00:23:49 · Molly O'Shea
[00:23:49] S1: We've seen hundreds of billions of dollars move through these cycles. You've definitely seen it and felt it, but I'm really curious because we had Web three point and the consumer demand was insane, and people were trading NFTs, there were lots of fun things going on, and then that kind of washed away, and then now we have prediction markets, and hundreds of billions of dollars are being traded in prediction markets. So one, I'm really curious if you have an answer for this or any sort of estimate, how much money do you think is left on the sidelines as dry powder for these big, huge events? And then two, how do you form your product decisions around that? Why did you decide to go into prediction markets? Like, what's your competitive advantage there?
00:24:32 · Brian Armstrong
[00:24:32] S0: Yeah. Well, the good thing about being in this industry, it's very innovative. So every few months or year, there's some new trend, right? You mentioned a couple of them. And you're right. We're in a cycle right now where prediction markets are really trending. Stablecoin payments are really trending. Derivatives are trading trending. And I think sometimes people say, oh, the the price of Bitcoin's down, so crypto's down. And I have to kinda remind people that, like, crypto's much broader than just Bitcoin now, and so when stablecoins and derivatives and prediction markets are all trending up, you know, Bitcoin might be down. It's like there's always gonna be something that's up and something that's down. That's the nature of financial markets. So what we've tried to really do at Coinbase is just diversify our suite of products to, include everything. So if just recently, I mean, we've been seeing some of the largest IPOs in history start to come to market, and the AI companies, I think, have really, eaten up a lot of the risk capital in the world. Right? That actually might be part of the reason why Bitcoin is down, actually, because people are just trying to get as much of their risk capital into, SpaceX OpenAI and Anthropic right now. And so from a Coinbase point of view, we're like, great. If that's what people wanna trade, guess what? We have pre IPO perps. Right? We're gonna you can get exposure to these things before they go live, and then once they're live and trading, we're gonna have tokenized equities and traditional equities. People can trade, these as well. So, you know, long term, I'm still super bullish on on Bitcoin. I think that I'm hoping we hit the bottom at 60 k or so, and it seems it seems to be trending back up now. But, yeah, as some of these AI companies go go public, and I think the risk capital will start to shift around a bit more, and the the market structure legislation might help as well.
00:26:07 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Armstrong
[00:26:07] S1: I mean, to your point, we are seeing trillion dollar IPOs. That has not happened before. When I talked to Vlad Tenev, I mean, he really wanted to democratize access to these companies because all of the upside was happening on the private side, not where you traditionally get it on the public. [00:26:23] S0: Mhmm. [00:26:24] S1: So with these, like, how are are you first are you actually seeing people transfer their crypto into these pre IPO perp?
00:26:33 · Brian Armstrong
[00:26:33] S0: Yeah. So we we launched, with SpaceX a few weeks ago before they before they went public, and we saw quite a lot of volume on there. And I think to your point about democratizing access, it's this is a very important point. Right? You know, private you know, retail really didn't get access to a lot of these private companies as they were going up in value. I think we can change that, with things like pre IPO perps. I think that, the accredited investor laws really need to get updated in this country. So for people who don't know what that is, you know, to trade in by invest in private companies, you have to become an accredited investor, which basically means you have a certain net worth or income that's quite high. And the intention behind this was good. And they're essentially trying to protect people from high risk investments or scams, but you have to judge these policies, by their intention, but by the results. The results have been quite bad. Essentially, makes it so only rich people can get richer. It's like the most regressive tax. Typically, we wanna have a progressive tax system. Rich people pay more. In this case, it totally benefits rich people who can make more money in the private markets. And once something is valued at a trillion, then only then can retail trade it. It's completely unfair, and so the better way to do it would be a financial literacy test. So it doesn't matter if you're rich or you're poor. If there's a concern about scams, pass a financial literacy test, and then you could trade it in the private market. So that's the kind of thing that maybe once market structure's done, I'll get a chance to go talk with the Senate about.
00:28:09 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Armstrong
[00:28:09] S1: Sure. That'll be fun. [00:28:10] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I think, honestly, I think there'd be support on both sides of the aisle for that. It it would just yeah. It'd be good for Americans. [00:28:18] S1: To go back to the everything exchange, it does seem like every fintech and financial service company is trying to be the financial super app. So why does Coinbase win? [00:28:32] S0: Yeah. Well, you're right. I think lots of people now are starting to integrate crypto trading, for instance. It's actually you know, even though this idea is something a lot of people are talking about, the execution on it is really not there from almost anybody. I think we're actually leading now on this, where you can get access to, you know, millions of crypto assets, including, like, DEX trading support that we added. You can trade every stock out there in the world pretty much. Pre IPO perps, you can trade commodities, you can do prediction markets. So I would say, like, this you know, even even, like, getting these approvals in The US, we were the first for, these, perpetual style futures and things like that, for for crypto and and options trading. We're the first company to do that. I don't think any other company in The US has gotten that yet. So there's a number of things where we've been first, and so doing it all in one product with HITRUST, where we're storing more crypto than any other company in the world, and we have this kind of deep crypto native expertise. Those are our strengths. Lots of people are gonna try this. Our job is just to be out there in the front.
00:29:40 · Molly O'Shea
[00:29:40] S1: We've gotten pretty far, and we haven't really talked about AI that much, so I wanna talk about it. You talked about your agents, but there was a tweet that you put out that got over 24,000,000 views. It went really viral. Mhmm. I'm gonna just share a little bit of it for the audience, and then we'll just link it. But you essentially said that Coinbase is rebuilding around intelligence. And so what does that mean, and why that path forward?