The Wolf Of All Streets - "That's Something I Didn't Envision In My Wildest Dreams" | Brian Armstrong

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Brian Armstrong discusses the fallout from the failed Clarity Act and why he believes crypto regulation can still move forward through the SEC and CFTC. He shares his outlook on tokenized equities, crypto perps and new capital-formation rules, arguing that clearer regulations could open access to new financial products and make the U.S. more competitive in crypto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Discover coffee plus on nispresso.com. Brian Armstrong told me crypto wasn't going to wait for Congress. Less than 24 hours later, the SEC proved him right. When we recorded this exclusive conversation, the only comments he's made about the Clarity Act, it had just failed. And Washington appeared to have delivered another devastating setback for the industry. But Brian argued that the SEC and CFDC already had the authority to move major parts of crypto forward without Congress.

The very next day, the SEC opened the door to tokenize stock trading in the United States. United States. That makes this conversation even more important now than when we recorded it. Brian lays out Coinbase's plan to tokenize everything, stocks, private companies, real estate, and entirely new forms of capital formation. We talk about perpetual futures coming to America. I think perpetual futures is a pretty killer product that a lot of people haven't experienced yet. Under this administration, we have been able to bring some of these perpetual futures products to the U.S. It gives traders a 24-7 phenomenon, but it also gives them leverage. An economy where billions of AI agents transact with one another.

Coinbase has the leading stack for agentic commerce, especially with stable coins. You know, we're going to keep investing in that because we're going to be here in the future not too far where there's actually more agents transacting in the economy than humans, which is a pretty wild thing to think about. And why he believes Bitcoin can reach $300,000 to $400,000 by 2030. It's gone through many of these cycles now where it'll have run-ups, oftentimes around the Bitcoin-having events. And then you'll see drawbacks. And usually they last about a year or so.

If it follows similar patterns to the past, my hope is by 2030, we could see a $300,000, $400,000 Bitcoin. Congress failed to deliver clarity, but crypto may have just found another way forward. Let's go. Today's video is brought to you by Kalshi. You probably know Kalshi for prediction markets, but now you can also trade crypto perps directly

on the same platform. That means Bitcoin and other major crypto assets with leverage on a platform that's US regulated by the CFTC. CalShe has the lowest perps fees in the United States and you don't need to be trading millions of dollars to get exclusive benefits if you sign up through my link Trade just $100,000 in volume per month and you unlock a bunch of VIP perks like one-basis point-taker fees Private invites to Calci events and more. You can sign up using my link in the description and you'll get $25 when you trade your first $50. So you famously said in January that we'd rather have no bill than a bad bill.

Was the Clarity Act that failed the other day what you would define as a good bill? Yes, I think the most recent draft that failed was a good bill. I was proud in January to stand up for our customers. That initial draft that came out did have a number of problems with it, which I outlined at that time. We felt like it had a de facto ban on tokenized equities and too many penalties for defy developers and CFTC spot market authority of stablecoin rewards. And so those were kind of some of our, what we felt would be must-haves for the industry in that negotiation. So I'm proud that we stood up for the industry in that moment.

And to their credit, the Senate actually took a lot of that as feedback and iterated on it. And all four of those things were fixed in this most recent draft. So, you know, there were other issues which caused it to fail, I think, yesterday. And that was really a missed opportunity for the U.S. to lead. But there's another path, luckily, with the regulators, the SEC. and the CFDC and we'll we can talk about that when you want yeah I want to dive into all that so there are several I think competing explanations for the bill's failure obviously Democrats point to President Trump's involvement in crypto I think Republicans point to the

Democrats not being willing to come to the table in an honest manner there was a fight over the stable coin rewards opposition from the banks what do you think ultimately actually killed clarity yeah well you know obviously it's a nuanced process but from where I'm sitting if I to oversimplify it. I think the ethics deal is what killed it. I think that there was a real offer on the table from the White House, and it had real restrictions on the president and elected officials for issuing and promoting tokens or meme coins. It would have required them to put that into a blind trust. It gave real authority to the state AGs to go, for instance, to go and force that, something I thought that they would never agree to. But I think,

some of the Democrats that I spoke to, they wanted something more. And, you know, it's a bit of a shame because this was really about politics at the end of the day. It had nothing to do with the actual underlying fundamentals of the bill in terms of market structure and how we protect consumers, the new tools for law enforcement, the new powers that it was going to give to banks. And, you know, we wanted banks to succeed as part of this as well. And, you know, 95% of what both sides wanted, was all agreed to in the bill. And it was kind of frustrating that we let politics get in the way, I guess. This kind of issue that I don't think will matter in a few years.

You know, this bill could have had the ability to affect America for generations to come. But unfortunately, it didn't happen due to politics. And that's a real shame. I'd say it's an abdication of responsibility. Now, luckily, like we talked about, there is a path forward for getting clear rules for crypto. and the SEC and the CFTC have really stepped up already in their public communications to say that they're not going to wait for Congress. They're going to put out rules under their existing authority, and that's starting now. And we're going to dive into that in a minute, but what blows my mind is the unintended consequences of blocking ethics.

So in my mind, rationally, the Democrats didn't want to give President Trump a win. So they obviously didn't come to the table genuinely to discuss ethics. But what happens now is that Trump and Hunter, Biden and any other politician can continue doing exactly what Trump did that they were starting, that they were attempting to prevent. Isn't that true? Now there's no ethics clause and everybody can just do what they want. That's the point I made to several of them as well is a vote against this bill is basically saying there should be no ethics restrictions whatsoever. So what does that even accomplish? And, you know, I think, I think some of them were kind of worried about

the optics of giving a win to the president, but you're right. By not voting for it, they arguably gave him an even bigger wins. It really makes no sense to me. And none of them ended up voting for it. I mean, this went 49, 50. Maybe they realized it wasn't going to pass and didn't want to stick their heads up and play, you know, whackable with the crypto lobby. But it seems like at least one of them who even proposed this bill in the first place might have stood up and said, yes, we should at least pass cloture so that we can discuss this further. that's important to remember this was just a motion to proceed it was not the final bill there would have been opportunities to put in further amendments to continue negotiating in pieces of it if

they wanted and so they really voted the votes who voted no said we don't even want to proceed at all even discussing it um you know which is a real that's a real disappointment from my point of view and you're right they did they all voted as a block i think you know nobody wanted to stick their head up and they voted as it was either going to be 14 or so votes yes or 14 or so votes no and Nobody wanted to stick their hand up and say, actually, we think there should be clear rules in America. Yeah, I was watching it. When I saw Jill O'Brien vote, no, I just shook my head. That was shocking.

That was shocking to me as well. Yeah. And really in disbelief. So now, do you view this as entirely dead? You know, a lot of people are saying, hey, it could come back around. Llamas, of course, saying it's over for many, many years. Do we proceed now as if this is not going to be a thing in the future? Well, my understanding is that there are some members of the Senate that are trying to revive it and have another bite at the apple like Senator Tillis.

You know, I commend them for doing that. I don't really know what the chances are of that happening. I would just at this point assume it's dead unless I hear otherwise and then I'm pleasantly surprised. So, you know, I think we can't really wait at this point for the Senate to act and we need to go to the regulators. in a way, this is a, it's a feature, not a bug of American democracy. We have three branches of government to do checks and balances. And so if one branch of government is not going to deliver on a solution for the American people, another branch can step up. And I think that's what we're seeing here. So credit to the founding fathers for having some, you know, diversity of branches at the top.

Is there a world where we have regime change at midterms and we get a version of crypto legislation? that's much more contentious and written by the people who oppose this? I don't know. I mean, I think we'll have to see what happens in the midterms, but I mean, my sense is that, again, you'd have to have both the Senate and the House agree on a draft, right? And then, of course, also the president for it to become law. So it's hard for me to imagine that they would come back together

with some different draft. I think what's more likely at this point is, yeah, the rules get published and they do rulemaking under SEC and C and C. CFTC, which arguably are going to be more permissive in certain ways than we would have seen from the Clarity Act. And so, you know, I personally, I just think it would have been good for America to see it in legislation and have a true, that bipartisan process. But honestly, in the, in the short term, it's probably better for us in certain ways. It's a little bit more permissive to have this SEC and CFTC do it. Well, we sort of laughed at the unintended consequences of not

passing an ethics clause. The banks push back heavily against the rewards that Coinbase for example, already offers to their customers. And that's allowed by genius. So didn't the banks effectively just shoot themselves in the foot by blocking clarity, which could have actually put more restrictions on Coinbase and others on rewards? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't have said it better myself. You know, we're happy to work with anybody in this process. We listened to the concerns of the banks.

We went and talked to some of the community banks. We started providing services to community banks, along with the big, banks in terms of how they could integrate stable coins. We wanted really all of them to win. But somehow the bank lobby got really spun up on this issue of stable coin rewards. You know, I think because some of the big banks just didn't want the competition and they wanted to use the government to kind of squash their competition. But, you know, you're right. At the end of the, I made this point to several of them. I said, well, if you don't want to come to the table and work on an iteration of this bill, then

genius is already the law of the land. That's, so, you know, that's what it basically we fall back to at this point where we can continue. continue to pay rewards in an unfettered way on stable coins. And I think that's good for American consumers. We were in the interest of getting something done. We made some concessions and clarity in negotiations with the banks that the Senate facilitated. But I guess we don't have to do that now.

It's a little unclear to me why they fought so hard against it if they were so worried about stable coin rewards. They're in a worse position now. Yeah. Yeah, it's just really, really confusing to me. But you keep alluding to the fact that now we can get rulemaking from the SEC and CFDC. And I think everybody agrees that we have very favorable regulators

and heads at both of those agencies. Atkins and CLEG deeply understand the industry. They've made it very clear even before clarity failed that they intended to write rules that would allow the industry to move forward. So let's talk more deeply about what they can and can't do what you're expecting from the SEC and CFDC in the short term now that clarity is effectively dead.

Yeah, well, Chair Atkins at the SEC, has come out and said that there's an innovation exemption that they're expecting soon. This would allow things like tokenized equities to come to the U.S. We can talk about that because I'm very excited about that product. I think that we could also see things like perpetual futures for single stocks and pre-IPO perps. These are trading products that our customers love. They're only available outside the U.S. right now.

These things could start to come to the U.S. And then more broadly, I would say just crypto has a really important role to potentially play in updating how capital formation works or basically the ability for people to raise money, whether that's a new company that they're trying to create or a real estate project or a podcast or anything. Today, those are securities. And we think that in many cases, people, it's too difficult for them to raise money. The fees are too high working through the traditional system. And so long term, I think that's an exciting area where this rulemaking could actually allow us to make it much more democratized access to capital formation. And that would be good for everyone around the world. I was blown away by regulation crypto when Atkins proposed it.

I mean, effectively it said you could raise up to $5 million. The investors wouldn't even necessarily need to be accredited. So it could be from your friends more favorable than capital formation for other companies. And that it could be done effectively on a white paper with a three to four year safe harbor to become sufficiently decentralized. It really actually seems more favorable than fundraising in other industries if it becomes a rule. Yeah, that's right. I mean, this is something I've been passionate about for a while now is that in the U.S. we have these accredited investor rules, which basically means you can't invest in private companies unless you're already rich. It's actually kind of one of the

most regressive taxes out there, if you want to call it that. Like, it's basically saying you can't get rich unless you're already rich. I mean, how is that fair? There's a lot of really, really smart, aspiring people earlier in their career that maybe they don't have a huge net worth, but why shouldn't they be able to go and make these investments to try to grow their own wealth and have a level playing field? So I've long been in favor of, you know, you could basically make a financial literacy test or competence test. It shouldn't be a test of means, like what's your income, what's your net worth. That's inherently unfair. It should be a test of your literacy around finance if we want to make sure that people aren't getting tricked into some scam or something like that.

So, yeah, that's another kind of policy angle that would be fun to go push on. And I think that the SEC is moving in that direction already with these kind of exemptions. Do you have any idea what the CFTC may propose? I think Atkins, obviously, has been out in front of this. And I think that's largely because Hester Perch has been there for years. She had already proposed safe harbor. And I think a lot of this builds on the ideas that she had, even during the Gensler, you know, when he was ahead of the SEC. Do you have any inside baseball into what we might see from the CFDC or what you would hope to see? Yeah. Well, actually, some of those products that I just meant, obviously, I can't speak for the CFTC or SEC, but just looking at their public comments, you know, the CFTC chair just recently put out that they're locked in ready to ship. So he looks like he's intending to put out these rules as well. And some of those products that I mentioned, like single stock perpetual futures, that actually requires both the CFTC and the SEC. So they've been working hand in hand, which in itself is actually, a breath of fresh air because often in the past we would see the heads of the two agencies have

kind of a turf war and try to claim their space. But this is one of the first times that I can remember where the heads of the two agencies are actually very collaborative and trying to get sensible rules out there to help America win. Yeah, I think it's easy to focus on the negative of the Clarity Act failing, but you look back at what you dealt with in the previous administration, the come in and register nonsense from Gensler. And when you try to do that, you basically just get threatened with litigation or actual litigation. So I think people should actually view or understand that this is probably the best it's ever been, even with the Clarity Act failing, in my opinion. Well said. Yep. Yeah, glad you agree. So the SEC and CFDC obviously are going to write rules,

but that doesn't necessarily mean that those rules will be lasting, right? So I think we're being intellectually honest, there is some downside to the Clarity Act, not passing because legislation would of really put this on the books somewhat indefinitely. What problems do you think that the CFDC and SEC could face with their rulemaking, be it, you know, regime change and those rules being reversed? Obviously, we had Loper Bright, which kind of reduces the power that regulatory agencies have to write rules. I mean, do you think that they could get sued if they write these rules? I mean, what concerns do you have? Yeah, well, you're right that having legislation can be more durable and that's part of the reason why we were advocating for something there. But I actually

think that the rulemaking process can be quite durable also. And the reason is that we have a lot of laws in the U.S. that are already on the books. I think that one of these people refer to as the Administrative Procedures Act, which essentially is a fancy way of saying how the agencies go through the rulemaking process and they have like a notice and comment period and they can accept input from all the relevant parties, you know, Treasury and industry and consumer groups and all kinds of folks. And so once they go through that process and actually put rules out, it does have some durability. I think it would be, you know, and by the way, they may get sued on some of these. The courts may have to opine about where exactly the line is, but that's good.

It actually creates like a legal precedent, which can stand the test of time. And so I think they've been very mindful of this of wanting to make sure that they have enough time, say, in the next few years to get through any sort of potential litigation. Now, could a future administration come in and try to create a different rule? Yes, but they would have to go through a similar rulemaking process under the Administrative Procedures Act. And if they tried to undo rules that were already established and had court precedent, you know, it could create more litigation. So my hope is at any point in the future, if someone were to try that, I think we have to make the political calculus that, look, they just have bigger fish to fry at that point. You know, they're going to have to

go worry about AI or something else. And once these rules are out and well established and courts have opined on them, you know, it's just the political calculus of why to go try to challenge it again and spend all your time and resources on that. It just, we need to make sure it doesn't make sense. AI is going to kill us all on three months, apparently, anyways, so I'm not sure we're going to get far enough to care down the road. But, yeah, if we actually have litigation and that drags out, I assume Coinbase, you're a behemoth. So I assume you're going to continue to launch products and continue to plow forward as if it's the law of the land. But there's a lot of probably smaller builders or companies that have still been waiting for some sort of clarity in the United States who may be scared to continue innovating or launching products here while we don't have that legislative clarity.

I mean, would you launch a meaningful, sizable product while there's litigation over the rule that, you know, is allowing you to launch that product? Yeah, I mean we would do that if we felt like it was the right thing to do. We're not afraid of litigation. We're, you know, in the past, we actually, in the prior administration, we actually sued the SEC in one, which is a pretty atypical thing to do as a public company. Yeah, so we would look at the rules and where we think they're ultimately going to land and we would push forward. In many cases, it will be the agency that's engaged in litigation, not necessarily us, although, you know, you could always have something at the state level or something like that. But yeah, in general, I'm not worried about litigation. We just try to go pursue things forward and do the right thing for our customers.

You bring up an interesting point, which is in many ways, legislation would have been good in the sense for America, right? In the sense that durability, clarity of the rules, I think that would have also had a downside for Coinbase in the sense that we would have just had every major financial services company in the world would have started integrating crypto with that regulatory clarity. we would have had tons more competition. So, you know, in a way, like, honestly, it arguably could even be better for us to go under this path because we're one of the few companies who is willing to go through that. But, you know, ultimately, I'm trying to grow the adoption of crypto globally,

including in the United States for everyone. That's more aligned with the mission of Coinbase. I don't really think of the world as a zero-sum place where, you know, if it's better for us and worse for someone else, I mean, look, I love competition too, but ultimately, I'm trying to advance civilizational progress and especially for America. And that's why it was so frustrating to see people get into their tribal camps and forget about the bigger picture.

Yeah, it's interesting. I had a conversation with Chris John Carlo, who of course was the ex-head of the CFDC. And he told me that the banks and institutions actually needed the Clarity Act much more than Coinbase in the crypto industry did. Because they're so much more beholden to the law and they move so much slower. and they want to custody these assets and participate. So once again, another unintended consequence for them may it be that they slowed themselves in a very fast race.

Yeah, I mean, it's ironic, but it would not surprise me within a handful of years if it's actually the banks coming and lobbying for Clarity Version 2 or something like that. Because you're right. I mean, they need to stay relevant with technology and crypto is the most important technology updating the financial system from payments to trading to borrowing and lending.

these are all big trends that are growing fast. And so who knows, anything can happen in a few years. Okay, so let's talk about the tokenized stocks because obviously it's one of the things you're very passionate about. While I'm sure that you've really enjoyed being a political, you know, policy expert for the past few years,

I know that at heart you're a builder and that you want to offer more products. So tokenized stocks, you guys announced in August that you'll be doing this through a regulated hub in Abu Dhabi. So once again, we have this scenario where an American company is building incredible product that are offered outside the United States, but not to Americans. So what does it take for you to bring that full product suite to me as an American investor and crypto enthusiasts? Yeah, so first I'll talk about what it is, and then we talk about how to bring it to the U.S.

because this SEC is very interested in that idea as well. So first, I think we've built the best version of stocks, period, whether tokenized or traditional. And the reason is that tokenized equities allow you to trade these shares 24-7. You can send them anywhere in the world. And there's something like 4 billion people in the world who actually don't have access to any kind of brokerage. And so suddenly they can all trade on one unified liquidity pool globally 24-7. And it's an incredible thing to give people access to high-quality investments where, you know, if they don't have access to any brokerage account, they might just be holding their money. in cash, you know, living paycheck to paycheck.

How do they actually become an owner of these businesses and grow their wealth, like in the way that some of us have access to? That's a great thing for the world. Even for people in the US who have access to a brokerage, it's great to be 24-7 and be able to send these things just as easily as sending a payment on your phone. So we took the time to build these tokenized equities

in a really thoughtful way, which I don't think has been done before. You know, most of the tokenized equities out there that I've seen, are actually all the ones I've seen, they're really a derivative, they're a synthetic, they're a debt instrument. It's something that's intended to try to give you exposure to the underlying share, but it's not actually a real security. And we've done that for the first time now. We've made a real security. You can redeem it one-to-one for the underlying share, and it actually gives you the shareholder rights as well, including dividend upside and voting and things like that. So I think that's a big deal. We've just launched it a few

weeks ago, we've already done about almost a billion dollars in trading volume, which has been incredible to see. It's growing very fast. And so, yeah, we're going to keep this idea of tokenization just growing and growing because it creates better products for our customers. You know, we started with stable coins. That's a version of tokenization, a one-to-one-backed digital token for a dollar. Now we're doing it with stocks. Hopefully we can do it with all kinds of things in the future, you know, private companies and treasuries and the big, you know, the different asset management funds out there. We want to tokenize everything and make it accessible to people around the world. Fast, cheap, globally distributed, reduced settlement risk, these kinds of

things. I think it'll be good for the world. It will be good for the world. And the world is living in the future while it feels like we're living in the past because I can't participate in that, like I said. So obviously, I want to also be able to have everything in one wallet and be able to borrow and lend and have my stocks and my Bitcoin in one place all tokenized. What does it take for that without clarity to happen for me in the United States? Yeah. Well, so this is the innovation exemption that Chair Atkins at the SEC has been talking about. And from his public comments, it appears that he's moving forward with that. So that's the way that we'll get this in the U.S.

And I think, you know, as the U.S. has the right to do, it might have a couple tweaks to it that make it, you know, more palatable to the U.S. regulator to create that safety and trust that they're striving for. So there might be some KYC attestation on chain. These are things that we've kind of hope to pioneer from a technology point of view. But yeah, once that's live in the U.S., I think it'll be good for the U.S. investor as well. It seems like it's a race right now for every platform to offer everything. We sort of talked before about how the big institutions want to get into crypto. Maybe that'll be more difficult now, but the crypto companies obviously are crossing the bridge as well in trying to offer everything. So what is the path to being the

everything app, the everything company look like, you know, beyond just tokenized stocks and what you're already offering? Yeah, it's a great point because, you know, I think a lot of people when they hear crypto, they still think about, you know, Bitcoin or something like that. And Bitcoin's great. You know, it's digital gold. It's going to be here forever. I'm very bullish on Bitcoin.

But crypto is actually much bigger than that now. It's crypto is a technology that's updating every aspect of the financial system from trading of every, all these different asset classes, including stocks and prediction markets and commodities and FX. It's also updating payments, stable coin payments are growing like crazy. It's doing tokenization. We can talk later about agentic finance, which I think is very powerful, and that's primarily a phenomenon happening on crypto rails. So crypto, you should think of it as just a way to update the financial system writ large. And many people who don't even really care about crypto are going to be able to benefit from it with these just making better financial

services. So you're right. Coinbase is now, you know, we're leaning into this trend. And I think we have the most complete trading platform in the world at this point, arguably. It's a place where pro-traders can come in to trade options, spot, futures, perpetuals. They can do it with crypto. They can do it with equities. They can do it with commodities, prediction markets. And it's one platform where they have deep liquidity and cross-margin across their assets, or at least by end of this year, I think we'll have that vision fully complete. It's partially there today. And that's just that's a powerful thing. We haven't seen in the traditional platforms that they've been able to move fast in that direction.

I think that's what our customers want. And I encourage anybody who hasn't tried it recently or at all, you know, come to sign up for Coinbase or Coinbase Advanced or Advanced Trading Platform. These are both good products to go get a sense of what the Everything Exchange can really deliver. The fact that we're even talking about tokenized stocks probably shows how early we are because this probably becomes mainstream when they're just stocks. Yeah, exactly. I think, yeah, you're right. A lot of people are just going to open a self-custodial wallet somewhere in the world on their phone, smartphone, and they have an internet connection, and they're going to be able to buy

a share of Coinbase or Nvidia or whatever, and it's going to be so low friction that they won't believe it, right? I mean, that's the future that we all want to build here by updating financial system. And the mission of Coinbase is to increase economic freedom, so it's very in line with that mission. Yeah, I don't think people realize how few people in the world have access to US capital markets. And this not only gives them access to the dollar through stable coins, but obviously gives them the ability to invest in American companies. But there's a lot of other crypto innovations that are now onshoreing.

It's actually almost crazy to watch 24-7, 365 markets are likely coming to Wall Street. I mean, perpetual swaps were invented in crypto and it's a superior futures product. Which one of these are you most excited about, or is it sort of everything at once? Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know. perpetual futures is a pretty killer product that a lot of people haven't experienced yet, because until recently, a lot of it was happening offshore. But under this administration, we have been able to bring some of these perpetual futures products to the U.S. and it gives traders, certainly it's a 24-7 phenomenon, but it also gives them leverage.

And, you know, I think it's a pretty, it's a pretty killer app in the trading world. So I'm excited about that there. There's lots of other things we can talk about. Coinbase is building in the debacle payment space and with the base blockchain and agentic finance, but on the trading side, the perpetual future thing is pretty big. Let's talk about agentic finance because the hottest topic is arguably the, well, AI in general, but certainly where AI and blockchain meet. So you're building that. What are you building with that in mind? Yeah, so I think we're all just witnessing this golden age, the birth of AI, and it's growing, it's growing very quickly. And we want to make sure that we get to a future where these

AI agents can actually do work on our behalf and just make all of us more productive and more efficient and improve everything around us. You know, GDP, healthcare, education, etc., etc. So we realized at a certain point over the last year or two that AI agents are going to need their own financial infrastructure, right? If we're going to ask them to go get worked on our behalf, today people just chat with them and ask them questions sometimes, but increasingly we're asking them to actually go get worked on. So what does that mean? Well, they might have to go spin up and pay for resources. Like, for instance, I asked an agent to go build me a website. They might have to, you know, pay for AWS or GitHub, some of these developer tools. Or if you have an AI agent that

it's kind of like an assistant to you or a personal assistant, you're asking it to go book you a plane flight or a hotel. And, you know, or a scientist needs their AI agent to go get through a paywall to read a research paper or get some data set or something like that. So what we realized is that the existing payment rails are sometimes not sufficient for AI. They tend to, they want to move very fast. They want to make payments globally. They want to do, in some cases, very small transaction amounts. And so we built a set of tools for the agentic economy, which includes, you know,

the base blockchain where most of this activity is happening today with USC, which is a stable coin that we co-created with Circle, and something called the X402 protocol, which is a protocol we created. It's now under the Linux Foundation in collaboration with Google and AWS, Cloudflare, others. And it's allowing agents to pay each other in real time instantly all over the world,

even very small transaction amounts, like a couple cents at a time, which the traditional payment rails don't really support. So at this point, I think it's fair to say that Coinbase has the leading stack for agenic commerce, especially with stable coins. And we're going to keep investing,

in that because I think we're going to be here in the future not too far where there's actually more agents transacting in the economy than humans, which is a pretty wild thing to think about. I want to talk a bit about AI Dumerism because I've only been in crypto since 2016, so I was obviously much, much later than you, but I was here for most of the narratives, right, that crypto is only for criminals and hackers that were boiling the oceans, that Bitcoin mining is using up all the electricity on the planet, that it needs to be stopped, strangely hearing the same things about AI, right? Killing the data centers that it's going to be used to hack and kill us all.

What do you make of the general trend here of AI dumerism and, you know, how are you viewing that? Yeah. I think, you know, there's actually a long history if you go back and look at this, of any time a new technology comes onto the scene, recently we've seen this with AI and crypto, but even if you go back in time to, you know, the automobile when it first came out, people, people were very worried about it. This is going to scare all the horses and, you know, it's going to create all the, like, even things like the bicycle, believe it or not, when this first came into society, people had a moral panic about it because I think the fear at that time was, you know,

where are your children going to be? They could be all over town. It'll lead to licentious behavior. People had all these moral panics. So it's a common theme. And, you know, you can spend a lot of your energy trying to yell. into the void and try to convince people that it's not that bad. And some percent of your time, maybe that's fine to do that.

What I find to be more effective is actually just to go build useful things with the technology, and that's what will ultimately convince people. You know, early users of the internet had the same skepticism. They thought it was going to be used for terrorism and all this kind of illicit activity. But once they are using, they have Amazon shipping packages to their house, you know, 12 hours later, or they can email their friends for free or message them for free anywhere all over the world instead of having to mail a letter with a stamp on it or something you know they start to forget about that moral panic and they go on to the next moral panic and so the solution is just to

build useful things for your customers and then you'll get through it i mean it's unstoppable anyways i agree i mean what yeah this whole idea that we're going to um i don't i personally am skeptical of the idea that we're going to all agree somehow with china and everyone to pause at at the same time. I mean, you know, I don't think it hurts to have voluntary cooperation amongst industry participants. And hey, if we all want to opt into some SRO or, you know, show each other each other's work or something, you know, if it's voluntary, I think that's fine. The dangerous part is where you get into, you know, saying, well, there should be some government agency that approves everything. And we've just seen that go wrong so many times in history, like with the

Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for instance, you know, once that was created to have safe nuclear reactors the net outcome was we almost saw i think like zero or one nuclear reactor got created in the following 50 years or something like that there's been many examples of that like um you know i think it was like dodd frank or after the great financial crisis um you know and then we saw basically no new banks got created like the big banks just got it even bigger and so you know you have to look at fear can give you bad advice and people feel like there has to be something we mean we have to do something and then you'll end up 10 years later it actually had the opposite of the intended effect. So yeah, I think that AI anxiety is overblown. Some of it might even be due to foreign

influence or bots or whatever. And, you know, we have to keep an optimistic perspective on the future and try to mitigate the risks, but keep building through it. Yeah, I mean, if we posit, China is just going to build it, right? It kind of circles back even to the question with clarity, which is if we're not going to do it here, isn't this just going to move forward without us all over the world? Isn't this an opportunity for foreign governments and other entities to play at regulatory arbitrage and to pass legislation and woo the industry there? Exactly. I mean, you know, there's sort of a joke inside the industry a little bit that, you know, the best way to do economic development for these countries overseas is to have

less clarity in the United States. So, you know, I guess they're probably having a good day today. So you recently said Bitcoin's bottom and it's headed to $400,000 by 2030. We have to end with, you know, thoughts on Bitcoin in the market here. Yeah, well, you know, predicting the future is always difficult and none of this is an investment advice. But I, you know, I do think it's interesting to go look at the cycles that Bitcoin's gone through over the last 10 years or more. And I guess really since, yeah, 2009 or so when it first came out, it's been longer than that. But, you know, it's gone through many of these cycles now where it'll have runups, oftentimes around the Bitcoin halving events, where the amount of Bitcoin being mine gets cut in half.

And then you'll see drawbacks. And usually they last about a year or so. We've just gone through one of those recently. And so nobody knows for sure. But if it follows similar patterns to the past, hopefully we've seen the bottom of this cycle around 60K or so on Bitcoin. And it's up a little bit from that now. And yeah, my hope is by 2030, we could see a third.

$300,000 or $400,000 Bitcoin. And I think it'll keep going through these cycles. And then, of course, all the other parts of crypto are growing like wildfire, regardless of the price of Bitcoin, you know, stable coins and perpetual futures and prediction markets and agenic finance are just growing really nicely regardless of what the price of Bitcoin is doing. So it's important to keep that in mind as well. Do you by chance remember what the price of Bitcoin in June 2012 when you started Coinbase was?

I don't. I'm seriously asking. I think it was probably between like five. and $25 if I had to guess. I remember for a long time when when Coinbase app first came out, I was actually just trying to get early users on the platform in 2012. And a lot of people I'd just go around and I'd say, hey, you know, we'd come check out the app. And I'd send them one Bitcoin, which at the time was like $5 or $10. And I probably did that with like a thousand people. I gave them like a whole Bitcoin back there. And so many, many people have come back years later

and kind of, oh my gosh, that thing you gave me like 10 years ago is worth, you know, $60,000 or $100,000. So yeah, that's been fun to watch that journey. And anybody who sort of buys in and then the price goes down, you know, they feel, they feel like bad about it in the short term, but I always tell them, you know, hold onto it. And they go through the next cycle and they feel like they're a genius. So we'll see what happens in this next cycle. I mean, from five bucks to $126,000 to casually in the 70,000s, it's kind of a good analogy for where the industry is at now.

I can't imagine when you founded Coinbase, but maybe as a final question that you thought we'd really be here in 2026. Maybe you did. I always hoped that that would be the case. But yeah, I mean, there was many moments where it looked dire and we didn't know what was going to happen. And, you know, yeah. So actually, I remember early on when Founding Point Base, I had some idea. I was like, one day, the president of the United States or Congress or the government is really going to, like, come out and be talking about this as a really important thing in the world. Because nobody took it seriously back in the early days, you know, they thought it was some kind of a joke or something,

some internet scam, but it's, it's become so big and so important that, yeah, it's, it's like one of the few bipartisan issues, or at least, you know, in the House it was very bipartisan. And, you know, the president talked about it very regularly. So it's kind of surreal in some ways. I never thought we would even be here. I mean, believe it, the United States government has a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Think about that for a moment. That's something I didn't even envision in my wildest dreams. Absolutely crazy. Well, Brian, thank you for. for your efforts over the past 14 years, specifically your efforts trying to get clarity done.

I'm sorry that it didn't happen, but we really appreciate the fight. Yep, I'll keep showing up and doing it. I love it. All right, thank you, Brian, and thank you everyone else. We'll see you tomorrow on the next Daily Wolf. Peace.

Thank you.