Opinion
Armstrong: Gensler and Warren unlawfully tried to kill US crypto
“And so it turns out in the past, this ambiguity about where crypto assets set, you know, sit between the two federal regulators, that lack of clarity was really weaponized and by Gary Gensler, the former SEC chair, and Elizabeth Warren and people like that who…”
Opinion
Armstrong: Elizabeth Warren is a socialist who wants government running financial services
“Well, ok, so Elizabeth Warren is you know, in my view, she's a socialist. She believes the government should be running all financial services.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Armstrong: Members of Congress told me Warren asked Gensler to curtail crypto
“My understanding, this is kind of what other people in the Congress told me, is that she asked Gary Gensler to go hard on crypto and like try to really curtail it in the United States.”
Assertion Supported
Armstrong: Around 300 Coinbase employees staged a walkout over BLM stance
“This erupted in Slack and basically 300 employees did a walkout. In protest.”
Disclosure
Armstrong: Coinbase stays strictly apolitical unless an issue impacts crypto mission
“Outside of work, people can do whatever they want. You can go protest. You can be left or right or whatever. But just inside the workplace, we're not going to be political. We're just going to focus, unless it has to do with our mission, crypto and economic fr…”
Assertion Partly supported
Armstrong voted against building USDC before it generated ~$800M in revenue
“There's actually been examples where I voted no on something and it turned out to be a massive success. And an example of that is like USDC, which is the stable coin. I actually, Embarrassed to admit, I voted no on that idea. Luckily, somebody else funded it o…”
Assertion Supported
Armstrong: Coinbase paid zero fines and won SEC lawsuit
“Oh, and I should mention we won that case. It was, so we didn't pay a single dollars, a single dollar in fines. We didn't have to change a single thing about the company. The judge Actually, the SEC withdrew it under this new administration, and several judges…”
Disclosure
Brian Armstrong says being on the autism spectrum aids his focus
“I think I'm somewhere on the spectrum. You know, I've taken some online tests and things like that, and there are things like where, you know, I have difficulty like reading people's faces and emotions sometimes. And, you know, I kind of can get overstimulated…”
Assertion Supported
Armstrong: Five percent of Coinbase staff took exit package after blog post
“We put out the post, and I said, anybody who's not aligned with this new direction, we'll give you a good severance package. You can fill out this form and accept it by Friday or something. And five percent of the company took the exit package.”
Opinion
Armstrong: Bad socialist policies collapsed Argentina from top 10 to 100th richest economy
“And then over a period of like a hundred years of bad economic policy, of essentially like socialist policies of them, the government, like stealing wealth from the people. Well, claiming to help them. It's now like the 100th richest economy in the world. It w…”
Assertion Supported
Armstrong: NewLimit successfully reprogrammed human cells to restore function
“We've demonstrated successfully programming human cells for the first time to restore function.”
Opinion
Armstrong: US should create 10 federal special economic zones for frontier tech
“My ideal world, you'd have, like, 10 plots of land, like, take federal land in the U.S. And designate them as special zones. So you could have one that's, hey, this is, this, in this sandbox, you can iterate on nuclear reactor design. In this one little area, …”
Disclosure
Armstrong: Coinbase spent $50M–$100M fighting the SEC
“I think the total amount we spent
On legal and all that was maybe in the 50 to a hundred million range as a result of that law.”
Disclosure
Coinbase requires pre-submitted town hall questions and excludes off-topic issues
“We had this culture of this open mic thing, but I realized that later we actually don't really do that. We just have people pre-submit questions. And if we think we take hard questions, but if they're like just way off topic or someone's pet issue, we just don…”
What-if
Armstrong: Coinbase would not have survived without co-founder Fred Ehrsam
“And I actually don't think Coinbase would have succeeded without Fred, like, if you look at the subsequent three, four, or five years, There was a lot of, like, near-death experiences, and he's just an absolute killer.”
Disclosure
Coinbase uses internal VC pitch process where a single executive can greenlight projects
“Twice a year, any employees can come pitch and say, hey, I think we should be doing this, and I have the team to go do it... What we've tried to set up internally is we call these next bets, but you can come in and pitch. So each of the product group leaders h…”
Insight
Armstrong: Companies should publish directly rather than through journalists
“Every company is a media company now. You should be publishing your own content direct to your own blog, social media. Some companies have their own podcast. I don't, you never should be going, like, through, I really don't like this idea of putting informatio…”
Assertion Supported
Armstrong: Five GSIB banks are working with Coinbase on crypto integrations
“Five of the, you know, GSIB banks in the world, the largest banks are working with us now on crypto integrations.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Armstrong: Over 50% of Coinbase's code is written by AI agents
“More and more of code is being written by these agents, more than 50% now.”
Assertion Partly supported
Armstrong: Crypto commodity vs security debate is uniquely American
“So in other countries where we operate, like in the UK or in Singapore, they only have one federal regulator for financial services. So they actually don't care whether these are commodities or securities. It's a totally parochial issue in the United States th…”
Assertion Supported
Armstrong: Coinbase met with the SEC approximately 30 times after going public
“We did maybe 30 times. We met with the SEC after becoming a public company where they allowed us to become a public company.”
Insight
Armstrong: Calling domain experts is faster than reading books for insights
“Calling people, I think it's faster if you have access to them, especially. Earlier in my career, I didn't have access, but now I feel like I can get access to more people, and it's often just a shortcut. Like, if you know the right person to call who's been t…”
Assertion Supported
Armstrong: PayPal founders initially tried to create decentralized money like Bitcoin
“You go back and look at what, you know, Peter Thiel and Elon, Max Levchin, all these guys were doing, David Sachs, they actually had many similar ideas to Bitcoin. They were trying to create a decentralized form of money that could be permissionless global on …”
Assertion Supported
Armstrong: Coinbase's first employee hire was former lumberjack Olaf Carlson-Wee
“Actually the very first hire at Coinbase was this guy Olaf Carlson Wee, outside of Fred and I as the co-founders, and we were trying to hire this customer, someone to come in to run customer support, because of the backlog I mentioned, and I remember it came d…”
Brian Armstrong