Coinbase CEO says cryptocurrency needs an iPhone or Netscape moment

[Pegasus]

Brian Armstrong, the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, spoke about the factors that influence the mass adoption of cryptocurrency, during an Ask-Me-Anything [AMA] session on YouTube.

The session began with Armstrong explaining the three important aspects needed for the mass adoption of Bitcoin [BTC] and other cryptocurrencies. He stated that volatility, scalability and usability were the factors that influence the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies.

Armstrong stated that it would be harder to use a cryptocurrency as a real medium of exchange if its price was subjected to high volatility, adding that stablecoins are currently solving this problem.

“[…] the other thing is going to help with that [volatility] is just more and more real use cases in the world happening so that these crazy bubbles that go up and down and all the speculation in crypto will kind of get dampened out if we drive the utility phase […]”

This was followed by Armstrong speaking about the second aspect, scalability. He stated that “luckily” there were “five to ten really well-funded teams” working on this, citing the example of second layer solutions such as Lightning Network and next-gen protocols. He went on to state,

“[…] we need to get crypto to be not just you know [complete] 5 – 10 – 20 transactions a second but on the order of 500 a second to 5,000 a second to really be at like PayPal or visa levels. That would allow us to get say an app with a hundred million people using it in crypto so scalability is the second one[…]”

Armstrong then explained the third important factor, usability. On this, he stated that there were still “a lot of challenges”, adding that the current applications were still “too complicated”. He stated that even if it’s a wallet, be it a Chrome extension or not, “it should work like WeChat”.

” […] where when you go to the app, it already knows who you are and it has your payment method already attached and with one tap you can then complete an action or complete a payment and so we need to get that usability, just simpler and simpler and simpler, kind of like having the Netscape moment or the iPhone moment for crypto”

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