Coinbase’s John D’Agostino: Why Bitcoin Doesn’t Need the Clarity Act to Win

**John D'Agostino** (0:00)
Everyone's looking for the catalysts. And I try to get people off that notion. Catalysts are for unproven technologies. Bitcoin is proven technology. It doesn't need a large catalyst. What happens if you pay attention are what I call micro catalysts. Every single day, we're seeing more and more interesting innovations that are proving out the use cases. You've got growing agentic trading. You've got the dollar amount growing. It was microtransactions at first, now the average amount is over a dollar. And so we're starting to see this future map out. What I know is that we're heading in this direction very steadily. Clarity will amplify that. There's no question. But the grinding increase is happening regardless of anyone.

**Spencer Nichols** (0:43)
Hello and welcome back to the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Nichols. And today we are sitting down with John D'Agostino, Head of Strategy Institutional at Coinbase. John, how are you doing today?

**John D'Agostino** (0:53)
I'm doing great, Spencer. Thanks for having me.

**Spencer Nichols** (0:55)
Of course, we're excited to have you here as well. And John, I think right now, clarity is very much top of mind for most people in the market currently. And also people watching Congress generally. This has been kind of a hard fought battle over trying to get regulatory clarity over the entire crypto industry. And I think I just want to hear it from you. What is your take on how much this matters for both crypto and Bitcoin?
And is it really just a formality of implementing regulations? Or is there really a deeper impact on the institutional investor psychology that you see?

**John D'Agostino** (1:24)
Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a fair first question. I think everyone's sort of getting a little tired of talking about clarity despite how incredibly important it is. But there's been just a bunch of folks on the policy side, at Coinbase and other places who have worked tirelessly on this.
I am relentlessly optimistic. I know we're getting down to the wire. I know that politicians and bankers and opponents are sending sort of rage baiting tweets to shred a rile everyone up. I understand all of this. I'm relentlessly optimistic for three reasons. One, as I mentioned, the smartest people I know, the most ethical people I know, are working tirelessly on this and they're optimistic. So I trust the experts in that way. They're on the ground, they're talking to the right people. We're right. The messaging is the correct one. We are on the side of the correct innovative path, and eventually, we do the right thing as a country.
And then finally, I'm reminded that the Genius Act, although people remember it as kind of passing through easily, in reality, it was hard fought until the bitter end. So I am optimistic that what we're seeing in these last couple of days, all the sort of silly hyperbolic tweets and the misinformation, I'm optimistic that those are the sort of desperate final throws of an opposition that realizes it's against history.

**Spencer Nichols** (2:54)
Yeah, John, I think that's really well said. I think we're seeing a lot of similarity between how the Genius Act was treated and how clarity has gone so far in terms of those for and against. I think that right now the market is still largely unsettled as to whether or not they think clarity will pass. But I do think that if we take past precedent as indication of the future, there certainly is still a very strong chance that this will happen.
But I would love to dig a little bit deeper in, what are the conversations that you're having with people in the institutional finance space? There's both the regulatory simplicity that clarity will offer, but I also think that there's this psychological element to, okay, now this is an acceptable asset class for us to invest in, for us to explore. What is that dynamic like on the ground for you? How important is this for those people that are looking to invest more in crypto or dipping their toes in the water?

**John D'Agostino** (3:42)
I don't want to understate the importance of clarity. And because clarity is a market structure bill. And as amazing as Genius was, and we saw, brother, Genius has not even been enacted into law yet. That starts in 2027, yet it's demonstrably changed the face of stable coin adoption, stable coin growth. We saw the embedded demand on the supply side with tons of banks now issuing stable coins, companies issuing stable coins, before the actual act is signed into law. I mean, that's extraordinary, right? So we know that these bills matter. And market structure is genius on steroids. We don't do market structure very often in this country. And when we do it, we tend to do it after a financial crisis. When we realize, wow, we have to put reins on something that disappointed the entire country from a financial perspective, Commodity Futures Modernization Act, things like that.