Brian Armstrong Says Coinbase Aiming To Become People’s ‘Primary Financial Account’ of the Future

The chief executive of Coinbase says that he wants the top US crypto exchange platform to eventually become their customers’ go-to financial account.

In a new interview on CNBC Television, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says that his company plans to roll out new features that could compel customers to use the platform as their main financial account over their bank account.

“In the banking world, they do something called fractional reserve and it has its own regulatory requirements for that. We’re not intending to become a bank, but we are intending to become people’s primary financial accounts.

And so, the digitization of money and having mobile money on your phone – your phone is your bank account in the future. There’s going to be a whole generation of kids who grew up and they’re not going to have a bank branch on the corner with a checkbook in the way that maybe you and I did growing up. Their phone is going to be their wallet. That’s how they get paid. It’s how they live their lives and borrow money if and when they need to.

So that’s the opportunity for Coinbase, and we have the beginnings of that with Coinbase Card for instance, which lets you spend. We have USD Coin if you want to hold US dollar balances. And in the future, you can imagine us adding other features like the ability to send a wire transfer or bank transfer, and then it could really be your primary financial account.”

Armstrong also says crypto adoption is quickly increasing among the biggest players in the traditional finance (TradFi) sector.

“Fifty-six percent of the Fortune 500 are now doing something on-chain and we go and survey executives from those companies, so the biggest companies in the world whether it’s BlackRock tokenizing real-world assets, JP Morgan is doing things on-chain with Onyx, Google Cloud is accepting crypto payments, fintechs like Stripe and PayPal are doing things with stablecoins. So I think crypto is here to stay and the biggest companies in the world are all integrating it.”

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