Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says Layer-2 Solutions Will Drive Many Use Cases in Crypto Economy

The CEO of US-based crypto exchange Coinbase is optimistic that layer-2 scaling solutions will transform the crypto economy.

Speaking at Coinbase’s first-quarter earnings call, Brian Armstrong says he sees layer-2 scaling solutions facilitating the explosion of crypto use cases with lower fees and faster transaction times.

“As a reminder, layer 2 solutions help blockchains scale, similar to when the Internet moved from dial-up to broadband. And we believe this scaling will drive many new use cases in the crypto economy.”

The CEO goes on to put the spotlight on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 designed to onboard billions of users into web3.

“Base has helped dramatically reduce transaction fees and confirmation times, getting us closer to our goal of having the average crypto transaction take less than one second and cost less than $0.01 anywhere in the world.

Developer activity on Base increased eightfold in Q1. In the last 30 days, Base has processed over 2x as many transactions as the entire Ethereum network on layer 1. 

We’ve made Base faster and cheaper to use with fee reduction by about 80% through protocol upgrades, and our fees are now often below $0.01.”

As for Bitcoin (BTC), Armstrong says the spot market exchange-traded funds have helped re-energize the entire crypto market.

“I think the ETFs got a lot of attention. But what we’re seeing is that when there’s attention on crypto in general, I think it creates energy and interest across all kinds of products in the industry.”

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