Hey, folks, I've got Brian Armstrong's CEO of Coinbase with me. Brian, great to see you.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Yeah, Brian, congrats on old success. I've been a user of coinbase since twenty sixteen ish. Watch you grow from a small exchange to doing an IPO to major acquisitions. How has your or has your vision for the company change, and what's your vision look like for the next five years.
Yeah.
Well, you know, coinba started out as just a trading platform and people came in to buy one of the twenty one million bitcoin that'll ever be created or a fraction of one. And over time, we you know, we added more crypto assets, but we realized that crypto was going to go way beyond just being a trading platform. Sure, and so what's really exciting is we're now seeing the mass adoption of stable coin payments.
You know, that grew fifty percent year over year.
The stable cooin aum totally uncorrelated to crypto trading volumes, by the way. Yeah, and now we're seeing people to do loans using DeFi and so crypto is really updating all financial services. It's not just about trading anymore. And you know, the stable coin moment is really here, like Coinbase is getting into payments in a big way.
Yeah, So it was announced today Coinbase for Business as well as an integration with Shopify. So do you see that being the untapped market the business sector bringing those folks on chain.
Yeah, Well, businesses are one of the early adopters of on chain payments because they have a really high pain point. You know, businesses they have to pay contractors, employees, vendors around the world, different countries.
There's FX fees, there's delays.
And of course they have to receive money from customers as well, and so that's a challenge. And you know, as you pointed out, we we've actually served large businesses financial institutions for a long time. We serve over two hundred financial institutions like black Rock and PayPal and Stripe. But today we're announcing a new product for startups and medium sized businesses called coinbas Business, and that has a powerful suite of stable coin payment APIs baked into it
as well. So that's how we're hoping to power this for businesses. And you know you mentioned we also announced the partnership with Shopify, so consumers can now pay using SDC on base with Shopify merchants, So we're really trying to tackle all these different pieces of payments and update the system.
And there's also a credit card that you're going to launch, the coinbase one.
Yeah, well so, yeah, we launched a bitcoin credit card today in partnership with AMES and it gives you up to four percent cash back in bitcoin for every purchase that you make. So a lot of times, you know, you get you can get rewards on cards, but they don't have as much value or they lose value. I think for our core audience, they want to they want to get bitcoin back something that will go up in
value over time. So that was a really cool partnership with MS and it's just helping people be able to spend crypto anywhere around the world.
That's exciting and I love that.
I personally have used other apps to spend and earn bitcoin back. I'm gonna use that card. So, Brian, what is your outlook on the crypto market as far as legislation. Do you expect the stable coin Bill and the Market Structure Bill to get pass this year?
Yeah.
I mean we're incredibly excited about the progress on legislation. I got to give a lot of credit to this administration and the Senate and the House that are driving this forward. So there's a bill called the Genius Act for Stable Coins going through the Senate right now, which has a lot of bipartisan support and momentum. And then we saw something called Declarity Act, which is for market
structural legislation and crypto coming out of the House. So my hope is that by some combination or you know, one after the other, these will become law. And you know, President Trump has said that he wants these to be brought into law by the August recess. And so yeah, we're just incredibly thankful and happy for everything that Congress and this administration is doing.
Brian, when you first got into crypto, we were nowhere where we're at now. Do you sometimes pinch yourself and like, this is kind of surreal where we've come and now we're at.
Yeah.
I mean that's the nature of entrepreneurship is you have some kind of contrarian idea and early on a lot of people thought we were crazy. You know, I had venture capitalists like you know, a lot got a lot of no's. I had bank banks like hang up on us or deep Bank US and so, you know, it took a long time to get here, and I in my wildest dreams, I thought maybe someday, maybe the President
of the United States would say the word bitcoin. And now we have, you know, kind of the most pro crypto president and it's a bipartisan issue, and it's like probably the most bipartisan issue in the United States government. So it's great if we can get legislation passed. It'll ensure that this industry can get built here in America and ultimately we want it to be everywhere around the world.
Absolutely. Final question, what are you most excited about for crypto moving forward? Is it a certain sector? Is this just the macro in general as far as adoption and things like that.
Yeah, well, right now, our core focus is on trading and payments. Those are our core businesses. But there's a lot of things on the horizon that I'm also excited about. You know, the way that capital formation happens could be much more efficient on chain, everything from how people incorporate issue shares, raise money, you know, token is securities. I
think these will all be big areas. I think that AI agents are going to use stable coin payments and so there's a whole concept of agentic commerce that we're trying to help enable through products like coinba Commerce, And you know, we have a lot of cool venture bets.
Base is our layer two solution.
A lot of people are now building new applications on chain, and we have a cool announcement later this year about how we're updating ourself custodial wallet. So there's a lot of cool things on the horizon, but our core is really trading in payments for this year, and.
I feel like that's the key to getting adoption, having folks be able to move money faster, transact with merchants that they love, businesses that they love. So great stuff. Yeah, drives utility awesome, Brian, thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you.