Hi, I'm Dan Premack, and welcome to Axios Recap. Today is Wednesday, April 14th. And we're coming to you a bit early today because today is the day the cryptocurrency giant Coinbase is going public.

Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, began life as an academic exercise by technologists

who not only wanted to digitize money, but also decentralize it, free it from being

controlled by governments.

And in the early days, it was best known for wild price fluctuations and its use in the sale

of illicit goods from guns to drugs.

Today, though, Bitcoin's market cap is larger than $1 trillion.

And there are lots of other cryptocurrencies with high values of their own, as both retail

and institutional investors have become enamored with what the new SEC chair once called,

a modern form of gold. In short, it's an industry. And if you're buying and selling Bitcoin

the U.S., you're probably doing it via Coinbase, in exchange that generated more than $1 billion

in revenue during just the first three months of this year. Today, Coinbase is planning to list

its shares on the NASDAQ. And why that matters is this will give the entire cryptocurrency

industry a Wall Street seal of legitimacy, kind of like what the Netscape IPO was for internet

technology back in the late 1990s. So today we want to speak with Coinbase's president and chief operating officer Emily

Choi about how she thinks about crypto, why Coinbase is going public today, and if we're ever

going to use Bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee, instead of just investing in it as an asset class. We're joined now by Emily Choi,

President and Chief Operating Officer of Coinbase.

Emily, let's start a big picture here, because you come from kind of a tech Silicon Valley background, but not a crypto background prior to Coinbase.

How do you explain cryptocurrency or your job to friends and family who aren't in the industry?

Yeah, it's always the fun Thanksgiving table topic. Like, what exactly do you do?

And to be honest with you, Dan, it's funny. In some past crypto winter cycles with the Thanksgiving table, people look at me like a little pitifully like, oh, what job did you choose? The reason I got into crypto is because I felt like there was this intuitive thing about the digitization of value in the same way that many years ago we saw the digitization

...