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Faryar Shirzad

Chief Policy Officer, Coinbase Global

Search every verified Faryar Shirzad interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Faryar Shirzad, chief policy officer at Coinbase, has been active in media appearances discussing the Clarity Act and related crypto regulation. Following the failure of the Senate cloture vote on the bill in September 2026, Shirzad attributed the setback to the electoral calendar and opposition from traditional financial institutions, which he said mounted a roughly $200 million campaign against the legislation. He expressed optimism about regulatory progress, citing actions by agencies under the Trump administration, including work by Paul Atkins, and said Coinbase’s focus would shift from roughly 65% legislative and 35% regulatory efforts to the reverse as agencies step up. In other appearances, Shirzad discussed the importance of avoiding partisanship in crypto policy, the potential for regulators to implement parts of the Clarity Act administratively, and the national security implications of the U.S. falling behind other G20 countries in establishing a federal framework for crypto markets. He also highlighted Coinbase’s preparations for post-quantum security and described crypto adoption as extraordinary across both the crypto sector and traditional finance. Shirzad characterized the Clarity Act as a bipartisan effort, noting the House passed it with support from 78 Democrats and all Republicans, and framed the legislative moment as a choice between the U.S. and China leading the next-generation financial system.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“I think Gary Gensler was able to sew chaos because there were no rules in place. And so, if he sort of clamped down and started bringing enforcement cases, he had the advantage of ambiguity to in order to defend the lawfare that he was engaged in. What Atkins CLE and the other Trump regulators are doing is they're providing rules. Now in principle a future administration can change those but as market practice adapts”

“We ran into the buzzsaw of I think a few things. One was just the electoral calendar caught up to us. I think Democrats were unwilling to vote on a crypto bill that a lot of their base associated with the president so close to the election day. And I think Trafi and particularly the big banks put up about a $200 million fight against the bill and that created a lot of drag on the process. There's been a lot of effort”

“No, I think this is kind of the under reported story of crypto as a political force. We did two gigantic things in the 2024 cycle and all credit to Brian Armstrong for essentially kind of putting us on this path. One is we created a gigantic super PAC and so almost every story you read about the crypto's power as a political movement is focused on the fact that we had a very large super PAC that we funded that went i”

“I think the one thing that as an industry we've been pretty good about and I know at Coinbase we've been extremely focused on this is avoiding crypto becoming partisan. Everything is so tribal in Washington that if you allow an issue to become a reds or blues issue, you know, red shirts, blue shirts, Republican, Democrat, it's kind of the end of the issue. It doesn't matter if it's apple pie or motherhood or whatever”

“And so, at that point, we realized that we had an existential battle that we were in the midst of, and there was no amount of white papers that were going to solve the problem against the enemies that we were facing. And so, we built the largest political operation any industry's ever built. And the way I put it is that we built this large political operation to take the politics out of crypto. And so, what we did is”

“At some point in the middle of 2023, we realized that there was a small group of progressive members of Congress and the key regulators in the Biden administration who were unambiguously trying to destroy the industry, drive it offshore, and were targeting individuals in the crypto sector through regulatory action. And so, if you talk to a group of crypto people, not just big company people, but grassroots people, yo”

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