AI takes nothing away from crypto, says Coinbase CEO
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has pushed back against calls for crypto founders to pivot to AI. In a post on Sunday, Armstrong took aim directly at the years-old slogan “If youre in crypto, pivot to AI,” which seems to have become popular in recent months, amid the growth of AI. “Its zero sum, scarcity thinking,” he wrote, saying crypto is a general-purpose technology. “If youre in crypto, pivot to AI.” I used to hear versions of this, and it‘s the wrong way to think about the world. It’s zero sum, scarcity thinking. Crypto is a general purpose technology. Its infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It… Coinbase CEO says crypto will power agentic payments Armstrong put crypto in the same category as electricity and the internet, saying it‘s an infrastructure that doesn’t compete with AI, but rather underpins it. “AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto. If anything, it makes crypto more important,” said Coinbase CEO. He noted that the opportunity lies in crypto being a real-time programmable money, a new sector coined as “Agentic Finance (AiFi).” According to Armstrong, AI agents will eventually need their own financial infrastructure to trade, hold funds, and pay for items, among other things. He believes crypto will