Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says US Will Get Crypto Rules, Pitches Overseas Expansion and Stablecoins

At the Goldman Sachs Communicopia Conference in San Francisco, Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi sat down with Coinbase co-founder, chairman and CEO Brian Armstrong, who was appearing on the outlet for the first time. Sozzi opened with a blog post Coinbase had published that day, which suggested the company would look overseas if the United States could not get its rules sorted out. Armstrong pushed back on the framing: Coinbase is not leaving the US, he said, because it remains the company's largest market. But he said the firm looks at every region, uses regulatory clarity to decide where to invest, and pointed to a figure he found striking: 83% of G20 countries either have crypto legislation or have it in progress.

Armstrong called the US a laggard on this front, though he said he expects it to catch up. He cited a couple of crypto bills that have moved through the House and favorable court rulings. His summary of the company's direction was that Coinbase will be a US company with multinational reach.

Asked which countries he has in mind, he started with Canada, where Coinbase launched the previous month after filing a pre-registration statement with the regulator. He described the Canadian regulator as great to work with and said the company added a payment rail integration with Interac. In May, Coinbase also launched an international derivatives exchange, a market he called a big piece of the crypto ecosystem. In the US, he added, the company had just been approved for its FCM license for derivatives trading. The plan, he said, is to go country by country in major markets while keeping the US covered.

Why are other countries friendlier than the US? Armstrong acknowledged that US politics can be tough and that people have their own interests, but said the country has rule of law, and the courts are enforcing it. In meetings with members of Congress, he said, he sees broad recognition that the technology is important and is not going away, and that it needs to be done safely for American consumers. He raised national security as well, comparing crypto to 5G and semiconductors, industries that moved offshore and that the US is now fighting hard to bring back. He said the US needs legislation like what Europe has already put in place.

Sozzi asked whether the SEC simply does not want Coinbase to succeed. Armstrong declined to comment much personally and said the agency is made up of many people, with whom he said Coinbase has good relationships, including many staff and commissioners. But he said SEC leadership has taken a hostile view, regulating crypto through enforcement rather than through the rulemaking he argued the Administrative Procedure Act requires. Courts, he noted, have now pushed back. He said the matter will be resolved somehow, whether through the CFTC stepping up, new legislation from Congress, court-created clarity, or perhaps a different SEC chair next year. He quoted the line often attributed to Winston Churchill, that America always does the right thing after exhausting every other option. Asked whether someone other than Gary Gensler needs to be in that seat, he said he did not think so, though it would certainly help; for now it is business as usual.

On the market, Armstrong argued that in Coinbase's 11 years it has been through four price cycles, each settling at a new plateau. Measured trough to trough, he said, prices are well above 2019, and with Bitcoin still over 20,000 it is hard to feel like a true crypto winter. Trading volumes are down from the 2021 highs, he said, but he sees a flight to quality, with more institutions signing up and going through onboarding, even if they are not yet moving large sums. He suggested triggers such as better blockchain scalability, regulatory clarity or a court case could change that.

On spot Bitcoin ETFs, he welcomed applications from firms such as Fidelity and BlackRock and noted that Coinbase is named custodian on all but one of those filed. He said approvals could bring new pools of capital and that he sees ETFs as additive rather than competitive. He also pointed to Visa's announcement that week that it would move USD Coin over its rails, and called stablecoins an important stepping stone, citing a figure that 67% of Americans think the financial system needs a major update.

Looking ahead, he named Base, Coinbase's layer two network aimed at lowering costs and confirmation times, and continued investment in derivatives. He also floated ideas still on the horizon, including so-called flat coins, a next step beyond stablecoins possibly tied to CPI or purchasing power. Coinbase is not building one yet, he said, though a couple of teams are. The thing to watch is whether US legislation, CFTC action or ETF approvals arrive first.