Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is making a big prediction for the crypto space when BlackRock and Meta come on board.
In a new interview with CNBC’s Crypto World, Brian Amstrong says he expects big tech companies like BlackRock and Meta will all participate in the next phase of the crypto-powered Internet.
“We want every company in the world to integrate into crypto. Just like we would like every company to have an internet presence or use the Internet in some way. Even if you are not an Internet company, you will have a home page, or maybe you will attract new customers through the Internet or accept payments.
Crypto is the same way. I think big tech will play a role there. We are seeing companies like BlackRock, the largest asset manager out there, now integrated with Coinbase. Meta was another great example.
It shows me that we can really win, not only a large retail customer segment, but also doing business with the largest companies in the world such as Coinbase. This really bodes well for our future.”
As for the crypto winter, Armstrong believes that it will see a turnaround before the middle of 2023.
“Of course, we are in a downturn, but this is not unusual for us. We have gone through four such cycles as a company, and we are only 10 years old.
This one happens to coincide with the collapse of the broader macro environment. We all hope that it will be 12, 18 months and [dann] will be a nice recovery, but you need to plan, of course, that it will take longer. We are not trying to get too cute when predicting the future.”
He added that Coinbase continues to focus on its long-term goals, and not on price fluctuations.
“We have this saying internally that I like to repeat many times: ‘It’s never as good as it seems. It’s never as bad as it seems.
I think one of the reasons why Coinbase has been so successful over the last 10 years is that we try not to focus on short-term ups and downs. We just zoom out and think about it: “Will more people use crypto in five, ten years? Probably. Is the Internet becoming more widespread? Probably. Will there be more e-commerce and more digital payments?
These are all tailwinds that are long-term trends. If we don’t get distracted and continue to develop great products, we will do well in the next five or ten years.”
He sees the expanded STaking gradually coming into the crypto space very positively, especially driven by projects such as Ethereum (ETH), Polygon (MATIC), Optimism (OP) and Solana (SOL).
“[Staking ist] it is also important to make these blockchains more scalable. We see that Ethereum is getting closer and closer to Merge, which will be updated to Ethereum 2.0, and this will be a nice step on the path of upgrade [und] achieving more scalability of Ethereum.
We also see this with other blockchains. The Lightning Network has been really great at going in that direction. We see good things with Layer 2 solutions [wie] Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism. Solana has also done really well in scaling, so overall good progress in staking.”
