To be with you here. All right, we've got some great product announcements coming up this afternoon, but I thought to kick it off, I would zoom out for a minute and talk about why are we doing all this, why are we here? The mission of Coinbase is to increase economic freedom in the world, and we think crypto is a unique enabling technology to accomplish this mission. What does economic freedom actually mean? First, it means that it's your money. You should be able to do whatever you want with it. It means cutting out the middlemen with their high fees and their added delays and friction in the economy. It means fast, cheap, and global payments for people all over the world, anybody with a smartphone. Crypto is ultimately about freedom and individual sovereignty.
Crypto has an important role to play now more than ever because of what's going on in the economy. Usually, when you see an up and to the right graph like this in a product demo, it's a good thing. This is not a good thing. This is the U.S. federal government debt, and it's expanding at an exponential pace. I think people right now are really feeling a lack of surety about their money, about deficit spending, and this is not just true in the United States. It's true of democracies around the world. It's also not a coincidence that we're seeing all-time high prices of Bitcoin. People are turning to Bitcoin as a refuge from inflation and deficit spending, and it's ultimately going to be a check and balance on this kind of activity.
If this continues, there's a very good chance Bitcoin becomes the next reserve currency of the world. Now, while Bitcoin is a store of value and it's a check and balance on deficit spending, stablecoins are the medium of exchange. They're also having a massive up and to the right graph, but this time it's a very good thing. The stablecoin market cap is up 50% year over year, and it's totally uncorrelated with crypto trading volume. Crypto has really found its next daily use case in stablecoins, and this is really just the beginning. Now, at Coinbase, we are really trying to drive crypto adoption and grow the TAM of crypto, and we've always believed that this would happen in three phases. That first phase is really about crypto as an investment platform. It started off with Bitcoin.
We listed more crypto assets, and now we're seeing tokenization of real-world assets as they come on-chain. In fact, in the last year, the tokenization of real-world assets was up over 200x. There's about $20 billion that came on in the last year. Crypto is not just about trading. It's also updating financial services. Our vision here is not to just put a modern UI on top of the same old payment rails. We're building a new financial system layer by layer from the ground up: new rails, new money, and new financial services like Bitcoin-backed loans using DeFi and stablecoin payments. Finally, the third phase, crypto is not just going to be about financial services. It's also a platform for the next generation of internet applications.
I'm really excited for Jesse from the Base team to come up later today with some of our industry experts out there who are building this future. We're seeing things like decentralized identity, decentralized social media, use cases like prediction markets really start to take off and go mainstream. The future of the internet applications are really going to be built on-chain as well. Okay, we've got some exciting product announcements coming up in this theme of how do we go through these different phases, and they all relate to Coinbase's 2025 top priorities, which are around our core business growth of trading and payments. I'm really excited to give you a sneak preview, and then we'll have leaders from Coinbase come up and give you some more detail later today on each of these.
First, Coinbase has served large financial institutions and large companies for a long time. We actually serve over 200 institutions like BlackRock and PayPal and Stripe. Today, we're announcing a new product for startups and medium-sized businesses called Coinbase Business. Second, we're announcing a powerful set of payment APIs that bridge the gap between stablecoins and fiat currencies in different countries around the world. Number three, we're expanding our core business around trading by introducing derivatives, especially options trading with a recent acquisition we made of Deribit. We're also seamlessly integrating decentralized exchange or DEX trading into our products, which will help us go from a couple of hundred assets you can trade to ultimately millions. Fourth, we're building a new consumer payment product that lets you spend crypto anywhere in the world with incredible cash-backed rewards.
In summary, crypto is eating the financial services industry, and Coinbase is the leading crypto company. With that, I want to invite a special guest on stage. It is one of our launch partners and somebody who knows more about e-commerce and payments than just about anybody in the world. Please join me in welcoming Tobi s Lütke, the CEO of Shopify. All right, there is really nobody better than Toby to talk about E-Commerce payments. Shopify is an 800-pound gorilla in this space. I would say probably everybody in this room has probably bought something on Shopify, even if you do not know that you did it, because you are often interacting with a store that is owned by that individual person, but Shopify is powering it underneath. Stablecoins are also having a moment. I think there was about $30 trillion of stablecoin volume last year.
Circle just had a massive IPO. Tobi, why don't you just tell us your perspective on what this means for commerce right now?
Yeah, so thanks so much for having me and sharing this moment. It's like just an incredible confluence of infrastructure, vibes, regulatory changes all coming together to conspire that this is like the moment I think that a lot of the builders have been waiting for to just put all these wonderful things together. A lot of this conference, a lot of what you are announcing, a lot of what you guys and everyone in the room is working on is like enablement of these completely new things that haven't been possible.
In a way, I'm here to just balance things out a little bit because I want to talk about commerce, which is absolutely possible already and actually rather boring, but I think can play a really, really outsized role in, or at least a significant push of value for the people who are holding USDC and stablecoins, because at the end of the day, a currency is held by people if they think it's of value to them to hold this currency. There's a significant amount of fantastic products out in the world and e-commerce behind online stores and Shopify stores and these kind of things that people like purchasing.
Yeah, great. Okay, so maybe you can help us explain a little bit about why it's so hard to get E-commerce payments to typically work, because peer-to-peer payments have been working for a long time in crypto. E-commerce is a different ballgame, and you understand this really well. Maybe you can talk about how we started to make this possible.
Yeah, so it's funny because what crypto solves so wonderfully, effortlessly these days, it's like that you can send money to obviously anyone on their nerve in subseconds and thanks to recent developments also with very, very low fees. That seems like that would be the absolute core unlock for commerce, but it really there's pieces missing. E-commerce really lives in a world of particular primitives. A purchase is not actually just a clearing of money. There's actually multiple states that a transaction goes through. You might have heard about authorize and capture, which are like these primitives that credit card payments tend to implement. What really happens when you hit pay now in a commerce checkout is that you're coming to an agreement that is still yet to be brokered.
The final amount of the price is actually not known at this point because what actually happens is that inventory is allocated and reserved for you, after which then you'd go talk to all these different backends, like ERP systems. You're going to the shipping companies. You figure out what a shipping cost might be, the taxation, now tariffs. Sometimes the discounts interact with these things, and then you have to recalculate everything right after you figure out that a new discount applies and so on and so on and so on. There is a lot of things happening. This was just made with just being able to send money around, especially with zero recourse, just not really tractable for this space in the past.
Yeah, so credit cards kind of have these core verbs underlying them, like you authorize the charge. You only capture it later once you've reserved the inventory. There's like void and refund. We managed to get all this working together, which we'll talk about in a minute. For right now, let's roll a demo video and show it to people. Awesome.
Yeah, so what's so funny here is like Brian and I have been having probably annual calls for a very, very, very long time to ask him, "Hey, is it like commerce time in crypto?" It was almost like the answer was almost always like just about maybe soon. It is awesome. We're here. It's all coming together now, which is really, really awesome.
Yeah, and then it's kind of cool that this finally happened. I mean, what were the key pieces that finally came? Because you and I, about once a year, we would get together and be like, "God damn it, why aren't the crypto payments working in E-commerce yet? This is complicated and that." What made it finally happen now, do you think?
Yeah, so again, a bunch of things. I mean, stablecoins are obviously key here. I know we say the term a lot, but it's very, very bad for E-commerce conversion if you happen to end up with huge regrets for having purchased an item, the Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin appreciated in the meantime, right? That's obviously bad for conversion rates. The fees are very high. We also at the moment right now, like Circle had this IPO. You have been a public company for a while that these systems and then the stablecoins are backed by two public companies who are both audited, and these things are just hugely trust-creating. All of these things conspire. What we are excited about here is that today, I think we will go in early access.
We are going to make it so that buyers coming to Shopify stores will see a USDC on-base payment option and will be able to use it in the same way as anything else. This is something that's going to be in Shopify Payments and in ShopPay. This is starting in early access now, and we are intending to roll this out over the course of a year, default on across the system because we figured out how to make it so that it seems.
Yeah, yeah, so having a trusted stablecoin with USDC was a key piece. Having more scalable blockchains with Base was a key piece. There was a third piece, which we had to work on together. This is where our teams had to come together and actually co-create a smart contract on-chain that replicated that functionality. I mean, people have always talked about in crypto that it's programmable money. Okay, we actually had to sit down and try to write this smart contract. Maybe you can give people a little more detail on what this is.
Yeah, and I want to give a shout-out to Jesse and the Coinbase team. Shopify, again, we are very, very proud of looking. In fact, we are super excited to work on really boring things. We are reasonably into commerce and enabling entrepreneurship and these kind of things. We know more than is probably sane to admit about these topics so that everyone else does not have to, right? Our entire point is that Shopify loves Shopify's mission is to cause more entrepreneurship in the world, more opportunity, more in our own philosophical framework. We are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for. We work together with a Shopify and Coinbase Tiger team work together to.
Stripe too. We should give our friends at Stripe a big shout-out. They played a key role in helping this come together as well. Sorry.
Yeah, and so what we did is this is a smart contract that models this sort of complex state machine of taking the escrow money and then releasing it to the merchant if a transaction finally happens. This is an open-source smart contract, which we are publishing, I think, also today.
Yeah, I think it's now live. If people, for developers watching this, if they want to go to the Base GitHub repository, they can see the commerce payment protocol. It's open-source. You can submit pull requests. We're hoping that more and more companies adopt this open standard.
Yeah, yeah, it's based on EIP-3009 right now, which is solid and a great foundation, works with all wallets, which was one of the conditions. Yeah, here we are. It's very cool.
Yeah, it's making payments more efficient. I think the plan here is actually there's going to be a 1% cash-back reward for any customer paying with USDC. The economics of how we can incentivize this start to get really interesting as well later this year. Great, I think this is an amazing accomplishment from both our teams. We want to thank them who worked very hard on getting this live. It sounds complicated, but I think the big takeaway from my point of view is that for the first time, this is a large-scale e-commerce platform adopting crypto payments. It just shows that crypto is updating the financial system. We can make things more efficient, and that's good for merchants. It's good for customers. It's good for the world. We really appreciate the partnership with Shopify and for you coming out today.
So Tobi, let's give him a round of applause. ll right, next up, I'm going to welcome Alec Lovett to the stage, who's going to talk to you about the future of payments at Coinbase. Let's give him a round of applause.
Brian and Tobi are a tough act to follow, but I'm going to do my best. I'm incredibly excited about the Shopify launch. The thing is, Shopify is not a one-off. Coinbase is now a platform. We're extending our capabilities as infrastructure so that the best companies in the world can scale financial applications on our stack. Over the last couple of years, more than 200 companies have built on our crypto as a service product. This year, we're very excited to be investing in the next phase of our platform, Coinbase Payments.
Coinbase Payments is a platform product that empowers any business to innovate with stablecoins. It makes it dead simple to get started with stablecoins. It has simplified business onboarding, an intuitive UI, and a powerful suite of payments APIs that unlock stablecoin use cases, all with the safety and controls that users expect from a Coinbase product. Now I know there has been a lot of hype about crypto payments over the years, but we're now at a point where the technology is delivering. The bedrock of Coinbase Payments is USDC and Base. As you've heard a lot today, we are the largest distributor of USDC globally. Base is our L2 blockchain, which is purpose-built for enterprise-grade payments. When we put USDC and Base together, we have a store of value and a money movement rail that can massively simplify global money movement.
Not surprisingly, smart companies are figuring this out, and they're tapping into USDC and Base to get faster money movement, more efficient cross-border, and global payment acceptance. Just to give you a sense of scale, the USDC Base network settles $1 trillion monthly. The fastest growing portion of that is bonafide payments volume. Over the last year, we've nearly doubled the size of the USDC ecosystem in close partnership with Circle. While that revenue line is important, it's not the end goal. Our number one priority is building partnerships with innovative companies that can help us grow the stablecoin ecosystem and participate in stablecoin upside. Earlier this year, Stripe, a company that we admire, announced support for USDC and Base across their payments product. This was a huge milestone for mainstream adoption and the first of many such announcements we expect from companies outside the crypto industry.
It is not just plugging in USDC and Base. Forward-thinking businesses are building on Coinbase Payments to scale stablecoin solutions. Just to name a few, SAP, Deel, and Shopify are all building on our platform. SAP is integrating with Coinbase and USDC to enable cross-border treasury management and stablecoin-based B2B payments. Deel uses Coinbase and USDC to power stablecoin payouts to contractors all over the world. These payouts provide instant access to USD liquidity and the ability to earn competitive yield on savings anywhere in the world. As we heard just a moment ago, we are launching a payments acceptance product with Shopify, allowing over 2 million merchants on their platform to accept stablecoin and USDC at checkout. We are past the hype. We are on to real usage. We are building all the platform tools that you need to get started with stablecoins.
As you think about stablecoins and building your stablecoin strategy, we'd love to partner with you. We're not stopping here. We also want to extend these capabilities to businesses of all sizes, including everyday businesses. I'm going to invite my colleague Sid up to the stage. We'll talk about that next.
Thanks, Alex. Hi, folks. Running a business is not an easy job. Founders and entrepreneurs are hustling every single day of the week. They're hiring employees, closing deals, searching for product-market fit, cutting costs. On top of all of this, the number one pain point that they often have is around money management and payments. They hire employees around the world, and there's no easy way to pay them. They pay very high credit card fees, and very often they face unfair chargebacks that eat into their margins. Their payments are stuck in very long payout titles, and that is where their working capital is stuck. All the while their hard-earned cash is often sitting in a business bank account earning next to nothing. Now, the good news is that crypto and stablecoins can fix all of this.
For the first time, we have the technology to send a dollar anywhere in the world for under a cent in under a second. I know everyone in this room knows that already. What's been missing so far is packaging that technology into a product that's really easy and accessible for businesses. That's why today we're so excited to announce Coinbase Business. Coinbase Business. Thank you. Coinbase Business is our one-stop operating account for the modern business. If you're a founder, think of this as your one-stop shop to go here and manage all of your global money and payments. You can do everything from making payments. As you saw earlier today, we already have customers using Coinbase to pay vendors, contractors, and employees around the world. It's also a great way to get paid.
With Coinbase Business, you can accept payments instantly from customers anywhere in the world. We already have customers today that are shipping apps in the App Store, and they're using crypto payments so that they don't have to pay the 30% App Store tax. They're enjoying no chargebacks, low fees, and instant payouts. They're taking all of those revenues now that they're earning that they wouldn't have earned otherwise and reinvesting it into growing their business. We're also bringing the best of Coinbase to all of our business customers now. You can store and trade really easily with Coinbase Business. Whether you want to store any kind of crypto or stablecoin or your local fiat currencies, we've got you covered with seamless treasury management and trading. As you've seen recently in the news, governments and larger institutions around the world have started to hodl Bitcoin on their treasury.
Now with Coinbase Business, every business can. If you hold USDC on Coinbase Business, you can also earn up to 4.5% APY. If you're a founder and you have your cash sitting in a business bank earning next to nothing, Coinbase Business is a great option where you can earn 4.5%. We've also heard from business owners that they often need to build integrations with the rest of their stack. We've shipped APIs that let you seamlessly and automatically handle all of your payments and trading and money movement. It's also really important to have clean books. We've built seamless integrations so that you can reconcile everything you do on Coinbase Business back into your accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero through some of our partnerships. Finally, we've made it easy. Onboarding has never been simpler.
We built a brand new business onboarding flow that is self-service, no fee, and fast approvals. When crypto works for small business, it works for everyone. That is why we are just so excited to give this operating account to every business and startup that is out there so that all of them can run their business on Coinbase. I am happy to share that we are already live in an alpha preview today with over 1,000 customers on the waitlist. If you want your business to run on modern, faster, better money, please sign up for the waitlist and follow us on Twitter and Farcaster. Now, Coinbase Business is just the start of how we are serving institutions of all sizes. Now to share what is next for the larger institutions and what they are doing with crypto, I am going to invite up Greg and Luke to talk about that. Thank you.
Just a few weeks ago, Coinbase announced a historic transaction, the largest in crypto history to date, and one that I think will change the global crypto derivatives landscape well into the future. Coinbase announced our acquisition of Deribit, the leader in crypto options. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Luke Stryer, CEO of Deribit. Welcome, Luke. It's great to be here with you.
Thanks, Greg. Thank you as well. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Haven't been in the U.S. for a while.
Great to have you. We are so excited about this transaction for a host of reasons, and I'd love to hear yours. From our point of view, this really rounds out the portfolio that we have today. We're the largest regulated player in the spot market. We have our U.S. futures market. We have our perpetuals exchange, the international exchange. Adding options is a big deal, and it really makes for what we believe is the most comprehensive portfolio in the marketplace today. The second thing is, Luke, you've built, and you can describe this, an incredible team that's based out of the UAE and out of Europe. We think this is a critical way in which the institutional business is going to project itself globally with a team that really has its finger on the pulse of the needs of the international derivatives trader.
Third, and maybe most importantly, an excellent risk management capability that we think will tie together all of these various things in the market portfolio into a single capital-efficient means for the client to have the best possible capital-efficient experience. Luke, maybe from your point of view, how do you see this helping grow Deribit, and what are you most excited about?
Yeah, so for the ones that don't know us, we've been around for around a decade. We started trading in 2016, and we were completely focused on options from day one. When essentially everyone else focused on other products like spot, perpetuals, etc., we went all into options, which was a difficult decision, but in the end resulted in this moment, I guess. This focus has come at a price because we haven't developed a lot of features, but we focused on options completely. That means different hardware. That means we're not cloud-based. We have hardware based in London. That means focusing on different services. It means focusing on latency and processing capacity. It means focusing on risk. It means not focusing on borrowing and lending on an expensive or an extensive spot shelf. We're completely niche. And Coinbase is the opposite.
All these things that we sacrificed over the years to get where we are today is finally being completed. From our perspective, we have an amazing product. We have 80% market share, 78% just now looking at notional open interest across all the other peers as well. We started with 100 a decade ago, and we still have 80% despite firms like Bybit, OKX, Binance, Siemens trying. We got here, and now we're reaching like completion phase by merging or whatever the proper way of saying it with Coinbase. We can finally add the features that we lack. We're pretty excited, same as you.
Yeah, that's great. It seems like your focus has really served you well. You've been able to keep that 80% market share for a very long period of time. Congratulations. For us also, it is a highly profitable business. It really enhances the profitability of both our institutional business and Coinbase overall. We are very excited about this. I'll turn my attention briefly to Coinbase Prime. Coinbase Prime is our flagship product where we integrate together trading, custody, prime financing, custodial staking, and we released a prime on-chain wallet product. We are the largest regulated custodian in the space. We think that having all of these things together in one place is our largest differentiator.
We have competitors in each different segment, but making it operationally efficient for customers to go from each of these activities one to the other just is the biggest differentiator that we have. It is what has enabled us to win the vast majority of the ETF mandates and also to participate in some of the largest crypto transactions for corporates that have taken place to date with the likes of MicroStrategy, Semler Scientific, GameStop, and a host of others. We are very excited to introduce everything that we just talked about into Coinbase Prime. In the coming couple of quarters, you will start to see all different forms of derivatives, perpetual futures, our U.S. futures, and options ultimately as well. You will see that the second half of the year.
The other thing you'll hear a lot about in the coming quarters from the institutional business is something we're very excited about, which Alex referred to earlier, known as crypto as a service. That's taking all the things that we built, trading, custody, and now payments, and making them available to clients in a way that they can build into their own infrastructure. Today, we power over 200 banks, brokers, fintechs, and others, the likes of eToro and Webull and others that we've announced recently. This is the space that we're going to double down on as more firms are coming into crypto. We see this as our opportunity to provide the services to them so they can grow their own business. That's something we're very excited about, and we'll have a lot more to say in Q3.
We are very excited to be here. We are excited to have this transaction close in the coming quarters. I am going to turn it over to my colleague, Max Branzburg, who is going to talk about the consumer business. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. I am thrilled to be with you today to talk to you about how we're evolving the main Coinbase app. First, let's start 13 years ago when Coinbase launched to make it safe and easy to store Bitcoin. It made what had been a complicated niche technology accessible to anyone with an email address. In doing so, it helped spur a whole new on-chain economy. Since then, Coinbase has become a world-class crypto trading platform with millions of users trading hundreds of assets in countries all around the world. With a safe and trusted exchange, with excellent banking partners enabling high-quality on and off-ramps, and with world-class security, Coinbase has become the go-to platform for retail traders everywhere. We're not stopping there.
I'm excited to share with you today several product announcements of new things we're doing to accelerate Coinbase's path to becoming the number one financial app in the world. First, as the on-chain economy has evolved, we've seen millions of assets get created and traded on decentralized exchanges. Only few people have been able to navigate those decentralized exchanges to access and trade the assets that they want. That's why today, I'm incredibly excited to share with you that we will be integrating decentralized exchanges from Base directly into the main Coinbase app, enabling Coinbase users to access and trade millions of assets on-chain as soon as they're created directly in the same safe and trusted Coinbase app they already use.
Coinbase will be going from one asset 13 years ago in Bitcoin to hundreds of assets today to soon having every asset on-chain available to trade in the Coinbase app by default. You'll no longer need to wonder where you can find an asset or navigate the complexity of wallets and decentralized exchanges. With this launch, you can now be confident that if it's on-chain, it's available on Coinbase. We're starting with DEXs on Base, but we'll be expanding from there to other networks and protocols as well. We're also continuing to build out Coinbase Advanced, our advanced trader platform that brings sophisticated trading tools to our entire customer base in the main Coinbase app. Over the last year or so, we've made a concerted effort to expand our derivatives offerings, with derivatives representing 75% of global crypto trading volume.
Now, most of that volume has been in perpetual futures outside of the U.S. We have made good progress there with our retail traders doing more than $5 billion in volume in perpetual futures outside the U.S. in May alone. We will continue investing there with our international exchange and continued market expansion. We are not ready to let crypto derivatives trading be a non-U.S. phenomenon alone. That is why I am excited to share that we will be bringing the same great derivatives products to the U.S. next. As Greg mentioned, we have already announced first of its kind 24/7 crypto futures trading, and we will soon be launching CFTC compliant perpetual futures here in the United States. For U.S. traders, this means you now have access to the most powerful crypto trading products on the market on the safest and most trusted exchange in Coinbase.
This is also a huge moment for the U.S. crypto trading market, and I'm proud that we are leading the way with Coinbase Advanced. Now, as our trading platforms continue to push on the bleeding edge of what's possible, we're not stopping there either. We're continuing to expand the suite of offerings on our platform, going beyond trading to offer saving and earning, borrowing, payments, and more, all at market-leading rates. For example, you can now earn 4.5% yield when you hold USDC on Coinbase. That's five times the national average savings account rate of 0.6%. USDC on Coinbase is an incredibly powerful product. It's one-to-one backed with market-leading rates, instantly available for trading, payments, and anything else you may need. It is no wonder that USDC across Coinbase platforms has grown since 2023 from $1 billion to more than $12 billion today.
Another way we're helping Coinbase users grow their assets on platform is with staking. You can earn up to 14% yield when you stake your assets on Coinbase, and we offer eight different assets for our retail customers to stake, including Ethereum and Solana. Just like USDC, our customers love it. Just in the last two years alone, staked assets across Coinbase platforms have grown from $4 billion to now more than $15 billion and growing. Earlier this year, we continued to build on this suite of financial services, launching a first-of-its-kind Bitcoin-backed loan product on the main Coinbase app, powered by Morpho's on-chain lending platform, Onbase. With this product, you can instantly take out up to $1 million in USDC on the Coinbase app backed by your Bitcoin as collateral. No lengthy applications, approval process, delayed settlement. The USDC is instantly deposited in your account.
You can start earning that 4.5% immediately. You can withdraw it to pay a down payment on a mortgage, to buy a car for everyday expenses, whatever you need, all without selling your Bitcoin. Now, this product just launched, but even in the early days, it has had tremendous growth with over $300 million in loans outstanding. This is a testament to the power of on-chain finance when it is combined with the safety, trust, and distribution of the Coinbase app. Bringing together the full suite of financial services on Coinbase, Coinbase One has become the no-brainer membership for anyone participating in crypto. Today, with Coinbase One, you get zero-fee trading, boosted rewards across USDC and staking, account protection benefits, on-chain partner benefits, priority support, and more. In July, we are making Coinbase One even more accessible by introducing a brand new tier.
Coinbase One Basic will be introduced at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and it will offer the same great benefits of zero-fee trading, boosted rewards, account protection, and more. We see that when our customers adopt Coinbase One, they engage more deeply with crypto and they get more value out of the platform. That is why we are excited to bring these no-brainer benefits to everyone. Whether you are a veteran in crypto or brand new to the space, Coinbase One is the membership for you. Finally, there is one more thing.
The first Bitcoin block was called the Genesis block, the beginning of crypto as we know it. A call to update an aging system. Now, it'll be etched into millions of credit cards all over the world, turning old money into new money again and again. With the Coinbase One card, everyday spending just got a whole lot more rewarding. With up to 4% Bitcoin rewards back on every purchase in every category. No more points or cash back that lose their value. Now, every time you spend, you earn rewards that have the potential to grow in value. The more assets you hold on platform, the more Bitcoin rewards you will earn.
Every one of these 17-gram metal cards is etched with the Bitcoin Genesis block from the first Bitcoin block ever mined and a symbol of a dawn of a new era of economic freedom around the world. The Coinbase One card powered by American Express will be available this fall exclusively to Coinbase One members, including members of the new Coinbase One Basic tier at just $49.99 a year. Join Coinbase One now, and to be among the first that hear about when the card is available, sign up on the waitlist at coinbase.com/creditcard. To learn more about the Coinbase One card, please welcome Shan Aggahwal from Coinbase and Will Stredwick from American Express. Thank you.
Hey. Wow. What does everyone think about that card design? Yeah? Look at that. Woo! The Genesis block coming to a wallet near you soon. Thank you so much, Will, for being here, and to AmEx for your partnership on the Coinbase One card. We're super excited about it. I wanted to spend a few minutes to chat a bit more about what this card means to AmEx and what folks can expect from it. Maybe to start, can you just share your perspective on why AmEx is choosing to partner with Coinbase on this?
Firstly, Shan, thanks so much for having us join you today. We're super excited to be here and even more for the launch. Yeah, so why Coinbase? No one in this room needs me to tell you that at the DNA of Coinbase is innovation. You've literally been doing it from the day you were conceived and sitting here today. It's just rolling and rolling and rolling. Innovation is what AmEx is about. We've reinvented the company many times over. In this room today, some of you will know us for travel. Some of you will know us for dining. Others for lifestyle, maybe digital wallets, maybe tokenization. We're launching the program with you today on our agile partner platform, which is getting us to market so fast. When we think about why Coinbase, the answer is really simple. It's very clear today, and you can see it.
Coinbase puts the customer at the center of everything. You think about customer value, you think about the customer experience, you think about how to deliver the product and the service to the customer. From our point of view, it makes it a totally logical partnership. I got to throw that straight back at you. Why AmEx?
I think for us, it was pretty easy. First and foremost, we really like the way the AmEx and the Coinbase Blue look together. In all seriousness, we took the decision very seriously, and we felt a very strong sense of shared values with AmEx just based on the customer focus that you mentioned and AmEx's experience delivering very high-quality premium experiences that we think is very much aligned with the Coinbase brand. When we were thinking about the right partner, it felt like a very natural fit for us in delivering what we think is a very unique and innovative new card offering to the market. This is also one of AmEx's first forays into crypto, and Coinbase being the crypto company in a lot of ways has brought a lot of consumers into the market.
I'm just curious, Will, to learn a little bit more about why you're getting behind this card and crypto now.
I'm happy to talk to that. Let's just talk about crypto, and then we'll talk about why now. I think on crypto, again, it's so obviously becoming so mainstream, so part of so many people's lives. It is pan-generational, but it does particularly upgrade millennials even more in Gen Z, and I'm 100% sure even more in the generations to come. AmEx plays extremely well to millennials, Gen Z, the younger generations, and we want to be part of that journey. We can't think of a better partnership and a better time than now. In terms of specifically why now, I think it's just serendipity. We wanted to partner into this space. You were looking for the right partner. The question was, is this the right time it was?
What we're excited about is the words Coinbase, crypto, powered by the American Express network, and then just innovating together from now on.
Serendipity. I love it when that happens. All right, one last question. Without saying too much, what should people expect from the card on the AmEx network?
I love that question. Can you not tell us about the product, but tell us about the product?
Yeah.
Look, firstly, as you outlined, having up to 4% Bitcoin at the center of the rewards program is just epic. What should people expect from and members expect from American Express? What do you always expect? You just expect to see from the network great offers, great value, great experiences, great protections, a whole lot of value. I can't wait until we're talking about this in more detail later in the year.
Awesome. We are so excited to be doing this together. I also want to give a huge shout-out to our partners, Cardless and First Electronic Bank, our program manager and issuer on the new card. I know this is just a teaser, but I really think that this card will be a must-have for Coinbase customers, especially when paired with the new CD1 Basic tier. I personally cannot be waiting to be stacking stats with every swipe, and I hope that you all will join the waitlist, which opens up today. Be sure to get on there and be one of the first to get the Coinbase One card.
Thanks again for having us. We're so pleased to be here and celebrate with you for the future of money.
Thank you.
Take care.
All right. So pretty exciting stuff here in the Coinbase product vision directly from our CEO. That was cool. I'm going to summarize some of these takeaways and lead us into the home stretch. Together, Coinbase and Shopify are bringing USDC payments on Base to millions of merchants worldwide. We're hearing about that amazing Coinbase One AmEx deal. The good news for me is if you're a smug Jimmy Kimmel wannabe, you get to the top of the waiting list, so I'm psyched. Coinbase's acquisition of Deribit, I'm particularly excited about this. This is very, very cool. The power of spot and derivatives is just extraordinary. I know this from my background in the commodities world. We have a whole new business suite of new tools, empowering businesses with stablecoin payments, USDC rewards, on-chain tools. We have three more sessions for today.
We're in the home stretch. Okay? First up, I want to introduce Jesse Pollock, our Head of Base, and three fantastic panelists that will talk about the movement to bring the world on-chain as they showcase all the different products, companies, partnerships that are driving mainstream adoption. A lot of you have been asking about when this is going to happen, we're going to hear from Emilie Choi, our President and COO here at Coinbase, and Super Bowl champion Saquon Barkley on the path to economic freedom. Please, everyone, welcome Jesse.
Hello, everybody. How's it going? Yeah. I know we're in the afternoon. We're in the home stretch. I feel so grateful to be here and so grateful to be joined by this incredible crew.
We're going to be talking a little bit about what it's actually going to take to bring a billion people and then the entire world on-chain. I want to just start with the basics. I'd love for each of you to quickly introduce yourself, tell us what you're building, what the problem is that you're solving, and then how it's going.
Sure. I'll start. Hi. I'm Ty Haney, founder and CEO of TYB. Woo-hoo.
Yeah.
An on-chain Gen Z rewards app. My background is in the brand-building space. I had a company called Outdoor Voices. The problem we're solving, brands today have a relationship problem. Forever, brands have spent a lot of money acquiring customers through Facebook and Instagram and not owning that data or those relationships. It has gotten very expensive. We have a rewards, retention, and loyalty solution, and we are relaying and kind of re-platforming loyalty through TYB, allowing brands to directly incentivize and motivate their fans to take action. Ultimately, that makes community a growth channel.
I love it. Merlin?
All right. Merlin, co-founder of Morpho. So Morpho is the infrastructure for on-chain loans. We have like $6.5 billion of total deposits. Basically, if you take a step back 50 years ago, if you wanted to get a loan, you need to walk to the bank, talk to the banker, provide a ton of information on you. Today, you basically need to do the same thing. Going to the banker provides maybe even more information than previously, and it's super slow. With Morpho, we are just basically saving time and solving that exact problem. I mean, we have internet, AI agents. We have smartphones. The financial service and the financial infrastructure is still super slow. We have a lot of human work in it, and we're basically solving that. A good example that we released this year with, wait, Coinbase as Coinbase released a Bitcoin-backed loan product.
Right now, there's like a billion dollars deposited as collateral, $300 million of active USDC loans, and it's one click away from all Coinbase users. It's at 5%, the cheapest rate that you can have among the tried-and-tested world. So that's basically the problem that we're solving.
Incredible. Shayne?
Hi, I'm Shayne. I'm from Polymarket. Polymarket is a prediction market, and people basically trade markets on events. The really cool thing about it is when you let people trade these markets, you get price discovery, and the price discovery tells you how likely something is to happen and how it's changed over time. You may have seen some screenshots or where there's a question about what's going on in the world, and you see a chart, and you see a percentage, and people are putting their money where their mouth is. It started five and a half years ago, and I'm really excited. I always deeply believed that the idea of markets as an information source was this really powerful undertapped concept. It's been awesome to watch it become more of a thing than it was when I started.
We still have a long way to go, though.
Polymarket is the news today.
It's definitely sometimes when I see the stats, sometimes when I meet people and they tell me, "Oh, I religiously check Polymarket," like earlier today, it kind of sets in. Yeah. It's amazing that a lot of people rely on it for forecasts and fact-check or get an alternative point of view from what they're seeing on the news or what they're seeing on X. I just think about if Polymarket didn't exist, the fact that we wouldn't have these markets, it's like, how could you ever go back to that now?
I love it. Just kind of listening to what you guys are building, it's across a bunch of different things. We have consumer loyalty, e-commerce, we have lending, we have the news and prediction markets. All of you have decided to build on-chain, this kind of new internet, this new technology platform that we think is going to transform the world for the better. Shane, I'd love you to just start, why did you guys build Polymarket on-chain? What was that, yeah, what did that get for you as a business?
Yeah. I mean, look, I started Polymarket literally with no money, like no money. What I love about blockchains, first and foremost, is this idea that some kid in his bedroom can go and innovate and build something that's like a new model and go test something that would be extremely difficult, extremely time-consuming, extremely expensive to go and do in a tried-and-tested environment so that you can let people experiment and sort of validate demand and validate the feasibility of an underlying financial idea or an experimental market structure. There really was no other alternative. I think what's exciting about Polymarket being on-chain is two main things. The first is it's inherently global. If you want these truth markets, you want people to be able to go and put their money behind their opinions.
The more sort of people who are trading, the better price discovery, the better liquidity you have, the more accurate it is. That is really powerful, especially when it is like the past month, there have been all these events all around the world. I will just see in my emails and on my X feed so many people getting angry at me or adding me from different corners of the globe. That is when I am like, "Okay, we are doing something right." The second is the element of transparency. What is cool about Polymarket is that when you go on, you can see who holds shares in what, what other markets they are trading, what price they bought at, and what price they sold at. You can go check on-chain to validate that that is true.
As the market moves, when someone starts buying a lot, you can go and look at that wallet. You can go and see what else have they traded. Where did the USDC that they're using come in from? Where was it transferred in from? There are all these data points, and there's almost nowhere to hide. It is the most transparent, open market that it can be. I think that's really important when you think about building, on one hand, the global truth machine, but also the global prediction market, which is obviously like half truth machine, half financial market. I think that the signal would be much lower if it was this opaque box once you came into it. Yeah, it's been exciting.
I love it. Merlin?
Right. What Shayne said at the beginning, I think, deeply resonates. Crypto lowers the barrier to entry to everyone to build businesses and be creative. I mean, we started also in our bedrooms. We started Morpho as students, and now we are basically building a protocol that holds billions of dollars where you have users from, I don't know, Argentina, U.S., Asia, whatever. This is one of the superpowers of DeFi, but also the fact that it's globally open allows deep liquidity, which allows better rates for everyone. Also, it's fully transparent. It removes all the intermediaries that are quite useless and take rates at each step. Also, you have instant execution, which is something that in tried-and-tested world could take like a month or something like that. You could just have the liquidity in just seconds, which is unbeatable in the tried-and-tested world.
Those are some of the key improvements that DeFi provides.
You've been talking about markets, but you're coming at it from a different perspective.
Yeah.
Like why on-chain for you guys?
Yeah, of course. I think the core concept and why this matters in our space is ownership. I think there are two things that matter in brand building today. It is about co-creation, so inviting your most kind of loyal superfans into the fold to help you power things like preferences, insights of things that are going to come out later, like products, and then incentivization. I think five years from now, ultimately, we are going to have kind of the crypto infrastructure, on-chain infrastructure kind of in this community commerce space that allows for the next Nike to truly be community-founded, community-funded, and community-run. In the meantime, what we have started to, we have kind of created this wedge around loyalty. I think for too long, loyalty for a brand has been in a silo where my status with, let's say, Rare Beauty only exists within Rare Beauty's world.
That definition of loyalty has been too narrow as well, where it's just I'm getting rewarded for how much I purchase. With TYB, it's an app, multiplayer game. All of your favorite brands are in this app, and your status with each brand speaks to one another. We are making loyalty more effective. I can go into that in a later question. Ultimately, I believe in this idea of the consumer-owned identity and loyalty becoming essentially status. Over time, as all of these different preferences and statuses within different brands are kind of culminated into one ID on-chain, that becomes really powerful as we think about powering commerce not only within the TYB ecosystem, the Base ecosystem, but everywhere.
I, in a lot of ways, think of it not as like a credit score, but the consumer version of that, and that's why it needs to be on-chain.
I love it. Maybe just to, I love those answers because they're so concrete. I'll just summarize them before I go on to the next question. For Shayne, it was easier for you to do it, and it was really the only way for you to build the product. It was transparent so that you could actually build this effective open market, and then it's default global so that everyone everywhere can participate. For lending, it's that, again, it's easier, 10 times easier. As a student, you could actually build a billion-dollar protocol, which in the traditional financial world is impossible. You have this incredibly effective market because everything's happening in real time. It's all happening in this programmable layer.
For CYZ, it's about ownership and sovereignty where people can actually own their data and benefit from it, as well as a level of composability so that the data for one brand isn't in a silo, but instead it's connected to all the others, which lets you build a better experience for consumers. Those benefits, the leverage, the globalness, the transparency, the market efficiency, the sovereignty, those are such concrete kind of core values of on-chain and a core platform unlock. I think at the same time, it can be hard for people to almost wrap their head around, like, what is crypto good for? What is on-chain good for? Each of you is building a real product that is actually making change in the world on a daily basis. People are using it, and you're the people who are closest to that.
I'd love for you to just share an example. How is this actually working? How are people using your product? How is it helping real people? How is this pushing the world forward?
Yeah, happy to start. We are fortunate to work with some of the best or most of the best consumer brands, think Rare Beauty with Selena Gomez, Crocs, Glossier, etc. The brands are our customers. Traditionally, loyalty programs are ineffective. What they use our service for is to gamify loyalty in a way that they invite their members into their community. They have different challenges and prompts, so valuable type actions for a brand, creating content, hosting events, showing up to events, purchases, that as these people, the fans, the superfans, take action, they are earning coins that become redeemable through a Shopify integration on their site. It is interesting and quite simple. It is a game. We are driving engagement, and it ultimately leads to increased frequency of purchase and higher lifetime value.
At the end of the day, when you think about making community a growth channel, it must be measurable. As we are able to look at the purchase data and ultimately the value of these customers, we're making them more valuable over time for all of these brands through this game.
What about on the consumer side? What are the experiences that the people who are in the game are?
Yeah, it's so cool. If I'm part of the Rare Beauty Selena community, there's like 200,000 of them, and all of these guys are on-chain.
200,000 people on-chain, participating in the game.
Just the Rare Beauty and Selena. I mean, there's a lot more. We have 200 brands on the platform. Anyway, I'm entering this community, and I'm essentially spinning up an ID. I get a membership collectible. It represents my belonging to the community. As I progress from level one to level two to level three, I unlock rewards. That could be something like an exclusive product through TYB Shop, which is powered by Shopify. It could be that I get to go to the front row of a Selena concert. At the end of the day, community in the brand world has been a fluffy kind of intangible term. When you look at the data, it really can become an effective growth mechanism. That's what we're proving out, kind of making community measurable.
I love that. Merlin, how are people actually using lending and changing people?
Right. One of the superpowers of DeFi is letting access to basic financial infra and services to everyone on Earth. I think there's a very good example of that, which is that we recently launched on World Chain two months ago, so the Sam Altman project. We had 300,000 users using the Morpho Mini App to lend and borrow, so getting access to just basic financial service. How many countries are in the West from the top 10 top countries? Zero. Not a single one. It's just South America, Southeast Asia countries. I mean, this is a big driver for us. This is just the power of DeFi, and letting access to that is just wonderful.
Yeah, I love that. Shayne? I feel like we've all gotten a little bit of a taste of it if we're on Twitter, like how is Polymarket changing the world? Yeah, what are you seeing for?
Very kind of you. Yeah, I mean, look, it's just very special to see people who are really focused or really curious or really anxious about something that's going on in the world, that they really want to know what's going to happen because it's going to affect their future. They can look at Polymarket to go and get a much more accurate picture of what's likely to happen than if they were on X. There's great stuff on X, but if they were watching TV or on X. You look at maybe traditional polling or you look at algorithmic news feeds that go and show you things that you already want to see. There's all this user-generated content and all these different people's opinions, and it's showing you specific opinions based on your user profile, right?
The fact that there's just one canonical place that shows sort of where people are putting their money, where their mouth is, and what the price is that moment, it helps people get a better picture of what's likely to happen in the future and better plan for it.
Yeah, I love it. I'll just share. These are actually all three products that I have used or am using. Polymarket, I recently used. We had a local election where I live, and the data is just really slow to come in. I was tracking Polymarket to figure out what was likely to happen in the election, and it was happening over like a two-week period. Polymarket was the thing I kept going back to. For Morpho, I actually, right now, in my savings, I have cash savings, and I could put that in a traditional savings account and earn whatever, like 1%, perhaps 25 basis points, or maybe if I put it in a CD or something longer, like 3% or 4%. I have my cash sitting in a Morpho pool that's managed by another protocol, Moonwell. I think I'm earning like 8%.
It is low risk, incredibly secure, trusted, just immutable contracts. TYB, TYB, am I allowed to talk about what is coming this summer with the news?
Yes.
Yeah. TYB is this summer doing a collaboration with Crocs. Crocs is coming on board as a brand partner. Folks do not know, Crocs has, I think, one of the most avid consumer cultures around buying Crocs, customizing Crocs, the gibbets, putting them in there. I will confess, my primary shoe is a Croc.
Yep.
If I wasn't told I had to wear a suit, which I also maybe a little bit ignored, I would have worn Crocs.
You better join first person. It's all on-chain, right?
Crocs, like this summer, I'm so fired up because I'm going to get to be a part of TYB and using Crocs and participating in that. I feel like it can be a little bit hard for folks who are totally outside the space or maybe even folks who are just primarily on the speculative side of the space to see what's the real-world impact. The second you actually start digging into the products, the products that people like y'all are building, it's actually pretty real. It's happening right now. It's consumer products. It's financial products. It's news and prediction products that are having a real impact on millions and millions and millions of people's lives all around the world. I don't know.
I felt honored to get to be on stage with all of you because getting to actually use the products and then meet the people behind them is a pretty special thing. With that said, I want to—we're getting close to time, but if folks could not tell, we got maybe like kids on stage panel. That is why we are all wearing T-shirts. I wanted to just push on that a little bit. What is a spicy take for each of you? Give me one spicy take, something about the kind of trad fi or trad world that is broken that you think crypto can fix, and then something about the crypto world and culture that is broken right now that you think we need to go and fix.
I think I have one for both of those.
Okay. Okay, let's go.
That's the crypto has a girl problem. There's not many of us that are in the space. That's a problem as we think about the traditional world that's broken. A lot of women, if we don't do something about this, are going to miss out on the value creation off of the decade and beyond. That's something I take very seriously as I think about bringing millions and millions and millions of women on-chain. The other way around, need to fix. Same thing, same problem. I walked in here, respectfully, and the guy was like, "Nope, I don't think this event is for you." I was with two girls from my team. I'm like, "Yes, we're speaking.
We're speaking. The hoops we had to jump to get in just because we didn't look like the crypto or financial world or audience was a big deal. I think that if I had to crystallize, the issue and the opportunity is very real.
Yeah, and I feel like it's also there's like you have 200,000 people participating in Selena Gomez Rare Beauty on-chain.
Yes.
Like, why isn't that being talked about right now?
Oh, yeah. I know, yeah.
Like, that's one of the largest consumer use cases of crypto, period.
We've got a lot of heat on board, maybe not as much heat as this guy or this guy, but a lot, and we're coming.
Yeah, no, it's incredible and just super grateful for all the work that you're doing.
Thanks for having me.
Merlin, Shayne, either of you want to jump in?
Right. I think for the trad fi part, I will leave it. I think we've already talked a lot about it, about what's broken in that space. On the crypto space, I think I have a hot take, which is we should focus more on the infrastructure side. It's great if we focus on UX and apps, etc. The problem is, I mean, it's at the infra side that if you do it right, then you enable all the use cases on top, and you enable all the creativity and the opportunities on top. If you mess up with the infrastructure, you won't get that paradigm shift that crypto and blockchain can enable.
I think founders and builders into that space should really focus on trying to improve the infrastructure first and then getting to the millions or billions of users and letting actors like Coinbase build those consumer products that reach those billions of users.
100%. Shayne?
For crypto, it's kind of the opposite of what you said, but I think the main thing is you.
It's good.
Yeah, of all the things people build, maybe I'm biased, but I think when you build a product, the hard part is building something that people actually use, that people want to use organically, that people want to go to after they see it one time, they come back to it later. That's what it's all about when you're an entrepreneur, you're a product builder. I think that in crypto, the incentives just get skewed where it's much easier to build some infrastructure that no one will ever use and just try cash out, or it's much easier to build a protocol and just try cash out. It's sort of the incentives are aligned as such that no one really tries to build something that could actually catch on amongst people organically using it.
Over the past few years, all we ever hear is people talking about killer use case, users, and it is sort of like this cause playing that people care and no one really does. I think that I commend anyone trying to build something that actually has users or cultural impact. I think that is really important. I think that is how things get—I think that is how the space gets pushed forward. I think that is how more users come on-chain, if that is the nomenclature used here. In the traditional world, I mean, there are so many.
I guess what's close to home with Polymarket is I'm kind of excited that we're in this stage of the Overton window shifting, where it's just like a lot of these traditional institutions that were gatekeepers are really holding on to the last shred of credibility or the last strand of leverage that they have. These institutions or these gatekeepers have their credibility, the merits of their stamp of approval has just been diluted and diluted to the point of it almost being a countersignal, but at the very least being near useless. I think I'm just excited at the next generation just being a lot more not even skeptical, but just ready to go and look at alternatives and go and not take everything that they see on TV or on the internet at its word, especially as AI proliferates and becomes even more important.
Hopefully we can have the people who've been able to go and spin whatever narrative they want. There's a little bit of a new world order. I like to think that Polymarket, where it's driven by markets and not just who can spin up the best story or who can be the most charismatic, I think that's kind of one of the antidotes. I'm excited about what we do in that regard.
I love it. I appreciate the take. I'm going to share mine. I feel like I get to do that.
Come on.
First one on the trad side, and I think Shopify is a good example of this. I think at this point, there's no higher leverage investment for a trad fi company than figuring out what's their most complicated business process with money and figuring out how to write that in a smart contract. Literally, I think you could probably take things that are millions of lines of code and compress them into thousands of lines of code. It's just about figuring out the wherewithal to do that. There's going to be this massive disintermediation where the companies that realize that make the investment and go, and the companies that don't die. I think it's going to happen faster than people expect. That's on the trad fi side.
Then on the crypto side, I think if you're on crypto Twitter and I know just how many people here are, it's kind of crazy. There's some doom and gloom right now of the prices aren't up. Bitcoin's at $100,000, but putting that aside, I think that people are massively underestimating how close we are to all of this just totally hitting. I think that it's now measured in months, not years, and that we have the pieces coming together and that sometime this year, we're going to start the viral growth phase where literally it just won't stop growing until the entire world's on-chain. I think that's a combination of the infrastructure finally being ready, a new kind of wave of founders like y'all who are product-centric and really building real consumer experiences, and then just the kind of decaying of the existing systems.
That catalyst is coming together where we're about to bring the world on-chain really quickly, much quicker than people expect. Is there somebody out there? No.
Me?
Yeah.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing. Okay. Last question, kind of along that lens, what's something you're excited about right now that you're working on that you think is going to help unlock more adoption, grow the pie, bring us on-chain faster?
Yeah, of course. Our focus is on-chain community commerce. For me, that requires three main companies. I'm excited to announce that we are migrating to Base, which is, I think, of the best friends as we think about on-chain community commerce as Coinbase, Shopify, and TYB. That is right ahead of us. I think collectively, we are going to be able to bring a lot more women and the whole world on-chain.
Yeah. I'm so fired up about it. Me and Ty have been talking about doing this for what, like three?
A long while.
The whole time that Base has been existing.
Finally happening.
The whole time that Base has been existing, me and Ty have been DMing about how do we make this happen? When's the right time? Of course, it was Crocs. Ty came to me and said, "It has to be through a net." Not really, but I did learn about the Crocs campaign.
You're going to earn for your obsession now. You'll have a proof of pan. You can show that you're level three, but you got to prove it.
I'm so fired up. I'm so excited to build together. Merlin?
Right. Just four hours ago, we just announced our B2, which is an instant Base lending protocol. You will be able to just express what you want, what you want to lend, how you want to borrow. It would be fixed rate, variable rate, cross-chain, whatever. It will basically solve every problem from fintechs, institutions, DeFi protocols. We are super excited with that. We deeply think that it is at the right moment where all the fintechs of the world, Coinbase is coming on-chain. This is the moment to build those kind of use cases and letting access to every user on Earth to just simple getting a loan on-chain instantly. If it is interesting, let's chat.
Yeah. That's what I'll say is if you're doing any kind of lending, whether it's consumer lending or institutional lending, I would really encourage you to connect with Merlin. The technology that they've built, like you said, is powering the new Bitcoin back loans product in Coinbase. It's a one-tap borrow USDC against your Bitcoin. Behind the scenes, the way that actually works is it takes your Bitcoin, it wraps it into Coinbase Bitcoin, it deposits that Coinbase Bitcoin on Base into Morpho, and it borrows USDC against that. All of that is bundled into one transaction using the smart wallet.
Then you can spend those USDC to buy your coffee or yeah, just the coffee that you have here.
Wherever you want. We've built all of this infrastructure. Now the market, there's almost $1 billion of Bitcoin that is being borrowed against now. It's happened in about four months. It's growing really, really quickly. The really cool thing about it is it's a totally repeatable model where other businesses that look like Coinbase can do this, more kind of institutionally scared lenders who need access to capital can plug in here. People who are building all sorts of lending products can collaborate with Morpho. We highly recommend doing that. Shane, one thing you're excited about?
There's a lot of things I'm excited about these days in the Polymarket world. I'd say recently we announced our partnership with X, which is just really exciting. Took a lot of work. The first thing that we rolled out is just when I look at Polymarket to go get a gist of what's going on in the world, I'm always like, "Okay, the market moved, but what does that actually mean?" or, "Okay, here is this market, and this seems important, and other people think it's important, but why is it important?" We added these Grok annotations with X post, sort of like an overlay into the chart, which I think so far people have thought is awesome, and I personally always wanted. The first little bite of the cookie, and it's just something that's practically very useful.
Any other alpha leaks on what's coming next?
No alpha leaks, unfortunately. Stay tuned.
Thanks to you three for joining us. Thanks, everybody. Let's bring the world on-chain.
How's it going? Yes. Yes. Indeed. Go birds. Hi, everyone. I know I have the coolest session, so this is pretty awesome. It is great to be back in New York, home of bagels, skyscrapers, until recently our guest. Giants fans, no hard feelings, right? You shipped Saquon down I-95, and he repaid my Eagles with a Lombardi and 2,000 yards. I am a lifelong Eagles fan. I am from Philly. Max Brandsburg, who was on stage earlier, he's another Coinbase exec member. He is a lifelong Eagles fan. We're both insane Saquon fans, so we are so happy to have him here. Who in the audience is an Eagles fan? I love it. I feel like there's a little bit of bitterness from the Giants element, but that's okay. That's okay.
We were just having a discussion backstage about the rivalry between the Eagles and the Giants and the dynamics there. Anyway, since then, Saquon has graced the Madden cover and become the first Eagles offensive player, rated 99, which is huge. I do not know if any of you saw the filming of the Madden cover, but it is insane. When you see the cover, you are going to be blown away. Off the field, Saquon has gone deep into crypto, taking endorsements and investing for years. Today, we are going to unpack that crypto playbook and toss in a few football questions. Please welcome with a big mighty roar, even if you are a Giants fan, Saquon Barkley. Like many, I noticed in 2021 when you decided to take endorsement money in Bitcoin. That was a bold move.
First of all, really curious, what was the initial spark that got you into that?
Yeah, that's a great question. First, thank you guys for having me. The initial spark for me would have to start with my manager because we have a great relationship and a great partnership. As an athlete, being focused on the football field, trying to perform at a high level, but also, as we're going to talk a little bit later, financial freedom. How can I do that? New creative ways I can do that. He's a wizard. He's super smart. He's surrounded himself with great people too and kind of brought the opportunity to me. I was able to get involved with Jack Mallers and Strike. That's when it kind of was a no-brainer for me to really fully commit.
Amazing. At that time, Bitcoin had fallen from a peak of $60,000 to almost $30,000. How did you decide at that moment to invest? I was just curious, did people around you kind of say that was a dumb or crazy thing?
Yeah, I mean, people are going to say, "Those don't have something to say no matter what." That's something my mom taught me, whether it's getting involved in new things, whether it's in football. Those don't have something to say. For me, I felt like it was the right time to get involved, me and my manager, because having a conversation with Pomp and Jack, it felt like that was the perfect time to do it. I was able to get on a phone call with Michael Saylor. Back then, he told me that I should take all my money and put it in. I think he's doing pretty well. I probably should listen to him. Yeah, you have people who have their opinions, but that's what I felt like was right. I have a big thing within myself.
I never want to be the smartest person in the room. I feel like the only way you're going to grow and improve is by surrounding yourself with super smart people. I know I have super smart people around me. It was the right decision to make.
That's awesome. It seems like in your whole career and personal life, you've always bet on yourself, college, the pros, coming back with injuries, switching teams. Do you take the same approach with crypto investing? Do you have some philosophy there? If people doubt you, whether on the field or in your investing or anything else, does that push you harder? Does it actually motivate you? Or do you feel like sometimes you're like, "Oh, I could second-guess myself"?
No, I think it always goes back to the mindset of surrounding yourself with the right people, trusting in the right people. Yeah, I'm a go-getter, I guess you can say. I don't think I would be in the position I am today, especially in my profession when it comes to football, if I didn't have that mindset of not caring what people say, always try to break the norm, always try to do creative things. I think that's how my style of play is too. Yeah, I think it goes hand in hand with me and knowing how I am on the football field and how I am as a competitor and always want to be doing the right things and getting wins and surrounding myself with the right people has been kind of the smartest play.
You know, it reminds me your first week and second week at the Eagles, you had three touchdowns the first week, and then the second week was a little rougher, and Eagles fans were a little rough on you. How do you navigate that? Is there something you kind of do to just dig down deep and just push through the noise?
Yeah, it kind of motivates you, right? You always got to have your why. For me, my why is many things and my family, but my love for the game, but most importantly, just being a competitor and wanting to be the best. That happens. You're going to have your moments when you're at an all-time high. You have the game in your life. You won the Super Bowl. The majority of those moments, you're going to have bad plays. You're going to have plays that you wish you could have back. You just got to keep going. You got to strive and make sure you know why you're doing it. When your purpose and your why is bigger than what other people have to say, it doesn't really matter.
Yeah. That's great. Recently, the NCAA started allowing players in college to monetize their name, likeness, and image through NIL deals. I think this is probably very good as it allows players to build and monetize their brands earlier. I'm sure it can also be overwhelming for young athletes coming into this type of money so young. If a younger Saquon Barkley was playing at Penn State and about to be drafted today, what advice would you have for him about investing? How would you see crypto fitting into that?
I think when you look at it from the crypto side, you always try to find financial freedom. I feel like that's the best way to do it. The things I'll have to say to myself, and I kind of go back and forth with this and with college teammates or guys in the league. We have these conversations. You see all these younger guys and younger women making all this money. It's sad, though, to say financial literacy is not there for a lot of us. I'm honest enough to admit that was the case for me too. I got really lucky. I've been able to surround myself with some really, really smart people and great people too. That's not the case for a lot of guys. You hear a lot of horror stories of guys that just got into NFL.
Now, when this started, when these guys are going to pay you at 17, 16 years old in high school. The best advice that I would give is just educate yourself. Try to educate yourself as best as you can. For our profession, the majority of us are Black men, and we do not come from much. We are not having those conversations with our parents. Some guys, their only way out, they believe, is play football or rap or play basketball. When you get all this money, it is kind of like, "Whoa, okay, now what?" A lot of us are not ready for that moment. I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I was not 100% ready for that moment, but I was able to find really, really smart people and people that I can trust.
That would probably be my best advice that I would give to myself and to all the young guys now and younger women now is surround yourself with the right people and just educate yourself as much as you can.
Do you find that these younger players are asking you for tips?
No, not really, to be honest. I got to take that on my own and as a leader in the NFL and as an older guy. I talk about it all the time with my team and my boys. I got to stop talking about it and actually do it. I got to create some seminar. I got to create something where the NFL actually does that. When you are considered a top 30 player, your junior year or your sophomore year, they bring you into Indianapolis. All the horror stories that come up are like, "These people are going to steal your money," or, "Don't trust this woman," or, "You got all these older guys that's coming." They are not telling you that, "No, your money can make money.
You can get involved in cool, unique things that you're passionate about, and you can create that financial freedom. Maybe just create a seminar or create a space where I'm able to continue to educate myself because I still need to get educated on it, but also educate these young men and women and maybe grab some of you guys here and be able to show them what it takes to really do it at the highest level.
Yeah. I think that's really interesting. I mean, I think the whole roots of crypto are oriented around economic freedom and taking control of your own economic future. Yet, it's a scary ride because with volatility, it can kind of feel like you don't exactly know what you're doing. If you look at Bitcoin over a long period of time, everybody's done great. If you look over a short burst, it looks super volatile. It's an interesting thing. On that note, every NFL player notoriously has their welcome-to-NFL moment where you transition from college to the pros, and someone hits you, and you've said, "Oh my gosh, this is different. This feels very different to be in the pros." Every new crypto investor has their welcome-to-crypto moment where the markets swing, and you experience that volatility.
How do you react in those moments, whether it's with crypto or something else or in your life where there's something that's super volatile and you're trying to kind of navigate through it and make decisions but not overreact to the situation?
Yeah, on the crypto side, I remember kind of like my first time when you had the dip or it went down, and I'm like, "Whoa, what is going on?
What did I do here?
You see everyone on social media, they're like, "Buy the dip, buy the dip." I'm just learning. As I said, I'm educating myself going through this. I'm talking to my manager, and I'm like, "What is going on?" For him to be able to calm me down and get me to understand the long run, the long run. It's kind of like anything in life. You can't get too caught up into the highs. You can't get too caught up into the lows. Kind of like an example that you used week one being a Philadelphia Eagle, it was, "Thank you, John. He's the best. He's going to do this for us." The next week, I dropped the ball, and they're like, "Go back to New York." It just doesn't work like that.
That's true.
You have your moments. I think when you really buy into it and you really believe into it, you do not really get caught up in it. You know for the long run it is going to work out, and you just got to have faith.
Are you on Twitter? Do you like to catch up on what people are saying about crypto and tech? Or where do you like to learn?
I would say I was way before. In football season, I tried to stay off a little bit for good reasons and bad reasons. When you're playing well, it's an amazing place to be on. Don't get me wrong. I know how quick it could turn. The Pomps, Anthem, Anthem is a really good friend of mine. I think his tweets are hilarious. I think he does a really good job of educating people. To be able to meet him and also him being a big Philadelphia Eagle fan, I got to meet him before I played in Philly. The first time I actually met him, I was a Giant, and that was my last time playing in MetLife and we beat the Eagles. That's a fun little story that we have.
Yeah, Pomps and Anthem are probably the two biggest ones I go to.
That's awesome. You have a pretty viral clip of you and Coach Sirianni on the sidelines when you had a chance to break your single-season rushing record. But you chose to sit out, and you let the other players get some yards in. I think the quote was, "Let the young guys eat." In this situation, I'm not sure many other running backs would have done the same thing. It appeared to the world like you had a very compassionate leadership style. Yeah, it's worth a clap. It's a really nice thing to do. It definitely wasn't for the cameras. It was like in the middle of the game, and you're just like, "Let them go do it." My take was you're a very compassionate leader. I'm curious, how would you describe your leadership style? How did you think about something like that?
You're like, "Oh, I can literally have the record, or these guys can go out there and start building their own record.
Yeah, I think that's a story that's been talked a lot about in the past months and over the past year. I feel like I'm getting a little too much credit for that, to be completely honest. When you understand the dynamic of the business that I'm part of, and the NFL is a sport that we've all played since we were little kids, but it's a business. For me, in that moment, yes, there was an opportunity there to stick it to the Giants and have my personal record. Yes, but that's not why I play the game. I play the game because I want to be great. It's a game that's fun to me. I know you guys see me on Sunday carrying the ball 30 times and playing at a high level. It's hard.
They say every hit in the NFL is like a car crash. I play probably the most brutal position. That Wednesday or that Thursday where I may have to rest, who do you think's taking the reps from me? That's the bad guys, or in that case, the young guys. Let the young guys eat. That's Kenny, and that's Will. Will's a rookie who I'm high on, and he needs some time. He needs some game film. Kenny, in his last year, he's going to be a free agent. He needs to put film on for opportunity for him to create more money for his family. We had a meeting with Peyton Manning, and he said that the best teams that he's been a part of, your leaders and your best players, it's never about them. It's by everyone else.
In that moment, I was able to get captured. It was like that throughout the whole team. We have all these stars and all these all-pros and pro bowlers, but we all just have one common goal. That one common goal is to win. I think that's why you see why we're such a successful team. My leadership role is just, or the way I like to lead, is by my work ethic and just being a passionate person and a loving person. Whether it's your lineman or your defensive lineman, your running back, your quarterback, just try to sit down and talk to everyone and get to know everyone because all that stuff matters when we all have one common goal, and that's winning a Super Bowl.
That's awesome. I think you do deserve the credit for that. That's amazing. You've been talking a lot about freedom. Coinbase's mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. Economic freedom means different things to different people. What does it mean to you personally?
Yeah. I think you mentioned it. It's going to mean something different for everyone else. For me, it's time. It's just your time. You're not going to be able to—I know we forget about that. We're all on a clock that's running out. Just trying to be able to do whatever I want to do with my resources and enjoy my time with my family and my friends and my loved ones, that's what it means to me.
Totally. One thing that's well-known about you is what a great dad you are. Raise your hand if you saw that or heard that amazing clip from his daughter, Jada. Did you hear this before the Super Bowl where she—I have listened to it like 100 times, I was telling him, and it made me cry every time just because I think it speaks to what a great dad he is in terms of just the way that he has raised his kids. You talked about, "I'm going to make sure my daughter never has any worries in life." Oh, sorry.
I'm going to make sure she never has any worries in life, but I'm also going to show her that you have to work for everything in life." This kind of reminded me of Coinbase is obsessed with this idea of grit because we found that the best people in life in our company, the ones who are the most successful, have this enduring grit. Like you said, there's always this balance of wanting to give your children everything that you didn't have and then also wanting to groom that grit and work ethic that you've built for yourself. How do you balance and navigate that?
Yeah. That's a great question. I think if anyone's a parent, you kind of ask yourself that every day. For my position, and not having much growing up and now doing pretty well for myself, it's like, how do you inspire your kids to have the passion to do what they want to do? I think it stems from the same message my parents gave to me. It's just pouring belief into me, pouring confidence into me. That's what my parents did to me. Kind of like I hope when people watch me play football, you can see it. I feel like there's nothing I can't do on the football field. I feel like there's nothing I can't do in this world.
When you're a little kid and you hear your parents say, "You can do whatever you want as long as you put your mind to it," you're just like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah." It is instilled into you. I feel like that's the way I do it. It's like just letting my kids know that, obviously, the way we're growing up is a little different than what I did, how I grew up. The mentality always has to be the same. I feel like if you look at anybody who's super successful, whether they come from a lot or they do not come from a lot, it's just that creative mindset and that passion to not be denied is going to take you where you need to go in life. That's just a challenge that me and my fiancée have.
I think we've been doing a really great job with that, especially my fiancée, being a stay-at-home mom. I'm traveling or coming here doing this, or I wake up at 7:00 in the morning, and I come back home at 7:00, 8:00 at night. She has a big responsibility. I think she's been killing it also.
You also talked in the green room about having a very athletic family. Do you think watching others in your family inspired you and helped you realize how hard you would have to work despite having belief in your own abilities?
Yeah. I would definitely say that. I would just say just watching my parents go to work, watching my parents make the sacrifice for me and my siblings just pushed me in the direction I wanted to go. I think kind of everyone has their niche. For me, it was football. For my nephew, it's football. For my daughter, it's more like the Bible and arts. She likes stuff like that. Even though I think she could be an Olympic gold runner, I will try to push her that way. She loves watching Alexander Hamilton and dancing. My son, he's running around, jumping, trying to jump backwards over fellows. He might fall in love with football. We all have our own thing. You just got to find something that you're passionate about and that you love, and you just got to go attack it.
Love that. Where do you think crypto could be when they're your age? Do you think that your children are going to have their investment accounts all in crypto? Have you ever thought about what they might be doing?
That's a good question. I never thought about it that way, to be honest. I don't even know where it's going to be by time, right?
It's all changing.
It's all good things, though. I would say, yeah, I don't really have a great answer for that one. Possibilities are endless there, to be honest.
It's interesting to watch a lot of Generation Z just transact their whole lives in crypto. It will be interesting to see how the trend carries. I do know you have friends in the audience. As we said, you've been in crypto for quite a long time. What draws you to the community? What energizes you? What do you find surprising or motivating about the crypto or the tech community that is potentially different from sports?
Yeah. It's different, but it's the same too, especially when you see the followers of this space, this world. We were talking about it back there. It's kind of like the Eagles fans. They're super passionate. They're not scared to let their feelings be known, their opinions to be known. They got your back. I remember when I announced that I was getting involved, I got a lot of love and support. Another thing I find similar is to be able to meet a lot of these successful people, that success is the same in any profession, what it takes to be successful. You got someone who's super talented, surrounding themselves with a great team, and able to do what they want to accomplish. I would say that's probably the similarities that I've seen since I've been getting involved with it.
That's awesome. You are an amazing startup investor too, and you've invested in some of the biggest disruptors, including Ramp and Anduril. Was there something that caught your eye with those? Is there a space that you like outside or inside of crypto that you've been interested in, in tech that you like? What is it about that you like about these companies that gets you excited? I've seen the pictures with you and Palmer. Fun.
Yeah. The thing that gets me excited, especially with Ramp and Anduril, it's getting to know the team and getting to know the guys. Whether it's Palmer, whether it's Trey, whether it's Matt on the Anduril side, or whether it's Eric and Kareem on the Ramp side, they are amazing people and super talented. When you actually get to know them and spend time with them, like I said, success is not an accident in any form or way you look at it. There's a reason why. The way that they run things, the way that they handle things, the culture that they're building. Now that I'm allowing myself to be involved with that, it's been super special to me.
Just continue to try to get myself involved with tech companies, with the tech side, and just continue to surround myself with the right people. Like I keep mentioning, I have an amazing manager. We're both big Peter Thiel fans and just kind of trying to follow his philosophy of finding things that are new and that's never been done before. It has been fun. It has been a fun ride. Interesting too because the whole time I'm putting myself in these rooms and having conversations with these people, and I'm just learning. I'm just trying to educate myself as best as I can. It has been super fun.
Founders are fun. Why do you think crypto resonates so well with athletes?
Financial freedom. I think when you look back in it, back in the day, a lot of these athletes, especially in the NFL, the money that we're making now, the contract sizes that we're making compared to what they were making, it's not even close. A lot of guys, sadly, go broke. I forgot the percentage of NFL athletes that go broke. It's pretty high. It's too high. Now, with having all the technology that we have and all the social media that we have, everyone's trying to find new ways and creative ways to create that financial freedom. This space is a space that continues to keep coming up. I think that's probably the reason why a lot of athletes have been trying to get involved into it.
You were saying years ago, Michael Saylor told you to put 100% of your net worth into Bitcoin. What would you say to a young athlete if they asked you?
I could never tell anyone to put 100% of their money into anything. Even though I am passionate and I think he's doing really well for himself, I probably should have. The thing I would say is just continue to educate yourself on it. That's the best advice I can have. I wouldn't say a set number or a set amount. You got to feel comfortable with it. For me, the reason why I've been able to get involved as much as I've been able to is because I've tried my best to educate myself, and I'm surrounding myself with the right people. Just continue with the mindset of never trying to be the smartest person in the room. I think that that'll take you a long way.
Cool. Let's end with rapid fire. Who is on your Mount Rushmore of running back?
Dang. All right. Barry's first. Walter. You guys know who that is, right, those two guys? Oh, really? I really enjoy that. Barry, Walter, AP, Jim Brown. Now, I do not necessarily think those are the best four. Barry's the best, but my four favorites.
You liked watching them.
Yeah. I would say those four. If I could add another one, it'd be like Marshawn Lynch.
Who squats more? You or Jalen Hurts?
I get asked this question a lot. Jalen, that's my guy. I think he would sit here and say, if he squatted more than me, we'd probably have a problem just because he plays quarterback and I play running back. Yeah, it's more power to him because he's a quarterback and he's super strong. It's not comfortable.
One piece of money advice you'd give your younger self?
A lot. Continue to surround yourself with smart people. Because when you surround yourself with smart people, sometimes there's some not smart people that get involved and probably not listen to that person. I'll be respectful here. Yeah.
Did you run the backwards hurdle in a practice, or did that come naturally?
I don't think you can practice that. I would joke around with it. It's kind of like similar, like I said, just being creative, trying to come up with new ways and new things. I let my body go, let my God-given ability take over, and got lucky and was able to create a pretty cool moment.
Cool. First major thing you bought with an NFL paycheck?
This is my biggest flex. It was before I got paid in the NFL. Shout out to, again, my manager and CAA of getting me a lot of money before I got signed. I was able to buy my parents a house. That was probably my biggest flex, for sure.
Go to hype song before a game if you have one.
I don't know if this crowd is going to be familiar with it. Broadway is a really famous artist. Probably not so much right now. He got in trouble. But Broadway 25. Great song. If you guys want to listen to it.
What historically great defensive player do you wish you could have gone up against?
Brian Dawkins.
Yeah. You're like.
Actually, I was golfing right with him. I was like, "Me and you in the hole 10 times." He was like, first question he asked, "How much space?" We were like this. He was like, "Well, I'll give you three or four." I was like, "Dang, three or four?" I was hoping I'd get five, but it's Brian Dawkins. I give him the benefit of doubt. Especially being an Eagle player now, definitely Brian Dawkins.
That's awesome. If you could play any other sport, what would you play?
If God could bless me with the talent he blessed me with football, it would be golf. It's a no-brainer. I'm a little frustrated. I played today. I have a goal to break 80. I got close. I'm in my dip phase right now, let's say that, in my golf game. We'll figure that out.
You got to persist. What's your favorite cheat meal?
We're talking about this. I don't think it's a cheat meal. I think a cheat meal is anything that you eat, your body doesn't really like it. You know, say if you have McDonald's and you wake up the next day, you're like, why did I eat that McDonald's? Chick-fil-A, I guess it's fast food. But for me, the nuggets and fries.
Feels good.
Yeah, it just feels good.
You do a lot of interviews. Is there a question that you haven't been asked that you wish you were asked?
Okay. Do I have to answer my question too?
Yeah. Do it. Yeah. Do it both. Let's put the work on you.
All right. I was talking about this the other day. I do not know if this, I am probably just going to talk in circles here, but I get credited a lot for, okay, the backwards hurdle, which, do not get me wrong, is unbelievable. I know God has blessed me. I feel like people fail to realize how competitive and how much work I put into my craft. I think a lot of people just think it is just like, and I get it, that, "Oh, that guy is just super talented." I kind of, like, I do not know. I see it as disrespect to me because it is not giving any credit to the work that I put in. I think if you ask anybody that knows me, they see the squat 600 pounds of me lifting 405 pounds on a clean.
There is a lot of work that went into that. People think I just roll out the bed and it happens. There are guys like that in the NFL, do not get me wrong. I do not believe that is the case for me. I think it is a blend of the mentality I have, the passion I have, the work ethic I have, and the good Lord took a little time with me too. I am aware of that. That would probably be my question and answer at the same time.
Yeah. This reminds me a lot of like Tom Brady says this. He's like, "Talent only gets you so far. It's the work ethic and the hard work that takes you to the next level." Final question. Any plans for Father's Day?
Oh, I lied. Remember I said I wanted to go golf?
Yeah.
Sorry. Backstage, I said I wanted to go golf. My sister graduated. My sister graduated from West Virginia. It's going to have a graduation party. Yeah, Sunday. I will be in Pennsylvania if any of you guys are around.
Amazing. Yeah. We'll all join the graduation party. Saquon Barkley, you are such an inspiration to us all. Thank you so much for taking this time.
Thank you for having me.
It's an honor.
Okay. I mean, Saquon made me an Eagle fan. That's the nicest guy I've ever met in my life. Okay. We are really close, everyone. I mean, the only thing separating you from the cocktail hour is my boss and the world's largest asset manager. Okay. We are ready. We are going to hear this out. We are going to close this out today. We are going to hear from Brett Tejpaul, Head of Institutional at Coinbase, and Rob Goldstein, the Chief Operating Officer of BlackRock, to discuss how crypto is changing financial markets. Everyone, please welcome Brett and Rob.
All right, Rob. I'm absolutely delighted to be here with you. I want to start by thanking you for your partnership. BlackRock has been just incredible for this industry. It's been incredible for Coinbase. I have completely appreciated the integration to Aladdin.
We admire the scale you've achieved with your ETFs, your tokenized money market fund, and we all owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. Is that enough flattery to sort of get you warmed up to say nice things?
Not really. Not really.
All right. Brett, let me start out by saying thank you, guys. I think you've been incredible. You, Coinbase, you personally have been incredibly helpful on our journey. I know we've sort of kicked you guys in the shins a fair bit in terms of making sure that you were of the standard that at least we required relative to the traditional financial ecosystem. I think you've done an incredible job with that.
Thank you for the compliment. It is actually the investor day at BlackRock today. We are really fortunate to get Rob to zip from over there to over here. Since you are prepped on all questions, we are going to start at a high level. It has been kind of a crazy world for markets. Just as leader of the largest asset manager in the world, tell me, what are some of the things that keep you up at night? What are you worried about? What are you excited about? Talk to me about the markets.
Sure. Let me start out by saying I am a bit disappointed that you did not ask me what I did with my first paycheck from the NFL. I think that would have been a very natural segue. That is just one guy's opinion. If you want to skip over those kinds of questions, I think that when you look at the world today, it really is remarkable as to how much the world has changed over the past few years. If you play the Rip Van Winkle game for a second, just rewind back to January 1, 2020. If I would have told you, "Okay, let me explain what happens in the world for the next five years." You basically have this global pandemic where we have to shut down the world simultaneously. You cannot really leave your house anywhere in the world.
We're going to try this thing called remote working, see if it works. That is one thing. We're going to have a ground war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine. In addition to that, we're going to have North Korean troops as part of that. We're going to have this new technology that could save humanity or threaten humanity. We're going to have this popularism where politics is going to get more and more extreme. I could just keep on going. If you look and I would have asked you, "Okay, five years later, what do the markets look like?" There is no permutation, I think, where you would recognize how resilient the financial ecosystem has been, how resilient the real economy has been, just how robust the past few years have been. I think there's a lot to be positive about.
I think we are more constructive on the world and the markets, notwithstanding everything that's happening. At the same time, it's very important to realize that the world has just fundamentally changed. If you look at the past few years, the world has fundamentally changed in terms of technology, the rewiring of the global order. One of the key drivers for the past several decades in the world has really been the integration of China into the global markets. That's obviously changing in this polarized world. Just politics and popularism is changing quite dramatically. The rate environment, deficits, all of this is changing at the same time that you have these incredible demographic forces.
I think when you look at all of it, the truth is the resilience of the real economy, particularly in the U.S., things are still growing and there's a lot of opportunity to make money. What is clear, and I think this is going to touch a little bit on some of the discussions about why is BlackRock as an asset manager here at the Coinbase conference, what are we doing? I think it's also clear that building portfolios and building portfolios to achieve specific outcomes is getting progressively harder. Building portfolios that have tools in them that really enable diversification is also getting progressively harder. We are constructive. I think it really is miraculous how resilient the financial ecosystem has been.
I think there's a lot to be positive about in terms of the markets, notwithstanding how easy it is to get into this negative feedback loop of the media.
Interesting. I'm going to tell a personal story because you triggered me as we were going through the memories of COVID. Five years ago, I joined Coinbase and I was talking to Brian and Emily. We were trying to do some goal setting on what it would mean to build an institutional business. The first thing that Emily said to me was, "I want you to get BlackRock invested in the space." That was at a time where Coinbase was essentially still entirely a retail app. You and I have talked for quite some time. To embarrass you for a second, I did make a quick outgoing phone call.
I don't know if you remember what you said, but you said, "Brett, I understand why it'd be really great for your business to have us as a client, but think a little bit more about the value proposition for BlackRock to get into this space.
Oh, that's much more polite than I would have guessed. That's good. Very professional.
There was like a, "Duh." I'm like, "Did he just hang up?" It has, though, to your point on resilience of the financial system, resilience of your own view of the world, your comments on technology. The past two years has been crazy within the context of crypto. Any reflections on sort of the thoughts you had when you embarked on this mission, what you've learned in the past two years, and where you ended up?
Absolutely. I mean, I actually believe it's a really interesting case study. I think it's a really interesting case study in several regards. To give you a sense of the journey that BlackRock has been on here, we had put a team together. I think it was in 2016 or 2017. We drove the team nuts because we had them do analysis after analysis after analysis with a conscious strategy of not wanting to do anything. That was our conscious choice. It was not that we would have all these people come to us and tell us what idiots we were because we're not doing this, and we're not doing this, and we're not doing this. I felt reassured because we had spoken about doing those things, and we actually chose not to. We actually chose not to.
We thought there would be a point where it made sense to start. We took a very different perspective than what we normally do as a company because there is so much energy and buzz about this topic, it needed to be managed a little bit differently. We had a strategy. Maybe three years ago, four years ago, we finally reached the point where we said, "Okay, now is the time." Normally, when we have a strategy, we try very hard not to share it with the world. Normally, that is a good thing. You do not want everyone to know what you are doing.
In this case, we decided because there was so much buzz of people telling us what we should be doing and people telling the media that they told us what we should be doing, therefore there was an assumption that we were doing it, we decided to take a completely different approach. We actually sent a memo to the whole firm with, "This is our strategy." We've been maniacally focused on these four components that define our strategy. That's really been the past two, three years. The first part, quite simply, was this concept of ecosystems and networks. Our Aladdin platform is one of the primary networks with regard to traditional finance.
We felt, and we continue to believe, that the core role that BlackRock should play in terms of value proposition is how do we be a bridge between traditional finance and this alternate universe, this digital asset ecosystem that had emerged. We basically said, "Okay, how do we find a partner that is the closest thing to the Aladdin of this digital assets ecosystem?" That really led to our relationship with Coinbase. How do we bring together Aladdin and Coinbase in a way that would enable, and we just had our investor day, as you mentioned. If there was a word cloud, the words "whole portfolio" would be quite prevalent on the word cloud. How do we enable this whole portfolio for our clients that is public markets, private markets, and digital assets and crypto? How do we enable all of those together?
That was the first component of the strategy, was this network component. The second component was we saw just incredible utility, and we believe it's still quite early innings. We saw incredible utility with regard to stablecoins. We saw not only incredible utility, but we saw a real requirement for the underlying assets to be managed, not sort of like a money market fund, but in a money market fund. We are one of the largest managers of money market assets in the world. That led to our relationship with Circle, where we're the underlying reserve manager for USDC. That was the second part of the strategy. The third part of the strategy was about access. This is where we were ready to go, but we sort of had to wait for the starting gun to begin.
That was the beginning of IBIT, our Bitcoin exchange-traded product that Coinbase is very involved with as a service provider, as the custodian, as a variety of different functions there. When you look at IBIT, I think it is one of the most fascinating things because what did we do? We enabled, through the boring old capital markets, that hundreds of people had come to visit us and told us we are going to be going the way of a dinosaur in a few years. We enabled, through those boring old capital markets, people to have institutional quality, to have BlackRock quality, Bitcoin exposure. That became the fastest exchange-traded fund to hit $30 billion, $40 billion, $50 billion, $60 billion, and last week, $70 billion.
72 billion.
$72 billion in assets. I was going to say, but who's counting? I guess he's counting more than we're counting. $72 billion in assets. I think that proved how many people wanted these exposures, but actually wanted them within their boring old whole portfolio of the capital markets. That was that bridge strategy in terms of enabling that crossover between the two. Personally, I believe that's still just getting started. An interesting fact about IBIT that I think is quite remarkable is that of the 25 largest ETFs in the world, the youngest one, aside from IBIT, is 12 years old. IBIT is 18 months old. I think that's a great demonstration to this ecosystem. I also think it's a great demonstration, to be candid, just everything in the world is happening faster. Everything is happening faster.
The last component of the strategy is about tokenization. We really look at tokenization as a technology. It is very interesting at investor day that we had afterwards during lunch, a lot of people were so energized about our BUIDL, tokenized liquidity fund that we have. BUIDL is technically the largest tokenized fund that exists. It is only $3 billion. This game has not even started yet. We see a world where tokenized funds are going to be maybe not the default, but they are going to be a much more common option.
And why?
It's very simple. As the COO of BlackRock, I've easily had 100 people come in and pitch me on they have an idea to tokenize every stock and bond and how great that's going to be. Then when they leave, I go back to my day job. I look at my to-do list. My to-do list is almost infinite. Nowhere on my to-do list is like we have a problem with stocks and bonds. That isn't our problem. The marginal cost of another stock or bond trade at BlackRock is zero. The frictions that still exist are much more oriented towards funds. There's a legacy ecosystem that's been built over the past several decades that just has a lot of cost in it. It's slow. It doesn't scale that well. I think that's a natural place for innovation and disruption just through technology.
Tokenization, at the end of the day, is just a new technology within the wrapper that could enable better, faster, cheaper. The other component, which is why we're so excited about BUIDL, and we believe it's just extremely early days, it is shocking how much friction still exists with just cash.
That's unbelievable.
It's unbelievable. The ability to just make that also be better, faster, cheaper, I think we all know there's a lot of opportunity there. It just requires a new way of looking at the same old problem.
I'm so pleased that you've carried the entire interview by yourself and you chose to open up and talk about this. I've been dying to talk about it for years. I want to make a couple of reflections about some of what Rob said. When you talk about bringing institutional capital into the world, it's not a trade. You didn't do IBIT to raise a few billion dollars on a $10 trillion asset manager. The thesis needs to extend well beyond just a single point in time. I'm glad you actually articulated your three-pronged strategy, which wound up achieving its first unbelievable outcome. That's an important thing.
It also maybe helps the room understand a little bit what it means to go through the diligence process and thought process around what a partnership means to bring assets to scale, what Rob would consider the minimum standard of quality and safety to launch a series of products.
Brent, let me spend a minute on that because I think that maybe it may almost be more flattering to come from my mouth than yours, which is we approached it as we started our relationship with you with regard to IBIT in particular. We approached it quite simple, which is there is a standard that we apply to all service providers at BlackRock. Why should that standard be any different for this alternate universe? It was that simple. There are a bunch of technical things that need to be different. At the most basic level, that was if we are going to put our brand on something, it should be no different. That is the partnership that we are very appreciative of.
Thank you. I appreciate that tremendously. In this room, I've been trying to get everyone excited, and I want the next wave of institutional capital to enter the space. We've seen this big change to regulation that hasn't been talked about enough, but it's created another wave of enthusiasm. There are all these large financial institutions that are looking at BlackRock, and they're saying, "Wait, what? It's the largest asset manager in the world. It's the most successful ETF. They're involved in tokenized money market funds." The COO was talking about tokenization of funds broadly. What advice would you give to sort of the rest of the financial universe that are thinking about getting into this space now?
It's a great question. I think from our lens, what I'm going to say is going to be very simple. Executing it is extremely hard. I recognize that. To us, it's very basic. You basically have a new set of exposures. The real utility in Unlock is to be able to put them in the whole portfolio. Interestingly enough, I think you could turn the telescope around also and say, ultimately, how do you put these capital markets exposures in digital wallets? How do you go?
If you think about the bridge strategy of this alternate digital asset universe and bringing it to the capital markets, I think it's naive to assume, and this doesn't have to be in a month, but if you look out over time, it's naive to assume that you don't also have to think through how do you bring the traditional capital markets to this alternative universe. I think both connection points will define the next decade.
I couldn't agree more. The best example of it, by the way, was the ETF. We got all thrown a curveball in the last minute. There were no in-kind creates. We were forced to try and figure out how to make old world meet new world, right? Hopefully in the next version thereof, we're going to have more of a synthesis of those two things. Yeah, you're spot on. I agree with that. Any last thoughts you want to leave with us in terms of what may be next or what's to come?
The only thing I would say, two things. One, we're very excited. I think that everyone has learned something through the ETP experience with regard to Bitcoin. What the key learning, in my opinion, is, is how much opportunity there is to build those bridges. That is sort of point one. Point two, from our lens, this set of activities, this game is extremely early innings. It is extremely, extremely, extremely early innings. There's so much more opportunity here. It's barely started yet.
Okay. I want to end where I started, which is a thank you for your leadership. I did not forget that you bravely went out and tried to do the ETFs with a backdrop that still was not all that crypto-friendly, which was a spark and a catalyst that kept this industry moving forward. We will not forget that. Thank you very much, Rob. Appreciate you taking the time. Thank you all.
Great.
Thank you guys.
Okay, now we're not done yet. We're not done yet. We're really, really close because it doesn't exist if you can't post it. We've got kind of a sizzle reel of today's events. Let's take a look. I am thrilled to be emceeing the third annual State of Crypto. That's kind of the nature of entrepreneurship. You have to have a contrarian idea that's right and be willing to get 99 no's for every one yes. Okay, let's keep the energy going online and on-chain. Share your experience by tagging @Coinbase mentioning State of Crypto. You're going to receive an email following today. Please complete the survey. Give your honest feedback. Food was great. MC was awful. Whatever you want to say. The day's not over. We're going to see you at the Cocktail Reception in the North Concourse and on the Terrace, our on-chain charity station.
Please, please, please, if you can, donate. Hugo, St. Jude, you cannot do better. If you do not want to donate yourself, we should have a swag station where you get free stuff as well. Whatever you are into, go to one of them. We have great, great swag with the F1 Aston Martin connection and the limited edition F1 Lego. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, we have a big surprise waiting for you outside relating to our F1 partnership. Thank you, and we hope to see you next year.