Here’s What Crypto Will Look Like in 2030, According to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is giving his predictions for the state of crypto in 2030, forecasting “substantial progress” in a number of areas.

In a new interview with Bankless, the head of the top US cryptocurrency exchange says that along with significant technological advancement, he expects there will be one billion users of digital currencies around the world by the end of the decade.

“2030. I think we’ll have made substantial progress by then in a number of dimensions. I think blockchains will be more scalable. I think a lot of the usability will be there. You just send it to someone’s DNS [domain name system] name or whatever standard takes off. Payments will arrive instantly for less than a penny anywhere in the world. Those sort of just basic things.”

Armstrong says he believes by 2030 central bank digital currency (CBDC) will become more prevalent and he hopes existing stablecoins will act as the CBDC in the United States.

“I think we’ll see more central bank digital currencies. I hope that the US essentially grandfathers in these stablecoins that have followed the rules and just are backed with dollar in the US and they become the de facto CBDC of the US.”

Other predictions from Armstrong include that other countries will follow El Salvador and make crypto a legal tender.

“I think we’ll see more countries around the world adopt crypto. So kind of like what we did with El Salvador. And I think we’ll see, actually, probably by 2030, I don’t know what my prediction is, but at least a handful of other ones, if not maybe some even medium-sized ones, may even start to adopt crypto as a legal form of tender.”

He also believes that by 2030 crypto tech startups will launch with the assumption crypto will lay some role in their core function.

“We used to call them dot-com startups. But now you just call it a startup. Every startup uses the internet. I think by 2030 there’s not going to be a crypto startup. It’s just every startup will use crypto in some way, shape or form, whether it’s to raise money or collect payments from their customers or build their community or whatever.”

Lastly, Armstrong predicts wider adoption of crypto and innovation of applications in the Web3 space.

“I hope by 2030 we have a billion people in the world accessing an open financial system every day through products like Coinbase and others around the world…

And we’ll probably see a whole other category of applications that get built that are in this new decentralized way on Web3. That would be a lot to get done by 2030. But I think it’s definitely possible.”

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