Institutional & AI Agent Adoption is Surging on Coinbase's Base! | Xen Baynham Herd

**Xen Baynham-Herd** (0:00)
The sorts of things we're hearing from the largest banks and financial institutions of the world, all of them are saying, we have to tokenize, we have to adopt this new technology. So yeah, it couldn't be more bright for crypto than it is right now.

**Tony Edward** (0:12)
It seems like blockchain tech will have to be used to help police agents and humanoid robots have them control they can't be hacked, but to allow them to do commerce, to transact.

**Xen Baynham-Herd** (0:21)
Yeah, totally. The phrase, not your keys, not your money, crypto is relevant here.

**Tony Edward** (0:31)
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Hi, everyone. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm Tony Edward.

**Amanda Wickroft** (2:42)
And I'm Amanda Wickroft.

**Tony Edward** (2:44)
And joining us today is Xen Baynham-Herd, who's the head of growth at Base, which is a high-performance blockchain enabling fast, low-cost settlement for stable coins, on-chain assets, and agentic commerce powered by Coinbase. Xen, great to have you.

**Xen Baynham-Herd** (2:59)
Great to be here.

**Tony Edward** (3:01)
Xen, lots happening in the Base ecosystem. I've been following it for years and we're seeing a lot of institutional adoption. So Amanda and I are really, really excited to dive into the latest and greatest. But we would love to start with your background. Tell us about where you're from, your professional background, and how did you make your way to crypto?

**Xen Baynham-Herd** (3:18)
Sure. So I live in the UK, I'm just outside London. I started my career in investment banking and spent about eight years as a derivatives trader at UBS and Investment Bank. I found my way into crypto whilst working and leading a stablecoin project at UBS, a very early stablecoin project in 2016 called the Utility Settlement Coin, which was a project where we were using central bank deposits to create a cash-backed token, a stablecoin, to be used for interbank settlements. That project actually got spun out into a separate entity now called Finality, a leading settlement there for banking.
I went on to join blockchain.com, where I spent five years growing the company in various roles, including ops and product. I then spent about a year working on the Network State Project, which is a project with a goal to create a new country. And it's now evolved into the Network School, which is a college campus for people who want to found start-up societies and network states. I spent two years building a start-up called Roam, which was an on-chain browser and search engine. And Coinbase acquired that company about a year and a half ago. I left and joined Base, and I joined Base to lead global expansion and everything from community to growth, to marketing.
And, yeah, having a great time here building the on-chain economy.

**Tony Edward** (5:08)
Xen, you were so early. I mean, 2015, 2016, you mentioned at UBS, and the fact that they were exploring stablecoins so early, Xen, before the tidal wave of TradFi institutions we're seeing now adopting, tokenizing, launching stablecoins.