HIGHLIGHTS: Brian Armstrong - CEO of Coinbase

Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody, and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And today, I'm joined by Brian Armstrong, the cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, which is America's largest crypto exchange and increasingly one of the powerful forces shaping global finance. So, Brian, warm welcome. Thank you for having me. No. Thirteen years ago, nobody trusted crypto. And today, nobody can ignore it. And so what happened really? Well, you know, I first read about Bitcoin in December 2010, and it was describing how there could be a a decentralized network to move value around the world. Kind of like the Internet was removing information, but this was removing value. And, you know, it was initially didn't get much attention. Only people that were computer science PhDs or, you know, libertarians or anarchists were excited by it in these small forums on the Internet. And it slowly grew over time. And, of course, Bitcoin was the first asset that got created kind of like this digital gold standard, but quickly the technology evolved to be, you know, blockchain as a broader concept. And so people made all kinds of things. They made ways to trade other asset classes like commodities and equities. They made stable coins for better payment rails. They made prediction markets. And so now I think we're in a world where crypto is actually updating all aspects of the financial system. It's not really just about Bitcoin. It's it's about payments. It's about borrowing and lending. It's about capital formation. And how can this technology actually make financial services more efficient and more global, more fair and more free all over the world? And so it has increased in trust quite a bit. I think the things that have helped that have been, number one, regulatory clarity, which we're seeing emerge now in Europe, in another in in The United States, we got legislation recently passed for stablecoins. We're also seeing adoption by the largest institutions in the world. So, you know, there's lots of, Bitcoin ETFs now and fun like BlackRock and Apollo have come out and said they wanna tokenize all of their funds. Companies like Visa and JPMorgan are running experiments with how to do stablecoin payments. And so I think these trusted institutions coming in has also been another factor in addition to the regulatory clarity. Now you call it, you call it the everything exchange. So stock trading, crypto, custody. So are you building a bridge to traditional finance, or are or is this the end of traditional finance? No. I think it's an evolution of traditional finance. So we are building the Everything Exchange, which is bringing every asset class, into one tradable platform. So you have not only crypto assets, which which there are millions now, but you have …