Coinbase CEO Predicts 1 Billion Crypto Users Within the Next Decade

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is predicting that one billion people will have used crypto in the next decade.

Speaking on the first day of the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, Armstrong said: “My guess is that in 10-20 years, we’ll see a substantial portion of GDP happening in the crypto economy.” 

Armstrong was joined by star investor Cathie Wood, who said: “In the case of DeFi and next-generation internet, we are seeing a lot of financial companies losing talent to crypto.”

Both Wall Street and various government agencies have lost employees to crypto companies in the last year. “They [Wall Street] have to take it seriously, or else they are going to be hollowed out,” added Wood, CEO of Ark Invest.

Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase, was previously at OCH-Ziff Capital Management, while Blythe Masters hopped across the pond from Citigroup to Copper. And Robert Zagotta, the CEO of Bitstamp USA, previously worked for the CME Group.

Wood did say that crypto’s advance continues to be suppressed by a lack of regulatory clarity, something not experienced even in the early days of the internet.

Last year, Coinbase COO Emile Choi touched on the potential impact regulation will have but said she was confident that increased adoption will occur soon. “We’ve hit mainstream adoption. We have more than 50 regulators alone in the U.S. and we can navigate that and we embrace it. 

“We’ve always leaned into [regulation], but for the crypto ecosystem to thrive, we need to have fair rules, we need to have transparency and we need to have more clarity,” she said.

A report by Crypto.com in Jan predicted that there will be one billion crypto users by the end of this year, based on a formula derived from deposits and various crypto address data points. 

Chainalysis, an analytics firm, highlighted in a 2021 report that peer-to-peer marketplaces are responsible for crypto adoption, especially in emerging markets facing high inflation.

Areas in North America, West Europe, and Eastern Asia, on the other hand, have seen increased adoption due to institutional investment.