Shawn Ryan Show - #222 Brian Armstrong - Co-Founder & CEO of Coinbase

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

Brian Armstrong, born in San Jose, California, is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, which he launched in 2012 with Fred Ehrsam. A Y Combinator alumnus, Armstrong grew up in a middle-class family and earned a B.A. in Economics and Computer Science from Rice University in 2005, followed by an M.S. in Computer Science in 2006. Before founding Coinbase, he worked as a software engineer at Airbnb developing anti-fraud tools and founded UniversityTutor.com, an online tutoring marketplace. Under his leadership, Coinbase went public via direct listing in 2021, reaching a $100 billion valuation. As of 2025, it serves over 110 million users with a market cap around $60 billion. A Forbes-listed billionaire with a net worth of approximately $10 billion, Armstrong is a vocal advocate for clear crypto regulation. He founded the Stand With Crypto PAC in 2023 to support pro-crypto politicians, promotes decentralized identity solutions, and has pledged 99% of his wealth to charity through the Giving Pledge. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://bunkr.life – USE CODE SRS Go to https://bunkr.life/SRS and use code “SRS” to get your 25% off your family plan https://shawnlikesgold.com https://helixsleep.com/srs https://rocketmoney.com/srs https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS https://ziprecruiter.com/srs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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O'Henry, O'Henry. Brian Armstrong, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Oh, my pleasure. I've been looking forward to talking to you for quite some time, so thank you for making the trip., yeah, you have a lot of stuff going on right now And even outside of crypto and we'll dive into that later, but um, everybody starts off with an introduction. So here we go brian arnstrong

co-founder and ceo of coinbase the world's leading cryptocurrency exchange A rice university alumnus with degrees in computer science and economics whose engineering background at Airbnb and early startup experience laid the foundation for revolutionizing finance. Visionary entrepreneur who transformed a passion for Bitcoin into a publicly traded company

that's now part of the S&P 500, driving economic freedom through blockchain technology. An advocate for free market capitalism and crypto's role in fixing broken financial systems. Founder of innovative ventures beyond crypto, like New Limit, which aims to extend human health span through epigenetic research and Research Hub, a platform for open scientific collaboration.

And I just wanted to rattle off a couple of stats here when we were researching you, we found some stats about crypto. And so just 9% of Americans are satisfied with the current financial system. 38% of young people say crypto can increase economic opportunities and crypto prices are up 90% year to date.

There you go. It's pretty interesting statistics there. So, alright, couple things before we get going here, so Everybody gets a gift. Mm-hmm So I got you a couple gifts, okay, here's the first one Those are vigilance league gummy bears, all right legal in all 50 states Not that you have to worry about that in California. Yeah

But it's just candy so okay, no CBD Nothing great. Thank you. I'm dying sugar, baby. That's it. Thank you. You're welcome and Found out that you are a firearms enthusiast so Got you a gift. All right. Added the collection. All right. So that's you've heard of Sig, right? Sig Sauer. So I got a friend over there. His name is Jason. Huge crypto guy. Okay. Told him you were Sig Sauer P226 Legion. I think that's the top handgun that they have right now. Yeah.

And so just a little background on that. You know, we were kind of talking about my SEAL career and some firearm stuff at breakfast. Yep. So that is the upgraded model of what all seals were issued and that thing is awesome. I think you'll really really like that. All metal. They don't make guns all metal anymore. Not very many of them and and it's just a well-posed third machine. You're welcome.

All right. You like it? I like it. I mean, it's California. Do we have to go to some federal firearms? We'll handle all that stuff for you. The transfer part. Okay.

We'll handle that stuff for you. I love it. Thank you so much. Yeah, you're welcome. So how is this different from the one you were issued in the SEALs? So are you new to shooting? I've been shooting since I was growing up So how is this different from the one you were issued in the SEALs? So, it's, so... Are you new to shooting?

I've been shooting since I was growing up a little bit here and there, but I'm not like a... I own a couple guns, but... So it's... Pretty much, it's pretty close to being the same thing, but there's a couple of things. So if you look at the front towards the barrel there, you'll see those grooves on the top. Oh, okay. So that that is that disperses the gas Which helps you stay on target faster. So instead of your gun flipping up like that all the time It'll stay nice and flat. Yep. Yeah, the trigger has been upgraded

There used to be like this decocking lever On the old one But they've done away with that. And then one of the things that I really like, you see that little notch that's sticking out like right under the ejection port? They call it a gas pedal. Other side?

This? Yeah, right there. So you put your thumb on that. That's what I was thinking, yeah. It's for the, yeah. So that helps keep the nose down. Helps you control it a lot more. Cool.

So yeah, it's like running a sewing machine. I love that thing. What's the magazine capacity on these? I believe. Is that even allowed in? I believe it's 21. Your version might be a little different. Yeah, we might have to adjust those.

We're gonna take it to California, but yeah, nine millimeter. Okay. Yep, nine millimeter. You'll love that millimeter. Okay. Yep, nine millimeter. You'll love that thing. Cool. Well, yeah, I don't know if we'll have time later today, but it'd be fun to do some shooting. So thank you for that.

Hey, my pleasure. Yeah. My pleasure. We don't get to do it today. Maybe the next time. Yeah. Well, definitely the next time because in the new studio, we've got a gun range literally right at,

you walk out the studio. Yeah. And you're on a gun range. So we'll have to have you back. That's great. I brought you a little gift too. You wanna go for it? I love gifts. Okay, so.

I'll let you open that. This is a, one of 21 Satoshi Nakamoto commemorative cards. This is a Bitcoin credit card. Anywhere you spend with that card, you get 4% back in Bitcoin. And this is something we released recently. This is awesome.

Yeah, so it has, on the front there, you see a bunch of numbers and letters. That is a copy of the Bitcoin Genesis block, which is the first Bitcoin block ever created. And there's kind of a Easter egg in there. Satoshi Nakamoto, which nobody knows who this is, who created Bitcoin. We can talk about theories on who it is if you want later.

But there's a, when they released it in, I think, 2008 or nine, there was a headline, Chancellor on the Brink of Bailouts, which was related to the 2008 financial crisis. They encoded that in the first Bitcoin block. It was kind of a, nobody knows for sure, but it seems like a good guess that they were sort of saying, this is an answer to the bank bailouts and the financial crisis is like, let's create a new monetary system.

Anyway, so we encoded that right on the front of the card and you can get 4% cash back in Bitcoin anytime you spend with that. Oh man, thank you. This is awesome. I appreciate that. I think I'm gonna have to have you sign the front here. We'll frame it, put it in here.

Okay, cool. With all the other relics. Yeah. Thank you. That one's kind of commemorative, but we'll get one hooked up to your Coinbase account too and send you another one. put it in here. Okay, cool. All the other relics. Yeah. Thank you. That one's kind of commemorative, but we'll get one hooked up to your Coinbase account too and send you another one. Oh man.

You can use for day-to-day spending. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, we're framing this. Cool. Thank you. But, and yeah, I do want to talk about who that was. Sure.

But, all right, one last thing before we get into the interview. So I have a Patreon account, subscription account. we've turned it into one hell of a community. Think we got 90,000 people in there now. And so one of the things that we do is we offer them the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. So this is from Achilles Actual. What measures is Coinbase taking from a cybersecurity standpoint to prevent cryptocurrency theft? Additionally, how is the company addressing concerns that advancements in quantum computing

could potentially compromise blockchain security and threaten the integrity of Bitcoin? Yeah. Well, great questions. So there's lots of ways that we try to prevent theft of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency generally. First of all, there's Coinbase accounts where we store people's funds and we do lots of security around that,

which I can talk about, but we also have a self-custodial product. So if people don't want to have to trust us, they can store their own crypto. And then they're responsible for their own security, but it's fully in their hands. On the crypto that we store for customers, there's a few things we do.

One is the vast majority of all the customer funds are actually stored entirely disconnected from the internet, which we call cold storage, because every system can be hacked in theory, right? That's especially these systems that are online. So what we do is we actually generate these keys in different geographic locations around the world and there's redundancy and consensus needed. So you might need 10 different keys.

Imagine there's some in the west coast, the east coast, you know, the middle of America, but also some in London, Dublin, Singapore, Australia, like kind of ally countries. So we have these different secure facilities like a like a skiff, skiff, if you're familiar with those from the. Oh yeah. Yeah, so we'll generate them in these secure facilities and you need let's say five of the 10 pieces to come together to ever move those funds. So if half of them get lost,

like let's say there's nuclear war or there's some accidental loss or a natural disaster, you can lose up to half of the keys and still have the funds, but no one or two people can kind of take their piece of it and move off with the funds. It requires consensus to come together. So we've had, then we hire external firms to come in and try to break into that system and pen test it.

And we do audits like that every year. So that's where the vast majority of customer funds are stored in these offline systems. And we do this now for governments, like big financial institutions, and the same securities provided to retail accounts. And then for self-custodial wallets, we also allow people just to store it themselves,

like in our new self-custodial wallet. The questioner kind of asked about quantum as well. And there's this whole kind of area of research around post quantum cryptography. You know, for people who don't know that quantum computers are this new type of really powerful computer that can theoretically break a lot of encryption that's out there.

And if this happens, it's bad for crypto, but it's also bad for a whole bunch of other things that we use encryption for. You know, like- Pretty much everything. Yeah, banking, you know, financial services, military uses tons of Pretty much everything. Yeah, banking, financial services, military uses tons of encryption, everything.

So basically, there are post-quantum cryptographic algorithms that are out there that people can upgrade to. And the cryptocurrency blockchains are currently meeting, they have proposals that they're looking at about how to upgrade these. I don't think it's gonna happen in the next one to two years, but maybe next three to five years,

it's important that we get that done. The US government, by the way, they publish standards on this through an organization called NIST. I forget the exact what it stands for, but the government has a role here to play too, to help industry update to these common post-quantum cryptography or PQC type standards. So Coinbase is, you know,

if you're storing your money with Coinbase, we're gonna help you make sure that it's quantum resistant as these computers come online. So you think quantum computing will come into play in about five years? Well, let's say I'd wanna make sure we had a solution in place before then. It might take 10 years,

but I'd rather have this solution in place ahead of time because otherwise if China or someone gets one of these things booted up, we might just start seeing money moved unexpectedly or communications get decrypted that should be sensitive. We might start seeing bad things happen. So it's the kind of thing you'd want to get ahead of. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Yeah, a lot of talk about that. A lot of talk about quantum computing lately, but Well, I'm just fascinated with innovators like you and dove into the tech space at the beginning of the year and So one of the thing I just I like hearing where you guys grew up What your childhood was like and and and how you came to? Coinbase, so let's start with where did you grow up? Yeah, I grew up in San Jose, California.

And my mom and dad were both engineers. My mom was a programmer at IBM. My dad was a civil engineer, worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. And so it was kind of a household where we focused a lot on school, academics, you know, science and math. And both my sister and I kind of learned a lot about that growing up and had early computers in the home.

And I was kind of like a, I was a very shy, introverted kid, you know, I was not very good at talking to people, but I loved computers. I just kind of initially gravitated toward them when we had them in the house, like the early IBM 486 PCs and these kind of things. So initially I was like playing games on there, but I got to learn over time about operating systems, some basic programming languages.

And yeah, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life, but I was a nerd basically. I was like a total geek learning about these things. And- What age did you start getting interested? Pretty young. I mean, even in middle school, I was trying to learn how to program computers.

And in high school, I was taking some classes in that, like at the local community college. So I had my normal classes for high school, but I was kind of more interested in the programming classes I was taking at the community college. And yeah, and my free, I would stay up late, like until two in the morning and three in the morning, kind of learning how these computers worked.

And then I'd be like totally sleep deprived for school the next day, like kind of faking my way through these classes. So, you know, in hindsight, that should have been a signal probably that I was more interested in this other thing, which they weren't teaching in school. But, you know, we didn't have like computer science classes

at the high school or anything. What else were you into as a kid? Were you into any sports, outdoors, just computers? Well we lived next to this pretty cool park, so I did spend a lot of time outdoors, just kind of exploring that with my dog. And I was never the most athletic kid. I tried out for the JV tennis team,

and I was into running and sort of like, just things that were more like personal fitness, I would say. But I was never good at team sports and stuff. I mean, I played a couple intermural things in college and stuff. But yeah, I was never the most athletic kid. I was never the most outgoing.

So yeah, I was pretty introverted. Right on. Yeah. Where'd you go to school? Well, high school or, yeah, so I went to this school called Bellarmine in California, which is, it's a private school. It's actually a Jesuit school.

It's all boys. It was very good academically. And they had this mission that was men for others, right? So they actually, I didn't think too much about it at the time while I was in school, but I actually do think it influenced me, like Judeo-Christian values and thinking about how to live your life kind of,

to try to create value for other people. At the time when I was there, we would have mandatory kind of like volunteer service and different things like that. But as I've gotten older in life, I like building things that try to advance the world, you know, be useful, like how to use technology to create better lives for people.

And creating companies is kind of my way of doing that, right, of trying to create value in the world. And so I do think it actually, a Jesuit education kind of had a big impact on me in a in a strange way Where do you go from there? Well, I applied to a number of different schools I really wanted to get out of California because I I don't know I was I was really craving like independence autonomy I'd been living at home my parents, you know, I'd like a lot of young men

Probably I was like I want to get out of here and just become my own man, right? It was a little too sheltered. And so I applied to some East Coast schools, and I didn't get into like MIT or Harvard or anything like, so I did apply to Rice University in Texas, which had a good engineering program, and I applied to like Berkeley and I got in there. But I went and visited a couple of these schools and I just really liked Rice University.

I had a great experience in their kind of, they have a week you can go by there to sort of test it out. So I ended up choosing Rice University, really good engineering program and learning about economics as well in that setting was really interesting too. I mean, I remember like the first day of, Econ 101 kind of on your freshman year.

And the professor said, I think the very first line he said was, economics is the study of scarcity, right? Like there are finite resources in society. And so if you ever are saying, hey, we should have more teachers or more firefighters, you always kind of have to ask the question, well, at the expense of what? Right?

Because there is scarcity of resources. So if you want to have more of something, you have to have less of something. And they get into supply and demand and housing work. And so that was a really interesting foundation for me. And then I combined it with computer science, which was really foundational just helping me understand how technology and computers work. And so I had no idea what I was gonna do with my life at that time.

But of course, in hindsight now, economics and computer science, like crypto was kind of the perfect intersection of that. Interesting. So I know you went to Argentina. Was that to study? That was after college. And again, it was me sort of,

I think I was just seeking adventure. You know, I had never like been in the military. I'd never been in like a frat. I don't know, I always felt like I was a little too sheltered. And so after college, I had tried starting this company in the tutoring education space and it wasn't going that well. And I was like, I just need to,

I felt like I just needed to go abroad and like try living in a bunch of different countries and put myself out of my comfort zone. So I went to Buenos Aires, Argentina, almost like the first stop. And I was gonna do like a month in every city and a major city in South America for like a year. But once I was like kind of more set up

and established in Buenos Aires, I was like, I don't know, it became like a home base. I didn't, and I didn't want to move every month. It was just too much work. So I spent about a year living there and- Did you like it down there? Yeah, I mean, it was, so in some ways it was like quite lonely actually. Like I didn't really know anybody.

I barely spoke the language. I was trying to learn Spanish. There was a bunch of expats. And so you get to meet some interesting people, but I didn't really have that big of a friend group. So it was kind of lonely for like six months, but I eventually did start to build a bit of a community. One other thing that was fascinating, again,

kind of in hindsight, this makes sense, but at the time I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I was just trying to start different companies and doing some software consulting for people. And I got to see a society that had gone through hyperinflation, right? Because the currency in Argentina has been devalued many times and people,

it affects the whole culture, right? People get their paycheck and they're like, immediately I wanna go spend it because it might be worth less tomorrow, right? Or I remember like they had these buses that would go around Buenos Aires and you know, it would take like coins, you'd put coins in there to like get on the bus,

but the currency had been devalued so much, people had to bring like two handfuls of coins or something to get on there. So coins actually became kind of scarce in society, people would hoard them. It also just, it really has destroyed, I think, the culture, like the people there, they're not optimistic about the future.

They actually kind of revere the past, right? I think in America, we generally have more optimism about the future, even though people here say it, like they get down on it sometimes with polarization, whatever, but it's still more than most places in the world were optimistic about the future. In Argentina, I think people feel like, hey, it could all be gone tomorrow.

And so just like live every day like it's your last, have good food, good wine, good family, conversations, relationships. And that's fine too, but there's an inherent pessimism about like, just kind of keep your head down, don't try anything too crazy because the government might just come in and take all your stuff.

So that was something I had never seen really growing up in the United States. And again, when I read the Bitcoin white paper years later, that piece clicked there for me. I was like, oh my gosh, there's people in the world who don't have access to any kind of sound money that really stores value. It can be abused and manipulated by the government.

And that's actually the default in most countries of the world. Like the United States historically has been a real exception to that. And people who've only spent time in the United States, I think, sometimes don't, they didn't really get crypto early on because like, what problem is this solving? The dollar works fine. And the dollar has its own challenges and with inflation now and there's high fees and all kinds of broken things about our financial system, but the rest of the world is way,

way worse. Right? So that was something that when I saw Bitcoin, I was like, okay, this could solve a real problem for a lot of people. I mean, what was in the white papers that you read that got you all fired up about it? Yeah, so the Bitcoin white paper is a pretty fascinating document.

It's pretty complicated and it's kind of dense. And for anybody who's not read it. And it, you know, I read it in, I think, December of 2010. I just happened to see it on this website called Hacker News, which, like, people would put out technical content. And it was describing how the world could have a currency that was decentralized, no country controlled it, no company controlled it. And, but it could be provably scarce, kind of like gold, where you couldn't just make more of it out of thin air.

And, you know, you and I could have a peer to peer transaction with no intermediary in the middle, like a bank or credit card company, or someone taking fees, or being able to de-platform or de-bank one of us, Or, you know, and so if you could have a peer-to-peer cash system that was trusted because it, there was no government or kind of company that could go in there and manipulate it, I was immediately captivated by that.

Like I, you know, I had been reading like a lot of, you know, like Ayn Rand and some of these economists like Milton Friedman, these kind of free market guys and libertarian stuff. And the idea really appealed to me having seen how Argentina, like these people's lives had been destroyed by high inflation. I was working at Airbnb at that time,

seeing how they were trying to move money to 190 countries all over the world. And it was completely broken and slow and high fees and delays. And so I read that Bitcoin white paper and I was like, that's a crazy idea. That's kind of like the internet or something. How do we have a global decentralized network

for sharing information? The internet kicked that whole thing off. This was describing something kind of like the internet but for moving value and money and all types of assets and kind of like an internet of money or something. And so I just kind of couldn't stop thinking about it for like six months. I kept reading more and more,

trying to get my hands on any kind of information I could find. And then I started going to these early Bitcoin meetups that were happening in San Francisco, which was a crazy experience of its own. Cause the people who would show up to these things in 2010 were like, some of them were like anarchists. Some of them were like computer science, PhDs.

Some of them were just like homeless people coming in for free beer and stuff like that. It was like, it was a real motley crew of early people. But I couldn't stop thinking about it for six months. And that's what made me start to work on this prototype, like nights and weekends of what would eventually become Coinbase. Interesting. Interesting.

I mean, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Who is it? Yeah. So nobody knows for sure. And I wouldn't claim to know for sure. But I think there's a couple of good theories out there. One is that there's this guy, Hal Finney, who is a computer scientist. He passed away, so he's not alive anymore.

I think there's a good argument he's probably one of the people that created it. Now it could have been multiple people that collaborated and tried to use this pseudonym as kind of a, you know, I think they knew that if this worked that they might get hauled in front of Congress or, you know. Killed.

Killed, yeah. I mean, and that, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto or whoever that is or they are, they did mine a lot of early Bitcoin, which is now worth a ton of money, like at least a100 billion or something. So they knew like their family would have to have private security and all.

So I think they were thinking that far ahead. I'm just speculating, but that could be the case. So anyway, Hal Finney is a good candidate. There's another guy, Nick Szabo, who may have been a collaborator. There might've been a third person. And a bunch of journalists and stuff have tried to track down these different people

who may or may not have been Satoshi. I think most of them got it wrong. The most likely explanation is it's probably Hal Finney maybe in collaboration with one or two people like Nick Szabo. But regardless of who Satoshi actually is, the idea stands on its own, right? It's kind of like, I don't know, like if someone had discovered the theory of relativity,

but that person turned out to be a bad person or a good someone had discovered the theory of relativity, but that person turned out to be a bad person or a good person, whatever your judgment of them, it doesn't really matter. Like the theory stands on its own. It's a genuine breakthrough. And I think that Bitcoin, that white paper is a genuine breakthrough in computer science. It's the first time that someone was able to come up with a purely digital good that was provably scarce.

You know, like, I'll give you a simple example. Like, you know, let's say you have a photo on your phone and you can make infinite copies of it. You can send it to me, you can send it to a hundred people. Like most digital items are easy to be copied and you can just have infinite copies of them. That's a bad property for something to be used as money. Money needs to be provably scarce.

Otherwise someone can just kind of create a ton of it out of thin air. And so this algorithm that they describe in the Bitcoin white paper says, all right, we're gonna have a digital item, but we're gonna guarantee the scarcity of it. And I mean, if you want, I can try to describe how that works.

It gets a little complicated, but like the important thing to realize about it is that at this point, like thousands of people have looked at that algorithm and tried to break it and no one's found a way to break it. Even like, you know, if China or like these big nation, state actors with the top resources, everything in the world, if they could find a way to break it,

it's very profitable. They would be able to take a trillion dollars or something out of Bitcoin. No one's been able to break it for like, whatever it is, 13 years now. So the longer it goes on, the more proven it's become of how it's going to stand the test of time. And the mathematics behind it is really solid. Can you talk, I mean, we're talking about printing money out of nothing.

Yeah. Sounds familiar. Yeah. And very familiar. Better reserve, yeah. of nothing, sounds familiar. Yeah. And very familiar. Federal Reserve, yeah. And yeah, actually, that's where I want to go is I want you to talk a little bit about the Federal Reserve when we came off the gold standard and what's happened.

Yeah. So I think this is a fascinating topic if you look, study history, right? And there's been, obviously America has the reserve currency today. It's a huge form of power for the United States. And if you look back at history, there have been various other empire, the British and the Dutch and going back China

and various countries at different times have had been the global superpower and had the reserve currency. And usually what happens is they start off with their currency being backed by a hard commodity, something that is provably scarce, like gold. And then eventually, usually during a time of crisis, these countries will quote unquote temporarily

de-peg it from that underlying commodity. And then after a number of decades or whatever, they'll lose discipline and start to over print it. And then they lose the reserve currency status and some new one arises. So in the US, unfortunately dollars are no longer backed by gold, right? That used to be the case.

There was a piece of it got disconnected in like, I think the 1930s where they said, the gold is still there, you just can't actually come in and exchange a dollar for gold. It used to be actually you could go't actually come in and exchange a dollar for gold. It used to be actually you could go in and if you gave them a dollar, they'd give you back, I forget, some fraction of an ounce of gold in exchange for it.

In like the 1930s, they said, trust us, the gold is still there, you just can't come and exchange it, but it's still backed by gold. And then I think it was 1971, Nixon during the Vietnam War, I think they were having budget deficits and whatnot. And he kind of said, as a temporary measure, you can go watch the video of this on YouTube. You know, he literally says,

this is a temporary emergency measure. It's not gonna be, we're gonna go back on the gold standard soon, don't worry. We're gonna de-peg it from, fully de-peg it from the gold. And that allowed them to run these budget deficits. And of course, we never went back. So the dollar today is not backed by gold. We have started to see more inflation happen with the dollar. I mean, it was a couple years ago, I think it there's different ways you could measure this, right? But it hit like eight or nine percent. Typically, they're trying to target more like two to three percent. But it's like, where's the

discipline going to come from, right? Like if it's like, where's the discipline gonna come from? Like if it's not backed by a hard commodity, the temptation is always to give people more free stuff to get elected, right? It's kind of like high school, free drinks in the vending machine or whatever. So if the dollar continues to lose discipline like that, then the US could lose the reserve currency status.

And I think it's more likely people actually flee to Bitcoin, gold, or real estate, these things which are provably scarce. Like they're not making any more real estate in the world. They're not making any more gold. They're not making any more Bitcoin. So that's the kind of assets that people wanna go own if they're in this environment of high inflation where people are just any more Bitcoin. So that's the kind of assets that people want to go own if they're in this environment of high inflation

where people are just printing more money. And that's, I think, why we're seeing all time high prices of Bitcoin right now. Have we lost all discipline? It's kind of like a big question, right? Is America in decline? I mean, I, you know, I would trust in our institutions is that all time lows if you look at the polls.

You know, I do think that the future is not guaranteed, right? There are moments in history where you have a great leader come in and change the course of history, right? So, you know, around crypto and things like that, like President Trump has done a lot of good stuff. He's, we can get into this whenever you want, but I mean, there was a whole war being waged on crypto

in the last administration, which we had to fight back against to protect. Yeah, get into it. Let's get into that. Yeah, but I, maybe I'm just trying to think about your broader, it's a big one. Like, I mean, I hope America is not in decline, right? I like, America is such a unique thing historically

to have a land where you actually have these freedoms and democracy and whatnot. Like it would be a damn shame, right? If America starts to fall, who's gonna take up the mantle, right? Like I don't think China is aligned with our values on that economically or in other ways. So it would be bad for the world

if America really is in decline. I think we've got to try to save it, but we can also have alternatives, right? Like Bitcoin can come up or maybe we'll have Mars, maybe special economic zones in the US. We can talk about all kinds of stuff. I love to talk about this with my friends, but yeah, you want to jump to the war on crypto?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think America's in decline. I think we're at a very pivotal moment where if we don't turn the ship around, then we're probably going to be entering decline very quickly. Yeah. We've been through some crazy shit before, right? I mean, yeah, the sixties and all that. And then we also landed a man on shit before, right? I mean, yeah, the 60s and all that, and then we also landed to man on the moon, right? So yeah, America seems to be,

no matter how screwed up America is, it's like everywhere else is kind of worse. So. Yeah, that's kind of where I was going too. Yeah. I mean, we have the best innovators in the world. They've been, I mean, I'm sure you're gonna relate to this, but I mean, like I said, I've dove into the tech space and I've talked to a lot of innovators and the one thing

I will say, man, is that all of them are really fired up about the current administration and getting rid of some of the bureaucracy, everybody in power and AI and all everything, everybody seems to be gung-ho about this administration kind of gotten the bureaucracy a little bit and letting the innovators innovate and change the world. Yeah, I'm all for it. That's how we build a better future is we've got to get rid of the bureaucracy, deregulate, allow people to build power plants, nuclear fusion.

We should have supersonic jets, accelerate biotech. It takes 10 years and $2 billion to get a drug to market now. So it's like, every year you wait, people are dying. So the mentality of, if you overregulate, you can be so safety-oriented, but then you just freeze in time. Air travel is pretty safe.

Used to be. Yeah, that's true. Some gaps in that maybe recently, but overall it's pretty safe. And then, but like the jets literally look the same as they did in the sixties and none of them can fly faster than 600 miles an hour. So that's not what, to me, that's not what

America's strength is about, like, is freedom, you know, free markets, small government. In my view, like the government really should just be there to kind of run the military, protect from foreign invaders, you know, run the police, protect, enforce the laws at home, and run the courts and adjudicate disputes. And I think pretty much everything else, like the private market, would better solve those issues.

And education, healthcare, go on down the list. And you should, it's a philosophy of more like personal responsibility and like there are non-government solutions to things in society, right? Like private charities, you know, churches, like the family unit, like these kind of things can create that structure

and safety net in society. The government doesn't have incentives aligned to create good outcomes typically, because there's no competition. Competition breeds excellence. And if the government is the only game in town, it just deteriorates over time. So the incentives aren't aligned for the government to do good things. They should be small, focused on what they have to do, the monopoly on violence, and then let the free market cook. And I think that would be a stronger America.

Me too, me too. So what's the war on crypto? I'm not, I can't say I'm not a crypto guy cause I buy it even though I don't understand it nearly to your level, but why would there be a war on crypto? Yeah, well, crypto is a threat to some people in power, right? You know, in particular, like in this last administration,

Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler, I would say, were the biggest architects of this war on crypto. And, you know, Elizabeth Warren is a socialist. She basically thinks the government should run all financial services. And she likes to apply pressure to the big banks that are kind of under the purview of these financial regulators to get stuff done

that she can't get done through Congress because the American people don't want it. So as an example, she put a lot of pressure on JPMorgan to say, you know, don't give loans to oil and gas companies or to gun companies. And so she has these kinds of political motivations and she can, because she can't get them passed through Congress, because the American people

don't want that, she'll kind of in an extra judicial kind of way, appoint these financial service regulators and those regulators will go into the bank and say, hey, it would be a real shame if you were to do this. They have a lot of soft power. They can say, hey, we're gonna come in and audit you once a month instead of once a year and ask you to produce thousands of pages of documentation.

And if you upset your regulator, you can be in the penalty box for years and years, right? So this kind of soft power, we called it like Operation Choke Point 2.0. They would, they'd go into the banks and try to debank people that they didn't like for their political reasons. And so crypto comes along totally outside the power structure

that they've been able to infiltrate. And it allows people to kind of do financial transactions without the risk of being shut off by your bank. And so she hates crypto and it's like, it's pure hypocrisy too because she's always kind of out there saying, well, you know, we're here about consumer protection,

I'm trying to protect the little guy and the minute, you know, like some legislation gets proposed for crypto that would protect the little guy, she'll fight against it like tooth and nail. So anyway, long story short, she appointed this guy, Gary Gensler, to be the SEC chair as the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

And he's like a powerful financial services regulator. And what members of Congress told me was that she made a deal with him. He really wanted to be Treasury Secretary, but she said, hey, look, in the first term of the Biden administration, do the SEC chair role, go hard on crypto, try to really tamp down on this stuff. And if you do a good job, I'll try to make you Treasury Secretary in the second Biden term.

And so he really wanted this job to be Treasury Secretary. So he's a smart guy, by the way. If you go back and look at his talks before he became the SEC chair, he was teaching these classes at MIT about how great crypto was and how it's such a powerful technology to update the financial system and all this.

Are you serious? Yeah. So he totally flopped. Yeah. He totally flip flopped. Yeah, I think- Just for a job. I think these guys, like,

they're just, somehow they're mentally willing to, you know, change their values and what they will do to, it's for basically for personal advancement, right, to get the job he wants. And so, you know, he went in there and started creating all this lawfare essentially against crypto companies. And like for us, we had gone public in 2021. As part of becoming a public company, you have to disclose all this information to the SEC. They send you like a bunch of comment letters

back and forth. Like they sort of turn over every stone. They understand everything about your company. And they allowed us to become a public company at that time in 2021. They said, okay, great, you're good. The public consumers can own your stock and you're good, kosher.

And then a few years later, after this pressure from Elizabeth Warren, he decided, you know what, actually we don't like all this stuff. And they started sending us these really nasty letters like, hey, we have deep concerns about all these things you're doing that they had just allowed us

to become a public company doing. And so our lawyers, we went in, we met with them probably at the SEC like 30 times over a period of a year or two. And we just tried to be helpful and answer all their questions. And, you know, and we would ask them, sometimes we would ask the regulator should be giving you a clear rule book, right?

Like here are the rules you have to follow, and then we follow them, and that's how it should work, right? They wouldn't give us any rules to follow. And our lawyers, I remember we had asked them in these meetings like, well, here's how we think about it. We read the law and here's the program we designed in compliance with the law.

Do you have any feedback for us? And they'd say, we're not gonna give you legal advice. And we'd say, okay, well, are we doing anything wrong? Like, we're not gonna give you legal advice. And then after 30 meetings, they hit us with a lawsuit, claiming we had violated all of these laws. And so that was like a pretty interesting moment as a CEO, because normally, most people would tell you,

never engage in litigation with your regulator. You know, it's like, they can make your life hell, right? And I made a decision at that point, I was like, we got to fight this, you know, because I was like, show me in the law where we're, did we violate any rule? They couldn't point to anything, but they said, you have to stop all this activity that you're doing. And I kind of felt like if we just complied with that, it would not only hurt our business, it would actually kill the entire crypto industry in America. And a lot of this stuff had been going offshore anyway.

You might've read about like FTX, this exchange, and Mt. Gox, and like these things, American consumers were using these offshore platforms, which were then blowing up and stealing people's money. And so I was like, really? We're just gonna cede this entire industry to foreign companies and not have the future of technology and financial services be built in the US, screw that.

Like let's go fight these guys because I think we have the better argument. Now that of course litigation takes a long time, right? So for a period of a couple of years, we were engaged in litigation with the SEC. It had a massive depression on our stock price because a lot of public market investors will just be, oh, you're suing the SEC. Ooh, this is too risky.

I'm not going to go near that stock. And they kind of played dirty. Like they pressured these different companies not to work with us. And they would, they said- What companies? Like we were trying to close deals with, you know, big banks and to plat, you know,

to get money moving onto our platform. And they would, the SEC would go meet with them and tell them, Hey, you know, that company Coinbase is under investigation. Like we don't think you should work with them. Wait, are you talking like, like when I go into Coinbase and I want to, you know, put in money from my bank account, is that what they were trying to stop?

Linking bank accounts to Coinbase? I mean, to be honest, I was worried about getting like personal criminal charges because some people I talked to, like my lawyers and stuff, they said, you know, this is a civil lawsuit where they think maybe the company had some technical violation, but they're like, it's not unheard of

where they actually would put personal criminal charges on you, even if they're totally bogus, just to try to pressure you to settle the other case, right? And so, you know, I was prepared for that to happen if it was gonna go there, but luckily it didn't. And, you know, these guys, basically the, once the Trump administration came in and they appointed a new SEC chair,

he looked at these cases and he just threw them all out. Like he just was like, this is ridiculous. And so that case got, luckily this year, I think it just got totally withdrawn. We didn't pay a single dollar in penalties. We didn't have to change a single thing about our business. It was like pure lawfare. They were just like harassing us with these bogus lawsuits

to try to kill the industry. And a lot of start, luckily we had deep enough pockets where we could pay these lawyers. We probably spent like $5,100 million on lawyer fees. We had the money to do it, but a lot of startups died because of this in the United States. Like I know a lot of founders who their companies

just shut down because they couldn't deal with the legal costs of the SEC suing them. So it was pretty messed up. With prices going up on just about everything lately, saving money is essential, but stressful. Trying to manage subscriptions, track spending, and cut costs can feel overwhelming. Rocket Money is here to help. If you see a subscription you no longer want, Rocket Money will help you cancel it. Their dashboard lays out your total financial

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Just go to this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash SRS right now to try it for free. Again, that's zipprecruiter.com slash SRS. Zipprecruiter, the smartest way to hire. I mean, I gotta commend you here. That takes some serious balls to go after the SEC. Yeah. I mean, people told me I was crazy to do it, but I mean, I'm so glad we did because like,

the crypto industry might not exist in the United States if today, if we had caved on that. Yeah. And we did it at great personal cost as well. Wow. And that took how many years? It took about, I think two or two and a half years to resolve.

And yeah, it was like 50 or $100 million in direct legal fees. But then, yeah, our stock price was down in the gutter too for a long time. So yeah, it was a huge setback for America. And I sort of joked with some people that, after being SEC chair, Gary Gensler should go run the economic development board for like the UAE or the Bahamas or something,

because he literally just, he grew their economies enormously, because a lot of the crypto businesses moved offshore outside the United States and set up shop there. And he created all these jobs offshore, you know. Anyway. Well, it turned into a huge win. Yeah. At least in my eyes. I mean, the positive of it is that

we learned how to become very politically engaged as an industry. I mean, I was sort of telling you at breakfast, right? Like I, naively coming into starting a company, I kind of thought, and I was always kind of apolitical and I was like, I didn't really want to engage in government stuff.

And I was just like, all right, well, if we just follow the law, we don't have to deal with DC and a bunch of policy stuff, right? But it turns out, even if you're not interested in politics, politics is interested in you. And occasionally they'll come and try to unlawfully kill your whole company. So then we realized, you know,

I give Mark Andreessen and some of these guys on our board a lot of credit for this, but they were like, we have to help our customers and develop political power. We had tens of millions of customers in the United States. We were like, how do we organize these people? These are voters, right? And so we actually got, we created this grassroots campaign called Stand With Crypto.org. It was a 501C4.

We got about two million Americans in this last election to raise their hand and said they want to elect pro crypto candidates. And we created like scorecards for all the different members of Congress and everything. So about two million of those voters showed up in this last election and we now have the most pro crypto Congress ever. So that was something where I had never really engaged politically before, but there has to be real consequences, right? Like if you have a member of Congress who's out there trying to kill crypto, and that's not what the American people want, they gotta lose their job.

For the rest, somebody in DC to wake up and, oh my gosh, this is a risk politically for me to be against this thing. So that's exactly what we did in this last election and I think it had a big impact. I mean, you set up, correct me if I'm wrong, but you set up a fund, you've got, is it $140 million set aside for pro crypto candidates? Yeah, yeah, that's a-

Doesn't matter what side they lean, that's the goal. It's bipartisan, that's the goal. It's bipartisan. That's a pack that we were involved in, along with a bunch of other people in the industry called Fair Shake. So yeah, it's got a bunch of money and they're helping elect pro-crypto candidates. How's that?

I mean, have you got anybody unseated in the Senate or in Congress for going against crypto? Yeah, so the most notable one was that in this last election in November, Sherrod Brown was the sitting member, he was chairing of the Senate Banking Committee and he was super anti-crypto. I flew to DC probably like three or four times trying to meet with this guy. He would never take a meeting with me.

We flew in a bunch of entrepreneurs from his state, Ohio, like crypto and blockchain entrepreneurs. This was during election year. And I was like, hey, maybe if you won't meet with me, he'll meet with people from his state trying to build businesses, right? He refused to meet with them, didn't show up. And he was just blocking. Every time we were saying, look,

the SEC and Elizabeth Warren are trying to kill our whole industry unlawfully. Like, can we talk about getting some real legislation passed that would protect consumers and allow the industry to be built here, he would never meet, right? And he would block every attempt at legislation. So he was up by about 11% in going into the polls,

going into November, sitting member of Congress, like very senior member of Congress. And there was a guy running against him, Bernie Marino. And we and the crypto community decided to like back against him, Bernie Marino. And we and the crypto community decided to like back this guy, Bernie Marino. And he went from being down by 11 points to winning the election. I can't remember by how much, but it was,

that was a huge upset. That sent like shockwaves through DC where people are like, oh my gosh, like Sherrod Brown, the sitting Senator, like got kicked out because of the crypto industry. And you know, I think that woke a lot of people up and there was probably like a dozen other races that we played in, in the house and the Senate. Most of them, I can't remember what percentage it was, but it was like an 80 or 90% win rate.

Yeah, and so people- Congratulations. Well, people realized in DC, there's like, there's no constituency that wants to vote. If you're anti-crypto, nobody really cares. But if you're pro-crypto, you can get a lot of votes. The American people want this. So it's just bad politics to be anti-crypto.

Have you had anybody that told you that they would be pro-crypto and then flipped? We've had some people that were a little wishy washy. There was a couple of people, we called it some people that were little wishy washy. Yeah, like there was a couple of people, we called it like a foxhole conversion, you know, like, like right before the election, they'd suddenly be saying a lot of pro crypto stuff, but they had been saying anti-crypto stuff previously. And then, you know, I, Maxine Waters is like

a very interesting person. She, I spent a bunch of time with her trying to like get her educated on this. And she was always like really nice to me, to my face. And then we donated money to her and all this stuff, which was probably a terrible mistake. But yeah, when this crypto bill came up, there's been a couple of them,

one of them just got passed into law. She would like go out on the house floor and talk about like how terrible Coinbase is as a company. And I was like, damn Maxie, I spent all this time like with you, you were so nice to my face. And suddenly she's like, yeah, she flipped. Yeah, I don't think she's gonna, she's not gonna be pro crypto.

I mean, how do you educate congressmen, senators, anybody, appointees, anybody at government, especially, I mean, we're dealing with a lot of dinosaurs up there. Yeah. You got, we have people stroking out on camera. We have people dying in office. We have people with dementia. Like how do you, because I don't even understand it fully.

And I mean, I just interviewed Charles Hoskinson. Yeah. Awesome human, but I still don't get it 100%. And so if I don't get it, how do you get it to somebody that's a dinosaur in government? I mean, how do you educate them? Yeah, well, this is definitely a bit of a generational issue. Like a lot of times I'll meet members of Congress

that are like over 70 and they don't really get exactly, but all their staff have the Coinbase app or their kids have the Coinbase app. And it's okay. Like if I was in their shoes, they're like a mile wide, inch deep, right? They need to know a little bit about everything. School choice and healthcare and supersonic jets.

So they're constantly just have a stream of people coming into their office every day, trying to tell them about their local thing that they care a lot about. So I get it why they're not like experts and everything. I don't think I could be either. And so they have to rely a little bit on their staff and a little bit on just good general principles.

Like, do we think the government should be building more stuff or like the free market, right? Or there's various principles like that you could fall back on. And one thing I realized actually having, I don't know, probably like five or six years ago, I started going to DC like once a quarter to try to build these relationships.

Cause I knew the policy thing was gonna be important. Initially, we started off just trying to be an educational resource and it kind of, it didn't really work that well. I was, I think I was sort of naive about what, how DC worked. Cause I'd go in there and I'd tell them, I try to be helpful and answer their questions.

And, and then kind of pat me on the head and like, okay, thank you for coming in. I'd leave it, nothing would ever happen. Right. And it wasn't until we actually got like political power, like organized the millions of Americans who are using crypto, like with real votes that could get someone elected or, you know, have them lose an election.

And it wasn't until I think the political power is what really woke them up and like, hey, we need to get this done. Cause a lot of these folks in Congress, like not to be too cynical about it, I think a lot of them are like really hardworking Americans that wanna do something good. But a lot of them are also,

they're just trying to stay in power, you know? And like to stay in power, you have a finite amount of things you can focus on at any given time. And so it's kind of like, who has a bunch of votes? Who has a bunch of money? You gotta kind of focus on that. And be, you know, you kind of want to be

for the thing that's going to happen. And nobody wants to stick their neck out for some kind of pet issue that's not going to decide an election one way or the other. And so it wasn't until we actually got the crypto industry organized to protect our customers' rights that they started to take us more seriously.

I mean, what do you tell them though? I mean, cause especially with some of these, the older generations in government, I mean, I can't see any of them wanting to move to crypto. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, in many ways you're right. I mean, crypto is about individual freedom and sovereignty. Like it's not, if you want more power in the government, like it's a little unclear why, you know, but the people want it, right? So the things that we usually talk to them about are, this is a technology to update the financial system, right? Like your average consumer and American or citizen,

like you talked about those stats at the beginning, right? Like vast majority of Americans think the financial system is not really working for them, right? Like the fees are super high. You get like these overdraft fees, right? It's hard to send money in certain ways. Like, you know, you can get deep, deep banked or there's unequal access.

Like there's a whole bunch of people who are underbanked or, you know, can't get a bank account or get access to a loan or these things that just, you know. So if you look at how satisfied Americans are with the financial system, it's very low. So we tell them that crypto is a technology that can update that.

It can make payments faster and cheaper, more global. It can give people better rewards on their money. Like, you know, right now the average savings account in America pays you 0.14%. You should be getting like 4.5%. That's what the US treasuries are paying. So that should just be arriving into your checking account.

Why doesn't every American have that? There's all these kind of, and the payments don't really work on the weekends, and the stock market doesn't work on the weekends. So there's all these kind of legacy systems that are just kind of there because they've been there for 30 years, and they're ossified,

they have no incentive to really improve. And so crypto's coming along and updating the financial system, making better financial services for everybody, empowering them with sound money that can't be inflated away, and it can do it for everybody in the world with just a smartphone, right?

Connect them into this global economy. So that's appealing to many of them. I also, we talk a lot about like the national security arguments, right? Especially for people on the right. How a digital dollar is essential to ensuring it maintains like its reserve currency status. How we want these industries to be built in America.

I mean, imagine if like the big internet companies were built overseas, like Google and Amazon and all these things, people have their quibbles with them, but like I'd much rather those companies were built in America under the US system than to be built in China. We were all using a Chinese search engine, right? So if the internet companies had been built offshore, that would be a huge loss to America.

Okay, let's make sure the crypto companies are built onshore as well. Once in a while, these things get away from us. Like, you know, the 5G or semiconductors now are all being made offshore. And it's a big issue in DC. Everyone's like, well, we can't be buying our 5G routers from Huawei, maybe the Chinese company, or the semiconductor are all made in Taiwan.

And this is a huge national security risk. They're all trying to, now scrambling and throwing a hundred billion dollars to try to bring these things back on shore. It's like, well, hey, let's just not lose it in the first place. Yeah. So those are the kinds of arguments we make to folks. And it's generally pretty compelling. Like the Congress is now, there's a strong bipartisan majority that wants the industry

to be built here in America, partially because of this last election. And actually they just passed this piece of crypto legislation last Friday. I was at the White House doing that signing ceremony. That was a huge step in the right direction. And then there's one more bill that hopefully will get passed in September, October of this year. We'll get into those in a little bit, but I wanted to ask you, we were talking about money, we were talking about the Federal Reserve

coming off the gold standard real estate, how currencies can be tied to commodities. And so I just wanted to ask you, I mean, what is money to you? Yeah, well, to me, money is really like a medium of exchange. And it came out of this need from the barter system, not fully working, right? Like if I grow apples and you raise beef,

and I kind of want some beef, but you don't need my apples right now, you got enough apples, it's like, that's a barrier to a trade happening, right? So it helps if we have this common medium of exchange that can be used to price things and just allow a transaction to happen even if you don't need the exact good that I produce, right?

And over time, lots of things have been used as money, right? Like people use salt as money at one point. In prisons, people use like cigarettes or different food items as money, seashells, you know, famously, all these like kind of things. And there's certain properties of money that make it good money or bad money, right? Like scarcity is one of those. Can people just, if you can use, find a bunch more seashells on the beach, then that's like a bad form of money, right? Or durability, like, you know, will the thing deteriorate over time, like bread

or something like that is probably like a bad form of currency because it just goes bad, it rots, right? How portable is it? Like, you know, a bar of gold is great as like a store of value, which by the way is another good property of money, but it's hard to move gold. Like if I need to pay somebody in Japan, like I need to fly that bar of gold, right? Or how subdivisible is it, right? Can I like chip off a little flake of gold to pay for my coffee or, you know? So people look at these different properties of money

and you can kind of score different monies. And like, this is partly why I think Bitcoin is probably the best form of money that's ever created because it is scarce, provably scarce, just like gold or something like that, but it's more portable than gold. You can send a Bitcoin transaction kind of anywhere in the world pretty quickly.

It's subdivisible down to like eight decimal places. You know, it's very durable. It's not gonna go bad or, and it's like, it's not gonna go bad. And it's fungible too. You know that if I have one Bitcoin, it's just as good as another Bitcoin, right? Imagine if you had different purities of metals and like, oh, is this one diluted a little bit

or are they hiding some lead in there? So yeah, I think you could think of Bitcoin as like a digital gold. And it has some of the best properties of gold, but some of the ones that gold doesn't have too, like the portability and subdivisibility, the programmability too, I would say. You can use it in different, set up different contracts with it and things like that. So that's kind of what money is to me. It's intended to be a medium of exchange. And I think crypto is really providing a better alternative on that dimension.

I mean, you know, the big argument in, I listen to a lot of people that I respect. One, Dave Ramsey, are you familiar with Dave? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. He's a good friend of mine and a big finance guy does not like crypto, unless he's changed his mind in the last,

I don't know, year. But, you know, and he says it's backed by nothing. And so, you know, is that's kind of where I'm going is yes, there's a limited amount of crypto. It's never gonna go over, I can't remember how many coins. 21 million, yeah. 21 million coins. But what actually, like what, why do people value it?

Yeah, well, he's right. I don't think it's necessarily backed by anything, but neither is the dollar. We've talked about it's no longer backed by gold. Are Picasso paintings backed by anything? Not really. I mean, they're just paint on some canvas. There's not like an intrinsic value to it.

People value gold or Picasso paintings or Bitcoin because they are scarce. Um, and other people believe they have value. It really comes down to, um, trust, right. And a lot of things contribute to trust. Like the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto kind of put out this white paper and allowed anybody in the world to mine it. So it was kind of like a fair way to launch it into the world.

That created a lot of trust. The fact that no government or anybody has been able to hack it or break the algorithm behind Bitcoin, that created a lot of trust. So... Do you think that the energy required to mine Bitcoin is possibly a backer? Yeah, I mean, so you could make an... It's cost money to mine it. Yeah. Your energy process. possibly a backer? Yeah, I mean, so you could make a cost off the argument. It costs money to mine it.

Yeah. Your energy process. I think if you were to make an argument that it is backed by something, yeah, so there's a lot of energy and hashing, computing power that goes into verifying the network. So that makes it defensible against somebody trying to take it over.

I think you could say another, like what is the intrinsic value of it is another question people ask sometimes. And the way, the value of it is that it allows you to instantly transfer value anywhere in the world on a decentralized ledger, right? So these are kind of philosophical arguments though. Sometimes people get really wrapped around the actual

of like, yeah, but that's not, it's not really backed by anything. And so, I don't know, I just like to kind of concede that point, I'm like, okay, just let's take it, let's just say that it's not backed by anything, but that's true of the dollar and Picasso paintings and all that. So to me, that's not like, you know, you can't like

discount Bitcoin just because of that. If people trust it and believe it has value and it's provably scarce, that's all you need. What are some of the other coins out there that people transact in? Or is Bitcoin the primary? I know it's the primary one, but you got all these other ones that popped up, Cardano, Ethereum, XRP, Solana. I don't know how many there are.

There's probably thousands. And then we saw the stuff with Doge, you know, and Elon. Yeah. Do it. Do it. Am I saying that right? Yeah. Dogecoin and, and, and like, I, I think it was like early 2020.

I was like buying all kinds of shit that I had no idea what it does. Yeah. You need to see these crazy spikes, both up and down. What are people using? What are the reasons people would hold some of these other coins? Yeah, so crypto is not just one thing, right? Like Bitcoin is digital gold,

but there's other blockchains that are really trying to be like the payment layer, the utility layer for crypto. So that's kind of what Ethereum and Solana are doing. And actually those are like, I would call those blockchains. There's like millions of coins built on top of these blockchains. So you could have, someone might be like, why would there be like millions of these things, right?

And if you're thinking about it in terms of currency or money, you probably only need like one or two of those. But if you're thinking about it as, of currency or money, you probably only need like one or two of those, right? But if you're thinking about it as, hey, this company might need to raise money, or this social media post, like this piece of artwork or content or podcast episode or whatever, that's how you're getting millions of these coins

actually coming out. And so this is kind of where crypto is now on the frontier. Bitcoin's like digital gold. There's USDC, which is like a digital dollar. That's like people spending dollars digitally, faster and cheaper, more global. And now there's people, every social media post, whether it's like text or audio or video,

that could be a coin or like, you know, you- What do you mean by that? Well, like if you put out this episode, right? You know, today you have like sponsors on the podcast, right? And you know, that's how you kind of have to monetize it is like a certain number of eyeballs and you sell sponsorship. But what if people who love your podcast

or on your Patreon or wherever, like maybe they want to own a copy of this episode, right? Or the next song that gets put out by some famous musician, right? People want to own a copy of this episode, right? Or the next song that gets put out by some famous musician, right? People wanna own a copy of that song. Like people are actually, they can buy directly from the creators in this new model for crypto. So it's actually, crypto started as like

digital gold with Bitcoin. Then it started to update different kinds of financial services like payments, borrowing and lending, trading. And now what it's doing is it's actually updating the way these applications monetize on the internet. Like even things that aren't directly related to financial services like podcasts or video or audio.

There's gonna be a version of it like YouTube, Spotify. Is this like NFTs? It's similar, yeah. So these things keep coming in waves but the early version of it YouTube, Spotify. Is this like NFTs? It's similar, yeah. So these things keep coming in waves, but the early version of it was NFTs, exactly, that were like pieces of artwork, but those were kind of like baseball cards or collectibles people would want to own

that was like a picture of a funny penguin or something. This is more like every piece of content generated online can be its own coin and have its own market cap and people trading it. And it's just a way for creators to get paid more directly by their audience and their fans. So is this happening right now? It is, yeah.

I mean, we just released this app called Base just like last week and it's still in beta but people can get invites for it and stuff. And it's kind of like, it's like a new social media app where every post that you make is a coin. And, you know, if, I hope we get you on there at some point or whatever, but if you could put out your podcast episode

and people could own it, and it would just monetize directly without having to have advertising be the primary business model of the internet. Wow. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah.

That's through Base. Yeah, so that's where this is going. The other cool thing about Base is it's a self-custodial wallet, so you can just hold your own crypto, you own all your own content. That way, you don't have to trust any third party, even Coinbase. You don't have to trust us. And we talked about this at breakfast a little bit, but for the main Coinbase app where we're storing people's money,

that's a regulated financial service business, right? So you have to get a license every country you want to operate in. And so we've had to go one country at a time, set up a local team, get the local license. So we're in like dozens of countries now, but it's really slow and expensive. With a self-custodial wallet, you're not a financial service business because you're never taking possession of customer funds. It's really just like a software product, just like a web browser or a messaging app or something. So we can launch that to 190 countries from day one,

and people in all these countries that really need access to better financial services like Venezuela and Turkey and Nigeria, places where there's high inflation, they don't have good options, they can now use a self-custodial wallet, anybody with a smartphone. So that's a really cool way for us to just get this technology to the other 150 countries of the world that are a little harder for us to operate in as a regulated financial service business. What, I mean, how many countries out there are fighting crypto?

Don't want it to... Yeah. So, I mean, the biggest one is probably China actually. It's not technically illegal for Chinese people to own crypto. And by the way, the people in China love crypto. They all wanna own it. Like, you know, a lot of the rich people there are trying to get their money out of China.

But the government doesn't like it. It's kind of like what China did with the internet, if you're familiar with that, like the great firewall of China, but the government doesn't like it. It's kind of like what the China did with the internet. If you're familiar with that, like the great firewall of China, where a lot of applications, including Coinbase, but also, you know, Facebook and all these things are blocked in China, like Google. So they've, China passed this law where they said,

banks in China cannot work with crypto companies. So they kind of like debanked them, kind of like what Elizabeth Warren tried to do in the United States. And so they made it very difficult for crypto companies to operate there, but the Chinese government issued their own digital currency for the Chinese Yuan.

So they made it what's called a central bank digital currency, digital Yuan. But of course it's controlled by the government. And if you get on the wrong side of the government, they can just take all your money and shut down your account. So it's a tool, they're using it as a tool for control because they wanted to run their own blockchain

controlled by the government. They're very anti like these decentralized blockchains like Bitcoin that are pro freedom for individuals. So yeah, so China is trying to crack down on it. There's a couple other countries that I'd say the commons like in India, for instance, the Reserve Bank of India has some concerns about crypto because they're worried about, again, capital controls. Like a lot of the wealthy people, they want to plug into the broader economy. They want to like get their money out of the country to go do things in the world. So some countries are trying to clamp down on that, which takes people's freedom away. So that

they tend to be a little skeptical of crypto, but the people in those countries desperately want crypto. So we're often like, we're often in this kind of interesting situation where we go in there, we want to work with the government in those countries to do things by the books. But the government's interest sometimes diverges from the people's interest in that country. And so we want to provide the tools to the people for freedom and not get on the wrong side of the government.

So it's like, we're trying to oftentimes play a delicate game there. Yeah, I'll bet, I'll bet. I mean, when we're talking about people exchanging, basically using crypto as a currency, how do they, I mean, the big thing for me is the volatility and all of it. You see these massive up and down swings. I mean, when do you think this will kind of, or will it?

Do you think it will level off? Yeah. So Bitcoin has gotten less volatile over the last 10 years because there's just more and I mean, when do you think this will kind of, or will it? Do you think it will level off? Yeah, so Bitcoin has gotten less volatile over the last 10 years, because there's just more and more people who own it now. And I think as you get like bigger pools of capital in the world, like big institutions and rich people all over the world, and just everybody really,

like as we get to having, there's maybe 500 million people who have used crypto today, I think as we get to like 5 billion, or even a couple billion, it'll get less volatile, but it'll still be going up over time because more and more people will be coming in. But you won't see like these 100% wild swings up and down. But you know, this is why a lot of people are using Bitcoin more like a store of value. And then the as a currency, like a medium of exchange, they're using things like USD coin or things which are less volatile. as a currency, like a medium of exchange, they're using things like USD coin

or things which are less volatile. So again, it's like crypto kind of has, if you're gonna update the entire financial system, you kind of need to reinvent everything. You need like a digital gold, you need a digital dollar, you know, you need digital stocks, you need digital, so crypto is kind of reinventing all these pieces of the financial system and making them more fast, cheap, global, efficient.

What do you think it will go to? Like the long-term implications of it or, yeah, I mean, well, from a market cap point of view, I think it's got like a long way to go, 10 or a hundred X, but I think the ultimate outcome of this is that governments stop controlling currency. We exist in this world today where there's like 190 countries or so. Some of them are pegged to the dollar, but there's maybe like 150 or so currencies.

And each country has its own currency. That might sound like an obvious thing, but imagine if every country had its own internet. That would be a terrible situation. Somebody in Germany wants to listen to your podcast and they have to pay an exchange fee because they're using different internets or something like that. That would be super inefficient.

We should all be running on the same internet globally. Well, we should all be running on the same monetary system globally, but do it in a way that takes the power out of the hands of like a small group of bureaucrats that can manipulate the currency or whatever. It should be like a fair system that no one country or company controls. So I think that's kind of what we're seeing is the power to issue currency is being unbundled from the state and it's returning that power into the hands of individuals and people who,

they can choose what they wanna use. They don't have to use it just cause they live in that country. And that's gonna be a more fair and free society. It's gonna be money that can't be inflated away. It's gonna be every transaction you can do instantly, for a tiny amount instead of like two to 3% every time you swipe your credit card.

And it's gonna work cross border. Like there's tons of people who are trying to send money to their family in another country, or they're trying to order goods from another country. Like the current financial system is this incredibly unfair tax on every transaction in the economy. And it kind of just slows down all progress. I'll give you an example would be like,

you remember text messaging used to be like 30 cents? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that at that time, there was maybe like a billion messages a day sent by text message or something. But these applications like WhatsApp came out and Signal and you know, text messaging got cheaper. And now it's basically like with WhatsApp or Signal,

it's free to send a message anywhere in the world, right? Instantly. There's now like, I think it's a couple hundred billion messages sent per day, right? It's no longer one billion messages a day, it's like 200 billion messages sent per day because it's free and it's instant and it's global. And that's kind of what's going to start to happen with the economy and with, with money.

There's so much friction today to move money that if we can bring the cost down, um, like under a cent, one cent under one second, anywhere in the world, you're just going to see. Like transactions in the economy will just flourish and you'll see a lot more of them happening. So that's kind of what we're trying to do is update the financial system with crypto, make it more efficient, more global, more fair, more free. Who, couple of questions just off what you were riving on there, who set up the USD stable coin?

So originally there was a company called Circle in partnership with Coinbase and we co-created it. And now they're the issuer of it and we're a distributor of it. But there's a bunch of legal details behind it. But yeah, basically Circle is the issuer of USDC. Okay. And then, you know, when we're talking about

moving to a digital currency globally and having a global currency. How do you think that would affect the US? I mean, Elon Musk talks about this, how the US has weaponized the US dollar, which is a bad thing, but, I mean, slippery slope there, right? I mean, you get the reputation of that,

then people are gonna wanna move. I mean, I've brought this up on several shows. We see BRICS, you're familiar with BRICS. Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, several other countries have joined because the US has weaponized the dollar. So if we'd move to a global currency, how does that affect the US from being able to have a certain amount of control around the globe through?

Yeah. So this is a great question, because I think it's a mixed bag. It's not, it's complicated, right? So I think if you think about like a digital dollar, I'll start with that, like USDC, to me that's unequivocally just good for the dollar in the United States.

It helps make sure the dollar is the reserve currency in all these countries around the world. It creates enormous demand for US treasuries. There's a bunch of reasons why it's good. If you're talking about Bitcoin, I think it's more complicated because if the dollar maintains discipline, then it'll continue to be the reserve currency.

If the dollar loses discipline, like we talked about earlier, people start printing a ton of it, like the Federal Reserve, or there's these huge budget deficits we keep running at the federal level that require us to print more money, just to pay things back,

and they sort of devalue at the dollar, people will flee the dollar and they'll go to Bitcoin. In that case, the United States could lose the reserve currency status. Now, if the US is gonna lose the reserve currency status, I'd rather people went to Bitcoin than to the Chinese Yuan, right? So that's why I say I think Bitcoin

is kind of like a check and balance on the dollar and in deficit spending. Like I hope that the US finds a way to maintain that discipline and the US remains strong. And in that case, crypto will just be on it, like a very good thing. But if we're going to lose it, I'd rather we have Bitcoin than, than we have to all live under a Chinese system.

And then, you know, we're talking about you're fighting congressmen, you're fighting senators, governments. What about banks? What about banks like chase, Bank of America, Regions? I mean, are they, I would imagine they do not want this to happen. Yeah, I mean, these are big organizations and it's funny sometimes like depending who you talk to

in the bank, it's either very positive or very negative. In general, we've had good relationships with the banks. You know, we actually need to work with them because we've basically built a bridge from the bank system into this crypto system, right? So when people come to Coinbase, they usually connect their bank and move a bunch of money into Coinbase.

So we actually need to work with a lot of them and we work with most of the big ones. But there certainly are elements of those banks that are skeptical about crypto and I think they're afraid of being disrupted by it. I mean, it could eliminate them, correct? Yeah, I mean, I don't know, if I'm sitting here in 10 or 20 years, I'd be hard,

I still think there'll be like dollars and there'll be banks, but you're right, I think a whole generation of young people are growing up kind of thinking like, why would I need some checkbook and a bank branch on the corner? Like I've got my phone. Obviously my phone is my wallet. And they're really using Coinbase like a bank replacement,

like a Neo bank, sometimes people call it. In particular, there's actually like this community bank lobby. I'll just tell you kind of one anecdote about this. So when we were trying to get this legislation passed in Congress for stable coins, the community bank lobby, which they have representatives in all 50 states,

so they're very powerful politically because there's members of Congress in all the districts around the US and they each have these community banks. So they came in and they lobbied hard against the stable coin bill. And in particular, what they were most concerned about is they said, well, these stablecoins are paying people

interest like four and a half percent on their money. And they don't want that to happen because they pay their customers like 0% or 0.14% like kind of in their savings account. And their argument to the members of Congress was, well, if you allow these stable coins to come in and start paying people 4.5% of their money, all the loans will dry up in these communities,

like in these small community banks. Now there's not really any evidence that that'll happen. I think what's more likely is they were just trying to protect their profit margins. They're like, well, we don't wanna have to pay our customers like a fair rate to compete in the market. And so they actually managed to get this line in the bill that prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest to their customers, which is kind of unimaginable to me how they managed

to convince members of Congress with a straight face that, like, hey, we want a law to block our competition from giving more money to their customers. It's kind of ridiculous.. Now- That passed. That passed. So now there's a good news here, which is that we're not a stable coin issuer, so we actually are allowed to continue to do it. We also pay rewards to our customers,

which are different than interest. There's a whole bunch of legal definitions around this, but we found a way to continue to do it. So we're gonna continue to pay 4.5 we're going to continue to pay four and a half percent to our customers holding USD coin because we want to just, that's what we want to do is update the financial system. And if people don't like the rates in these community banks, they should have to compete on a level playing field with everybody else. Like that's what the free market is there to do. It creates better products at lower prices for customers. So yeah, but that's the kind of stuff

we have to deal with in DC, is like these lobbying groups coming in with special interests. And it's part of the reason I'm in favor of small government is like, there's just less to be captured, you know? Yeah. If you have a big government, everybody's trying to influence it

and try to get their special favors. And it just, it gets like, it gets you these suboptimal outcomes. How long do you think it'll be before we start seeing, and maybe we already are, but when will we start seeing people use crypto as currency at Walmart, at the gas station, at the grocery store, everywhere?

Yeah. Well, I think the earliest adopters of it are gonna be online, like e-commerce. We, just cause they're more digital native, right? Like we actually just announced this partnership with Shopify, they have like, they have millions of merchants, even if people, almost everybody's actually bought something

from a Shopify store, they just, sometimes they don't know they're doing it, cause it's, each one's like a boutique shop, right? If you go and buy like beef jerky or like apparel or whatever. So we just announced a partnership with them where they're gonna accept USD coin and actually give 1% cash back to the customer

because the merchants are now saving the 2% to 3% on credit cards. So we're doing things like that. Oh, that's slick. Yeah. To incentivize them. Yeah, incentivize people to pay with USDC and get some cash back. Or like that Bitcoin credit card that I gave you at the beginning is allowing people anywhere

Visa's accepted or Amex in that case, we also have a Visa debit card. They can start to go spend their crypto. Now the merchant's still paying 200% on that, but I'm hoping we can go to the merchant eventually and say, hey, a lot of people are paying with crypto, you might not even know it. Why don't you do a direct integration? You can kind of save those fees. So there's areas like that where we're starting to chip away at it. But, you know, the credit card companies are a big oligopoly. It's the reason they're able to charge those high fees, because

they've built such a strong network effect that it's hard for new entrants to come in. So we had to come up, you know, a decentralized protocol like crypto is maybe the only way you could go compete with them. It wouldn't be, you wouldn't be able to do it as like, you know, if it was Coinbase versus one of those things, we'd probably lose. But if it's a totally open protocol like the internet

versus them, maybe there's a chance to break in. Do you transact in crypto? Yeah, I mean, I use my Coinbase card for most purchases and then I use it online too, just to like, just to buy crypto, shop increase, like these things at Shopify and stuff like that. But I'm kind of really trying to live on the frontier. A lot of people, they just, a lot of our customers,

they just hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, and they start off with like really an investment use case. And then they slowly add on these other things like this. All right, well, okay, I have a bunch of Bitcoin. Can I get a loan on that or? Can you? Yeah, like you can actually get loans on. There's a lot of people who they bought early Bitcoin.

They've got like tons of money and they can go get a loan on our website now. So we're starting payments, lending, earning yield. Like it's starting to become like a bank replacement. Is that through base or through Coinbase? That's through Coinbase. Okay. So I can go on Coinbase and apply for a loan.

Yeah. Fuck, I didn't even know that. Yeah. And that's what we ultimately want to do is, it's kind of difficult for a lot of people to get a loan and it's a lot of paperwork. And that's what we're trying to do is update the financial system, like all parts of it, including borrowing, lending. What do you check in when somebody borrows? Are you checking credit or is it just

what's in their Coinbase wallet? Yeah, so in that case, it's just the collateral with the Bitcoin in their wallet. So we don't need to run a credit check or anything, but I think we'd like to find a way to do what they call like non-collateralized lending too, which would be just based on credit. And I think one thing we're trying to invent is like

a decentralized credit score based on the blockchain too. So we could see a record of like, let's say that, you've been receiving a bunch of money from, I don't know, different companies you're involved in, this podcast or whatever. And you could actually build a reputation score, like a FICO score, kind of equivalent on chain of all the transactions that person has done,

and then probably lend to them based on that. So we're trying to think about how to create things like that too. Wow, wow. So a whole new credit card system. Yeah, and by the way, I mean, like in the US people, it's difficult to get a loan sometimes, other times you can.

In a lot of emerging markets, there's like, there's no credit system. Nobody, like when I was living in Argentina, nobody can get a mortgage to buy a house or get a loan to buy a car. So the only people who could own real estate are rich people who can basically pay the whole amount in cash.

Cause there's no mortgage industry. Yeah. So this is an example where, like we sort of take these things for granted in the United States sometimes, like you can get a mortgage to get a house, and that's how people build wealth and all this kind of stuff.

I think that we have a chance, again, with the smartphone and this new set of financial services powered by crypto, we can actually provide like a lending market to people all over the world. Like if you live, you're some 20 year old like living in India and you have, you want to start a little business or like, I don't know, whatever it is, you should be able to get a loan to do it. Lending is a key way that you grow, you have economic growth. And most people in the world do not have access to any credit market.

It's kind of crazy. Interesting. Interesting. Let's take a quick break. Yeah. And when we come back, I want to talk about the journey to starting Coinbase. Great. Perfect.

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That's 866-781-8900 or you can go to AmericanFinancing.net slash SRS. NMLS 182334. NMLS consumeraccess.org. All right, Brian, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to get into the journey to innovating Coinbase, but just a couple of questions that came to mind on the break. So we talked about 21 million Bitcoins, well, only 21 million Bitcoins will ever exist. What do you think will happen when we hit 21 million?

Mm-hmm. Well, yeah, so right now there's a smaller and smaller number of Bitcoin being produced over time and it kind of, it hits like a maximum number. It actually takes like a hundred years, right? But it, we're most of the way through that. I think there's probably already 20 million or so already out there.

So there's only maybe a million left that'll only, that'll ever be created. So right now, the new Bitcoin are created when people, the miners, the Bitcoin miners verify a new block. And so that's how new Bitcoin are kind of issued to them as like a reward for doing all that computational work, running the network.

Once that runs out, they're gonna have to be compensated by the small transaction fees that happen on Bitcoin. And so, this may be more detailed than you wanted, but you can take it anywhere you wanna go. But basically, miners are the people that run the Bitcoin network. They run these data centers all around the world. And today, you know, majority of their revenue is coming from new Bitcoin being issued and a smaller percentage is the Bitcoin transaction fees.

As fewer and fewer Bitcoin are produced and the network grows, it'll shift to being more about transaction fees than new Bitcoin being mined. And eventually it'll be zero new Bitcoin being mined, but they'll still make money from transaction fees. So I think what that basically means is that, the supply of Bitcoin is not gonna keep growing. So if you want Bitcoin, you're gonna have to buy it from someone willing to sell it,

which is how most people do it today already, but some people mine them to get brand new Bitcoin. So anyway, that's like a simple way to think about it is once the supply, there's no more ever created, you have to just buy one that already exists from someone else. And so that is the price of Bitcoin is who's willing to sell one.

So is that, how do I say this? Is that like already set up to where when we hit 21 million, then the miners will be incentivized with transaction fees? Yeah, I'd say that's already happening today. It's just it'll gradually shift more and more to the transaction fees over time. And then, I mean, does the system ever need to be updated? Like for example, Bitcoin, nobody knows who it is. And so, will it need to be updated?

And if it does, who does that? Yeah. I do think Bitcoin will need to be updated to become quantum resistant, right? So quantum computers create this risk that we talked about. And so, you know, Bitcoin has a mechanism for it to be upgraded. And the way that it works,

since there's no central authority that controls Bitcoin, right, so anybody can propose an upgrade to Bitcoin. There's what are called the core developers, some of the people that work on it, like the open source project kind of volunteering or they're getting paid by donors. There's also the miners, the people running the network. There's exchanges like Coinbase that play a role.

So there's this whole community of different participants in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And for an upgrade to happen, like to make it quantum resistant, there will be various people who discuss proposals about how to do that. Coinbase might help with that or the core developers have proposals. And essentially for Bitcoin to do that, Coinbase might help with that, or the core developers have proposals.

And essentially for Bitcoin to be upgraded, everyone has to agree. I mean, not everyone, you actually just need more than 50%. So let's say that 51% of all the people running the exchanges, the miners, the core developers, they all sort of decide, okay, this new proposal is the one we're gonna adopt. And that like at least 50% or more

moved to that new proposal, that is Bitcoin. That is the chain that has the most people on it using the most computational power. So it's truly a consensus mechanism. All these people have to come into agreement. Now there's pros and cons of that. The downside of it is it's harder to get that many people to agree on something,

so it can go a little slower. But the upside is that you're never gonna get some small group of people who can take it over and unilaterally do something to harm Bitcoin. Okay, that was actually another question of mine. I mean, Michael Saylor. Yeah. You know, I mean, he is just buying like shit tons

of Bitcoin. And so is that, is it good for the, for the Bitcoin market for somebody to have that big of a stake in it? I think it's good. I mean, he's obviously a bull on Bitcoin, but I don't, it's not like he can own like 50% of all Bitcoin or something like that. It's too big right now, like in many trillions, right?

Okay. So, you know, there's gonna be various groups that come in and try to acquire Bitcoin positions, but that's good. I think it's just driving up the demand. Okay, okay. And then just another question I had was, you know, will we ever see anything like investing for your kids like IRAs, Roth IRAs, 529 college tuition thing?

Like, is there anything like that that's going to come in the future where you can set aside money for your kids or your grandkids or whoever you want and without opening up all these different wallets? Yeah, well, so in some ways this is already happening today. In fact, like there's some members of my family, when they were born, I gave them like a Bitcoin, right? That their parents kind of put in a wallet just to hold on for future.

And they were kind of laughing at me too, because when I did it, it was like $200. And I was like, hey, maybe someday this will pay for their college tuition or whatever. And they kind of laughed at me, but they haven't sold it yet, so that's good. So in some ways it's already happening, but I think these IRAs and these different types

of tax advantageous accounts, I'd have to go look at the specific details on each of them, but there's certain that have permissible types of investments in there that are allowed or not allowed. We're constantly trying to chip away at these rules to make it easier where, I mean, people should absolutely be able to hold crypto in there

just like any other asset class. And actually we need to make it easier for people to do that on Coinbase. That's something we're still working on is to open up these kind of retirement accounts and tax advantageous accounts. We have some customers are asking for it now. So we'll probably have to do it soon.

Okay, okay. And then I had kind of touched on this earlier, you know, Bitcoin, I mean, there's a handful of them that seem to be the mainstays that are going to be around for a long time. But then we see all these, for lack of a better term, trash coins coming out and there's been, you know, there's been some scams in the industry. There's been you know, there's been some scams in the industry FTX Sam Bankman Fried, I mean had all these big-time celebrities Bouching for it turned out to be a complete scam. I mean, yeah, how do people navigate that that are new in the industry?

Yeah, so there's no there's no doubt. I mean crypto has attracted its fair share of scammers, right? Just like anything else, you know, yeah Yeah I mean like the internet, the early internet, and even still to this day, right, is like these emails from Nigerian princes and all kinds of scams on the internet. Technology's a double-edged sword, right? Anytime you make a technology, like a shovel,

you can use it to build something or hit someone over the head with it or whatever, right? And financial services technology, I think, does attract some of the wrong actors, but it also attracts the right people who can build things. My mental model of the world I always try to remember is, I think, roughly speaking, 99% of people are good, 1% are bad, so there's always gonna be bad people

who try to do these things, and some of them can attract a lot of headlines and get really big in the public psyche, but you have to remember there's always going to be bad people who try to do these things. And some of them can attract a lot of headlines and get really big in the public psyche. But you have to remember, like there's 99 people behind every one bad one that's trying to do the right thing and build good things in the world. So we have to be careful not to like, just say the technology is bad because 1% of people, bad people try to abuse it. But I think for the average person coming into the industry, I mean, look, it's a lot of basic stuff, right?

It's like, if someone's offering you some crazy yields that sound too good to be true, like it probably is. If you're just learning about something for the first time, don't put all your money into it. I would say that's true of crypto, but it's true of anything in life, right? Like a lot of people who are getting into crypto for the first time, I tell them, all right, put like 1% of your net worth into Bitcoin or something, and just see how it? Like a lot of people who are getting into crypto for the first time, you know, I tell them, all right,

put like 1% of your net worth into Bitcoin or something and just see how it goes for a couple of years. And, you know, if you like it and you wanna start trading other ones, you're learning about it, okay, put in 2%, 5%, whatever. There's people who have like 50% or more of their portfolio in crypto too, but they have different levels of risk

and comfort with that. And then of course, you gotta figure out what company to trust, right? Like sometimes there's companies overseas that are offering certain products and services that are not allowed here in the US. And that can be interesting because it allows you to live on the frontier,

but if you're gonna live on the frontier, you know what? You might take some arrows too. And so you've got to sort of have more personal responsibility. Like the government's not gonna protect you in that situation. You need to know what you're doing to really look out for yourself.

So I'd say, like in investing, there's no return without risk. If anybody thinks it's like a, this is a risk-free return or whatever, that doesn't really exist. So you know, that's doesn't really exist So, you know got to use good judgment sweet smarts. Mm-hmm. And then just another question, you know we're talking a little bit about prepping at breakfast and The big argument with crypto and

Which is a little ridiculous to me because Is basically what happens if the grid goes down? You have no access to your Bitcoin. Well, you probably don't have access to your money too because the financial institutions won't have any power either. But I just want to know what your thoughts are on that. Yeah.

Well, if the electrical grid or the whole internet went down, I mean, yeah, so society is going to be very disrupted at that point. Your Bitcoin won't be going anywhere. It's not like you're going to lose it. Like, let's say that there's an outage for a month or a year or like, you know, five years. At least, you know, your crypto is still safe. It's not going to go anywhere. There is a hypothetical way actually that people could continue to do transactions without any internet,

where it's actually using your phone, Bluetooth, just to talk to each other and you could actually have more of a mesh network, they would call it. So that is possible in that kind of situation, but I think it would certainly be disruptive and challenging. In that type of situation where you're talking about that level of societal collapse,

probably things like ammunition and gold, those start to be a little bit more like your fallback. So I think people should also own gold, right? I don't think it's not like exclusively one or the other, but in a world where civilization more or less continues to exist with electricity and things like that, I think Bitcoin is probably a superior version to gold. So.

Thank you, thank you. All right, let's talk about the road to Coinbase. Yeah. So I know you got inspired by the white papers. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was December of 2010, I first read that Bitcoin white paper. At that time I was working as an early employee at Airbnb,

a software engineer trying to help them move money to different countries around the world. And reading that white paper really captivated my attention. I was like, wow, this is fascinating. And I kept, I reread it a few times, went to some of those Bitcoin meetups I mentioned. How did you come across it? Well, yeah, I was just cruising.

There's this website called Hacker News, which sometimes people in Silicon Valley read that has just technology and coder type updates. And yeah, it got posted on there in December 2010, I think is where I first saw it. And I went and talked to some of my friends about it, who I was working with at that time. I was like, this paper is really cool.

Like, have you seen it? What do you think? And a lot of my smart friends, they're like, I don't get it. This doesn't make any sense. Like, this sounds like a scam or something. And so I kind of had a lot of self doubt about it. I was like, I don't know.

I think this is kind of a cool idea, but a lot of people I talked to didn't seem to think that. So for about six months, I was just thinking about it, reading stuff, going and meeting people at these meetups. And sometimes when I can't get an idea out of my head and I keep thinking about it and going down this rabbit hole, I'm like, okay, I gotta build something.

I gotta try doing something because I don't know what's gonna happen, but if I take some action in this direction, like it might produce more information. And later this kind of created a good thing I like to say to people, which is like action produces information. You know, if you're ever unsure, just like do anything. Cause like if you do, even if you do the wrong thing, it'll help you figure

out the right thing to do. So I started working on a prototype on nights and weekends, uh, while I was, you know, I was at my job at Airbnb nights and weekends, I'd come home and work like 7 PM.m. to midnight on this prototype, which was a simple Bitcoin wallet. And I wasn't really thinking of it exactly like a company, I was just trying to like learn about Bitcoin and figure out if I could make a simpler way

for people to use it. The analogy I kind of roughly had in my head was, you know, email is another decentralized protocol. A lot of people don't know this, but underneath when you're sending emails, it's using a protocol called SMTP, which would be sort of like Bitcoin in this example. And you could in theory run your own email server, but most people don't do that.

They use like Gmail or Outlook or something. And that's kind of like a hosted server in the cloud. They sort of deal with all the security updates and how these email servers talk to each other. And so I was thinking there's probably gonna be a company kind of like that for Bitcoin. That's like Gmail, right? Like I'll run the servers for you,

worry about the security and the backups. And the average person is gonna benefit from this, but they don't need to have to understand exactly how Bitcoin works and all the complexity behind it. So I started building this as a prototype and I applied to this startup incubator called Y Combinator. Some people might've heard of it,

but it's kind of famous in Silicon Valley because they'll give you like 150K as a check if you have a really early stage idea for a company. And I applied to this Y Combinator program and I got invited to interview. I was trying to find a co-founder. I couldn't find the right co-founder. Long story short, I got accepted into this program or offered to join it. And they're like, well, you have to quit your job. We'll give you 150K and you come work on this thing

full time if you want to really do it. And so I had kind of a tough decision to make because Airbnb I knew was going to be a big company and I was an early employee there. So I had stock options. You know, that would have been like the comfortable path. Right? I think if I had just stayed at Airbnb

and just let my options vest, I probably would have been worth like tens of millions of dollars. And I had like maybe 20 grand in my bank account that time as just being a software engineer in Silicon Valley, traveling a little bit. I'd made a little bit of money and saved it, but I could tell I was on a rocket ship and this was gonna be a good company. But I was like, I really wanted to try to go build something new in the world. And I was willing to take that risk because I think I was 30 years old, unmarried, I didn't have kids. And I had this really deep desire as well.

I was like, I wanna try to do something important with my life, you know? I don't know if it was like an insecurity that came from like just people not recognizing me or you know? I don't know if it was like an insecurity that came from like just people not recognizing me or, you know, I wanted girls to like me or like whatever it was, I was like, I want to go to do something important, like it's something crazy and something hardcore,

you know, that really has an impact. And you know, for whatever reason, I was like, I have to do this and really give it a shot. And if it fails, like I'll be okay with that. But if I never tried it, I would probably regret it. Right? So, I don't know, it might feel similar to like, why were you called to like be in the military, whatever.

I never felt like I had taken a risk and really done something that would have greater significance. So, I decided to quit my job. I called my parents, told them that. My mom was like, oh my gosh, like are you gonna have health insurance? Or like, you know, shoot. My parents always worry about these, you know,

the practical things. And I was like, I don't know, I'll probably get health insurance, it's fine, mom. So this guy gave me 150K, I'm good, right? And so I quit my job to go work on this thing full time and I joined, YCommunity has this three month program where you go there and you basically with a bunch of other founders and hackers

and you just grind like 12, 14 hour days and you try to create a prototype and at the end of the three months, they put you in a room full of like a couple hundred investors like Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists and you give your like five minute pitch along with like a hundred other companies and then you see who wants to invest.

And, you know, at that time I was really just solo by myself and I didn't really get that much attention from investors. Like I was out, I was trying to, I think they'd given me the 150K check. I was trying to raise a million dollars as my, at the end of the three months from investors. And I think I got like three or 400K. Like I got a little bit of money,

but there wasn't enough interest to get like a million dollar investment at the end of this. And I talked to a bunch of these venture capitalist guys and a lot of them were like, this, you're gonna make like a new kind of money to like compete with the dollar? Like what, this doesn't, you know, why would anybody trust you?

This doesn't make any sense, right? And I was like, no, no, it's not me creating it. It's a decentralized protocol. It's Bitcoin, right? And they, like, no, no, it's not me creating it. It's a decentralized protocol. It's Bitcoin, right? And some people were just like, get out of my office. They didn't understand what I was doing. But there were a couple people that had already read about Bitcoin

and they were pretty excited about it. They were just looking for the right company to back. And I did get some good seed investments and things like that. And that's when I raised that initial seed round and then I was lucky enough to meet my co-founder, Fred Ursam. I can keep going, but some of the pieces started to come together in the early stages of like finding the right investors, finding the right early people to work with, finding a co-founder.

And we also made a big decision at that time to actually go and try to get licenses to operate in the United States and be like a trusted legal business. Cause a lot of the crypto people I met at that time, they were kind of trying to fly under the radar. They were trying to build these offshore entities cause they hated the US government. And I was like, you know what?

The company that wins in this space, you can't just be like underground flying under the radar. the US government. And I was like, you know what? The company that wins in this space, you can't just be like underground, flying under the radar. Like, you know, if you eventually it gets big enough, like the government's gonna come talk to you and ask you why you're doing this without a license or whatever.

So we went and got money transmitter licenses are called in the US. This is the same thing that like PayPal has and these different companies. So we decided to build it in the US, take a trusted and compliant approach. And you know, that was the early days. Like I can tell you, there's lots of good stories

about like finding product market fit. How did, you know, cause a lot of times you're building these prototypes and nobody cares. You put it out there in the world and like people come and look at it and nobody gives a shit, right? And yeah, I mean, I don't know. You want to hear that story? I can tell you a little bit. Yeah, I want to hear it. Yeah, I mean, so this is the hard thing about starting a company, right? And yeah, I mean, I don't know, you want to hear that story? I can tell you a little bit.

Yeah, I want to hear it. Yeah, I mean, so this is the hard thing about starting a company, right? Is like, you try to, this could be anything, like a podcast, a coffee shop, but it's certainly true in tech startups too. You know, you make your version one and you put it out there in the world

and usually like no one cares, right? That's the default. There's so much noise of things that people are going on. This is trending and this is, you know, and so how do you break through the noise? And so I had put out this prototype of a simple Bitcoin, hosted Bitcoin wallet, along with my co-founder, Fred Ersam,

and we posted it just on the internet, like on Reddit and some of these forums, and like a hundred people would come sign up and then no one would stick around and use the product. And so they teach you this thing in Y Combinator, which is like how to find product market fit. Like how do you get your initial users to want to actually come back and use the product

on a recurring basis? And what you basically do is you just like go and talk to them and get their ideas and feedback. And then you go try to improve your product. And then you go talk to them again, and you improve it again, and you talk to your customers again, and you improve the product.

It sounds simple, but like a lot of people don't do that. When they're trying to start a company, especially tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, they get caught up in all this other bullshit. They're like going to fancy conferences and like trying to write really amazing blog posts and try to sound smart and you know, just they over optimize on talking to every venture capitalist. It's like, no, you got to just talk to your customers and improve the product.

Talk to customers and that's how you get a product to actually find product market fit. So long story short, so I... How would you talk to, how many customers were there at the beginning? Yeah, so when we put out the first version, it's like maybe a couple hundred people came and signed up. And then they, but they didn't stick around. They didn't keep using the product. And so I remember I was just emailing random people

who had signed up and I'm like, hey, I built this app. I'd love to get on the phone and talk to you about it. So I would just call these people out of the blue. And I remember this one guy was talking on the phone. I was like, hey, I noticed you signed up for the app and you didn't come back like any feedback. And he's like, well, yeah, I mean, it was pretty cool. Like I would use the app, but I don't really have any Bitcoin. And I was like, oh, that's interesting.

Well, when you signed up, if there had been like a buy button right in the app, would you have used that? And he's like, I don't know, probably. And it sounds so obvious, but at the time you couldn't actually buy Bitcoin on Coinbase. If you already had Bitcoin, you could put it in there and use it. I don't know why I didn't think about this beforehand. Some of these talking to customers, sometimes you have these like obvious moments come back to you.

But so I was like, okay, well, let's try to just put like a buy Bitcoin button in the app. And to make that work, I had to go get a bunch of stuff done. We had to hook up like a payment method. We had to get a bunch of legal things figured out. We had to hook up to one of the early Bitcoin exchanges to source the Bitcoin. Anyway, long story short, we got that launched and like people started using it, right? Like, and it was like every day more people would use it than the prior day

because it became the simplest way to buy Bitcoin and people started to spread the word about it. Back in that time to buy Bitcoin, you had to go to one of these overseas exchanges like Mt. Gox in Japan, you had to wire money and it was inconvenient. And so just through that process of talk, by the way, that was not like the first thing we tried.

There was like probably a dozen other things we talked to customers about, tried to improve the product that didn't work. And eventually we hit on one of them and the product became good enough that there was more people coming back every week trying to use the product than had the prior week. Not because we were manually talking to them,

they were just word of mouth. They were starting to tell other people. And that was the minute we were like, oh, the metrics started to go up. And the biggest problem became not trying to find product market fit. It became how do you keep up with demand? And how do we scale this company? How do we start to hire more people? Because we were getting a bunch of customer support tickets.

How do we go raise more money? Because we were using all of our working capital to try to source the Bitcoin on these exchanges and moving tons of money around the world. So that was the moment we were like, okay, we're ready to go raise the next round of financing. And we felt like we had the kernel of something that was now starting to grow. People actually cared about it. And it came with, it like solved one problem, and then it brought it along a whole other set of problems to go deal with. Wow, wow. How fast did you see it grow? You know, that's, when product market fit,

especially with tech companies starts to work, it's shocking how fast it can grow because it's not like a local business, you know, a sandwich shop or something, only a certain number of people will drive by it every day or whatever. But it went from like a hundred people using it every day to, or it was maybe easier to talk about in terms of people signing up every day.

It was like, instead of like a hundred people signing up today, it was, it would be like a thousand and then it was like 10,000. And then I remember one day it was like 25,000 people signed up in one day. And I went to, you know, if you look at these different state sports stadiums and I was Googling sports, that stadium holds 50,000 people.

I was like, it looks like a ton of crazy number of people. And like, holy shit, all 50,000 people signed up in one day. You know, and then to give you a sense of the kind of problems we started to encounter at that point was like, you can imagine if you have 50,000 a day people signing up, you're getting a lot of customer support tickets. We had no customer support team. So between like 9 p.m. and midnight,

my co-founder and I and our first employee, we would answer all these customer support tickets. Holy shit. Yeah, so we were developing a backlog of like 10,000, 20,000 customer support tickets. Holy shit. Yeah, so we were, and we had, we were developing a backlog of like 10,000, 20,000 customer support tickets where like nobody was hearing from us. And this was a big problem. And then, you know, we had a bunch of hackers come in

and try to start to hack into our webs, into the app, because they realized, oh, more people are storing money here. And we had to create a whole, that cold storage system I told you about earlier, where we started to store all the funds offline. We had to create a whole, that cold storage system I told you about earlier, where we started to store all the funds offline, we had to build that rapidly. Because if we had gotten hacked at that point,

we would have been insolvent out of business. And I'll tell you a little story actually from that day, because you can imagine, we were kind of sleep deprived. We were working 14 hour days, seven days a week, trying to keep up with all this. And I remember we were in the office one day and eating lunch and there was just like maybe three or four of us around the table.

And somebody is looking at their computer and they're like, hey, there's a lot of like refunds going out to customers. That's weird. Like we all looked around and no, none of us are doing it. Who's sending all these refunds? We realized this hacker had broken into one of our systems that like an admin interface on the back end that allows you to issue refunds to customers.

And he was just sending refunds to himself as fast as he could, right? And we're like, oh shit. So we go in there, we shut down the site temporarily, customers can't access it either. And we're like, how shit. So we go in there, we shut down the site temporarily, customers can't access it either. And we're like, how did he get in here? We start trying to debug it. We find the way that he accessed this particular system

and we patch it and we come back online. In the time that he was able to send out all these refunds as fast as he could, you know, I think we had lost maybe $50,000 or something like that. Now at that time, we had only raised, I think the three or 400,000 that I mentioned. And so 50,000 out of three or 400,000, we were still alive, you know?

But if he had started doing that at midnight while we were all asleep, we would have been out of business by morning. Wow. You know, because we caught it within like 10 minutes. Yeah. And it's pure luck that like Coinbase would not exist today. That was like a coin flip.

That if that hacker had waited till midnight to start doing it and we hadn't noticed, we would have been insolvent by morning. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Damn. I mean, what was the moment that really got you

when you were like, holy shit, this is gonna work? Well, there was a lot of moments along the way where I knew that we had a chance to really make this big, but it was not guaranteed. There was a lot of ways we could fuck it up along the way. I mean, that's an example where we were seeing a lot of demand, we were starting to generate revenue, but were our systems hardened enough where these attackers couldn't get in? Obviously not. There were some gaps right at that time. So that was a risk. the cybersecurity risk was very real. That was how a lot of crypto companies died, right?

And then the other big one was compliance and like government. We thought the government might just come by and shut it down, the whole thing. So those were probably two of the biggest risks. And then there were also competitors, right? So we were off to the races, but then we started to see really solid companies pop up overseas and in the US.

Yeah, I mean, there was definitely, we also thought that, by the way, there could have been like a flaw found in the Bitcoin algorithm or something like that. That would have just blown up the whole thing. We had looked at it, we couldn't find any flaw in the algorithm. We thought like that, that would have just blown up the whole thing. You know, we had looked at it, we couldn't find any flaw in the algorithm.

We thought, okay, this will work, it'll stand the test of time, but who knows? Like maybe some smart mathematician came up with something we didn't think of, right? Now, so anyway, all those risks we were able to mitigate over time. And I think it got big enough where enough Americans started to use it that the government now

can't shut it down. It's just, it'd be political suicide to try to shut it down. Like people want freedom in the United States. They want the ability to own gold, guns. They want Bitcoin, like all these things. Yeah, so, but in the early days when it was small, somebody in the government,

if they had had their act together, could have tried to kill the whole thing. I mean, Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler tried to, right? But it was too late. So those were the risks along the way where we didn't know if it was going to work. Summer's here. And if you're anything like me, you didn't spend the winter just sitting around. You stayed sharp and kept moving.

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So I just want to ask you now, what does economic freedom mean to you? Yeah. I think economic freedom to me is, it's your money, right? You should be able to do whatever you want with it. There's a lot of middlemen in society that are blocking payments, taking fees, slowing things down.

Economists would call it this idea of property rights, which is basically, can you actually own stuff or can it be taken away from you without your permission? And in many countries of the world, actually the money in your bank account can just be yanked out by the government. In Cyprus in the 2010s, there was an incident like this where the government passed some resol- they were like, the government was having deficits and they had some law they

passed where they just took like 50% of the money out of everyone's bank account. So obviously you don't actually own it, right? When was that? I think it was in the 2010s. Yeah, or maybe the 2000s. Yeah. So there's examples like that in history. Same thing in Argentina, by the way.

There's times where the government has just printed so much currency that it devalued it. That's another form of theft, basically, as high inflation where they devalue everyone's assets to just give the government more money, right? So property rights is this kind of like, it's a foundation that's required for all progress in civilization. Like if you can't actually keep what belongs to you,

or like, you know, if there could be some gang that runs through the neighborhood and just like kicks you out of your house and takes all your stuff, you know, it's hard to like make a real plan for the future and try to build a company or like do anything good for society if your shit can just be taken from you at any given time, right?

And it's the same thing with what we would call like sound money, right? Can the value of your money or your wealth just be eroded or seized from you? So property rights, sound money, these are foundational to all progress in society. And most people in the world actually don't have very high economic freedom.

We sort of take it for granted in the US, even in the US, I'd say it's a little under threat. Like we talked about the inflation of the dollar. There's incidents where people have felt like their property rights are under threat here, eminent domain or whatever you wanna talk about. But in general, the US is pretty good. We have pretty good rule of law.

Most countries in the world, that's not the case. And so that's what economic freedom means. I think crypto is like a, it's the key piece of technology that can give economic freedom to anybody in the world, as long as they have a smartphone. They can sort of opt out of that local system that they're in if it's corrupt or not meeting their needs.

Why do you think crypto, or excuse me, why do you think Coinbase is the most trusted exchange out there? Yeah. What have you done that's different than the other ones? Yeah, it's a great point. When we do surveys by third parties or just blind surveys, we do come back at the most trusted brand of crypto.

I think it's a few things. One is that companies are a reflection of their founders, right? And I think the fact that I was willing to put my name behind it, I'm based in the United States, I'm an American citizen, I think just my demeanor, I try to just be like, do the right thing, kind of tell the truth. People may or may not like me, I don't know, but at least they're like, this guy, I don't think he's full of shit or a scammer, right? And I think we've also tried to follow like a compliant and regulated approach.

You know, like in general, I'm like probably more for like deregulation and like free markets, but we've like followed the law, we've gone and got every license that we needed to do in the US, in other countries where we operate. So I think those things, we also, we've reached a certain size and scale now where we have a track record of doing this successfully.

Like, we're storing crypto for like 140 different government institutions now. If you look at federal, state and local, we work with like the US Marshall service, for instance, at the federal level. There's other federal agencies we work with, but that we can't talk about. But you know, we work with some of the largest institutions

in the world too, like BlackRock and these folks. We're a public company. So our financial statements have been audited by the big four accounting firms. They can come in there and validate that we're actually saying what we're saying is true, the money's really there, these kinds of things. So I think all those things have contributed

to our brand having a lot of trust, and you have to earn it every day. I mean, there's times where we got backed up on customer support tickets, and we didn't invest enough in customer support. Or there's times where we've had hackers try to break into our systems and we've had to make customers whole, right? Or they'll call customers and try to impersonate Coinbase support and trick them into moving

their crypto somewhere, right? And in general, we try to like stand behind our customers and reimburse them when things happen that are our fault. And we try to go push back on the government when it does something unethical and tries to take our customers' rights away. So people, I think they really appreciate that as well. So those are probably all factors that contribute to trust.

How do you lead your company? Well, it's a broad question. I mean, there's kind of the tactical, which is about once a week I get together. Usually on Mondays we get together as an executive team and we just do a deep dive on anything that needs to get worked out and decided. I try to push decision-making down into the organization so that I'm not a

bottleneck to things getting done. Like oftentimes we're about 5,000 people now. And in these organizations, as they grow, oftentimes like people get frustrated with, I don't know, there's like seven people who have input on this thing. No one's in charge. Like if everything has to go up to Brian as the CEO, like you're just not gonna be able to execute quickly.

So I try to name who's the decider and push it down in the organization so stuff can just keep moving. Try to have a really high bar for talent. You know, like be very selective on the way in, performance manage people out, make it merit based. And then, you know, we have a healthy balance I think of, we're investing in our core business today,

but we're always trying to like build the next thing on the frontier and we try a lot of small bets and some of them don't work and that's okay. Like in a lot of big, a lot of bigger companies, you can actually, they get risk averse, right? Like if somebody tries some new project and it doesn't work, it's like a black mark against them and it's box up their career. Coinbase, that's not the case.

We want people who are willing to try innovative ideas on the frontier with small teams, like, you know, two to five people. It's almost like a startup within the company. And if they try it and it doesn't work small teams, like, you know, two to five people. It's almost like a startup within the company. And if they try it and it doesn't work, try another one, you know, and eventually these things break through and you can have innovation happen in big companies that create lots of products that people want to use. And so it's not just like, we found one thing that works and that's all we're going to do forever.

What are some of the things that your special teams have innovated? Well, an example would be like USDC. We co-created that with digital dollar. Another one is Base, which is like a very fast, cheap blockchain that allows all these payments to happen instantly over the world. And we just released a new app that lets these content creators get paid directly. You know, another one is that we are creating a platform where anybody can integrate crypto into their company. So you might be familiar with like, you know,

Amazon Web Services, right? It's like Amazon's the retail shop, but they also said, hey, all this computing and data centers, maybe if other companies want to use it, they can plug into it. We've similarly created something called Coinbase Developer Platform, CDP, and for people who want to integrate crypto,

custody, payments, trading, et cetera, they can just use the services that we've built and plug crypto into any company they want. So there's various products like that that we've built over time, which are, I think, hopefully continuing to push on the frontier. You know, another thing that I like about you

is you don't bend to the culture wars. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about it. Yeah, well, okay, I think what you're referring to is I put out a blog post a while back called Mission First, which was said, we're gonna be apolitical here at Coinbase. We're just gonna focus on the mission of the company and not any of the other activists kind of social justice

warrior policies that were running rampant at that time. And it had a big impact, not on Coinbase, but also I think a lot of the tech industry. I'll give you kind of the backstory on that. So yeah, it was around 2020, I believe. You know, as CEO, you always host these open mic sessions and town halls at the company. And normally people would be asking questions

about our products and competitors and regulators and like, how are we gonna win? And around that time, I noticed we started to get more questions from the employees at these town halls about issues in society that were totally unrelated to our business. They were asking about like police brutality or guns or Middle East stuff or social issues, right?

I remember thinking this was kind of strange at the time because I was like, that's not why we're here. Like I'm just like anybody else. I'm trying to understand these issues. I read about it sometime, but why are they asking me what I think about police brutality or something like that? That's not what our company's focused on.

And it got to kind of like a fever pitch at a certain point where it almost was like they were trying to put, see who could make the executives on stage like squirm the most with like the most uncomfortable, you know, difficult question. And this culminated with, at one point an employee stood up and they said,

I wanna know if this company is going to support Black Lives Matter. And I kind of, I didn't really know much about Black Lives Matter at that time and what that organization stood for. And I declined to answer. I was like, I don't know. Well, I'm happy to look into that,

but I'm not gonna commit at this moment. And they did like a little bit of grandstanding and they kind of held the mic and they said, that's not good enough. I need to know. Like, are you as a CEO going to support Black Lives Matter? This was kind of in the fever pitch of George Floyd and all this kind of stuff.

And I declined to answer. And so after the town hall, um, 300 employees did a walkout, uh, where they basically like refused to work and they kind of went on protest and left. Are you serious? Yeah. This was, I didn't realize the extent to which this had happened, but like a bunch of kind of this activism mindset had infiltrated the company. And a lot of this originated, I later learned a lot of this originated in the universities.

They were kind of teaching about like Marxism and how to speak truth to power and like be an activist inside these organizations. So culturally, this was like reaching a fever pitch. And- How many employees did you have at the time when 300 walked out? Probably one to 2000 or something.

So GoodCharm did a walkout. And actually it's funny, employees did you have at the time when 300 walked out? It was probably one to 2000 or something. So GoodCharm did a walkout. And actually, it's funny, I remember there was one guy in our team, John, he's actually a veteran and all these guys were like posting in Slack about I'm walking out and I'm holding the counter. And he was one of the only people who posted, he's like, you guys can leave if you want,

I'm staying here to support our customers. So he had the balls to like stand up to this in the moment, which was hilarious. But I always appreciated him for that. But anyway, all these people walked out. And so I pulled the executive team together and I had never experienced something like this as CEO. I was like, what is going on?

Like, what the hell is Black Lives Matter? Like, you know, and somebody on my team came in and they were like, I think it's just like, it's just asking for like equality amongst all people. And I was like, okay. Later, of course, I found out they wanted to like defund the police and they had all this kind of like crazy misallocation of funds.

There was all kinds of issues with BLM, but you might remember at that time, like every company in America, it felt like was putting out these flags and it was- Oh, I remember. Yeah. So, I was, initially I was like, okay, well, if it's just about equality or something,

like put out some statement and let's get people back to work. And people came back to work, but I felt like something was very wrong here. I was like, we have a fundamental misunderstanding about what we're doing here. I thought we were here to kind of build, create more economic freedom with crypto. And these people think that this company

should become an activist company for social justice. And BLM, like we are not on the same page. And what I realized is I had failed as a leader. Like this, it was one of those kinds of moments where the frog was slowly getting boiled. Like people were sometimes asked me these things in the company and I was kind of walking on eggshells around it, cause I was like,

I didn't really know how to deal with it. I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we're, we're, we're just kind of trying to be good for everyone. I made a lot of very vague statements and it culminated in this walkout. And the more I started to think about it, I was like, okay, either I need to go as CEO

because this is how companies are run now, like where you have to answer all these social justice things, or they need to go. Because I don't want to work in a company like this where we're just jumping to whatever the current issue is, trying to virtue signal and touch on some giant, you know, whether it's whatever, Hamas or whatever it is that day, you know, and like we should be focused on one thing.

It's hard enough to change one thing in the world. That we can't be like jumping around to some new issue every month. And I don't like this environment where like the company, the employees feel like they can come in and hold the company hostage to whatever their current thing is. So I drafted this post, which basically said,

hey, guess what? At Coinbase, we're gonna focus on the mission, increasing economic freedom. It's okay if you can have whatever political beliefs or anything you want outside of that, but like keep it outside of work, right? We're here to focus on work, at work, which sounds like kind of an obvious statement.

But at that time, this was highly contrarian. Let's just put it that way. And I knew that this was gonna be controversial if I put it out. In fact, there were people inside the company who begged me not to post this. They said, this will destroy the company. Like, you know, an underrepresented person

will never work at this company again. And I was like, as a young CEO, I was kind of like, is that true? That doesn't sound right. So I went and talked to like groups of employees, like including our black employees and other groups. And I kind of asked them and I was like, do you care if we're like a social justice company?

And they were like, no, no, we just want to like, come in here, do good work, like learn things, you know, have an impact, like make more money. Like that's the kind of stuff everybody wants. And so my instinct was telling me the level of fear is like totally out of proportion to reality. And some people told me, if you post this, like 50 or 60% of all employees are going to quit or they're going to walk out again and protest, it's going to be an even bigger protest. And it was be an even bigger protest.

And it was like this kind of like moment where I was like, have I lost control of the company? Or am I willing to stand up to this nonsense? And so I decided to post it, and I posted it and I announced it to the company. I was scared shitless to be honest with you. Normally when I'm up there talking in front of the company, I can like, I feel fine.

Like my leg was like shaking, my voice cracked, like I was a teenager. I felt, I was like, you ever, I don't know if you ever have that moment where you're like trying to give a talk to somebody and then there's like a voice in your head kind of evaluating how you're doing at the same time. You're like, oh, I'm fucking it up, you know.

So it was like the most awkward presentation I've ever given to the company. I almost like was like, wanted to cry. I was like, this is gonna, I knew it was gonna like piss off a ton of people. And afterwards I said, anybody who's not on board with this will give you like a three month severance and like, you know, help you find your next job. Like totally, you know, it's on, it's my fault.

Like I didn't make this clear upfront, but this is the kind of company we're gonna be going forward. So we gotta all be going forward. So we got to all be on the same page. And 5% of the company quit. They took the exit package. And 95% of the company was aligned. We were all ready to get shit done,

go in the same direction. Best thing we ever did for the company. And suddenly like a few things happened after that. Like one New York Times and a bunch of mainstream journalists started writing hit pieces for the company. And suddenly like a few things happened after that. Like one, New York Times and a bunch of mainstream journalists started writing hit pieces on the company about how we were racist and all this nonsense. Oh, go figure. Yeah. By the way, a year later,

it didn't change the demographics of the company at all. It was either the same or better metrics across all the things you look at, by the way. We just try to go on merit now. Who cares like what your sexual orientation is or whatever. It was either the same or better metrics across all the things you look at, by the way. We just try to go on merit now. Who cares what your sexual orientation is or whatever? I don't care. We just try to hire people based on merit.

But all of their accusations about racism and stuff, it was completely false. And then all these other CEOs of other companies started calling me and being like, holy shit, how did you do that? Like, I want to do that. And I, and I was like, well, you can just do it and like, but, you know, people were kind of scared to do it. Some of them did do it. And I think a lot of companies moved in that direction.

So, you know, we took some arrows for it to be kind of early on this, but I think it was great and I loved it. Like, um, it made us such a stronger company and I've now we've actually hired, been able to hire a lot of the best people who've come in and they're like, I joined Coinbase because of that blog post, like I want to, yeah. I mean, where, where did these people go? I mean, you did it, Elon did it with X and now we're starting to see it at Google. Facebook. lots of tech

companies like followed suit on that. Where do these people go? And that's a black mark. I mean, for anybody, I mean, the Silicon Valley tech network seems to be pretty tight. You guys all seem to know each other and so, and everybody knows what's going on and that hit the New York Times and everything. So I mean, if you see somebody that left Coinbase at that time error or left Twitter during that time, I mean, it's like a black mark.

It's like, oh, you were, oh, until that date. Okay. So you're one of those. Where do they go? Yeah. You know, I haven't really like spent a lot of time tracking that, but you're one of those. Where do they go? Yeah, you know, I haven't really like spent a lot of time tracking that, but you're right. I mean, we do look at that of when people worked at different companies and you can kind of draw a story.

And then you can go talk to them as an individual and get more nuance, but I mean, look, there were some companies that just leaned even harder into it. And they're like, hey, I know we make suitcases or like CRM software or whatever, but we're actually about some bigger thing in the world. And if people wanted to work at these social justice companies,

they're welcome to go do that. Um, not to mention, I mean, talking about social justice and what you're trying to do is economic freedom. I thought like, okay, like the fuck are you complaining about? Exactly. Like if somebody's really into like Marxism and socialism, it's like, the fuck are you complaining about? Exactly. Like if somebody's really into like Marxism and socialism, it's like not a good fit. You know, you should not work at CoinBit.

So there was, I think we've been much more clear with people now when they joined the company. And so that's what I had failed to do was just create clarity. Cause I was afraid of upsetting people. And that was a good moment for me as a leader to be like, okay, your job is not to be liked, it's to be clear about what we're doing here.

And then people can opt in or not, that's fine. Let's talk about, there was one other thing, took on the SEC, we talked about that, and then extortion by hackers. What was that all about? Yeah, well this has been a more recent one where, so we've always had hackers trying to break into our systems and we spent a lot of time building secure storage

and I mentioned earlier kind of like how we divide up keys and they never touched the internet and they're like distributed all over the world in these like super secure locations and we'd pen test it and everything. But there are hackers who tried to do something a little different recently, which was they actually started contacting

our customer support agents and trying to bribe them to turn over customer information. Now, our customer support agents don't have access, they can't like move your money, right? But they can turn over things like, you know, people's personal information, like their name, address, maybe their balance or something like that. Because they're looking at that

to try to help customers with their problem. And, you know, we started getting customer support agents get offered like 250 grand bribes for some of these things, which is crazy, right? And unfortunately, especially in some of our facilities, we operate overseas on this. If you ask a thousand people, you offer a thousand people 250K

to turn over some information like that, they're gonna find one or two bad apples. And so that's what started happening. Some of these agents were actually, cause they're not allowed to or two bad apples. And so that's what started happening. Some of these agents were actually, cause they're not allowed to use their own computer, they're not allowed, it's a lockdown system. They're not even allowed to bring in their own phone. They have to use like a work phone.

But what some of these folks started doing was smuggling in a personal phone and taking photos of the screen with some of the customer information and giving it to these attackers. And then the attackers would call up our customers and say, hey, this Coinbase support, like, are you blah, blah, blah, who lives at this address? And it would create credibility and they would try to tell them, hey, your account has been compromised like you need to move your funds immediately and like, can you send it to this

address and sort of trick people into sending their funds to the attacker. So we noticed that this was happening and we start, by the way, we refunded the customers who were affected by this, so none of them had any loss. So the attacker who had gotten this information, the information they had gotten was starting to get less and less useful because we were cracking down on it and hardening our systems. There's a whole bunch of ways we can do that by the way. But what happened is they basically, once the information started to be less useful, they sent us a ransom demand and they said,

hey, we're gonna leak all this customer information, send it to journalists, and if you don't pay us $20 million. So we kind of got together as a team, our chief security officer and these guys are great. Been working on this stuff for a long time. And they kind of said, look, we shouldn't pay the ransom because,

yeah, maybe they'll hold off releasing information for a few months, but guess what always happens? They come back and demand more, like three months later, six months later, and how good are we gonna feel if we give $20 million to these criminals and it just funds their next attack and like, you know, just emboldens them, right?

And so we came up with this idea in the room, why don't we flip the ransom on them? We'll put out a $20 million bounty for any information leading to their arrest and conviction. And this was kind of a controversial idea in the- Nice. Yeah. In the security community, a lot of people later told me like, oh, we always wanted to do that,

but we were kind of afraid to do it. And this was a great moment where I was like, let's turn the tables on them and try to catch these bastards, right? So that's exactly what we did. We put out this $20 million bounty. By the way, Os know Osama Bin Laden, took down the trade, the towers.

I think the US government put out a $25 million bounty for information on him. So this was like a pretty substantial bounty, right? And it's one of the, you know, you heard that expression, like there's no honor amongst thieves. So all these hackers started sending in tips. A lot of them were, some of them were regular people, but others were actually other threat actors.

And they're like, guess what? I know the guy who did that attack, like, you know, cause they have some beef with this guy or whatever. We got like 5,000 tips that came into this tip line because people wanted $20 million, right? And you know, maybe like a couple hundred of those were like really solid leads. We had a team start to work down the list.

We don't have anything to announce today on it, but I think we're making really good progress towards a couple arrests here. And long story short, it's not just one person involved. With everything, it's more complicated, but we've gotten to build some really good relationships with law enforcement and it's gonna feel really good to catch some bad guys. That's awesome man. Yeah. I

can't wait till you get them. Yeah. That's good thinking. Great thinking. Let's talk about the I mean I know you were instrumental in the Genius Act correct? Yeah. What is that? The Genius Act is a piece of legislation that helps stable coins be allowed to be used in the United States. Stable coins are these digital dollars. It allows payments to happen quickly and cheaply anywhere in the world with the US dollar.

I mentioned some of these other payment methods, right? Like credit cards, two to 3% fee every time the merchant swipes your card. Like wire transfers, they work internationally, but they cost like $50, they're kind of slow. There's lots of different payment methods, but none of them are like fast, cheap and global, right? And so stable coins are the only ones that check that box.

They can send them anywhere in the world for under one cent in one second or less. Wow. So, USDC is, you know, I think the biggest legitimate one that's out there and all the dollar stablecoins are backed by US treasuries, which means that we can actually pay like 4.5% to people holding these things,

which I mentioned earlier, you can't really get on your checking account or savings account. So anyway, the Genius Act, it took a lot of work by members of Congress and Senate, bunch of companies, including us, have been kind of advocating for this legislation. And it just creates like clear rules

around how these things can be issued and used. And now that there's clear legislation that just got passed last Friday, it was at the White House for the signing ceremony with President Trump. I think we're gonna see more and more businesses start to accept stablecoins. It just saves them money. Like if you're, I don't know, as an average consumer, you might think, oh, two to three percent fee, that's not that much. I don't pay it. The merchant pays it.

But if you're like a grocery store or something, your margin might be like only five percent, right? So if you have to pay two to three% to the credit card companies and your margin's five, that's like a huge chunk of your profit margin, right, your margin. So anyway, I think it's just another way that crypto is updating the financial system. And the Stablecoin Act is a huge first step, this genius act. The other big piece of legislation we need to get done

is called the Clarity Act, which is about the other kinds of crypto assets that are not stablecoins coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and it's kind of helping determine which of these are commodities or securities. This is the lack of clarity that got weaponized by Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren in the prior administration. If we have laws passed that make it clear how these things are regulated, they can't come attack it and try to kill it again in the future.

Makes sense, makes sense. I mean, what do you, I think I read that the federal reserve put Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, XRP, the federal reserve is gonna hold some. What does that, I mean, what does that mean for us? Yeah, well, the President Trump passed this executive order creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve and then a crypto asset stockpile

to hold some of these other ones as well. A lot of people don't know, but the US actually holds strategic reserves of a number of different assets. So gold is probably the most famous one, but there's a bunch of other ones that they hold, like there's an oil strategic reserve, there's palladium. I think there's a bunch of rare minerals. they hold, like there's an oil, strategic reserve, there's like palladium, I think there's a bunch of like rare minerals.

And so it's kind of a historic step where the United States government is saying, actually, we think Bitcoin is another strategic asset which should be held by the US government. This would have been unthinkable, by the way, like five years ago, where the government was so skeptical of it. And now like the United States government

is holding a stockpile of these Bitcoin assets. So that was a huge moment. It kind of, by the way, now that the US is doing this, I think like the rest of the G20 countries and central banks are all starting to look at this. It just kind of instantly legitimized it. And you know, President Trump to his credit, he said he wants to be the first crypto president

in the United States and certainly in the world. Like, he's all in on this. He's like, America has to lead here. This is a technology to update the financial system and become a financial center of the world, which is important for American power. So he's kind of gone all in on it. And I think the rest of the G20 are now looking at this as a model to follow. Man, nice work again.

Yeah. So let's move into, I want to talk a little bit more about the, about Base. So Jeremy, my producer, he met at breakfast says it's, it's the Amazon of crypto. What all is going to be wrapped up in this? Yeah. So Base is an app that we just launched the beta of it last week. People started off with cryptocurrency, they're buying it like Bitcoin,

like for investment purposes. Then we started to make other types of financial services like payments and borrowing and lending with things like USDC, stable coins. Base is kind of the third act here, where we actually wanna make a way for applications on the internet to use crypto natively and allow value transfer between users

that's totally permissionless. So like, if you're a content creator, either you have a podcast or maybe you put out, like you're a musician, you're putting out music, or you just post on social media, like text content or anything, you can have a direct relationship with your audience and actually monetize from them directly.

So an example is like, if you make a post on base and you put out a photo or a text or audio video, anything, every post is a coin, right? So people can buy that coin. If they think it's cool, they like it. They think it's going to go up in value. It's like literally every, every social media post on base, the minute you post it, it has a coin with a market cap that people can trade and they can also buy

a coin of you as the content creator. And they can say, okay, I like that post. I think Sean's going to put out a lot more banger content. Like let me buy his, his token and you have a market cap. and say, okay, I like that post. I think Sean's gonna put out a lot more banger content. Like, let me buy his token and you have a market cap. Like, you're thinking go up and down. And so it's allowing content creators to basically directly monetize their audience

or their customers. It breaks, you know, there's traditionally in the internet there's been kind of like an ad business model for everything. Sponsorship on podcasts is one example of that. But even like Google and Facebook, they always have these ads, right? Because payments are so high friction on the internet,

most of the big companies got built on the ad business model. And that means that they're collecting all your information and trying to sell it to advertisers. That's sort of how the internet happened. Now the internet has a native layer for money and value transfer can be super seamless like microtransactions, giant transactions, whatever. And so we think it's gonna actually put this whole ad business model like flip it on its

head where yeah people can directly have the relationship with their audience. There's no middlemen and like instead of 95% of the value going to the platforms, it's gonna go to the content creators. It's gonna totally flip that value equation on its head. Wow. What kind of creators are on there right now? So it's all early stuff. It's some people that are, you know,

they're putting out like video content, kind of like TikTok. Some people are putting out music. I think that you're also gonna see kind of like communities formed that are around specific interests, right? It might be people who are like tech entrepreneurs or really into fitness or whatever. So it's early days, it's kind of like the early days

of the internet, a lot of it's like kind of quirky and weird and, but people are experimenting with it and coming in at a pretty rapid clip. There's like, I think, I don't know, I think there's like 300,000 people on the wait list right now. So we're slowly giving out invites as it, as it ramps up. But yeah, it's cool.

And by the way, I should mention base is a self-custodial wallet too. So everybody owns their own coins and their own, all the content they're posting and everything. They, they fully own it. They can take it with them anywhere. If they, if they don't like the base. If they don't like the base app, it's all based on open protocol. So you can basically, you can move to another app that supports the same thing. There's no lock into that one.

And you own your own coins. Like it's not Coinbase storing it for you. It's a self-custodial wallet. So we can distribute it to 190 countries from day one. It's not a regulated financial service business. How do I get on the wait list? I'll send you an invite. Yeah, I mean, actually, I mean, you got your audience

to probably exceed our capacity, but yeah, I mean, we can give you an invite code or something if you want to give it to Patreon members or something like that. Hell yes, I would love that. Okay, yeah, we could do that. Hell yes, thank you. Yeah, how many Patreon members do you have? We Hell yes, I would love that. Okay, yeah, we could do that. Hell yes, thank you. Yeah, how many Patreon members do you have?

We got about 90,000. Okay, okay, that's even bigger than I thought. But we can break it up. Yeah. We can break it up. Okay. We'll put it at the top tier. Okay. Man, thank you.

Yeah, that'd be great. And then, you know, I know you're, so you're venturing into some stuff that has nothing to do with crypto. What is that? Yeah, well, I're, so you're, you're venturing into some stuff that's, that has nothing to do with crypto. What is that? Yeah. Well, I mean, just zooming out, like my, I guess the thing I'm most interested in the world and I feel like the best way to help the world is to accelerate

technological progress and try to build cool things that are useful to people. Um, and so when Coinbase went public, you know, I was, I got some liquidity from that, some money, and I was trying to think about, in addition to going and buying a house and some things like that, I was like, all right, what do I wanna try to do in the world? Still pretty young. And so I started to look at some of the, what are the big challenges on the frontier

of science and technology that I could try to put some money towards, right? Honestly, I was kind of inspired by Elon, right? He made some money early from PayPal, and he was like, you know, rockets and electric cars and you know, sometimes it's hard to raise money from venture capitalists for like the really crazy ideas because it's higher risk, right?

And so I feel like in some ways, if you're a software entrepreneur and you manage to have some success, you almost kind of owe it to society to like put some of that capital back into the frontier, like try to do hard things, which are high risk in the world of atoms, not just bits, right? Which would be like software, et cetera.

So I remember I reached out to a couple of smart friends of mine, we started hosting some dinners and I would kind of go around the table and ask people like, you know, what are the coolest things on the frontier of technology right now that need more investment and smart people working on it? And, you know, of course the coolest things on the frontier of technology right now that need more investment and smart people working on it. And, you know, of course, like people talk about AI, crypto, brain machine interfaces, fusion energy.

And one of the topics that came up was human longevity, right? And we were thinking like, okay, people have been trying to live longer forever. This is kind of like, you know, most of it's snake oil. But a couple of interesting trends are happening right now where this might start to be tractable like in the next decade or two.

One of those trends is that AI is coming on the scene, and we can actually use AI to test a lot of hypotheses and help drug discovery be more efficient. The second big trend is that there's something called single cell sequencing, where you can take an individual cell and read out the state of it, what genes are turned on and off and what kind of proteins are going on in there. The cost of sequencing in a cell, like its entire state, has been falling, falling like crazy. You're familiar with like Moore's law with the, in the computer revolution, there was a thing called Moore's law where like the number of transistors

that you could get on a computer chip, it like doubled every 18 months for a certain price point. And that's why computers kept getting more and more powerful at like an exponential pace. So there's a, there's a phenomenon kind of like that in biology where to read out the state of a single cell, human cell, the cost is like falling by half every 18 months or something like that.

And so we can now read out the entire state of a single cell for like five cents US. It used to be like $500 to do it per cell. Now it's like five cents and it's just gonna keep getting cheaper and cheaper. So these two trends were happening and some of these scientists and folks that we invited over, they told me, you should go look at this field

called epigenetic reprogramming, where you can essentially reprogram the state of a cell. Like if you had a cell that's an older cell, maybe you could restore function that it had when it was younger. Or if you had a cell like a skin cell, you could turn it into like a muscle cell or a different stem cell or like a neuron, like a different type of cell.

And so we went to go look into this and kind of like reading that Bitcoin white paper in 2010. And the more I started to read about epigenetic reprogramming, I was like, there's something interesting here. This is an underfunded kind of novel area of science that could be really high potential. Like imagine if your metabolism or your immune system or your skin cells, like we could go in there and reprogram it to restore function it had

when it was younger, right? Like who wouldn't wanna have like the metabolism of a 20 year old or maybe your muscle recovery from like injury or the gym or your immune system could be like a 20 year old, right? Like if you get the flu and you're 85, it could be fatal. But if you get the flu and you're like 20, it's fine. You just take a week off, right? So we found a couple of the right scientists

and people to start this with. I co-founded the company along with Jacob Kimmel, who is a brilliant scientist in this area, and Blake Byers, who had worked in biotech for a decade. Cause you know, it wasn't, my background was not in the science piece, but I had capital and I had some experience building companies.

And so we decided to kick off this company just a few years ago, and it's had some really exciting initial progress, where we've been able to demonstrate for the first time taking human cells and restoring function they had when they were younger. Wow. Yeah.

And there's some cool videos I can show you of just like, you know, like, um, we have these like humanized mice model where we actually put human cells inside the mouse and then like, if you have an old mouse and a young mouse and you give them both a certain amount of alcohol, like the old mice take longer to sleep it off, you know, it's kind of like, like people. Um, and we've been able to like restore the liver of these older mice and they, they wake up like the young mice with no hangover kind of thing.

So again, getting this working in humans is the next is like a big challenge. It's like, definitely this could take another decade to like start to see drugs and therapies that humans could take, but it's early stage. It's an exciting company. It's like 35 people in South San Francisco. You know, I put like a hundred million of my money into it, committed to it. And, you know, we've raised some money from some really amazing people too. So anyway, that's an example of the kind of thing I've been working on. What kind of things is that gonna be able to solve? Well, yeah, so imagine, you know,

we all kind of lose function in our bodies as we get older, right? Like the big things that, if you look at the biggest killers, it's like heart disease, cancer, diabetes. So a lot of medicine is targeting how do you treat that disease? But there's another theory which is like,

maybe the root cause of all those things is that our cells are just losing function as we get older and so you're more susceptible to get these diseases. Like, I'll give you an example. So if you're in, if you're like, let's say you're in your 20s or 30s and, you know, you have some damage to your cells. Like you, you have some, you drink too much or you, you get sick or like, you know, and there's a kind of. When you get older, your cells don't really have the ability to respond as well to these kinds of threats, or like, you know, it could be viruses,

or, you know, eating or drinking too much, not getting enough sleep or whatever, they start to lose their function. And so instead of treating like the effects of these diseases, why don't we just try to restore the function your cells had when you were younger? And it may actually be like kind of a root cause of a lot of these diseases that manifest later in life.

Like if you look at all those diseases I mentioned, they're basically highly correlated with age. The older you are, the more you're likely you are to get it, right? Like once in a while, you'll see a kid, like a young person who gets cancer or something, but it's very rare. It's almost all people later in life.

And so it's kind of like what you might call like a root cause or a meta, like solving a meta problem. Like if you can solve this problem, it automatically like knocks out or minimizes the effect of a bunch of later diseases that you get in life. Like you might be familiar with the GLP-1s,

like these Ozempic type drugs, you know, and that's the first time we've seen a drug that's like a trillion, sorry, a trillion dollar drug where even healthy people are taking it now because they just want to have, they want to lose weight. I think that the exciting thing about these longevity drugs is that if these start to work, and again, it'll take like another 10 years or more, no, for sure.

If these start to work, like everybody over a certain age is gonna take these, cause like, who wouldn't wanna feel like you had the metabolism or immune system or whatever, or the muscle system of like a younger person, right, that would just be more years of healthy life, you know, to get stuff done. So anyway, I think we're on the cusp of potentially being able to make a breakthrough in this area, and it's high risk, but I think this is exactly what people should be doing.

Like if you have some success in business, like try to push the frontier, right? Do something that's really challenging. So I mean, how is this like, how does it work? Is it like stem cell where they inject cells into you or? It's related to that. So, so yeah, the science behind it, I'll give you the high level version. So there's a guy, Shinya Yamanaka, who won the Nobel Prize, Japanese guy, around 2006.

And he showed you could take a skin cell and reprogram it into a stem cell, like you were saying. And he threw a bunch of work, he showed that if you basically put these four proteins in the cell, it kind of reverts back to an earlier state where it's a stem cell, and then it can redifferentiate into being a skin cell again, but with younger properties. So this was like a breakthrough in the field.

He got a Nobel Prize for it. Subsequent to that, people have shown that you could turn a skin cell into a different kind of cell, like a neuron or a muscle cell. What we're trying to do is not change the type of the cell. We're trying to just change the functional age of the cell. Like if it starts as a skin cell, stay as a skin cell, but just be like a younger version of yourself.

And so we're searching the vast space of different sets of proteins. They're called transcription factors, which basically turn on and off different genes in the cell. There's like a massive number of combinations of these that are potential. We've developed a high throughput screening system that can test like millions of hypotheses.

And we're looking for interesting targets that come out. Like to be honest, our understanding of the biology of it is not very good. We actually don't know why, like even this guy won the Nobel Prize, we don't even really know how it works, like and why it works, but he found something that did work.

And so that's what we've done at this lab in South San Francisco. We've set up this high throughput screening system that's testing millions of different combinations of these looking for novel sets of proteins you can put in these cells that change the state of it back to like a younger cell. And we know that-

So you're injecting proteins and it would be an injection of proteins into the body that the cells absorb? Yeah. And they're delivered via this thing called lipid nanoparticles, but yeah, yeah, yeah. It's basically a way to deliver proteins into these cells and it causes them to turn on and off different genes.

Wow. Yeah. How far out do you think you are? I mean, we're gonna start clinical trials on on our first program probably in the next year or two in humans. And that's where you have to go through FDA or different countries you can do it in. And then we have two or three other programs coming along. So I think within like five to 10 years, we'll hopefully have candidates ready for, you know, potentially someone could actually go get it prescribed by their doctor in like,

hopefully like less than 10 years. But these are kinds of things that, sometimes you need to try a lot of shots on goal to get something that works, right? And it can start to get expensive the later you are down doing these human trials. Like it costs something like $2 billion and takes about 10 years to get a drug to market.

That's with a lot of failures along the way. So, you know, we're putting a lot of capital to see if we can come over the breakthrough here. So you're getting ready to be introduced to a whole another type of bureaucracy. Yep, the FDA. I mean, actually inside the current FDA, they are trying to find ways to optimize this. Cause like, by the way, China is making very quick progress on how they run clinical trials. And there's a phenomenon happening where sometimes someone will publish a paper, like a research paper in the US,

and then apply for a clinical trial. And before their clinical trial starts, there's already patients in China with that drug in their body, because they're kind of seeing all of our papers get published and then they can run the trial faster. So there's people like in the current FDA that are trying to think about,

I'll give you an example of how we could make it more efficient. So right now there's phase one, two and three trials. The phase one trial is all about safety, like is this thing even safe to put in a human body? And phase two and three are about what they call efficacy, meaning does it even work? So first you check if it's safe, second does it work?

One thing we could do is like, if you pass phase one trial and you know it's safe, allow a doctor to prescribe it to patients while it's going through phase two and phase three. I mean, if someone's at the end of their life, like they literally, they're gonna die like in a month. And they have no other option and we know it's safe, do it, allow them to take it, you know,

especially if a doctor. We had something like that, right? Like a right to try. Yeah. Those kinds of things, but it's still, it hasn't gone far enough. That would be an example where we could really start to accelerate it.

So I hope we get some of those things put through the FDA as well. Otherwise, like these companies are gonna start running clinical trials overseas just to get faster data back. Yeah, I mean, I know you're in very early stages, but I'm just curious, I mean, how much, maybe you have a target, maybe not,

do you have any idea how much more life somebody could experience by taking something like that? Yeah, so the initial drugs that'll come through, we hope they could add something like five to 10 years of life, but the real moonshot goal here is that if we get this working in one cell type, we can get it working in another cell type, in another one, and eventually you'll be able to take

a cocktail of these that kind of help improve like a dozen cell types, especially your brain, like that's the, that's the Holy grail kind of, um, and if that works, I mean, the goal is to get to like, indefinite, right? Like you're not going to be immortal because you could still get hit by a bus or something or, you know, shot or something, right? But if you, if you don't have something like a physical thing that takes you out, you should in theory, I can't see any law of nature that's getting broken that would not allow you to become in perpetually the kind of renew, renew.

Right. And it, there's all kinds of crazy implicate implications of this downstream. If this works, I mean, I'm kind of in purely hypothetical land here, right. I don't want to overstate this, but we might start to see these people that, you know, they look kind of young, but they look different. You know, it's like the vampire movies or whatever. Like they look like they're in their 30s, but they kind of look different.

Like they're like a thousand years old or something, right? So you get into all kinds of interesting sci-fi type analogies and people come up with all these philosophical debates about, you know, should we even want to live longer? Anyway, I think that curing disease, giving people the option just to live longer if they want to, these are all unequivocally good things.

And so it's worth pushing on this frontier. But if it ultimately works, how it changes society could be quite profound. Yeah. I mean, do you think, do you think it would, would it make in, would it make an older person look younger or would it kind of stunt aging and you like, if you, if you're 42 years old, are you going to stay 42 years old or are you going to look like you're 32 years old in a year or however long it takes to work? Yeah, the answer is we don't know for sure. I mean, there are now examples of human cells

that we've been able to restore. It's not just stopped aging. We've been actually able to restore function they had when they were younger. So in some sense, you can call it like reversing the aging, right? But, you know, I'll give you an example. So like your skin, when you're, you know, we all start as like a single cell,

like a fertilized egg, right? And we're dividing in our skin and bones and like brain, everything kind of develops. Like in our skin, we have this thing called the extracellular matrix, which is kind of like this protein structure. It's not the, it's not the cells themselves, but it's kind of like, you know, you've probably heard about collagen and these different, so it kind of gives your skin like that flexibility and springiness. And over time that the ECM, the extracellular matrix,

kind of can deteriorate, right? So this is like a big open question. If we restore your skin cells to be like they were when they were 20, are they actually gonna go in there and maintain and repair the extracellular matrix so your skin stays like really springy? Or are they just gonna be like aged, or sorry, are they just gonna be young cells

but on an aging extracellular matrix? We don't really know. We gotta go run these experiments. Another example would be like, you know, people who they have like scarring on their liver, it's called fibrosis, right? If you damage your liver, it develops this kind of like scar tissue.

And one of the experiments we've kind of running recently is like if you reprogram your liver cells to back when they were younger, maybe your liver cells are young, but the scar tissue is still there. This is still too early to say, but some of the data we've been seeing indicates that the young cells can actually repair

or disintegrate the scar tissue. Wow. So we don't know yet, but there's a possibility that if we actually are able to successfully restore these cells back to the younger state, that they'll just maintain and restore. I'll give you one other kind of interesting data point. Like, you know, baby, there's a thing called like,

I think it's called like prenatal surgery, right? Like where a baby in the womb can actually get some kind of surgery to repair something. And when the baby's born, they don't have any scars from the surgery. Or even you see this sometimes with like really young kids. Like if they get like a part of their finger chopped off or something, it's like a kind of horrific thing,

but there are accidents like this. If that happens when they're really young, like two years old, a lot of it will grow back, right? And so our bodies, like there is something in our biology which has the ability to like regenerate tissue, to even regrow like a piece of a finger. And if we can unlock that capability in adults, we know it's possible because it's happening

when we're younger. So why can't we turn that back on? It might be possible in adults. I mean, it's not like some completely, it's impossible thing. They're sort of an existence proof. It happens at some point in our life. So why couldn't it happen later in our life?

That's what we're trying to find out. Do you think it could be a cure to diseases like Alzheimer's, stuff like that? Again, we're in highly speculative land here. I don't want to like over promise, but in theory, yes, it's possible because we don't know exactly the cause of Alzheimer's. I mean, people talk about these amyloid plaques building up and things, but when you're younger,

why don't they build up? I don't know. Maybe you're, there's certain cells in your brain that are not like the neurons, but they're basically helper cells trying to clear out those plaques and things. So if we can reprogram them to have the function they had when you were 20, maybe it does help with that. We don't know. One, we haven't started on,

we wanna actually start a program on Alzheimer's and brain and like brain cells. We haven't started it yet, cause it's one of the most expensive ones to do in terms of how you run clinical trials. So, but we'll get to it eventually. I think that's one of the most exciting ones to figure out. Cause ultimately, if our bodies are still functional

but our brains are going, it's kind of like, what's the point, right? No reason to live if your brain's not there. Sorry to pepper you with questions. It's great. You know, newborns, I mean, stuff like Down syndrome, things like that, is that something that this could prevent?

So that's kind of a different area of science, but I think, because that's really more about the DNA, like if you have an extra chromosome, that's what causes Down syndrome. But I do think there's a whole other field that's emerging around embryo editing, right? So you're probably familiar with like people using IVF, right, and you can have these embryos frozen,

and then you can kind of sequence them and see if they have diseases or Down syndrome or anything like that. And this is kind of controversial because people, you know, people have all kinds of beliefs on this about what should or shouldn't be allowed. Is the embryo a living thing or not?

Is there a lot of fraught territory here? But I think what's happening is that first we're getting to a world where people can choose like sequence these embryos and choose the one that they feel like has the best chance. Then what's gonna happen is people are gonna have a lot more embryos to choose from. There's a technology called in vitro gametogenesis

where you can turn skin cells into embryos. So you don't have to like harvest them from the eggs, like from a woman, which can be a quite invasive procedure. So then you'll be able to have like thousands of embryos to choose from. Then what'll happen after that is people will choose the best ones and then they can start to make a few edits to it, like it to prevent, it'll start off initially

to prevent disease. Like there's like sometimes a single base pair of DNA can cause you to have like heart disease or higher risk for Alzheimer's. Like there's different single base pair changes. And then there will eventually be multiple base pair changes where, I don't know, anything like depression, IQ, there's all kinds of things people might

want to edit in the future. And it's an interesting thing society's going to have to figure out is is do we feel okay with that? Like, you know, we already sort of go out of our way to try to give as much benefit to our children as we can. Like what food we give them, where we send them to school, where they live. And so I think if you have a choice about,

okay, like this embryo has a 50% chance of depression, but they might also be like a great artist, you know? And this embryo, they're less likely to have these bad things and they spike really high on these other things I care about. People, parents are going to have choices to make, like which, which embryo do I want to implant? Which one do I want to bring to fruition? So, you know, in some ways that's for a lot of people, that's probably like

really scary and playing God and like all kinds of things. I think for other people it's, it's saying of people, that's probably like really scary and playing God and like all kinds of things. I think for other people it's saying, okay, how are we gonna start to shape evolution and like take control of it? Because AI is taking off at a crazy pace. Like how is human intelligence gonna keep pace? And we already kind of, we already choose this

by who we choose to marry and who we choose to have children with, has a huge impact on what our kids are and where you send them to school and et cetera, et cetera. So why wouldn't we also give them the best chance they can genetically? I think eventually it'll become weird not to do this, like in 50 years.

It'd almost be risky, like rolling the dice to not take a look at the data. So that's another interesting area that could come to fruition. I'm not doing anything currently in that area today, but just kind of intellectually interested in it. Wow. Fascinating stuff. Yeah.

We're wrapping up the interview, but I just got a couple questions left. What advice do you have for new innovators and founders? Well, there's a lot of different areas like people could get advice on. have for new innovators and founders? Well, there's a lot of different areas like people could get advice on. I think the big picture advice I would give people is it's action produces information, right? A lot of people are sitting there thinking, ah, I kind of want to start a company,

but I'm not sure exactly what to do. And this area could be interesting, but what if that happens? And what if the government shuts it down? What if this competitor does it? And you can kind of have this analysis paralysis. You just need to get started with something and just anything you can think of to do,

like just go try and do it. It'll probably be the wrong thing, but just the fact that you tried it, it'll give you an idea about what to do next. And there was many times in Coinbase's history where that was the case. Like the first version of the Coinbase app that I built, I built it totally wrong, right?

And almost like the minute that I released it, I was like, oh, now I realized how I should have done it. But if I hadn't actually gone and stepped into the unknown, I never would have figured out a better way to do it. And there's an analogy I love to think about, which is kind of like, imagine you're looking at a mountain, you wanna try to summit the mountain, and it's shrouded in fog and clouds,

and you can't really see the top of the mountain. In fact, you can only see like six feet in front of you, the fog is so thick, but you know there's some mountain up there. You can't just sit down on the ground and think about how the right path, you gotta take a few steps into the fog, into the unknown. And you might get stuck on some ledge that's like,

oh, I got a backtrack, like that was the wrong way, right? And sometimes you'll be able to see a little farther than the distance. Sometimes you can only see a few feet ahead. But if you don't take steps into the unknown, like that action, you'll never know the better path to go. And most people, they don't have, I don't know if it's the risk tolerance

or the fear of looking stupid or like doing the wrong thing or whatever it is. I think, you know, they never take that step into the unknown. Sometimes people ask me like, why do a lot of tech founders have autism, you know? I think like one of the reasons, I'm probably somewhere on that spectrum myself, by the way. But I think one of the reasons like people with

on the spectrum or have autism like our tech founders is that they don't really have social anxiety about people thinking that they're looking stupid or dumb. Like it's not that they don't know it's happening or that they, but they just don't care. It's like, and so- The fear is gone. Yeah, like, and it's like a social, they're kind of blind to it socially, which can

be funny in certain situations. Like, you know, if they just do something that they don't, everyone else thinks it's weird, but they don't know that it's even weird. Um, but in, in an entrepreneurship that tends to help you a lot, uh, because you're willing to just take steps into the unknown, unafraid of looking stupid, to try lots of things and eventually you find something that works. So that, I don't know, that would be my biggest piece of advice is just like action produces information.

If you have any kind of an idea of what to do, just do it. Even if it's the wrong thing and it'll produce more information. I love that. I love that. Last question. If you had three people you'd like to see on the show, who would they be? Hmm.

Ah, there's so many good ones. I think, and you've met with a bunch of them already. Let's see, have you had Elon on? No. Okay, could be a good one. I mean, everybody wants to interview him. That's maybe an obvious one. I'm trying to think about ones that would be less obvious.

Who are you excited about? Yeah, I think I am excited about people building on the frontier of technology. So I'll give you a couple names. I think there's a guy, Keller Renato, he started a drone delivery company that's really amazing called Zipline. He's also working on another biotech company.

I think he's really impressive. Have you had, I know you had Palmer on, have you had Brian Schimp from Andrel? He's the CEO, he's a rock star as well. I mean, they're building like nuclear submarines, like all kinds of crazy stuff now. Let's see. I mean, do you wanna talk to like government people?

You'll talk to anybody. Government people? No. We talk to a lot of those. Could be anybody. How about the crypto space? Yeah. Who's doing something new and innovative than that?

Well I think Jesse Pollack on our team who created the base protocol and the base app, he's great. Perfect. That's three. Yeah. That's a good start. All right. Brian, thank you for coming, man.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the time and I hope's a good start. All right, Brian. Thank you for coming man Thanks for having me. I appreciate the time and I hope to see you again. Thanks for being interesting. Well, we're up to Jim Rome takes on sports. Why? Because you're not playing me. With rapid fire takes. Ain't a lot to get to and I'm not sure you're gonna like all of it. Honestly, I don't even care if you like all of it or not. I have a job to do.

Scorching debates. On any given week you have lots to beef about. Ticket manager, get up in here. He's the Spitfire of sports smack. It's just not my fault. We will get to all of that. The Jim Rome Show podcast. Get up in here and we'll beef later on. What's your beef? Follow and listen on your favorite platform. You've been warned.