Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Where Crypto Goes From Here Without The Clarity Act, According to Coinbase's Brian Armstrong

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Brian Armstrong is the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S. and the first crypto company to crack the S&P 500. He joins Nicole on the exact day Congress failed to pass the Clarity Act, a bill Coinbase has spent millions lobbying for, to break down what it actually means for anyone who owns crypto, or even just an index fund. Brian explains why he still believes regulatory clarity for crypto is coming either way, what percentage of a portfolio he thinks should be in Bitcoin, and the real difference between how the SEC and CFTC would police your crypto investments. He also digs into the fight with big banks over stablecoin rewards, why he thinks the bank lobby are trying to kill competition, and his ongoing rivalry with Jamie Dimon. ----------------------- Start investing at https://SoFi.com/MNN Private Wealth Collective: Nicole's boutique wealth management practice for people who want more than a robo-advisor and less than a hedge fund minimum. Real strategy, real relationship. https://privatewealthcollective.com The Money School: Nicole's $149 investing course that actually breaks down stocks, ETFs, crypto, and building a real portfolio, no jargon, no judgment, lifetime access. https://themoneyschool.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Brian Armstrong is the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S. and the first crypto company to crack the S&P 500. He joins Money Rehab on the day the Clarity Act is being voted on. That's a bill he's invested millions of millions of dollars in to see pass. It's disappointing that the Senate didn't vote for it after so much bipartisan work went into it. The reality is that regulatory clarity is coming for crypto either way. Why he thinks Bitcoin could reach $400,000. If you look at the history of Bitcoin, it tends to go through these four-year cycles.

If it follows a similar pattern again, I could see a path for us to 3x its prior all-time high by 2030. Whether or not you can use your Bitcoin to buy a house. Bitcoin was the best performing asset class of the last decade. I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. I'm bullish on it long term. I want to use it as collateral to see if I can get a better rate on a mortgage. What kind of regulation crypto will be getting in the future and why we should care? If you want me to go out of land and make a wild prediction, if the U.S. doesn't get these clear rules soon enough, this industry will...

I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rea. Brian Armstrong, welcome to Money Rehab. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Well, you're here on a really, really big day. This is the day that we just got word like five seconds ago, that Congress failed to move forward with the Clarity Act, which has been your baby for years

and has massive, massive implications on how crypto is classified. How are you feeling? Well, obviously, you know, it's disappointing that the Senate didn't vote for it after so much bipartisan work went into it. But the reality is that regulatory clarity is coming for coming for crypto either way. I mean, the Senate, by the way, they might revisit it here in a week or two. There's still some negotiation happening. There could be another vote. But even if the Senate doesn't decide to act, the regulators have made clear that they're willing to move forward under

their existing authority to publish clear rules for crypto. So the SEC and the CFTC in this case are both very much wanting to see clear rules for crypto in America. And that's something we've wanted for a long time to you. So we're going to get it either way. It's important because we want to have consumer protection. We want to make sure that bad actors can't use crypto for something. We want crypto to benefit everyone around the world and update the financial system, which 80% of Americans say is out of date. It doesn't work for them. It's too slow. It's too expensive. And so we've got to get this right here in America. Why should a person, why should a newbie investor with like 500 bucks in their Bitcoin care about any of this? Everybody's just thinking about how do I create

financial freedom? How do I build wealth over time to benefit my family and myself and my future, future generations. And so, you know, there's lots of historical advice that people can can go to on this with financial advisors and they can try to build the classic portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds or something like that. And what we've realized over time is that, you know, people need to diversify a little bit more than that. Bitcoin was the best performing asset class of the last decade, even with the volatility. And I'd say most financial advisors at this point, they say that anywhere from, you know, one to 10% of people's portfolios should probably be in Bitcoin as an example. So it's just, that's step one. It's part of every diversified portfolio out there to help people

build well over the long run. The second thing is that crypto is not just about Bitcoin anymore. It's also helping people update all aspects of the financial system, including payments. So we mentioned stable coins before. We now have a clear regulatory framework and law in the United States to have these digital dollars, and they're backed one-to-one by dollars sitting in a bank account or in short-term treasury bills. So they're very safe. And what they allow people to do is make fast cheap payments anywhere in the world. You know, why doesn't money move at the speed of information, right? We're all used to using text messaging or WhatsApp, and you can send a message anywhere in the world. It arrives within one second. It's basically free. Why doesn't money move

like that. You know, banks are closed over the weekend and on holidays, right when you have actual time to go in there and talk to them, every time you swipe your credit card at a merchant, you may not see it directly, but they're paying two to three percent in fees for that, and that fee gets passed on to you as the consumer, so it matters to you as well. There's lots of people who are trying to send money home to their family overseas, and they're paying five to ten percent in remittance fees. So payments should flow at the speed of information, and stable coins now allow that. So you can actually send, for instance, USD coin or USDC is the largest regulated stable coin, and you can send it anywhere in the world for less than one second and less than one cent. So it's starting to move money

at the speed of information, which is great. And then, you know, we can talk about all the other areas that crypto's updating, whether that's borrowing and lending, making that, getting an instant answer on a loan or a better rate. It's working on things like prediction markets. It's making things like tokenized equities to help the 4 billion people in the world who don't have access to any, you kind of brokerage account. How do we make sure that they can get access to high quality investments, build their portfolios? And for people here in the U.S. too, be able to trade 24-7 or easily send a share of stock to your friends and family. So these are all examples of how crypto is updating the financial system. And that's why it's important that we get this built

here in America. Yeah. And I want to definitely dig into all of that. But let's double click on your first point for a second. What percentage of someone's portfolio do you think should be in crypto? I'd say as part of a diversified portfolio, a lot of wealth managers, and I would agree with this, are now saying anywhere from like 1 to 10 percent should be in Bitcoin. I think it's, you know, it's anti-correlated with other things you might have in your portfolio. Like, you know, if let's say that there's high inflation, people are worried about that or government spending, people tend to rally to Bitcoin in times of uncertainty like that. So it's an important part of any diversified portfolio at this point, I'd say.

I'd say maybe 1%. It's been pretty correlated lately. Well, it's been correlated to stocks recently. You know, it goes through different periods. But sometimes it's correlated with stocks. Sometimes it's not, you know, if generally, if interest rates go up, Bitcoin price will go down and the opposite. But any, all around the world, we're seeing democracies kind of struggle with deficit spending and printing too much money. And when that happens, we see Bitcoin go up. So maybe more on the 1%, maybe you're at closer to the 10% itself. like. Start with 1% and see how you feel about it. Fair. And yeah, learn more. I'd say that's a good

place to start. Let's double click on the second part because I want to break it down very simply, even though it sounds cuckoo-wonky with all of the clarity act stuff. There are different watchdog agencies, right, looking over different kinds of investments that people make. So right now, major coins, Bitcoin, you mentioned Ethereum are classified as commodities. Commodities have the CFTC over them. astringent agency compared to stocks that have like the big bad SEC watching over them. But there's now some confusion, right, over other coins. So right now, right, if I buy crypto, who is actually protecting me? So you're right. The CFTC regulates commodities like gold and oil and now Bitcoin and Ethereum. The SEC regulates what are called securities, which are basically

stocks. And there's been a lot of debate about which one crypto assets fall into. And the reality is you can do both. So Bitcoin and Ethereum are, they're decentralized, kind of like gold. There's no one country or company that controls it. And so they are really commodities. I think in the future, we'd like to see a clear framework. And this is what the regulators are now, I think, going to publish rules on about how companies could raise money with crypto assets. And those would be securities under the SEC. So there's a role for both agencies. And the way you characterized it was the CFTC is lighter touch. The SEC is big and bad. I think if you asked the CFTD, the CFT, the CFT, you know, the CFT they would say, we are a very serious and rigorous regulator, and I would agree with that. So I think

they're both very important and serious and have an important role to play. Honestly, even at the state level in the U.S., there's a money transmission license. We can go down the alphabet soup if you want, even just under like Unfair and Deceptive Practices Act. And like, there's lots of rules in the U.S. that if you issue or create a product that harms people, you're liable for it. And so the U.S. has very strong protections against this already. Where people have gotten in trouble in the past is where U.S. people have kind of used these offshore unregulated platforms. You probably have heard of some of them, you know, FTX and things like that, that blew up and did cause consumer harm. And that's why I think it's important to have these companies be built in the U.S. under U.S.

regulatory perimeter and U.S. law. Yeah, for sure. I think everybody can 100% get on board with that. I think the question is like crypto, obviously, two trillion dollars. This, as a SEC has $2 billion budget. The CFTC has like 500 people down 21% from last year, $365 million budget. So I'm just saying it's much smaller. And so what people who were criticizing this bill were saying was that they needed to be with the bigger dog, not the smaller dog. Yeah, that's fair. The CFTC does have a smaller budget. They have a narrower scope. I think they're just as serious on the scope that they do regulate. But it's important to note that you know, in the Clarity Act, there was a very clear role for both the SEC and the CFTC.

So I would disagree with the characterization that it was trying to give more of the responsibility to the CFTC. I actually think it was very balanced on that. If a regular person, though, if we bring it back to Earth, gets scanned under this bill or what the actual regulations look like without the bill, do they have less protection than if they get ripped off by a stock? I mean, you mentioned FTX, for example. That's what people are really nervous about. So I think it's important to distinguish there's no investment return without risk. So it's not that these regulators, in my understanding, are trying to get rid of all risk. That wouldn't make sense because then there would be no real returns or upside.

But what they do want to get rid of is fraud and people misrepresenting something or failing to make adequate disclosures. So investors should have all the information in front of them that's true to make a good investment decision. And then it's up to them to decide how much risk they want to take. And, you know, I think that's, that's an appropriate balance and distinction to make. You know, certainty is definitely needed here. And it keeps crypto in the United States instead of pushing it overseas. That's, I think, where everybody hands down agrees. And that's hard to do. So do you worry that the U.S. will lose dominance here? Am I worried about it for the U.S.? I mean, yes. I think that, again, we have two pathways to get

there. So the Senate can either pass legislation or the regulators can publish clear rules. And I think both are viable paths. So now it just means we have to focus on the second path. And there is a real risk, though, I think that if we don't get clear rules via one of those two paths in the U.S., that America will fall behind. I mean, one of the greatest strengths of America from, you know, creating jobs and tax revenue and economic growth is that we are a financial hub. We are the largest financial markets in the world exist in the United States, classically out of New York, right? We have the deepest liquidity for people to raise money and our stock markets are kind of the envy of the world. And it's this great, you know, fuel for capitalism to help people start the next business, which hopefully

grows the economy and tax revenue and pays for all the services that we need in our society. So without economic growth, you know, a lot of things start to look worse off, education, health care, deterring, you know, conflict with other countries, like all kinds of of things, right? So I do think it's really critical that America stays as a financial leader and a technology leader. And crypto is really at the intersection of both of those. I would argue it's probably the most important technology updating the financial system writ large today. And so, yeah, the clear rules will ensure that these companies get built onshore under American regulatory purview so that folks don't get harmed. Like if someone wants to build a company offshore

and attract customers from the U.S. or anywhere else, and they do something bad, the U.S. government really has no authority to go after them in most cases, right? Whether you love crypto or hate crypto or whatever, it's like we got to have clear rules so that people don't get harmed. And it's better to have it under U.S. law than offshore in a way that we can't control, such as being built out of China or something like that. Is there an actual cost that we can quantify around the lack of clarity, I suppose, pun intended, without clarity? Can we quantify that in dollars or even delayed innovation? For sure. I mean, just one stat is that something like 80% of crypto trading has actually moved offshore already because the U.S. is a bit late on this. A lot of the biggest

companies, they, you know, famously FTX was founded out of Bahamas. You know, some of the other big ones are out of the UAE. In some ways, this lack of clear rules has done wonders for the economic development of foreign countries. You know, if you're one of the leaders of those foreign countries, you probably should be thrilled about this delay that the U.S. has encountered. But, you know, ultimately, the U.S. is the largest economy in the world, and they're going to be a major player in this. And I think with the regulators that we have now, they'll, they'll force some clear rules out that'll hopefully allow a lot of this to be, these funds to be repatriated. I mean, just imagine for a moment, like when the Internet came out, what if the largest Internet companies had been built overseas, right?

I mean, I know sometimes people in the U.S., we have our gripes or quibbles with Google or meta or, you know, the major internet companies, the Netflixes of the world. You know, they all could be doing something a little bit better. But I can tell you that when I go meet with governments overseas, we have different offices all over the world. We serve customers in 100 countries. They would kill to have those, you know, these trillion-dollar companies, like they drive so much economic growth, job. tax revenue, soft power in the world, they would kill to have these companies based out of their country. They're all, they all are running these innovation programs to try to think about how they can grow more startups and how can they get the next generation of companies. And the U.S.

has this incredible gift that we, we have these things built here, even if they're not perfect, we can always, you know, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. So the biggest concern here with crypto is if the U.S. doesn't get these clear rules soon enough, this, this is, this industry will move offshore, just like most of the chips are created in Taiwan. The U.S. invented a lot of that technology, but chip fabs are now mostly happening out of Taiwan. We're trying to repatriate it now. There's a massive effort underway to bring that manufacturing capability back onshore. Or the same thing happened with 5G, if you remember that. A lot of that technology, China got really good at it. And then it created all these kind of national security

issues. And we had to make a huge effort to bring it back on shore. If the U.S. doesn't kind of get clear rules out soon, which I think they will, that's the risk, is that the future of financial services goes outside the United States. We don't have the ability to police bad actors. And it's essentially a loss of American soft power in the world. You could think of it that way. But I think a lot of people are also confused and there were some new updates to the bill as well around the president's involvement in crypto. Do you think the president's family should be in the crypto business while he's signing law about it? I know that there was an ethics provision that was included in this bill, and that was something that was very important in the Senate. A lot of people on both sides of the aisle were actually debating that. It's a little above my pay grade. You know, I was focused more on the rules that would affect our customers. I don't feel like it's my place, really, to comment on what the Senate should or should not do there.

But, you know, I was pleased to see that a really strong ethics provision did make it into the bill that the White House signed off on. It sounds like there was willingness to put that in the bill on all sides. And so I didn't see that as a major blocker. Yeah, I think Republicans toughened it, right? But it covered their spouses, officials and then their spouses, but not their kids. So the question was, are his son going to run the company? And so if the president steps back and his son keep running it, does anything actually change? These are all these are all big open questions that people have to figure out.

Because on the one hand, I can see why someone could be influenced by what the children would do. But, you know, it's also like if you have adult children, they're their own person. Some people are not even in touch with their children, right? So they may go, generally in America, like if one adult does something that untoward, it doesn't come back and affect the parent or something. So in some ways, how would you even force your adult children to do something different, right? You don't really control them at that point. But these are complicated legal questions and even constitutional questions, I would say, about the checks and balances of power in the United States between the administration and Congress and the judicial branch as well.

Okay. So definitely not something above your pay grade here. Let's dig into the big banks. You alluded to stable coins and the beef there with the banks. Some big banks, not all of them, are upset because they're worried that giving interest on stable coins is going to pull deposits out of the banking system. The banks wanted to ban people paying on stable coins. And then you tweeted, Mark It Up back in May. So what changed here? And what would you want to say to the banks today after the news? You're right that earlier this year, there was a draft of the Clarity Act that had a number of challenges in it that one of them was rewards, but there was several others around tokenized equities and defy, etc, that I thought were non-starters.

And so, you know, our overall goal is to try to make stand up for our customer's rights and make crypto trusted and safe and easy to use in the United States. so we can just improve financial services, even if people don't know that they're using crypto, they can benefit from it. And so I felt that the first draft of that Clarity Act missed the mark. I did say that publicly. I'm proud that we stood up for our customers in that moment. They subsequently iterated on it. And the latest draft actually fixed all of the things that I mentioned in that post,

including the stable coin rewards, but also the defy, the tokenized equities. And I believe the last one was around spot market authority for the CFTC. see, but so, you know, it was definitely, the bill was in a much, much better place. Now, just I guess to answer your question about stable coin rewards, I just, just zooming out for the average person here. I mean, our goal is that Americans should be able to earn more money on their money, pretty simple. And that, you know, if you want to hold a stable coin, you could actually earn rewards, which

is basically if the underlying dollars are stored in short-term U.S. treasuries, which today pay, you know, three to four percent or so, why shouldn't consumers be able to benefit from that? Seems like a pretty logical thing. Some of the bank lobbying groups came out against this early on. And, you know, I think mainly the reason is competition. They just didn't want to have to compete with stable coins that were paying these higher rates. But they sort of jinned up a lot of fear out there about this somehow creating deposit flight from community banks. It was really the big banks who are pushing this behind the scenes, but of course, you know, people don't have as much sympathy for the big banks as they're making record profits, et cetera. And so they sort of pinned it,

you know, they said, oh, it's really for the community banks. So we did a bunch of research on this to try to see, is there any shred of truth to this or evidence? You know, my, my skepticism radar was up. But we actually commissioned some studies on this, which found as stable coins have grown, consumer bank deposits have also grown. There doesn't seem to be any correlation. The White House Council of Economic Advisors published their own report, which indicated that there was no correlation between these two things. And in fact, it would be a net harm to society to prevent rewards on stable coins. It kind of defies this simple logic. If you think about it, like there's already things like money market funds, which people can put their money into and earn these rates on short-term treasuries. So money market funds are now like $7 trillion, yet plenty of people store their money in banks as well. And so it sort of defied credulity. And I think it was essentially misinformation published by the bank lobby to try to prevent, you know, prevent their competition in the market. So in my view, that was not, that was an unethical thing. And most of the Senate got wise to this very quickly and realized what was happening. The last thing I'll just say, there was a couple things that came out at the last minute, which I think was the final nail in the coffin, you know, on this argument, which is number one, we actually came out and said, we're going to provide technology to community banks to integrate stable coins. Despite some of the negative reaction from a couple of the big banks, many of the banks, B&Y Mellon and Goldman Sachs and, you know, I think city and organizations like fidelity and like

some of the biggest financial institutions in the world came out in support of the Clarity Act, including the Stablecoin rewards. And we actually came out and said, but we're going to provide this technology to community banks if they want to integrate Stablecoins. Because I want community banks to win. I want the big banks to win. Even the ones who fought against it or lobbied against it, I want them to win too. you know, Coinbase is actually powering stablecoin integrations for many of the largest banks as well.

Help me understand, though, when I hold USDC on Coinbase, you pay me a reward. So is a reward the same as yield or interest? Is this a tomato-tomato situation? So this gets into lots of legal questions. But for the average person, you know, what it means is that if you're storing a balance on Coinbase and underneath that, the dollars are being put into short-term treasuries that are earning three and a half or four percent, some of that can be passed back to you. You know, we call it a reward in the sense that it's like a loyalty program.

You know, there's been various debates about the nuances between yield and interest and reward. You know, interest is something that people typically think of more in a bank account where the banks are doing something called fractional reserve. They're actually lending out your money underneath, even whether you know it or not. And they don't actually have all of your money there. And so they might pay you interest. So there's different legal definitions of these things. Just to make it super clear that it was not interest on deposits, we call it rewards.

And it's just passing along some of the economic upside of where your dollars are being stored underneath. Some of the banks that you mentioned like Goldman, you did not mention J.P Morgan. You've had some kerfuffles with our friend Jamie Diamond in particular. His beef essentially, or you tell me if I'm missing this, is that if a crypto platform walks like a bank and quacks like a bank, then it needs FDIC insurance and capital requirements and liquidity rules and all that jazz. And the Clarity Act elect crypto. What would you say to Jamie today? Obviously, I can't speak for him.

But what I would say is that, you know, we believe in level playing field and we're not engaging in fractional reserve lending. That's what you need a bank license for. Part of the reason banks are so heavily regulated is it's very risky what they're doing. You know, they're they're lending out your money. and sometimes banks go insolvent. They go under. We saw that with like Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank recently. People say, well, it's FDIC insured.

Okay, but that's only up to 250K if people are storing more than that. They're not guaranteed to get that money back. And because banks engage in such risky behavior, that's why they have bank licenses. Stable coin issuers, well, certainly Coinbase, but we're not an issue of any stable coin. Stablecoin issuers, they don't do fractional reserves. So under that Genius Act, which is now the law. of the land for stable coins, they're not allowed to do fractional reserve. It's a 100% reserve. So there's no such thing as like a run on the bank in these regulated stable coins. The money is

sitting in short-term U.S. Treasury is, say, less than 90 days. So it's extremely liquid. Worst case scenario, if everybody wanted to withdraw their stable coins or convert them back to dollars at the exact same moment, they could basically wait 90 days and have all of it back, where in reality, there's a super liquid market for short-term U.S. debt like that. that at the end of the day, a couple of the big banks who happened to have key business lines around this, they frankly just didn't want the competition. And the part that bothered me was that I think they really kind of went to the government to try to kill their competition. And to me, that shouldn't happen in America. So who should they go to? It sounds like you guys had a little

run-in at Davos or something like they came to you directly. What they should do is just compete, compete on the level playing. That's how consumers win in America. You shouldn't go to anyone to try to kill your competition. So I think that's not how the game works in the U.S. So the beef has been settled with Jamie. You're ready to hug it out. You know, I don't mind like a little heated rivalry. I posted like a funny meme about that. But, you know, the reality is we're working with J.P. Morgan on a variety of things. I like Jamie Diamond. I've learned a lot from him like as a CEO. I think he's been incredibly successful. I don't like his stance on this one particular thing, but that doesn't that doesn't stop me from overall having admiration for them and being willing to work with them as they've been very

willing to work with us. How does this affect Coinbase stock, if at all? Well, I haven't looked at our stock today. I try to think about these things over the long term. But first, I think we're on a clear path to get regulatory clarity in the US if either through the Senate or these regulators, one of the other, either one works for us. So I think that's going to be fine. But we're also an international company.

So we have offices in the UK. we're the largest provider of crypto services in the UK. We operate out of Singapore for the Asia Pacific. We have an office or some folks in Brazil serving Latin America. We have an office in the UAE as well in the Middle East where we've just started issuing, for example, tokenized equities, which I think is important. So the 4 billion people in the world who don't have access to a brokerage account, they can actually trade U.S. stocks.

And we've started tokenizing U.S. stocks to make them available 24-7 to people all over the world as long as they have a smartphone. So we're going to keep democratizing access to financial services, making better financial services, both here in the U.S. and abroad. And if there's one thing I've learned, you know, over the last 14 years starting Coinbase, you know, when we first started out, there was like zero clarity. And people didn't even know what crypto was. And so every year, you just kind of have to be persistent. And you want to be an educational resource. And every year that I've run Coinbase, somewhere in the world, there's a, there's a country that's leaning in, and they're ready to embrace it, and you can kind of grow your business there.

And then every country, there's somewhere in the world that's leaning out, and they're, they're skeptical, they're not ready yet. And so you basically, and by the way, it keeps flipping, you know. And so any given year, you basically grow your business in the countries that are welcoming it. You basically just try to maintain your business in the countries that are leaning out. And then you wait a few years, and the governments and the, and the, and the, and the, attitudes change and then you go grow in the ones that were reluctant previously. How often do you check your stock?

It's hard not to look at it every couple of days or so. I think it's dangerous actually to get too caught up in short-term stock price fluctuations. What you want to be doing is thinking about what can we be doing that is going to serve our customers better a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, and like five years from now. And, you know, the key things that they want are they want financial services that are simpler, that aren't filled with lots of complex jargon. They want an app that's simple and easy to use. So if you need to update your address or reset your password, it just works. You know, don't bother me with the details. They want to have a human being they can contact. Well, I should say, first, they want just,

you know, to get an answer right away in the app and they can talk to AI if they want. But they also want to, if they can't get their thing answered right away by AI, they want to be able to talk to a human anytime 24-7, we offer that. They want to be able to trade every asset class, right? So it's not just about having, you know, a boring portfolio with, you know, an index fund or something. They are interested in having a balanced portfolio with some crypto assets, some stocks, some commodities, the ability to trade prediction markets in the same app and learn about what's going to happen next in the world to have a financial advisor right in their phone and have a modern day interface for that.

And to be able to make payments all over the world instantly, you know, if they need to send money to friends and family. So these are the kinds of things that I try to focus on. And the stock price over the long time, long term takes care of itself. What do you think the long term prices? You said you have a long term. Do you have a number in mind? On our stock or Bitcoin or what do you mean?

Well, I'd love to get into what it is for Bitcoin on your stock. Let's start there. Well, I think we're in very early days. You know, Coinbase is a 40 to $50 billion company depending on the day. I can see a path for us to 10x from here, which is just we're in the early days of a couple of really big cycles. You know, stable coins, it's still super early. We're seeing massive growth of that year over year. There's something in crypto trading called perpetual futures.

We're in the very early days of that. And we've started to really grow our trading volume share on that. This is all part of our, you know, as a public company, you can read about it on our investor website and earnings. prediction markets. We launched those recently, and they're growing really incredibly quickly, something like 100% every quarter recently. You can go look at our financials about that. And there's a big one on the horizon, which I would say is not really priced in yet, which is what we call agentic finance. So everyone is kind of trying to figure out in the world of AI, how are payments and financial services going to work?

And so we're making it easy for anybody to connect their favorite chat, you know, chat AI. agent into their Coinbase account, if they want to manage it that way, including for trading and payments and all these things. We're also building the infrastructure for any AI agent to have its own financial account. And so we want to, you know, bank the AI agents, if you will. And I think there's going to be more AI agents than humans at some point in the not too distant future. And so I think I saw some recently, some stat that stable coin payment volume is now like 17% of what visas volume. So it's, but it's growing very rapidly. So I think that could be bigger. If you look at all GDP globally, about half of one percent of it is flowing on crypto rails.

So we're still in the very early days. It would not surprise me if that's 10, 20, you know, 25 percent in the coming years, kind of like the early adoption of the internet, how it spread eventually to half of the world. And so in that scenario, I think over the next five, 10 years, point base as the most trusted crypto company, we've got a lot of room to run. So not so distant future means, what, 2030 earlier than that, that agents will surpass humans? Yeah, I mean, it's always tough to predict the future. But I guess if I had to estimate, you know, some of these agents are ephemeral, right? They may only be up for five minutes and then they shut down.

So it's going to be tough to get like an apples to apples comparison exactly. But I think one way you could look at it is the nether. number of transactions taking place in the economy between agents and between humans. Now, the average transaction size for agents might be much smaller. So I think then you would look at total transaction volume for agents versus humans. I mean, if you want me to go out on them and make a wild prediction, I think within certainly within five to 10 years, I think the agentic economy could be larger than the human economy in terms of payment volume. That would be an interesting thing to go see. Okay, let's let's keep with our crystal ball for a moment and go into

Bitcoin. You said that Bitcoin hits 400,000 by 2030. Is that still your price for hit? Yeah, I think I have said that publicly before. Yes, I would stand by that. I mean, it's at near 63,000 this summer down by half of its high. Can you help me with the math? Like, how do we back into the 400K number? Okay. So obviously past performance does not predict the future or any of that. So these are all speculations, right? I mean, I think anybody who tells you they can perfectly predict these things you shouldn't listen to, right? So this is just me hypothesizing. But yeah, I think if you look at the history of Bitcoin, it has been the best performing asset over the last 10 years or so.

And it tends to go through these four-year cycles. I won't get into the details of this, unless you want to, but there's something about the supply of new Bitcoin that's created, which gets cut in half roughly every four years. and what we see is there's periods of run-up around those dates. We also see periods of contraction, which usually last about a year. This last cycle, it's been about a year so far, and it was down at 63, and now it started to tick back up. So if it follows a similar pattern again, I could see a path for us to, you know, get to say 3X its prior all-time high by 2030, something like that.

Is it guaranteed? No, for sure. It's not. But I think that's a, if it follows a similar pattern, you know, you could, you could imagine that. And if people just go Google, you know, Bitcoin for your cycle or something like that, they could probably find some different thoughts people have on it. Yeah. Some back of the napkin map, Bitcoin has to grow. Sounds like 50% a year on average for four years to get there. So that's 2030. You're staying with the 400,000 number. What about the end of this year? Oh, man. I mean, shorter term is much harder to predict. I would say, I don't know. I think my guess, again, these are all guesses. My guess is we've hit the bottom of this last cycle and that we could be trending up a little bit, I don't know, 80 to 90 or something like that by the end of the year. And it's hard to say. And do you do any price targets or do you think about what the price target would be for other coins, Ethereum? In general, we don't publish price targets. You know, if you're asking me just for fun on a podcast, I don't mind riffing on it. Let's riff. Love to get your thought. Like where would you see Ethereum? or Solana or XRP. I don't think I have such a clear thesis on that. And also, you know, we work with all the different chains out there.

So I have to be a little bit careful. We're a neutral platform in terms of which blockchings we work with. And I probably will offend somebody no matter what I say on that. Bitcoin is considered more neutral, right? Because there's not a specific team behind it. But yeah, I'll decline to answer that one. Oftentimes Bitcoin Ethereum, Salana, it may move somewhat together. And like I said, my guess here is,

that we've hit the bottom of this current cycle a little bit earlier this year. But yeah, we'll see what happens by the end of the year. Hopefully it's up a bit. Okay. Something else that wanted to ask you about was Bitcoin for mortgages. You have a product now that lets you use Bitcoin to buy a house. Why do you think, like, first time home buyer should pledge Bitcoin instead of selling some of it to make a down payment?

So we have lots of customers, and probably many of your listeners, have a little bit of Bitcoin. and it's become a material part of their net worth. And so they were asking us, how can I use this as collateral to, you know, I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. I'm bullish on it long term as I am. But I want to use it as collateral to see if I can get a better rate on a mortgage,

to buy a home. And we partnered with a company called Better, which has a mortgage product. And we allowed people to pledge their Bitcoin as collateral to do that. So it's been a good success so far. we've had a number of people out there using it. I don't think we've disclosed the exact number publicly. But what's great is that you can get a very quick answer. You know, any of your listeners who've gone through the process of getting a mortgage, you know, in the old-fashioned way,

it can be a little bit of a difficult experience, right? There's lots of paperwork, there's insurance, there's appraisals, there's, you know, a lot of huge stacks of forms to sign. And it does feel a bit antiquated. And so I think Better has done a good job of making this product where you can get a pretty clear answer back relatively quickly about what rate you would get. And we've integrated with them to allow people to use their crypto assets. So it's just one more example of how crypto is helping update the financial system. And my hope is that anybody can actually just on their phone, you know, almost like put it in an address or take a picture of this house and like get a quote back within a few minutes with a fair and reasonable rate. I think that would

be good for the world. Should we also though clarify that, you know, volatility can hurt you. to have coins drop, you still owe that higher rate. It seems risky to me. I get a little concerned for a first-time buyer in that way. So who's the type of person that this actually works for? It's a relatively conservative loan to value ratio there. We don't want people to take on any unnecessary risk with it, but obviously like any financial product, you know, read the terms closely. There's so much reading that you're assigning to us, Brian. We got some M. Ones to read. We've got a lot of terms and conditions. I wanted before we thank you for for joining us on this really important day. Stablecoins, you've talked about growing into this

huge $300 billion plus market. It's become the part of crypto. It feels like to me, you tell me if I'm wrong, that both Washington and Wall Street actually got pretty comfortable with. So if I'm listening and I'm scared of crypto's volatility, what does a normal person actually do with one? How to get started? Well, you're right that stable coins are, as the name would indicate, they're not volatile. They're just linked to an underlying dollar that's held securely. But of course, you can get these rewards, which are attractive to many people. And then the other reason people wanted is that they can make payments anywhere in the world, again, instantly less than one second, less than one cent to any country in the world. And there's no other payment rail that can actually do that, all three of those

things. So the easiest way to get started is really just, you know, create a coin-based account. And you can, from your debit card or your bank, link, you deposit some dollars and convert it into stable coins. And now you're operating in this new economy that things are fast, cheap, and global. And so that's usually the best way for people to get started. We also offer Coinbase one credit card, for instance, which I think is the best card on the market. If people want to spend their crypto at various merchants and get rewards back that way, you know, they can get up to 4% back on every purchase and get it in stable coins, in Bitcoin, and hopefully eventually in stocks or whatever other asset they want to save in. And so that's a pretty cool feature as well

where not every merchant in the world obviously except stable coins yet. But if you have a Coinbase 1 card, you can spend your stable coins. And from your point of view, it's great. Maybe eventually we'll be able to go convince that merchant to accept stable coins directly and benefit themselves as well. I mean, right now it seems like a lot of the volume is traders shuffling money between exchanges for stable coins. People aren't paying rent with it. When do you think that, actually happens. What has to change there first? It tends to be with every new technology. The early adopters of it are people who have the highest unmet need, you might say, right? It's basically the people who have the biggest pain point. So actually the biggest area of growth for

stable coins has been business to business cross-border payments, which is kind of a mouthful. But what that basically means is there's somebody who's running their shop and they need to buy goods. Sometimes it's from another country like Asia or Europe. And this is a very antiquated, slow, underserved area of the market. And so they've actually been the biggest adopters of stable coins early on. There are people moving it between crypto trading venues and exchanges. That is true. There's people using it in defy. There's actually one of the, one, another really big area of growth has been stable coin backed credit cards. You can see some of the graphs for that online. That's been, that's been growing really fast. So,

Yeah, I think that payments are kind of like water. They flow to the path of least resistance. And so stable coins are just more efficient rails, speed, cost, and the number of countries they can reach. And so I would expect over the next five to 10 years, you're just going to see a larger and larger fraction of global GDP run on stablecoin rails. It's just better for everybody involved. So in the next five to 10 years, I know I'm trying to get you to be a fortune teller. But if stable coins become the default, when do you think something like that? that happens in the way that people move money around the world and then what happens to traditional banks then?

Yeah. Well, I think that there's not going to be one moment where it happens. It'll be, it'll be gradual. But I think stable coins have been growing something like Rita 5X over the last few years. And so they're growing quite quickly year over year. I think banks are going to integrate stable coins. I mean, it's already happening. You know, we're helping community banks do it. We're helping the biggest banks in the world do it by selling them technology solutions. like custody and payment rails and APIs and things like that. So I think the banks are going to be major innovators and users of stable coins. So here's what I'm curious about.

The piece of the bill that threatened your USDC rewards just died with it. So in a strange way, today protected a massive coin-based revenue line. How do you actually feel about that? It survives because the Genius Act for Stable Coins did pass through. through Congress last year. So, and actually that act was even slightly more permissive than what was in the latest Clarity Act. So not only does it survive, it thrives under the existing law of the land.

Yeah. I mean, you've spent what? Hundreds of millions? At least $100 million on this with this disappointment today. What do you think is next? Well, we're going to keep showing up on policy and advocacy. Part of it, money definitely helps. We have an amazing team.

We've donated to some groups like Fairshake that have helped elect pro-crypto candidates in different places around the world. But I think more impactful has actually been the grassroots movement. These organizations like StandwithCrypto.org, they've got millions of voters now who are raising their hands and saying they want clear rules in America for crypto. There's something like 50 million Americans who have used crypto at this point. So it's a massive voting block. And we're helping them get organized by funding group.

like stand with crypto.org, people should go there if they want to help elect pro-crypto candidates or find out which of the representatives are pro or against crypto. So the answer is we're just going to keep doing what we've always been doing, which is standing up for our customers' rights, trying to get clear rules. We're not really deterred by short-term setbacks in different, like I said, in every country of the world where we operate in any given year, there's someone who's leaning out, who's someone who's leaning in. We just have longevity, and we keep showing up and eventually things get to the right place. So that's what we'll do in the wake of the Clarity Act. I think the regulators are going to publish the rules here

within weeks or start doing that rulemaking process, which will give us the clarity we need. We all need some clarity for sure. It's a really well-named bill, by the way. A lot of them are not so much, but this one, we do need clarity. I mean, I'm just intellectually curious during the pandemic. You were like, we're at a political company recently. You saw Jensen with the all-in guys, say the same type of thing. So how do you think about that in the midst of all this policy work that you're doing. What do you mean by having a company be apolitical, but then also all of this? Well, I think it's important that companies now, yeah, they are bipartisan or apolitical. The distinction I make is that, you know, we call it mission focused, which basically means

if it's part of the mission of the company, which in our case is increasing economic freedom in the world and using crypto to do that, if it's part of the mission of the company, then it's fine. go have a policy advocacy arm to get laws passed or regulatory clarity, do it in a bipartisan way. So that's what we do, for instance, with these organizations that we fund. But other issues that are not related to the mission that are political hot-button issues, we really just don't talk about it at work. We ask, it's fine if people want to do that in their personal lives. You know, they can do it outside of work.

I think it's a distraction to bring it into work. We were early in taking that stance in 2021 when it was sort of this cultural moment that got very heated. And it created a little bit of a backlash and we got some negative articles. But that doesn't bother me. I think in hindsight, it was one of the best things we ever did as a company. And it's really in some ways gratifying to see it become more of a common stance today. Like you mentioned with Jensen saying it live on stage recently. We end all of our episodes, Brian, by asking our guests for a final tip that listeners can take straight to the bank or I guess the crypto exchange in this one.

For a person who owns a little bit of crypto, maybe is underwater and is nervous right now. What's one move that you would tell them to think about making? I would say, you know, hold through the crypto cycles. You know, the worst thing you can do is kind of panic sell at the bottom or those kind of things. It's better to take a longer term approach. And seeing many of these cycles now in the last 14 years running Coinbase, I can tell you, even people who bought the peak and wrote it down to the trough, they just,

When they just waited for the next cycle, they were super happy. So it's good to take a long-term view on these things and not let the day-to-day movements at the market distract you and make you worried and prevent you from doing important things in the world. So put your blinders on. How often would you check? Probably less often than you check your stock. If you're able to check it periodically and it doesn't cause you stress or it doesn't cause you to take actions, which you later regret, then I'd say, that's fine. It's kind of like social media or eating sugar or something like that, right? You want to make

sure you're doing it in healthy amounts. But if it's, yeah, if it's causing you to make, take trading decisions that you later regret, then it might be better just to not check it more than once a quarter or something like that. Or, you know, you can outsource it to your AI advisor in the app or something like that. So I think these can help people build wealth for the long term. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do with our, with our mission. We're trying to increase economic freedom in the world. We're trying to make better financial services for everyone. So if you have a smartphone, you can get access to all of these things, a great trading portfolio, faster, cheaper payments, a good loan. And if we can do that, we're going to be,

we're going to be in a happy place. I'll feel, I'll feel very proud of that. Let's do it. And that's a thing that I'm really bullish on with the, the AI is not as emotional as us, that's for sure. Yeah, I like that it takes some of the, really there's a psychology to investing. You don't want to chase the highs, you don't want to panic sell the lows. You want to be a bit of a contrarian thinker at times. You know, what's something that I think could be true or will be true in the future that most people haven't thought of yet? Those are all kind of fun games.

And then, you know, with most of your portfolio, just have a good diversification so that you're not just speculating with it. We want to help people build wealth for the long term and not speculate too much. If you want to do that with like 10% or some reasonable amount of your portfolio, I think that's totally fine. But I wouldn't do it with the majority. And that's where I see people tend to do well over the long term. Buy low, sell high.

It's just so hard when everything's. I mean, that is really the funny part about investing is when Bitcoin is hitting all-time highs, I'm like, oh, I just wish it would go down a little bit so I could buy again. You know, when it's hitting lows and that would probably be the perfect time to buy it, I'm like, I don't know. It's going down like the sentiment is so low. So it's really funny. the human psychology is really what you're trying to be aware of and then overcome in certain ways

to do the opposite of what a certain part of your brain that does fight or flight might be thinking. That's a fun thing to think about, like observing your brain from afar and noticing when it does something unhelpful. Yeah, the fight, flight freeze situation with investing is not ideal. But thank you, Brian, for creating tools to help us combat sometimes ourselves. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. Love me