Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says These Two Catalysts Will Drive More Institutional Investors Into Crypto

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the crypto exchange has been working to get sovereign wealth funds to invest in the crypto space.

In a new interview, Armstrong says that some of these institutional investors have already allocated a portion of their portfolio to digital assets.

“There are some sovereign wealth funds out there that have now done it and we’ve closed these deals with like BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, to kind of get more and more of this money flowing in.”

Armstrong says that more institutional investors will likely invest in crypto once there is regulatory clarity in the space.

“What are the major inflection points that can cause that to happen? The biggest one I think in my mind is regulatory clarity. When I talk to institutional investors, they always bring that up and the good news is we’re starting to finally see regulatory clarity. And we can talk about what that is if you want and I think even more regulatory clarity in the next year or two will actually drive a bunch more of that money.”

He says improved scalability of blockchains will also drive more wealthy investors into crypto just as how the internet transformed when it moved up from dial-up to broadband.

“The initial blockchains: I think Bitcoin was doing about seven transactions per second, Ethereum was doing 25 transactions a second and basically PayPal does about 500 transactions a second, Visa does about 4,000 a second, so we needed a couple of orders of magnitude to get to like those more Visa levels.”

He says crypto is on track to see improved scalability with recent developments such as Ethereum’s (ETH) merge upgrade.

“It has been an incredible technical accomplishment and I think the future pieces that they’re going to launch with that are going to improve the scalability even further with sharding and things like that. 

Other blockchains have been working a lot of really great scalability stuff too, Solana and others. I think we’re seeing the Lightning Network, all the L2 [layer-2] stuff. We’re seeing a lot of really good focus now happening on the scalability of blockchains.

The regulatory clarity, scalability to blockchains, to me that’s like we’ll probably get another order of magnitude or more out of that just those two things alone.”

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