Interview, Fireside Chat
Brian Armstrong: "We're Bringing Every Asset Class On Chain"
- Coinbase expects to ship twice as much code annually with improved quality and fewer bugs driven by AI, while planning to route 80% of its AI workload to models 99% cheaper than frontier ones; it projects AI price declines will outpace Moore's Law and anticipates having more full-time AI agents than human employees by the end of the current year.
- The company intends to launch "Coinbase MCP" to enable any AI agent to trade within user-set guardrails, release a SEC-registered AI-powered "Coinbase Advisor" app, and build full-stack financial accounts to support an emerging "agentic economy" where agents handle transactions, hire other agents, and interact with programmable money.
- Coinbase aims to unify U.S. and international liquidity to bring crypto trading back onshore, launch tokenized stocks to serve 4 billion unbrokered users seeking access to assets like U.S. stocks, and bring all asset classes on-chain within a single unified account to enhance liquidity and capital efficiency.
- Leadership anticipates a future where AI agents perform more economic work than humans, potentially including humanoid robots, necessitating new financial infrastructure for frequent small transactions, CAPTCHA bypass, and independent banking, with token usage costs growing exponentially as the cost curve flattens due to caching and open-source routing.
- Jesse Brown forecasts that the BASE blockchain will become the world's largest network for spot Bitcoin, Ethereum, and major crypto trading over the next five years, driving exponential enterprise adoption in trading, payments, and agents, alongside a rapid growth in tokenized stocks and business payments replacing legacy financial stacks.
- Morgan White and other speakers expect stablecoins and prediction markets to reach all-time highs during broader market downturns, with the next user tranche including everyone and anyone seeking better financial systems, as younger generations reject traditional institutions in favor of internet-built finance.
- The company plans to navigate a changing regulatory environment by establishing new pathways and rules, utilizing legal tools to unlock products and economic freedom, and expects the SEC and CFTC to maintain open cooperation, while legal workflows will be transformed by delegating document drafting to AI agents within 10 weeks to 10 months.
- Coinbase predicts that the convergence of AI (programmable intelligence) and crypto (programmable money) will create a perfectly complementary agentic economy, with AI agents taking on tasks and toil to allow humans to complete more work, rather than eliminating jobs, and that the BASE ecosystem will foster an emerging bubbling economy of real agents performing real actions.