Coinbase Co-Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong has made some outspoken – and rather sobering – comments regarding the future of Bitcoin and the crypto sector. Armstrong says that despite the hopes of the crypto community, mainstream adoption is still a long way off and that some digital assets might never see real-world application.
Brian Armstrong has an impressive CV which makes him as well-placed as any to comment on the future of the crypto space. He performed roles for an array of household names including Deloitte, IBM and AirBnB before co-founding Coinbase in 2012. With a background in both coding and business, he’s one of relatively few in the space who brings both technical and practical skills to the industry.
His business acumen has showed clearly in Coinbase’s steady rise, building a string of high-profile partnerships and leading the way with creative approaches to drive increases in crypto adoption. Today Coinbase is a true giant of the sector, with over 13 million unique accounts. So Armstrong’s comments will be taken seriously by a community still striving to find the key to not just Wall St acceptance, but Main Street adoption.
Armstrong says he thinks it will be “quite some time before you cross the street to Starbucks in the U.S. and pay with crypto,” referring perhaps to the fact that the international coffee chain have recently backtracked on their stated intention to begin accepting crypto payments through the Bakkt start-up. The Coinbase CEO acknowledges that the situation in countries with pressing economic issues such as Venezuela and Iran is very different. He is “bullish on countries that are going through economic crisis”, where “you could see people adopting bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as an alternative.”
But he argues it’s in the US that we’ll have to wait a while for truly mainstream adoption. He suggests that crypto may be where the internet was in 1998, with some estimates suggesting there may currently be in the region of 3% of households who have invested in digital assets. The irrational exuberance of the last bull run aside, there’s clear evidence that we’re still very early in the adoption curve. It seems investors might have to wait rather longer than anticipated to pay for their weekly groceries in their favourite cryptocurrency.
