Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says he believes Bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is now more trustworthy than the US dollar.
In a new interview on the Invest Like the Best podcast, Armstrong says the concerns about the future of the world’s reserve currency are mounting, especially in light of increasing economic stimulus and quantitative easing amid the Covid-induced financial crisis.
“The short-term effect of that has been deflationary… But if they keep stimulating and printing that much money, the long-term effect could be that there is actually more and more inflation…
There’s a lot of people out there who are starting to get this uneasy feeling: ‘What is going on with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and does this really make sense?’. It seems too good to be true. You just have to print all this money, and then somehow all is going to be okay. I think they are looking for an alternative system that they can trust and in cryptocurrency, there’s nobody who has their fingers on the dial…
There’s only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin. Nobody can really go and change that, and that so far stood the test of time. The US dollar, they have a feeling that they do not have the same level of trust.”
Armstrong also expands on the history of Coinbase and says initially, he thought altcoins might be a fad.
“A lot of our customers are coming to us and saying ‘Hey we want to trade other assets.’ I hoped that it would go away for a while… but it became clear to a certain point that we could probably fail as a company if we do not provide customers what they want. They’re just gonna go elsewhere.”
Coinbase currently supports around 30 digital assets for trading. Armstrong says the exchange will continue to add more to keep up with their customers’ growing interest in other cryptocurrencies. The company is currently considering whether to add support for 19 additional crypto assets.
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