Crypto

“About half of one percent of global GDP is running on crypto.”

“There's maybe about seven hundred million people in the world who have used crypto or hold crypto, but not all of them use it every month, which might be more like in the 50 to a hundred million dollar, 50 to a hundred million people range.”

“We did. It was still a year when the topics of the day were crypto and metaverse. So, twenty-twenty-two was still a year where, like, everybody was obsessed about those two. So, it was a perfect time because we could actually focus and build on a lot on the AI…”

“So they were all chasing, all the investors were chasing things that I'm like, that's not even a real business. And you're throwing cash. And I'm like, we have a real business.”

“If you take the cynical view that, that the appeal of crypto is the ability to operate outside of the law, then I feel like there's always going to be a market for that.”

“And also, I mean, if you take it as an asset, I think there's always a market for that too, just from a pure motivation of diversification and hedging.”

“To make a new financial system, you had, you needed a few things, like you needed scalability of the blockchains to get the cost down and the speed, speed down. You needed regulatory clarity, and then we needed privacy of the transactions. It's actually almost…”

“We're the company in the world that stores more crypto than anybody else.”

“I think there's been a lot of positive movement on regulatory clarity but at the same time, I think that sentiment for crypto has also gone down significantly from the general public.”

“Like most people don't know that 80% of the trading volume went offshore for crypto because of the lack of clarity in the US.”

“And you mentioned the Clarity Act. I mean, this would be another landmark piece of legislation that I think is a massive TAM expansion opportunity for Coinbase and for all of crypto. To have more of this built in the United States with clear rules.”

“In terms of Coinbase's unique advantage, I mean, so we're storing more crypto than any other company in the world.”

“When I started protocol ventures, which was again, the first fund of funds in crypto”

“Well, I think what's interesting right now is that TradFi, traditional finance, is really finally starting to bridge in to crypto and get really interested. And I think, you know, they may see like, hey, if we don't do something here, we may get disrupted. So …”

“Everything is, is traced on the blockchain. Like, crypto is a terrible place for criminals to move money because it's actually traceable on the blockchain. US dollars or any hard currency is much easier to be able to do nefarious things than having a currency …”

“There's a few things that I'll never touch. I'll never touch crypto. I'm not getting into whether I believe in crypto or not. I think it has huge use cases, but I think it's best left to the crypto funds. Consumer hardware is tough because of various, various …”

“You need a bare instrument on the internet. You need internet money for these AIs to be economic actors, and I think that's very likely to be crypto.”

“The truth is actually if you look at percentage wise, illicit activities in crypto is actually much, much less than your traditional finance.”

“I think AI is gonna use crypto for payments, for transactions. They're not gonna use, no, they cannot KYC through a bank. They cannot do they cannot do a selfie. They don't have a passport, et cetera.”

“I think right now crypto, if you buy crypto, Americans are probably paying the highest fees in the world. Whereas if you buy anything else, America's usually paying the lowest price.”

“AI within the trusted tribe increased productivity. Between trusted tribes decreased productivity. So you make more money perhaps within the tribe, but then you have to spend it on verifying stuff between tribes. So crypto is for between tribes and AI is withi…”

“I think crypto is the most obvious honeypot in a world where you can defeat encryption.”

“I think this is the grand unification basically of AI and crypto is what's about to happen now. I think AI is the crypto killer app, I think is where, where this is really going to come out.”

“I am right now in the middle of the final negotiations on trying to put in place certain rules around crypto.”

“The Fed has a pretty good tech team. Like, their systems are actually pretty good. If you think about it, the U.S. Right now, through the Fed, has the capability to move money and to clear money through all these institutions, 24 seven. Faster than stablecoins…”

“The model that we use in the book, Christian, is that we treat cryptos like companies. So technically they're different from companies. Legally they're different, but we can think of them much the same. So investing in a crypto is like investing in a company i…”

“You know, I was probably overly skeptical of at least many of the crypto messages that were out there, but the stable coin rails seem like a real, real innovation and something that has scale.”

“And in that world, I think crypto as an identifier of Authenticity is going to be more and more important. Like at the end of the day, I want the original. I don't want a reproduction.”

“Overall though, I would just say the Biden administration overall is quite hostile to crypto. I mean, they openly announced war on crypto.”

“Unfortunately the SEC started by looking at crypto as maybe the ostrich with the head in the sand, as was their attitude. Like maybe this stuff will go away by the time we lift our head out of the sand. That obviously didn't happen. And then came the very basi…”

“There's like, fifty-two million Americans who've used crypto now.”

“I think there's actually going to be quite a few intersections between AI and crypto.”

“What I loved about looking at Facebook's business was, you know, ad supported and everything they did that was on the core, like Instagram worked incredibly well. And when they tried to do crypto or when they tried to do other things that were not big as a boa…”

“I suspect that there will be a convergence of One side of crypto and core financial services be that exchanging you know, like checking accounts with dollars in them for checking accounts with USDC in them, wallets with USDC in them or similar.”

“I think we're kind of there in the AI roll-up right now, where You know, ourselves and ELOD and Thrive and a few others, AVC have embraced it, but I think most of the market is still pretty skeptical, you know, similar to kind of the crypto evolution and where…”

“Felix Pago is a remittance app. It's powered by stablecoins. It doesn't mention stablecoins or crypto anywhere on the website. It just talks about customer value, the fact it has nice integrations, WhatsApp, and things like that.”

“The utilitarian difference between a real US dollar and a US dollar crypto coin is like that the US dollar crypto coin is mostly like, it's sort of like gift certificates to scams. It's like, there's not that many things you can actually purchase with it that …”

“Why are there so many young black and Latino folks who care about crypto? Because frankly, it's the closest they often they're going to get to a friends and family round in technology that we've got to expand economic opportunities so they have more options.”

“The whole point of crypto is actually to protect consumers from software developers.”

“Y Combinator and Coinbase are together putting out a joint request for startups building in crypto.”

“Now, I think about fintech three point O as the opportunity to rewrite it all to basically start from the ground up and say, how do we make the financial system work better for everyone by building it on top of the programmable software platform that includes …”

“Candidly, no. And I think the reason I say no is because if you ask a friend or family member, I don't think they'd say, oh yeah, I have had a magic moment with crypto. I think instead they might be fearful. They might not actually know what crypto is doing on…”

“And we think about this as the broadband moment for crypto, where when we were in dial up of the internet, you couldn't have the applications that exist today. And then gradually we scaled the throughput, scaled the bandwidth, and that led to these new breakou…”

“I think the thing that's shifting with crypto is those network effects are being turned inside out. Where it's when we're onboarding people on chain and we're bringing them into these new systems, they're actually entering an open network where when you join t…”

“I think our advice to founders would definitely be look for those sorts of opportunities where you understand the technology Deeply enough. You've read the commerce payment protocol paper. You know how this all works, but you're looking for like actual problem…”

“One is in a world where AI proliferates it's gonna be really hard to know like what's real. And crypto provides a level of hardness and verification that I think can connect to AI in a way that solves that problem. Like if you have millions and millions and mi…”

“And I think that's exactly what we're seeing happen with crypto right now is that crypto is plugging in as a platform. That enables agents to transact natively. So instead of going and trying to operate in a browser over the legacy rails, they just call the sm…”

“I personally think that you could build a competitive product to TikTok with crypto if the magic, you caught that kind of lightning in a bottle, because the monetization mechanism with crypto is so different than the ad-based one.”

“I never got crypto. I still don't get crypto... It still feels like a Ponzi scheme to me, which I know it makes me an old fogey, but I don't get it.”

“I think Bitcoin is here to stay. Crypto is here to stay. This has lasted long enough. It's getting mainstream, whether it's banks or asset management firms who told you five years ago, we'll never touch this thing.”

“It's like literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than visa, more than dollars, more than anything.”

“Yeah, probably. Honestly, probably. Probably.”

“Unlike the whole, like, crypto craziness of the last couple years we didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet.”

“The electricity, the electric utilities are going through huge amounts of change, and especially with the waves of AI and crypto and so on, the needs that the grid has to be put through have fundamentally changed over the last five years, and will continue to …”

“And you're actually risk on by not having any exposure in your portfolio.”

“And so the market is actually already solved for these issues. If you were just to Google like crypto, like Estate solutions. There's so many companies that are solving for this now. So these were issues maybe five, 10 years ago, and people aren't aware to the…”

“While we go into the bear cycle, which will happen probably sometime in 20, 26.”

“I don't think that's true for crypto. I think that these cycles are super predictable. I think that they follow the M two. I think that they follow the having cycle.”

“So the vast majority of uses of crypto are illegal stuff. Gun trades, drug trades sex trafficking. Arms trades. It's the worst use of crypto.”

“If you over-financialize things, it loses the social side of it, which crypto does a lot.”