Stablecoins brought the dollar onchain, allowing anyone to own a low-inflation currency and send it around the clock for a fraction of a cent; decentralized finance (DeFi) gives anyone access to credit; tokenized stocks let 4 billion unbrokered people get exposure to the U.S. stock market; and bitcoin gives “a store of wealth that can’t be inflated away,” Armstrong said in the post.
“There’s more to do of course, but don’t forget about how far we’ve come,” Armstrong said.
PYMNTS reported July 30 that Coinbase executives said during an earnings call that the company is no longer operating as just a cryptocurrency exchange, as it is building subscriptions, stablecoins, payments infrastructure and artificial intelligence-ready blockchain rails.
Coinbase is also pressing lawmakers to advance the Clarity Act legislation that is intended to define how authority over digital assets is divided between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Armstrong said during the call that failure to pass the Clarity Act would amount to “business as usual” for Coinbase because regulators could still establish rules administratively. In his view, legislation would matter most by creating durability across future administrations.
Days earlier, on July 27, Armstrong criticized cryptocurrency companies who switch their focus from blockchain tech to AI.
“’If you’re in crypto, pivot to AI.’ I used to hear versions of this, and it’s the wrong way to think about the world. It’s zero sum, scarcity thinking,” Armstrong said in a July 27 post on X. “Crypto is a general purposetechnology. It’s infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It doesn’t compete with the next big thing, because it underpins it. It’s an [‘and’], not an [‘or’].”
It was reported Sunday (Aug. 9) that during the first seven months of the year, more than 100 crypto projects have either shuttered, filed for bankruptcy or gone dark for good.
The report attributed this trend to consolidation in ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem after a surge three years ago when new technological advances made it easier for companies to start their own chains.
