The Crypto Skeptic vs The Coinbase CEO | Brian Armstrong x Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF

People by WTF

In this episode, crypto skeptic Nikhil Kamath sits down with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong to demystify the fundamentals of blockchain techno

Key takeaways

• Brian Armstrong explains that stablecoin issuers like Circle pass approximately 90% of treasury yields back to users to remain competitive.
• The concept of 'agentic commerce' is introduced, where AI agents use stablecoins for payments because they can operate without traditional KYC hurdles.

Main topics

• Blockchain Fundamentals
• Stablecoin Economics

Notable quotes

The internet was a breakthrough in terms of democratizing publishing of information. And blockchains were a democratized movement of value.

Conclusion

A foundational deep-dive that frames blockchain not just as an asset c

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:30) is interesting. Everything from Bitcoins, Blockchain, Solana, Ethereum. I'm no expert in these, but I've always wondered what the nuances of this industry are. And today is probably a good day to find out. I am a critic. I have never bought any of these ever. I don't know if I'll remain a critic after this, but I suspect I will. So let's see how the conversation with Brian goes. I know he's going to take the for side. Somebody has to take the against side. It probably has to be me, even though I don't know too much about it. So this should be fun. Speaker 1 (1:28) How are you? Great. Good to Speaker 4 (1:29) meet Speaker 1 (1:30) you. Good Speaker 4 (1:30) to meet you. Yeah. Come. Speaker 1 (1:31) All right. Yeah, not too far away. We've got a big crew here. Do you like coffee? Maybe decaf or something, if you have that, or just water, yeah. Do we have decaf coffee? If not, I'll just do water, yeah. Speaker 1 (1:52) You drink matcha? Mint Speaker 4 (1:56) tea Speaker 1 (1:57) sounds great, yeah. Speaker 4 (2:00) Is that like your diet? Speaker 1 (2:02) Well, I drink caffeine, but I try not to after noon. So it's easier to sleep, you know. A Speaker 4 (2:12) lot of the people I met who were into crypto, like really into crypto, for the first time in a long time, they've become very disenfranchised in a way. Speaker 1 (2:25) I've heard that argument before and I don't really see it. You know, I'm going to call that out. Are you jet lagged? Speaker 4 (2:54) No, I was in actually Ojai. Okay. And I just drove back last night. Speaker 1 (3:01) Okay. Yeah. Speaker 4 (3:02) You're Speaker 1 (3:03) doing like a retreat there or something? That's an interesting city. Yeah, Speaker 4 (3:05) there's this pledge. So this was the three-day off-site. Speaker 1 (3:10) Yeah, thinking about how to do philanthropy effectively. Speaker 4 (3:13) That's Speaker 1 (3:13) great. Yeah, something Speaker 2 (3:15) I need to learn more about. Yeah? Do you believe in it? Speaker 1 (3:18) Well, yeah, I mean... Ultimately, all the money we're making can only go to taxes, philanthropy, or your kids, I guess. Unless we figure out how to live forever, maybe that'll happen. I've seen a lot of friends engage in philanthropy and it's just like startups. A lot of it doesn't work, but the best ones do incredible things. I've seen some people try doing philanthropy and I think it had unintended consequences, actually. So it's humbling. It's probably quite difficult to do it well. Yeah, have you done any philanthropy? Yeah. What are your main focuses? Speaker 4 (4:01) That was quite interesting. The door opened on its own. Speaker 1 (4:03) I scroll with it, you know. Speaker 4 (4:06) Yeah, we've done a bit of climate. The last year I've been doing a bunch around entrepreneurship. So a lot of people in India need seed capital to get started. This podcast is also like that in a way. It's not for profit. There are no... ads, there are no sponsors, we don't monetize anything. The intent is very much to tell young people where the opportunity lies. That's what today is about in everything that you're involved in. For today, we're going to make Brian not a startup founder, but a college professor who can teach people where the opportunity lies in your industry to build. Speaker 1 (4:58) It's great. I'm very passionate about how we can get more people to build companies in the world. I think entrepreneurship's a huge lever on how to improve the world. India has so much raw talent in that department as well. Speaker 4 (5:11) But if, like you asked earlier about giving, if people live forever Speaker 1 (5:16) or Speaker 4 (5:17) for longer and they don't give, and if wage, price, inflation does not keep up, with asset price inflation like it does not, even in America for the last 30, 40 years. What happens to income inequality? I've spoken a lot about this over the last week because I've been there listening to lectures around this. What do you think? Speaker 1 (5:43) I mean, it's such a big question, right? I mean, I think one way to solve it is to make everybody a capitalist, right? So you're not just working for labor. How do you... make it so everybody, even if you have relatively low income, you can put a little bit of money aside to own stocks or parts of other companies that can grow. So there's something like 4 billion people in the world today who are unbrokered. They don't have any ability to buy equities. And if you can democratize that, then everybody can have a piece of it. Here in the US, there's an experiment that's being done right now with these Trump accounts. You probably saw that. Speaker 4 (6:24) Brad Gersner's been Speaker 1 (6:25) great on that along with others. Just getting every kid $1,000 of the S &P 500 at birth can make them have skin in the game. You Speaker 4 (6:37) know who I heard pitch this many years ago? Mike Milken. He had this blueprint mapped out and I think Australia does it in some way. Speaker 1 (6:46) You could actually do it with a sovereign wealth fund as well. Some countries do that very effectively. And when you're born, you get a share of it, right? And then it's just like in any company, like the one you ran or run or the one I run, our employees get equity. And it's a beautiful alignment tool of, you know, we might not agree on everything, but we all own a piece of the same thing. So we're trying to work toward that. And then I think there's another interesting question, which is. Is income equality the goal? I think we can all say income inequality makes people unhappy, but we don't want perfect income equality. That would destroy merit and progress and competition and all these things which are also good. One way I like to think of it is, how do we just accelerate growth overall? I think a lot of people are looking at two different things. They're saying, How much better or worse is my life personally versus a year or two ago? And then they're also saying, how much is my life better versus someone else? The second one is envy, right? The first one is really competition versus yourself. And is your own life improving? And I think we are also seeing an issue in society where people's own life is not getting better. Speaker 1 (8:04) I think if the rising tide lifted all boats, let's say everybody, even the bottom 10%, their life was getting better, but there were some people getting way richer, they would still be mostly okay with that. When they're purchasing power or their wages are flat, and then someone's getting much, much wealthier, that's what creates the biggest social unrest, I think. Speaker 4 (8:23) It's an interesting thing to think about. Speaker 4 (8:29) If productivity were to go up and everybody's life gets better, Speaker 3 (8:32) but Speaker 4 (8:34) the rich get 10 times richer than they are today. Speaker 4 (8:39) I don't know if I can extrapolate that far, but I would still presume people would be unhappy because the very notion of wealth is relative. We all have a lot more today than we had 100 years ago or 300 years ago. Speaker 1 (8:54) Yeah. But Speaker 4 (8:55) people are not happier because of the relative change in individual wealth. Speaker 1 (9:00) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:02) Yeah. Are you familiar with the concept of the hedonistic treadmill? Speaker 4 (9:06) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:07) Yeah. So I think both are true. Yeah. There's some things which today, like even just having a great shower with hot water or something, I take it for granted. But if I go camping for a week and I'm sleeping on the hard... ground and I have to shower in cold water. I come back, I'm like, a hot shower is like the most amazing luxury, you know, in the whole world. So you forget that if you sort of become acclimatized to these things, even if your own life is getting better. But then you're also, you're right, it's the other factor is the looking at other people and comparing. That's part of human nature as well. So it's kind of an interesting question. Is it 50-50, you know, competing with myself versus others? Or is it 80-20? Everyone's wired a little differently. And should we What should it be in society? Should we try to encourage people, try to improve yourself, don't compare yourself to others. Should we try to teach that as a value? But maybe naturally people are skewed a certain way. Speaker 4 (10:07) What is it for you? Speaker 1 (10:09) I always try to just compete with myself. It's human nature. I can't help but compare sometimes to other people. But I sort of try to catch myself doing that. Speaker 1 (10:22) and try to reframe it in my own mind. Because I just want to be the best version of myself. If there's a friend of mine who made an investment and they got in Series A and I put money in the Series C and they did 100x and I only did 10x, I try to cultivate a mindset of being happy for them. Now someone could say, well that's great for you Brian. your cup runneth over, you know, you're living a life of post-scarcity. And there's a Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all this. There's a lot of truth in that, right? Like if I was hungry or I was unsure where my next meal was going to come from, you know, I might beat someone up to like take their food, right? Or, you know, you become much more zero sum in your thinking. But beyond like a certain base level of needs, I think it's healthy to try to cultivate a, I'm trying to be the best version of myself, not versus other people. Speaker 4 (11:15) Yeah. Income inequality or inequality is an interesting question. I feel like... It's not a problem in isolation. They will always, I'm a proponent of capitalism like I know you are and I've heard you speak about Ayn Rand in a couple of places. I hear you when you say separate church from state and then separate church from, separate state from economics as well. But I think the magnitude of income inequality is somehow becoming a problem. It's probably smart for the beneficiaries of capitalism to also fiend altruism because that allows for them to remain capitalist for longer. Speaker 1 (12:02) You're saying feign altruism? Fiend. Fiend? Fiend, feign, feign altruism. Yeah, okay, basically fake it. You're saying, okay, got it. Speaker 4 (12:10) Right? Like, when I remember the books of childhood, like, I can't remember where I read the story, but... In a kingdom, if the net produce is 100 and Speaker 2 (12:22) the Speaker 4 (12:22) king has 10 and the rest of the city has 90, it's okay. But when the king has a vast majority of the resources, at some point the people come to his door with, I don't know, axes and try to take it away. Speaker 1 (12:41) Yep. Guillotines in some cases. Speaker 4 (12:43) Is the world getting there? Speaker 1 (12:46) I mean, I think... Speaker 1 (12:48) You can look at, you know, there is a measure for income inequality, right? The Gini coefficient. And I haven't looked at it recently, but the last time I looked, I think we're not at like all-time highs or anything like that. There have been periods of high, and you look at different by country as well. Speaker 1 (13:06) So it goes up and down. I think it's probably, my guess is it's up a bit in the last 20 years, but we're not at all-time highs for the US, for instance. But yeah, definitely it creates feelings of unfairness when that goes up. And I think we're seeing that now with certain politicians getting elected, Mandami, these kinds of folks. And of course, AI is a big factor there too. Everyone's trying to think, is it going to take my job? Speaker 1 (13:35) Those fears are totally natural. And then the question is, you know, what do we do about it? Speaker 1 (13:42) Some people would say we should slow down. We should press a button to pause all AI development. And to that I would say, well, how are you going to get the countries of the world to collaborate on that? If the US does it, is China going to do it? There's people I've talked to who are like, no, the US government should be meeting with India and China and all the superpowers and saying, Speaker 1 (14:08) we should collectively agree to do it. And I'm like, well, then how are you going to guarantee that they do it? Are there going to be inspectors walking through the data centers? It's like, if you're training a new AI model on a data center, you can turn it off when the inspector is there and 10 minutes later the thing is training a different piece of software, right? So it's hard for me to imagine a realistic scenario where the world collaborates to pause AI. So, okay, I think that's off the table. Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. So we're in a world where the only way through it is forward. We have to try to build it responsibly. We have to try to leverage it for good instead of bad. It's just like any technology, right? Fire or you could make up any example you want. Crypto is another good example, right? Bad people have tried to use crypto. I think it has a lot of benefits to update the financial system. We can talk about that. So I think the only way... Out of it is through it. And you have to just... whoever in that moment is ready to step up and try to build something good in the world, they can sort of tell people about it and see if the world buys it or not. And people vote with their dollars, too. Nobody wants to buy an AI model that is dangerous, that's inside their company, or that's against their values. If they think a company is evil or something, they're not going to buy those products. So the free market is actually somewhat of a governor here on some of this. I think other people would say, well, the government should come in and do something. And then it raises the question of how competent do you think the government is on the frontier of technology? At least in the US, sometimes I'm skeptical on that. The Indian government has actually done some things very impressive, working with UPI, and these things are incredible. In some ways, we see competent government in some parts of the world. Speaker 4 (16:02) I think the lens with which you are looking at AI and the one I use is slightly different because here you're wondering if the fruits of AI are getting concentrated in a handful of people in a bunch of companies. In India, it looks like are the fruits of AI getting concentrated in another country altogether? Speaker 1 (16:27) Yeah. Which Speaker 4 (16:28) is a harder place to be because it's not about income inequality anymore. It's if we are any part of that value chain. What happens if we are not? I think countries like India then go the other way and they're like... Can we be part of the AI infrastructure value chain? Can we be part of the energy value chain? Can we be doing something uniquely over there to capture some of this value? So it becomes really hard. And especially in a time when America has become as combative as it has with tariffs and trade overall, it gets even more complicated. For sure. Speaker 1 (17:10) India has so many great engineering schools. I imagine that there's major efforts underway to build out the top AI companies in various ways there. Speaker 1 (17:23) One other thing that we're thinking a lot about is what's going to be the financial layer for AI. Because AI agents increasingly need to go get work done on your behalf and they're going to have to make payments. And so there's a whole emerging area of agentic commerce that we're building out and that's been exciting too. Speaker 4 (17:42) an asset that you deal with, say anything on the blockchain, Speaker 1 (17:47) win Speaker 4 (17:48) as a commodity of transaction for agentic AIs versus another? Speaker 1 (17:55) Well, I think AIs are going to use a variety of things. But the reason why I think stable coins in particular and blockchain are well suited is that an AI agent is going to have a hard time signing up for a credit card at a bank. And you have to show your ID, which only human beings currently can get this government-issued piece of paper. But an AI agent can spin up a self-custodial crypto wallet with stable coins. Speaker 1 (18:24) By the way, there should be a rupee stablecoin and everything. It can be fiat and country specific. But the onboarding works without KYC, right? And know your customer rules, which are present for most regulated financial service businesses. And then they can... The other thing is that the stablecoin rails have gotten very fast, cheap, and global, right? So for these small transaction amounts, like... You can send a payment anywhere in the world in under one second in one cent, US. So we're seeing a lot of agentic commerce send small transactions, even a couple cents, US, to read this research paper or get through this paywall or just call another API query, that kind of thing. That doesn't really work with credit card rails, the small transaction amounts. Speaker 4 (19:18) The need for KYC in a way is both a good thing and a bad thing, right? Speaker 1 (19:23) Sure. Yeah, that's its whole own deep topic. Speaker 4 (19:29) Especially when the agent does not need KYC. Speaker 1 (19:32) Right. Well, that's the question mark, right? Speaker 1 (19:39) Those KYC rules are in place for good reason. They're trying to stop illicit activity. A lot of firms have looked at this and researched what has been the cost and the benefit of it. There is a pretty high cost for all financial services with that type of regulation. There's some estimates that only about 1 % of all illicit activity is frozen or seized as a result of AML activities globally. AML is anti-money laundering, as you know. Speaker 1 (20:08) We're a regulated financial service business as well. We do this in the US and every country where we operate. We're happy to follow those rules as a regulated financial service business. It creates such a high friction in the economy. Imagine sending a WhatsApp message. It's free, instant, anywhere in the world. The number of WhatsApp messages per day is in the hundreds of billions or something. Speaker 1 (20:36) when text messages cost 30 cents, there was only 1 100th of that amount. So it's kind of a question of, for agents on the internet, like how... How much friction do we want to introduce into the system? There's trade-offs around that for sure. Every democracy around the world is trying to figure out what the regulatory framework should be. That's something we've been working on in the US as well. Getting, hopefully, this bill through Congress in the next couple months, hopefully. Speaker 4 (21:06) When I send a WhatsApp message to you, Speaker 4 (21:10) I am subsidized the cost of sending the message to you by WhatsApp for business or the data being repurposed for different things by Meta. What is the equivalent when I send you a stablecoin? Speaker 1 (21:26) Well, you are paying a small transaction fee, so it might be about a tenth of a cent US. So that might directly cover the cost. Speaker 1 (21:35) of the people running the sequencers and the nodes and those kind of things. You know, the stablecoin issuers, they actually are holding, in this case, the dollars, but it could be rupees or anything. They're holding them in US government or government bonds, I should say. So that's the business model of these stablecoin issuers. So there's the stablecoin issuer who's holding it in government bonds. They pass along some of that economics to the customer, but not all of it, and they hold some for themselves. And then the blockchain itself is taking a small transaction fee, typically. On the base chain, at least, it's about a tenth of a cent US. Speaker 4 (22:09) So Brian, I'm not an expert in this world. I know very little. So whenever I ask you a question, If I sound too much like an idiot, excuse me. Speaker 1 (22:19) I doubt that will happen, but yes, I'm happy to start wherever you want to start. Speaker 4 (22:26) Let's assume USDT or USDC is backed by short-term American Treasury, which yields about 3-4%. Speaker 4 (22:36) Now, if I take USDC from Circle and Coinbase, Speaker 1 (22:41) and Speaker 4 (22:41) Circle and Coinbase is earning 4 % on it, when I in turn say pledge or utilize the USDC that I have, and I monetize it further, say I make another 3 or 4%, treasury can only yield once. Where is the additional money coming from? Speaker 1 (23:00) Right, well, so in that case, Circle is the issuer. They're holding it in the short-term government treasuries. Actually, when people are holding those USDC on Coinbase, majority of that is actually passed to them, the economics. So maybe 90 % of that. Speaker 4 (23:15) Isn't that what the Clarity Act is for? I read parts of it, but it seemed like you're not allowed to pass it on and after this act you can? Speaker 1 (23:24) Yeah, so this is being carefully... has been carefully negotiated in the draft Clarity Act. The banks kind of made this concern out there in the world that they didn't want any rewards to be paid on idle balances. So that made it into the latest draft of the Clarity Act. But as long as the customer is doing some sort of activity, like a payment or trading, then they would be eligible to get these rewards. So the customer can still, at least in the current draft, if it becomes law, and it's currently allowed under the Genius Act, which already became law. customers could get the majority of these benefits from the underlying dollars held in short-term US treasuries. So that's the current arrangement. And then you had asked about another 3 % to 4%. I wasn't sure what that part was. Speaker 4 (24:11) If I were to lend my USDC, I can monetize it again? Speaker 1 (24:16) That's correct. So customers can opt in and choose to lend USDC into, say, a DeFi protocol if they want. and can earn some additional yield on that. Speaker 4 (24:29) Now, if I were to buy USDC directly, Speaker 1 (24:32) no, Speaker 4 (24:34) forget that. Actually, if I were to buy American Treasury directly, Speaker 1 (24:37) I Speaker 4 (24:38) have a certain amount of risk. Let's say there is crazy inflation, yields go up, I have a mark-to-market loss on the change in interest rates. Even if it's short-term paper, I'm not talking tables, I'm saying six-month paper, one-year paper. Whenever there is a significant change in interest rate, as it has happened historically, I would lose some money. Speaker 4 (25:00) Why would I, for the same return as I would get if I bought USDC or DT directly, put an intermediary in between and add an additional layer of risk to own the same instrument that gives me the same yield? Speaker 1 (25:18) The reason is you can use the stablecoin as a payment instrument or you can use it for trading and you can use it in DeFi. So in the traditional financial system, they have this separation and they'll say, okay, well here you can have your checking account, right? And that's for payments, but you don't earn anything on that. And then over here is your savings account or your money market fund. And that will pay you some yield for that. You can't spend it. You can't use your money market fund to pay for coffee or something. So in this new financial system, we're trying to update the financial system. We're saying, why do we force the customer to move their money between these two buckets? Why can't you just have one pool of money where if I want to spend it, I can spend it. And if I want to earn some yield, I can earn a fair rate. So that's kind of the goal with stablecoins. Speaker 4 (26:10) In a way, the reason banks do that is they can use your money to lend and monetize the money they have. They Speaker 1 (26:16) basically want to have the deposits in your checking account where they don't have to pay you anything. In my view, historically, they've intentionally created this friction so that they get a larger net interest margin spread, is what it would be called in the banking world. Speaker 4 (26:32) Where's the spread for you guys, for Circle and Coinbase? If you're going to give out all the treasury yield while you take the underlying risk, of a crazy spike in interest rate. Where is the spread to make good for this equation? Speaker 1 (26:48) It's about 10 % of the economics. It depends how much money people have. People could negotiate different rates at different providers. Maybe the market will compress even more over time, I don't know. But currently today it's about 90 % of the economics, at least on Coinbase, are given to the user. Speaker 4 (27:05) So Speaker 1 (27:05) we are keeping the 10%. Is Speaker 4 (27:07) that enough? If you were to say America has as much debt as it does, and a lot of countries across the world are bearing down their exposure to American treasury because 4 % is not commensurate to that level of debt. And in a certain way, the American government has indicated that they would like to see their currency depreciate to be more competitive from an export and manufacturing lens. Speaker 3 (27:37) Is Speaker 4 (27:38) 10 % of the economics on 4%, I'm guessing that's like 40 bips or 50 bips, is that enough to cover the risk of an interest rate spike? Speaker 1 (27:51) Yeah, well, a couple of points. One is we're not getting exposure on the interest rate spike. We don't have liability there. I mean, so if I think before you were kind of saying the interest rate you're earning on short-term US treasuries may not cover inflation risk and things like that. The Speaker 4 (28:08) change in interest rate. Speaker 1 (28:09) Yeah, but that's not something that would affect us like in terms of our bottom line. So we're just whatever the interest, you know, the short-term. bond rate is, we would pay 90 % of that to the customer. And would you also pass on the mark-to-market Speaker 4 (28:25) of interest rate changes to the customer? Speaker 1 (28:27) The mark-to-market interest rate changes, what do you mean? Speaker 4 (28:30) Say the treasury moves from 4 % to 5%, or 4.5 % to 5.5%. Speaker 1 (28:35) Yeah, we would adjust it. But I think the broader answer to your question is, is that enough? And how do you Speaker 4 (28:42) cover calendar risk? Say you have different maturities of treasury, Speaker 1 (28:46) how Speaker 4 (28:47) do you cover the calendar spread of different treasuries losing different amounts of money? You would just pass on all of that to the customer whenever it changes. Speaker 1 (28:55) Yeah, I think there's a... We're not a stablecoin issuer, but I think the ones like Circle and then they hold different maturities. Some percentage of it is 24 hours overnight. Some of it is one month. I think the max they can do under the Genius Act is 90 days or 93 days. In the worst case scenario, if everybody wanted to withdraw it all at once, there's a lot of liquidity for short-term US treasuries. But even if that went away, the worst thing you would do is just everybody would get their money over 90 days. That's what the US Congress kind of landed on as a reasonable low risk backing. And by the way, if you compare it, banks do fractional reserve. So they've lent out most of the money. And that's partly why they're so heavily regulated. They're doing fractional reserve. So in a stablecoin issuer is 100 % reserve. The only risk they're taking is at most a 93-day US Treasury. which most people would consider that to be the risk-free rate, so to speak. But I think your broader question was, is that enough? My comment on that is that I think that the cost structure to run a great fintech company has just come down over many decades. The classic bank model where you have these giant buildings and skyscrapers and you have branches on every... corner, and you have armies of tens of thousands of people doing compliance. Coinbase, I think we're just a much more efficient company. We can pass on those benefits to the customer. We don't have branches. We don't have skyscrapers in major cities around the world. We have some offices. We're able to use things like AI and automation to make a lot of these compliance processes are just much more efficient and more accurate, higher quality. So we're trying to just build the next generation of financial service business that can provide better financial services to people. Crypto is an important piece of that, but it comes from all kinds of things, policy work and good customer service and everything. You know how hard it is to build a great financial services company, right? So that's what we see. We think that crypto is a piece of that puzzle. We can help update the financial system, just make it faster, cheaper, more global, permissionless access for everyone. Speaker 4 (31:21) I tried for a little while, a couple of years ago, to figure out if there is a business to be built around. Speaker 4 (31:30) repatriation of money back into India. Remittances are quite high. Speaker 1 (31:35) I Speaker 4 (31:35) think the amount of money that goes back to India is about 150 billion a year. Speaker 1 (31:40) Yeah, I think I read it's the highest remittance market in the world, right? Yeah. Speaker 4 (31:45) The problem is there were no off-ramps back then in India for a stablecoin per se. Speaker 4 (31:55) The government, very rightly so, is disincentivized to provide an off-ramp for a stable coin that is backed by the American dollar in a way, by virtue of what happened when the US sanctioned Russia and the SWIFT. I mean, you don't want to... I don't see where the incentive lies. for the Indian government that runs a really tight fiscal policy by virtue of, you know, the oil shock and everything else that has happened in the recent past to allow for an ecosystem like that to foster. Because once you provide an off-ramp, you don't know if people start transacting in it. You can't really monitor USDC in that way. Speaker 3 (32:42) Yeah. Speaker 4 (32:43) So I don't know if that business opportunity is there. Have you guys considered Coinbase? I know you guys came into India at some point. a few years ago, and you're probably coming back. Speaker 1 (32:54) Yeah. Well, yeah, so on the stablecoin point, yeah, I mean, I think every country has the right to have sovereignty over their own money. And, you know, I know India is very, that's very top of mind for them. So every country in the world, like these major countries in the world, they're all creating digital versions of their own. Fiat currency, right so that a lot of stable coins today are dollar denominated, but there's euro stable coins and yen But none of them are working Speaker 1 (33:22) Well, I think that's, you're right, like the US has actually been forward leaning on that. And I would be certainly an advocate of India having a digital rupee that in a stablecoin format that has clear legislation backing it. That's what really caused it to take off in the US. Because without that, you're right, like people are going to be tempted to have dollar backed stablecoins. And I think India should be forward looking on that just as they've been with UPI and all those things that they've It's kind of the envy of the world in terms of digitization in every other category. So they might as well have a digital rupee. And you're correct. Coinbase, actually, we did try to launch back a few years ago, and we had trouble accessing the UPI system. But we've got that fixed now. So we're actually planning to relaunch in India on Monday. Speaker 2 (34:09) And Speaker 1 (34:09) I believe we're now the first international player in India that has a local license and access to the local payment rails. We registered with the FIU, so we've got a local entity, local license. And yeah, I'm excited to have Coinbase live again in India. Speaker 4 (34:27) Can I ask you a far-extrapolated question? Yeah. We have a need. Speaker 4 (34:35) To get more dollars into the country in exchange for rupees. What kind of product or ecosystem under what you're building can help us foster that? Like I had this stupid idea at some point and I spoke about it somewhere that Indian households have a lot of gold. Speaker 1 (34:56) Yeah. Speaker 4 (34:56) Like insane amounts. This is all we've been buying from, you know, like... If I can remember my grandparents and great-grandparents, it might have been a gram of gold, but people have been buying gold in all of our history. Speaker 1 (35:11) Yeah. Speaker 4 (35:12) I was thinking of a coin where there is a clearing house in, say, every town and every district. People have, say, 10, 20, 30 different pieces of jewelry that they can't use at one point. They can only wear one thing at a point. So you take what you own. go to this clearing, depository, custody place, Speaker 3 (35:34) place Speaker 4 (35:35) your jewelry when you're not using it. And in return for that, you get a coin backed by gold that you can monetize by lending, investing, pledging and doing other things with it. Do you think something like that could work? Speaker 1 (35:50) Yeah, I mean, I think in the same way that rupees and dollars can be tokenized, you can also tokenize gold. You can tokenize stocks, you can tokenize treasuries, bonds. So anything can get tokenized. And what generally happens is that you see a more liquid market for that underlying asset and more better distribution globally and real-time settlement. Like it's pretty difficult to... take a bar of gold and transport it across the world or to pay for a cup of coffee with it