Coinbase CEO Names Crypto Use Cases He’s Excited About, Says Retail Adoption Accelerating

Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong is saying that the utility of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology has expanded beyond their original use case.

Armstrong says in a new Bloomberg interview that while crypto assets were originally conceived as digital money, new use cases have emerged over time.

“The first use case of crypto was really a new form of money or this new asset class that got created… that is no small thing… that is a game changer. But beyond crypto being just a new form of money, it also became a new type of financial service. DeFi… and we saw different ways for people to do borrowing and lending and commerce payments and staking and various things like this. And so that was all very good. Now the third realm is kind of what you touched on as being about decentralized social and everything. We call it Web 3.0. It’s not only a new type of money, a new type of financial services but a new application platform. Even things that have nothing to do with financial services.”

The Coinbase CEO says he is “pretty excited” about the decentralized identity frameworks that use digital identifiers as well as verifiable credentials which are user-owned.

“I’m pretty excited about for instance decentralized identity with [Ethereum-based decentralized domain name service] ENS – that’s a foundational component so people’s identity doesn’t have to be sort of owned by a big tech company. Once you have decentralized identities, you can connect them in a social graph, you can make decentralized social networks. You can have public profile pages with badges and accreditation. And your badge you’re accessing buildings, proof-of-attendance concert tickets all these kinds of things.”

Armstrong also says that more than half of Coinbase users have diversified their activities on the exchange beyond trading crypto.

“I’ll disagree a little bit with this idea that it’s all speculation. I think that was probably a fair thing to say five years ago or so… we’ve actually tracked this inside Coinbase – what percentage of our active customers are doing something other than trading with crypto? And it’s now over 50%.”

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