Coinbase's Vision for Economic Freedom Through Cryptocurrency

Coinbase's Origin and Mission

Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, shared the company's vision, mission, and strategy for the next decade. He began by recounting his personal experiences that led to founding Coinbase:

• As a college student, Armstrong started a company and encountered frustrating bureaucracy when dealing with banks.
• While working at Airbnb, he saw how financial regulations could negatively impact people's livelihoods.
• These experiences made Armstrong feel the financial system was broken and inefficient.

In 2010, Armstrong discovered the Bitcoin whitepaper and became excited about its potential to create a more fair, efficient, and open financial system accessible to everyone. This led him to start working on what would become Coinbase.

Economic Freedom

Armstrong introduced the concept of economic freedom, which measures factors like:

• Property rights
• Ease of international money transfers
• Ease of starting a business
• Inflation rates
• Corruption levels

Economic freedom correlates positively with income levels, environmental protection, and self-reported happiness. It correlates negatively with corruption and war.

Armstrong showed examples of how economic freedom (or lack thereof) has impacted countries like Cuba, Singapore, and North and South Korea over the past 60 years.

While global economic freedom has slowly improved over the past 25 years, Coinbase's vision is to dramatically accelerate this improvement through cryptocurrency and an open financial system.

Coinbase's Strategy

To achieve its vision of increasing economic freedom globally, Coinbase is focused on building an open financial system powered by cryptocurrency. The strategy has three main pillars:

1. Enable Crypto Investment

This involves providing a trusted bridge between traditional finance and the crypto economy. Key aspects include:

• Adding more crypto assets to trade
• Expanding to more countries
• Making crypto apps easier to use

2. Connect to Crypto Economy

This pillar focuses on linking Coinbase's various products and services to create an interconnected crypto economy. Examples include:

• Coinbase Earn - allows users to earn crypto by completing tasks
• Coinbase Commerce - enables spending crypto at merchants
• Lending and borrowing features

3. Grow the Crypto Economy

This involves enabling and supporting the broader crypto ecosystem beyond just Coinbase. Key initiatives include:

• Coinbase Ventures - investing in crypto startups
• Supporting new fundraising methods like security tokens and Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs)
• Showcasing third-party crypto apps and services
• Building decentralized identity infrastructure

Coinbase's Unique Approach

Armstrong highlighted three key differentiators for Coinbase:

1. Trust - Built through regulatory compliance, banking partnerships, and cybersecurity expertise.

2. Ease of use - Making crypto accessible to mainstream users through intuitive design.

3. Product ecosystem - Offering a full suite of interconnected crypto products and services.

Long-Term Vision

While Coinbase has already signed up 30 million users, Armstrong's ultimate vision is to bring 1 billion people into an open financial system through Coinbase products within 5-10 years. He believes this will materially change economic freedom globally.

Conclusion

Coinbase sees cryptocurrency and blockchain technology as powerful tools to increase global economic freedom. By building trusted, easy-to-use products that connect the traditional and crypto economies, Coinbase aims to accelerate the adoption of an open financial system that can benefit people worldwide.

Article created from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQaegigv6jU