Let me invite to the stage Faryar Shirzad, chief policy officer, my good friend at Coinbase. I'm gonna make something happen here.
Do you know so he can get you a crypto wallet so fast?
I thought you were going to do it.
Steve will fund it. Exactly.
This has actually worked out pretty well for me. Like one millionth of a Bitcoin or something, you know, depending on... I don't have much of it. There's a funny story. Well, I'm not going to get into the story. Turns out I had like a penny of Bitcoin at one point because I sold all my Bitcoin way too early, but that penny became worth like $10 over a period of time.
Just think about that. That's the power, right?
Just think about that and cry if it'd been any more substantial. But anyway, thank you very much, Neil. I'm really glad. No, sit right there. Far, it's great to have you join us. Thank you for helping to host today and open this session. We've had an extraordinary array of minds coming through here and talking about the economy. I'm very excited about the dramatic innovations going on in the fintech space broadly, but also with stablecoins and crypto. I think there's a lot of noise out there and there's real stuff. President Trump and this administration passed the Genius Act, and I just saw something happen empirically: central banks around the world began paying attention in a way they would never touch this subject. I had two Federal Reserve bank governors of the United States Federal Reserve call me and say, 'Steve, if you do another program on crypto, we're happy to show up,' which would never have happened a year ago. So it's pretty interesting to see what's going on. I'd love you to help: one, I want our friend here, Neil Bradley at the Chamber, to really become very literate in everything crypto, and you can help. But secondly, I'm interested in what the Genius Act achieved and where your crystal ball says what opportunities will open up from an American growth perspective.
No, I'm very happy to be here, and it's good to be here with Neil. I think he underplayed how helpful the Chamber has actually been to crypto and to Coinbase. We're a very proud member of all the various parts, including the litigation folks who were amazing and very helpful to us when we were under siege during the Biden administration. So big shout out to Neil and his colleagues. For a lot of people who don't know crypto, crypto is fundamentally an information technology breakthrough. It does the thing that the internet was unable to do. If you're an internet technology expert, you'll know there's an error code called X42, which was embedded by Mark Andreessen and the folks who developed the initial internet to allow for value transfer, because the internet is built on a series of decentralized protocols that allow you to transfer data peer-to-peer without the need for an intermediary. Obvious early use cases are email and texts where I can send a message to you without needing the postal service or an intermediary. What the internet couldn't do is transfer value. If I wanted to send you a dollar, there was no way to know that I had a dollar, no way to send it so you took possession of it, and no way for you to tell the public that you're now in possession of that dollar so you could spend it with another person. Crypto created a technology that allows you to create a unique digital token. That token can be a dollar, a bitcoin, an auto title, your mortgage, your identity, anything you tokenize.
Could be your membership dues in the Chamber.
It could be your membership dues in the Chamber. It allows a person to transfer it on a peer-to-peer basis through a decentralized protocol without the need for an intermediary. So I can send you a message thanking you for whatever, or you can send me a message thanking me for mowing your lawn and then send me $10 in that same message, and that transaction could be executed. It sounds simple, but the impact is transformational. When the internet was created, a lot of people said it's kind of cool but is it that big a deal? Crypto is going through the same thing. The first generation of adoption is an efficiency play. Our payment system costs over $200 billion in the US alone. The average household pays about $2,000 simply for payments. We can take that efficiency out of the system with crypto technology.
And then the next generation would be programmability for transfer costs.
Just payment various bank fees, credit card fees, you name it. All of those are embedded. People in this audience don't feel it, but regular folks do.
Wow. Wow. That's why it's so transformational. I'm so glad you guys are here today. Big round of applause. Neil Bradley, EVP of the Chamber of Commerce. Good to see you.
He's had enough of crypto. But I want to just say thank you, Neil. I want to say what did the Genius Act do? Because what did it take it to a higher level?
Well, it did something very simple. It said that if somebody wants to be an issuer of a stablecoin, they should abide by a whole series of federal regulatory requirements, and they assign the job of overseeing the stablecoin sector to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is one of the bank regulators in the US. So if I'm going to be an issuer of a stablecoin, I have to apply to the OCC, be registered, have reserve requirements, capital requirements, audits, and do the whole thing. It's a straightforward legal regime, but it took years to get there.
So we're there now, but there's a part two we're trying to talk about, right? The Clarity Act. What is that? What is part two and why is it important?
Well, if I could just stay on part one for a second. The bill was signed in July as you know. In the months since July, in the US alone, there's been over a hundred separate announcements by different banks, payment processors, credit card companies, and corporates on adopting and integrating stablecoins into their payment systems.
City is one of them. Bank of New York, JP Morgan, we're partnering with City and a number of big banks on the implementation, Stripe, Shopify, Visa, Mastercard. The adoption is fast even before the bill goes into legal effect. What the stablecoin bill didn't do, what the Genius Act didn't do, is provide clear rules for crypto trading. So if I want to create a new crypto token, how will that be regulated, and is it the SEC or the CFTC, and who does what? Congress is in the process of getting those rules right.
