A couple of weeks back, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was interviewed on the WSJ podcast The Journal about the future of crypto. Full disclosure: I am a Coinbase customer and find the platform to be the most straightforward, easy-to-use tool for buying and selling cryptocurrency. It also seems to be the most compliant and least scammy of the crypto sites.

A good portion of the interview was about regulation - particularly Armstrong's belief that the principle cryptocurrencies should be considered commodities (like 'fiat' currencies) not securities (like stocks, bonds, etc.). He did also throw some shade at FTX and Binance, two rival crypto platforms that have run into serious legal trouble.

One phrase that is used a lot now in the sector is " running on crypto/web3 rails," meaning, I think, that the blockchain and other crypto-adjacent tech can serve as a more secure, private, faster or otherwise superior backend than tradtional internet technolgies. In my previous post, I cited Nick Grossman talking about Paragraph.xyz as an example of web3 rails in publishing. And in his interview, Armstrong refers to crypto rails as the future of financial services. In this case, Armstrong doesn't give a single illustrative example of how the new technology will make the future better.

I'm generally crypto-positive which is why I have a small personal investment in Ethereum which I acquired a few years ago and which has been quite volatile. For most of the past two years, the investment was underwater, but it is now modestly in the green. My intuition is that with all the smart folks who have a passionate interest in crypto as a store of value, a medium of exchange and an architecture for financial transactions, there must be something there. But neither Armstrong, nor Grossman nor anyone else I respect has been able to marshal compelling evidence to show that this is true.

A couple of weeks back, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was interviewed on the WSJ podcast The Journal about the future of crypto. Full disclosure: I am a Coinbase customer and find the platform to be the most straightforward, easy-to-use tool for buying and selling cryptocurrency. It also seems to be the most compliant and least scammy of the crypto sites.

A good portion of the interview was about regulation - particularly Armstrong's belief that the principle cryptocurrencies should be considered commodities (like 'fiat' currencies) not securities (like stocks, bonds, etc.). He did also throw some shade at FTX and Binance, two rival crypto platforms that have run into serious legal trouble.

One phrase that is used a lot now in the sector is " running on crypto/web3 rails," meaning, I think, that the blockchain and other crypto-adjacent tech can serve as a more secure, private, faster or otherwise superior backend than tradtional internet technolgies. In my previous post, I cited Nick Grossman talking about Paragraph.xyz as an example of web3 rails in publishing. And in his interview, Armstrong refers to crypto rails as the future of financial services. In this case, Armstrong doesn't give a single illustrative example of how the new technology will make the future better.

I'm generally crypto-positive which is why I have a small personal investment in Ethereum which I acquired a few years ago and which has been quite volatile. For most of the past two years, the investment was underwater, but it is now modestly in the green. My intuition is that with all the smart folks who have a passionate interest in crypto as a store of value, a medium of exchange and an architecture for financial transactions, there must be something there. But neither Armstrong, nor Grossman nor anyone else I respect has been able to marshal compelling evidence to show that this is true.