Relentless
01:25:19 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:25:19] S1: Do you know the logic behind this or the reasoning behind this set? [01:25:22] S0: Well, I think you said it was Game of Thrones. Right? Is it the bank? What is it? The... Not the iron bank. [01:25:26] S1: The iron bank [01:25:27] S0: of bronze. Okay. [01:25:28] S1: But, basically, the idea was I came across this idea that you've shared, which is, you know, Coinbase is trying to update the financial system. And I thought to myself, even before, like, Lulu reached out, I was thinking to myself for probably, like, two months ish, and then she randomly text me on Twitter. And she's like, do you wanna do an interview with Brian Armstrong? And I was like, yes, but only if we can do it under these conditions, which was like in a bank vault on top of the world's largest Bitcoin. And and she thought that was funny and wasn't totally serious, and then, you know, here we are. But my goal with this was basically showcase what old finance looks like Mhmm. And also, like, celebrate the reason, you know, for founding Coinbase, which is basically to buy Bitcoin and kind of marry the old with the new. Right? So it's kind like a baton passing. [01:26:09] S0: Yeah. I mean, I should be asking you how to, like, tell the story in a way that resonates with people emotionally. Like, I... You're you're bringing together a lot of key pieces of it here. So thank you for putting this this cool vision together. I mean, that's made out of granite, I'm told. [01:26:23] S1: Marble. [01:26:23] S0: Marble. Okay. [01:26:24] S1: Yeah. It's gonna be in your house if you want it. It's yours now.
01:26:24 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:26:24] S1: Yeah. It's gonna be in your house if you want it. It's yours now. [01:26:28] S0: We might put that in our office, actually. I think that would be sick. [01:26:30] S1: I was trying to create a full statue of Satoshi, but the problem is is, like, people won't intuitively get Satoshi. Yeah. And so I was like, well, what's the next best thing? And I was like, we could create a massive Bitcoin. [01:26:38] S0: Yeah. [01:26:38] S1: I think the best for... Like, the best founders are able to figure out how can I, like, build a company where at any given moment, I'm having a lot of fun, and I'm, like, setting? You know, extending the the goal post out so that you're on this, you know, infinite game. How are you kind of designing today so that you have those future milestones where you're really excited to wake up in the morning and tackle them?
01:26:59 · Brian Armstrong
[01:26:59] S0: Well, okay. So we have the things that we're excited about right now, like, let's say next three, four years, and I'll try to touch on, like, the big long term picture. So there's a few things we're focused on right now. One is the everything exchange. So every asset class is coming on chain, and it's gonna be stocks and commodities and crypto and prediction markets and FX, and everything is now gonna trade, like, 20 fourseven globally, democratized access. And I think that's the future of all trading and value exchange. Okay. Then we're seeing stablecoin payments just take off in a massive way. That's the second big use case for crypto, so we're making a bunch of investments there. And now you can send money instantly anywhere in the world for, like, less than one second, right, anywhere in the world. So that's powerful, and we're going to see AI agents start to do a lot of machine to machine payments and, like, a bunch of cool stuff's happening there. And then we're seeing that... We're like, more of crypto in the financial services is is moving on chain into these, like, decentralized protocols, like decentralized exchanges, DeFi, and that's a big... With our self custodial wallets, like, these allow us to operate in more emerging markets. Like, how do we get a billion people on chain? I think we're gonna have to be self custodial wallet. This is, our base app and what we're doing with base chain. And so those are, like, our three big priorities right now. And I think long term, you know, the mission of the company is really about increasing economic freedom in the world. So how could we actually, like, bend the curve on economic freedom in a bunch of these countries? Because everybody has a smartphone now. They have access to the Internet. Now they have access to sound money, global payment system. They can invest in assets, get access to, like, high quality investment assets. They can get a loan. They can do capital formation to start a business in a way that's much more efficient. I think ultimately, like, we're kind of unbundling money from the state, if you will. And I think there could actually be eventually, communities, cities, societies, countries.
01:28:55 · Brian Armstrong
Like, this is kind of the network state idea where actually governance might get updated, where I think there could be physical territories, different places in the world that are pro freedom, special economic zones, if you will, things like Prospera, which we're an investor in, that are actually like the governance from a voting point of view is done on chain. Land rights is all carved up and tokenized. So title exchange and all these things are more efficient, mortgages. And the entire economy kind of runs on blockchain. And I think that would be a cool longer term vision of like, I hope we get to make, like, a crypto city or some special economic zones in The US that would really unlock innovation. It's not just for crypto, by the way. I actually think we want these sandboxes of innovation for lots of things, like in biotech, like, do we run accelerated clinical trials, Operation Warp Speed, like, do it all the time? How do we have a special economic zone to develop nuclear power or fusion energy in a way that doesn't get blocked by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or a place where you can just build data centers unfettered? You don't have to follow a federal law, but within that sandbox, you can do much faster iteration or drone deliveries. Should be a bunch of these special economic zones. They worked really well in Shenzhen and China and Dubai and Singapore and Hong Kong. The US should have a number of these. That would be fun to really work on. And and can you imagine, like, dropping into some kind of, like... It would be like a weird... Like a Tokyo in, you know, the... A hundred years from now. Like, it'd feel like
01:30:23 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:30:23] S1: Like cyberpunk. [01:30:24] S0: Yeah. It would feel like a very different culture. Like, Burning Man meets, like, Tokyo or something. And you could drop in there and and feel what it's like to be in a city or in a society that really is not encumbered by so much [01:30:36] S1: red tape. If you look at zipline, they had... They they kind of took the same model where you can imagine Africa is like a special economic zone where suddenly you're able to fly the drones without the FAA worrying about it too much. Yeah. And they did exactly what you're kind of describing except for over there where they basically just gathered a bunch of flight time and data. I think they had like 50,000,000 flight time miles or flight miles before they even went and did their first flight in The US commercially. Yeah. And FAA just basically went over there, looked at their data. Kenya, I think, was like laughing at them because they were like, this clearly works, and we're... We've been using it for the last ten years, and what are you guys doing? And then they came back, and suddenly they're operating. I think they've got their, like, third major hub just turning on now. But I think that's kind of like countries is kind of the special economic zones right now. [01:31:22] S0: You're right. I mean, well, Zip Line is an amazing company, and you're right. Like, it's kind of... I mean, it's great that Rwanda, like, allowed them to be that special economic zone. Rwanda is kind of like the Singapore of Africa. [01:31:33] S1: Not Kenya.
01:31:33 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:31:33] S1: Not Kenya. [01:31:35] S0: Yeah. Rwanda. Well, they might be they might be in Kenya too. But, anyway, these social economic zones have been very helpful, and it's a shame that they had to, like, leave The US to do that. I mean, we should have those in The US as well. [01:31:47] S1: This is something that I've never heard someone in crypto talk about. I've never heard you talk about it. The Silk Road 2013. [01:31:54] S0: Mhmm. [01:31:55] S1: What was it like operating a crypto company as that was getting raided and, like, shut down?