Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says Crypto Payments Will Go the Way of Instant Messaging As Friction Vanishes

Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong thinks crypto is the best payment rail option in the world.

While speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference this week, Armstrong notes that Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 Ethereum (ETH) scaling solution, has reduced global transaction confirmation times to under one second and transaction fees to less than $0.01.

The Coinbase CEO argues fast and affordable payments are in the process of enabling “a new category of applications.”

“If you had fast, cheap and global payments, what might that allow people to do? Maybe, sometimes on social media, people click the like button or they upvote/upload something. You know, why can’t that be a small transaction? Right? Today in the US, people get paid every two weeks for their paycheck. Why shouldn’t you get paid every hour? Maybe this whole idea of payday lending could go away.”

Armstrong says a decentralized global payment system that is fast and affordable could reduce a significant amount of the “friction” in the economy.

“Even small amounts of friction that are reduced, you see huge increases in adoption. For instance, text messages used to cost $0.25. There were about [25 billion text messages a day] at its peak. Today with WhatsApp and iMessage and things… that are now free, there are hundreds of billions of messages sent every day. So you can get an order-of-magnitude increase in activity just by taking out a small amount of friction. And that happened in messaging, that’s now going to happen in payments.” 

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