co-founder of New Limit, which is an anti-aging and longevity company doing really interesting things in biology, including certain types of high-throughput screening to understand aging, different uses of AI, et cetera. Brian 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 at No Priors. It's a pleasure to see you.

Brian Armstrong (1:37)

Yeah, good to see you, Elad.

Elad Gil (1:39)

So I was hoping we could talk about a few different topics. I think there's a bunch of stuff relevant to Coinbase and crypto and 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 part of this conversation.

Brian Armstrong (1:56)

Yeah.

Elad Gil (1:57)

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. Can 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?

Brian Armstrong (2:12)

Yeah, so we're at a really exciting time in Coinbase's history because on the one hand, 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 derivatives, perpetual futures, it's all coming to one place where traders can do everything in one spot, including prediction markets too.

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 kind of our bread and butter, our core business. The next big area that's emerging is stablecoin payments, which have just been growing like crazy. 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. It's kind of like under one second, under one cent US to move money anywhere in the world. And then the third big one is something I know you talk a lot about on this podcast, which is how is AI changing? Because AI is changing everything. And so it's obviously going to change financial services too. And so we call this agentic finance or AI-Fi. And we're building this into Coinbase in a number of different ways. The first way is that people who have their existing financial account, they're going to want to 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 building the right portfolio and dollar cost averaging, tax loss harvesting and all these kinds of things. And if the market dips 5% or 10% or 15% leg into this kind of portfolio over time, and try to save money on fees and earn yield while it's sitting in cash, you can just talk to it like a human and it will do all these things for you. At least that's the vision. It's getting better and better. So we've launched an advisor in the Coinbase product. The next thing is that the AI agents themselves are going to have to have their own accounts. And so we're on a mission to go out there. We don't want the AIs to be unbanked. We want to bank the AIs. They deserve financial services as well.