Coinbase (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong joins Scott Melker for a conversation the latest innovations in crypto trading, such as perpetual futures products and AI trading agents.
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I don’t think people realize how few people in the world have access to US capital markets. And this not only gives them access to the dollar through stable coins, but obviously gives them the ability to invest in American companies. But there’s a lot of other crypto innovations that are now on-shoring. It’s actually almost crazy to watch. 24/7, 365 markets are likely coming to Wall Street. I mean perpetual swaps were invented in crypto and it’s a, you know, superior futures product. Which one of these are you most excited about or is it sort of everything at once?
Yeah, well, I mean, I I don’t know. I think perpetual futures is is is a pretty killer product that a lot of people haven’t experienced yet because until recently a lot of it was happening offshore.
But under this administration, we have been able to bring some of these perpetual futures products to the US and it gives traders, uh, certainly it’s it’s a 24/7 phenomenon, but it’s also gives them leverage. And, um, you know, I think it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty killer app in the trading world. So I’m I’m excited about that there.
There’s lots of other things we can talk about. Coinbase is is building in the Bitcoin payment space and with the Base blockchain and agentic finance, but uh on the trading side, the perpetual future thing is pretty big.
Let’s talk about agentic finance because uh the hottest topic is arguably the, well, AI in general, but certainly where AI and blockchain meet. So you’re building that. What are you building with that in mind?
Yeah, so I think we’re all just witnessing uh this golden age, uh the birth of AI and it’s growing, it’s growing very quickly. And we want to make sure that we get to a future where these AI agents can actually uh do work on our behalf and just make all of us more productive and more efficient and improve everything around us. Um, you know, GDP, healthcare, education, etc, etc. So,
we realized at a certain point over the last uh year or two that AI agents are going to need their own financial infrastructure, right? Um, if we’re going to ask them to go get work done on our behalf, they, you know, today people just chat with them and ask them questions sometimes, but increasingly we’re asking them to actually go get work done. So what does that mean?
Well, they might have to go, um, spin up and pay for resources, like for instance, if I ask an agent to go build me a website, they might have to, you know, pay for AWS or or GitHub or some of these developer tools or, um, if you have an AI agent that it’s kind of like an an assistant to you or a personal assistant, you’re asking it to go book you a plane flight or a hotel.
And, you know, or a scientist needs their AI agent to go get through a paywall to read a research paper or get some data set or something like that. So what we realized is that the existing payment rails, um, are sometimes not sufficient for AI. They tend to, uh, they want to move very fast, they want to make payments globally, they want to do very, in some cases very small transaction amounts.
And so we built a set of tools for the agentic economy, um, which includes, you know, the Base blockchain where a lot of most of this activity is happening today with USD USDC, which is a stable coin that we co-created with Circle, and something called the X402 protocol, which is, um, a protocol we we created it’s now under the Linux Foundation in collaboration with Google and AWS CloudFlare and others.
And it’s allowing agents to pay each other in real time instantly all over the world, even very small transaction amounts like a couple of cents at a time, uh which the traditional payment rails don’t really support. So at this point, I think it’s fair to say that Coinbase has the leading stack for agentic commerce and especially with stable coins. and um, you know, we’re going to keep investing in that because I think we’re going to be here in the future not too far where there’s actually more agents transacting in the economy than humans, which is a pretty wild thing to think about.
