#670 Building The Future of Crypto with Brian Armstrong

50% of the people I talk to in DC, roughly, they're still thinking of crypto as a risk. They think 'This is scary. This is dangerous.' They have all kinds of misconceptions in their head about the percentage of activity that's for illicit purposes. It's actually much smaller than most of them realize—it's probably about 1% or less, whereas the US dollar cash is like 3-4% illicit activity, right? But in their mind, they think it's like 50% illicit activity.

Bitcoin is kind of what got me super excited about crypto in the first place, and I still am excited about it. I hold a ton of... Bitcoin ... It's going to be around forever as basically, you know, the gold or the money of this industry.

Honestly, regulation would be the best thing to ever happen to Coinbase because we're the largest company who can shoulder that. We have huge a balance sheet. We have tons of lawyers on staff. We already have been leaning into regulation for many, many years ... The companies it would harm are smaller crypto startups ... It would entrench these companies.

This might be one of those rare moments in history where a small group of people could take this brilliant technology innovation, Bitcoin, and with the proliferation of smartphones and the Internet, actually inject economic freedom and property rights and good financial infrastructure into all these countries all over the world.

If you do something good for the world, you can capture some of the upside. That's a very simple but very powerful idea. And arguably, it's almost sufficient to get a huge amount of innovation and progress happening in society.

Over a thousand millionaires were created at Coinbase when we went public, which was an incredible statistic. So, that was just hugely emotional and life-changing for so many people, and it turned out to be for me as well.

My guess is that we'll eventually be in a world where there's maybe dozens of blockchains, but there's millions or billions of tokens.

I think DAOs are a really important innovation, and it's also going to be a really big trend. I mean, it already is, but I think it's going to be huge in the future.

Actually, today, Coinbase interfaces & interacts with 54 different regulators just in the United States. And we're actually in about 30 or 40 countries globally ... We're very much a global company, so we interface with similar counterparts in other places.