Why Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believes bitcoin has bottomed

When you put out an X that you think Bitcoin has bottomed. I mean, you get a lot of people excited. What made you put that out?

Well, nobody knows for sure on these things, right? But I think if you look at the past trends and just, you know, uh fear and greed indexes, indices and like if you if you just look at the past trends in Bitcoin, I I hope I think we we've bottomed at 60k or so. Um, but you know, like a lot of things could drive growth of Bitcoin here. I think market structure, uh legislation passing, I think some of these AI companies going public because they've been soaking up a lot of the risk capital. So, once these companies get public and the the unlocks happen, like I think you'll start to see capital move back around.

And then we need to go uh work on the quantum uh cryptography issue too. I think that's probably depressing the price of Bitcoin a little bit. And Coinbase has been doing some good work here. We put together um a quantum crypto advisory council with some really smart people from across the industry that are helping uh work with some of the core developers and

What is what is that problem for those not familiar?

Yeah, well, um, so quantum cryptography is this um next generation of that's of computers that are coming to market that could uh potentially break the classic classic cryptography. By the way, this is not just specific to crypto. It's used all over the internet uh for any kind of secure transactions and banks use it and everyone. So it's it's a broadly something that the world's going to have to update to.

And so, um, Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana and these other are all working on road maps to upgrade the underlying crypto cryptographic signatures to make them uh quantum resistant. And by the way, you know, Coinbase is making updates to our own custody and infrastructure to get prepared for this future as well. So if you have a Coinbase account, you don't really need to worry about it. We're going to just upgrade it all for you. But the blockchains themselves need to get updated as well.

Why does crypto still fall into these crypto winters? And do you think we're even in one?

Um, yeah, I'd say it's a winter. It's a mild for Bitcoin specifically, but the you know, the everything else in crypto is like seems to be growing.

Yeah, I'm listening to you tell me about making uh tying mortgages to crypto. I mean, that's not winterish to me.

Yeah, I mean, actually, I think Coinbase, whenever like Bitcoin is down and sometimes like the people who are casually interested in crypto just sort of get distracted and we we tend to do better like when Bitcoin is down because that's that's our core focus and we just we've been shipping a ton of product. I I'd say we're turning ideas into reality like faster than ever before and it's largely due to us being uh one of the most AI enabled companies out there. Like we're shipping twice as much code year-over-year um as as we were before and some of our engineers are really turning into these like super builders that are shipping like 10X as much code as some of their co-workers.

And so we're trying to teach best practices on that and um create an environment where we can just outpace any company with AI.