"That's Something I Didn't Envision In My Wildest Dreams" | Brian Armstrong

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Scott Melker (0:30)

Brian Armstrong told me crypto wasn't going to wait for Congress. Less than 24 hours later, the SEC proved him right. When we recorded this exclusive conversation, the only comments he's made about the Clarity Act, it had just failed, and Washington appeared to have delivered another devastating setback for the industry. But Brian argued that the SEC and CFTC already had the authority to move major parts of crypto forward without Congress. The very next day, the SEC opened the door to tokenized stock trading in the United States. That makes this conversation even more important now than when we recorded it. Brian lays out Coinbase's plan to tokenize everything. Stocks, private companies, real estate, and entirely new forms of capital formation. We talk about perpetual futures coming to America.

Brian Armstrong (1:15)

I think perpetual futures is a pretty killer product that a lot of people haven't experienced yet. Under this administration, we have been able to bring some of these perpetual futures products to the US. It gives traders the 24-7 phenomenon, but it also gives them leverage.

Scott Melker (1:27)

An economy where billions of AI agents transact with one another.

Brian Armstrong (1:30)

Coinbase has the leading stack for agentic commerce, especially with stable coins. You know, we're going to keep investing in that because we're going to be here in the future not too far, where there's actually more agents transacting in the economy than humans, which is a pretty wild thing to think about.

Scott Melker (1:44)

And why he believes Bitcoin can reach $300,000 to $400,000 by 2030

Brian Armstrong (1:49)

It's gone through many of these cycles now, where it'll have run ups oftentimes around the Bitcoin halving events. And then you'll see drawbacks, and usually they last about a year or so. If it follows similar patterns to the past, my hope is by 2030, we could see a $300,000, $400,000 Bitcoin.

Scott Melker (2:05)

Congress failed to deliver clarity, but crypto may have just found another way forward. Let's go.

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So you famously said in January that we'd rather have no bill than a bad bill. Was the Clarity Act that failed the other day what you would define as a good bill?

Brian Armstrong (3:18)

Yes. I think the most recent draft that failed was a good bill. I was proud in January to stand up for our customers. That initial draft that came out did have a number of problems with it, which I outlined at that time. We felt like it had a de facto ban on tokenized equities and too many penalties for DeFi developers and CFTC spot market authority, a stable coin rewards. And so those were some of what we felt would be must haves for the industry in that negotiation. So I'm proud that we stood up for the industry in that moment. And to their credit, the Senate actually took a lot of that as feedback and iterated on it. And all four of those things were fixed in this most recent draft. So there were other issues which caused it to fail, I think yesterday, and that was really a missed opportunity for the US to lead.

But there's another path, luckily, with the regulators, the SEC and the CFTC, and we'll, we can talk about that when we want.

Scott Melker (4:12)

Yeah, I want to dive in to all of that. So there are several, I think, competing explanations for the bill's failure. Obviously, Democrats point to President Trump's involvement in crypto. I think Republicans point to the Democrats not being willing to come to the table in an honest manner. There was a fight over the stable corn rewards, opposition from the banks.