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Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicola Tangian, the CEO of the Norwegian Sowan Wealth Fund.

And today I'm joined by Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, which is America's largest crypto exchange,

and increasingly, one of the powerful forces shaping global finance. So Brian, warm welcome.

Thank you for having me. Now, 13 years ago, nobody trusted crypto, and today, nobody can ignore it.

And so what happened really? Well, you know, I first read about Bitcoin in December of 2010, and it was describing how there could be a decentralized network to move value around the world, kind of like the internet was for moving information, but this was for moving value.

And, you know, it was initially didn't get much attention, only people that were computer science PhDs or, you know, libertarians or anarchists were excited by it in these small forums on the internet.

And it slowly grew over time. And of course, Bitcoin was the first asset that got created kind of like this digital gold standard.

But quickly the technology evolved to be, you know,

blockchain is a broader concept. And so people made all kinds of things. They made ways to trade

other asset classes like commodities and equities. They made stable coins for better payment

rails. They made prediction markets. And so now I think we're in a world where crypto is actually

updating all aspects of the

financial system. It's not really just about Bitcoin. It's about payments. It's about borrowing and

lending. It's about capital formation. And how can this technology actually make financial services

more efficient and more global, more fair, and more free all over the world. And so it has increased

in trust quite a bit. I think the things that have helped that have been, number one, regulatory

clarity, which we're seeing emerge now in Europe. In the United States, we got legislation

recently passed for stable coins. We're also seeing adoption by the largest institutions in the world.

So there's lots of Bitcoin ETFs now and fund like Black Rock and Apollo have come out and said they want to tokenize all of their funds.

Companies like Visa and JPMorgan are running experiments with how to do stable coin payments.

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