Brian Armstrong Talks Future of Digital Assets | Bloomberg Talks

Thank you for repeating the slogan. I like it.

It is here. 2025 was a massive year for crypto. We started to get regulatory clarity finally in the US. So we got the Genius Act passed. In the wake of that, we saw 200 companies announce stable coin integrations. Financial institutions are adopting this at an insane rate. We now power crypto infrastructure for five of the top 20 largest banks in the world. It's not just a US phenomenon. We're seeing incredible adoption of crypto in emerging markets where people have high inflation and stable coins are on a tear. Not to mention prediction markets, etc., etc. So, I do think that we're at a breakout moment for crypto and yeah, it's a big opportunity.

Well, we're meeting with world leaders to talk about economic freedom and how crypto can help update their financial system. We're meeting with central bank governors to talk about what they should do with stable coins. But probably the most interesting group that I'm meeting with here are other bank CEOs because we are having this moment in DC about getting market structure legislation passed and the bill has made good progress. It got a strong bipartisan vote in the House. It's now being deliberated in the Senate and there was a little bit of a blowup last week.

For that current draft, yes.

Well, there was too many giveaways to TradFi if I can say that. Our view is that there should be a level playing field for this is allowed, this is not allowed, and then all the US companies compete. And banks didn't like that. They were in my view like the commercial sides of these banks are very smart and the CEOs get it and they're talking to us about integrating crypto. The bank lobbying groups and bank associations are out there trying to ban their competition and I have zero tolerance for that. I think it's un-American. It harms consumers and the banks need competition. They need to innovate. We also saw this from some of the securities broker lobbying groups because you know tokenized equities are a big thing happening in crypto. So, there was three or four kind of red line issues we saw in the draft text. And as I was in DC that day meeting with members of the Senate, I asked them, okay, is there a path to fix this after it comes out of committee? And they basically told me behind closed doors, if this comes out of committee with a bipartisan vote, we can't really help you on the full Senate floor. And so I felt like I had to stand up and say something defending our customers' rights. And I was careful not to opine on what the Senate should do in terms of a markup or not. And I was careful not to say anything. We don't represent the whole crypto industry, but from a Coinbase point of view, I was not comfortable with the draft text as written. And I'm glad that everyone came back for another round of negotiation.

Oh yeah, I mean this is not our bill. I actually give all the credit really to the Senate and certainly President Trump has said that this is a core part of his crypto agenda. So my impression is that the White House is fully leaned in here and wants to get something done as do we as do the bank CEOs that I met with today. So I'm not seeing any real barriers here. There's some people who were a little grumpy. I think they got caught off guard that we didn't support the draft as is. But it's kind of like that metaphor of, you know, three blind people looking at an elephant and everyone's trying to figure out, you know, there's probably somebody in the administration who had that point of view, but that's not the people we're speaking with, I don't think, have taken that approach. They actually very much want to get this done.

Yeah, so that's certainly one of the core parts of the debate. I think that some of the bank CEOs I've spoken with have kind of said, hey, we have this really high regulatory burden with being a bank and what you're doing kind of looks like a bank and so we think it's super unfair. You should have to have a bank license, too. And what I tell them is, well, we're not doing something very important that you do. We do not do fractional reserve lending, which means for those who don't know, you know, at a bank you deposit your funds. They're not keeping your money there. They're actually lending it out and earning interest on that and then they pay you a very small percentage of that. Like the average savings account makes like 14 basis points or something and that's called net interest margin and that's the whole bank business model. And so that's why they have such high regulatory burden because there can be a run on the bank like your money is not all there. In a crypto world, there's a 100% reserve. So all your money is there. It eliminates this entire category of risk around a bank run. No such thing is possible if there's 100% of the money there. And so we don't need a bank license. We're regulated by the SEC, the CFTC. We have a national trust charter. Like there's different entities and stable coin issuers can operate under these models as well. And so we've kind of said, you know, we don't need a bank license. That's what currently already exists in the law. The Genius Act even enshrined that further. And so there has to be some other solution here. How do we flip the banks from thinking of this as a threat to an opportunity where we can all go win?

Well, there's always short-term fluctuations in crypto, but I think, you know, if you look over the last two years, Bitcoin's up like 100%. Pretty great outcome for anybody who invested. I've said publicly, I think that Bitcoin could hit a million dollars by 2030. I still think that's true. So, whatever happens in any given week or month, we try not to track it too much. It's the longer term trend that I think is interesting.

Well, you know, I don't like to make short-term predictions because who knows? It's the market, you know, short-term voting machine, long-term weighing machine or whatever. So, I think if I don't think people should be like day trading, you know, unless you really want to do that. That's I'm more of a buy and hold kind of guy for the long term. And I think that the cool thing about Bitcoin is that it doesn't unlike fiat currency, there's no money printer, right? So the supply of it is fixed. It's finite. And so as more people integrate crypto and use crypto, there's more demand and finite supply, that only means the price can go up. That's why I said by 2030, I think it could hit a million dollars.

Yeah. So tokenization is kind of a buzzword right now and it is really important as a trend because the same thing that happened with stable coins where a dollar got tokenized and now suddenly people all over the world can use it and there's fast cheap global payments. The same thing is now happening in the equities market and every kind of asset class really that people might want to invest in. So there's about 4 billion adults right now who are unbrokered. You know some people have heard about being unbanked. There's also about four billion people who are unbrokered, meaning they don't have any way to invest in high quality assets, whether that's American tech companies or the latest BlackRock or Apollo fund or anything like that. And so when you tokenize it, there's a bunch of efficiency gains, but it's also about just democratizing access. And you know, there's sort of like this balance between capital and labor, right? And for people who only make their income from labor, they're oftentimes left out of this wealth creation engine, which is the ability to invest some of their hard-earned money in high quality assets. So that's what we're trying to do with tokenization of every asset class.

Yeah. Well, I do think he's done a good job of being very crypto forward and helping get some clear rules and legislation passed. I go to DC about once a quarter, but that's not really usually to meet with the president. It's to meet with members of the Senate, our regulators, members of the House when the bill was going through there.

No, not yet. But yeah, I mean I've met him a few times and found him to be constructive on this issue and I think that if this market structure bill doesn't get moving, you know he may have something to say about that and I think it's part of his agenda to get this second piece of legislation through.

Getting crypto legislation passed. That's pretty much all we talk about.