Coinbase CEO predicts emergence of ‘crypto startup’ in 2020

Brian Armstrong, CEO and Co-founder of Coinbase, is the latest to join the crypto-predictions bandwagon for the year 2020. Drawing parallels to how tech startups leverage the Internet and machine learning presently, he predicted that most tech startups will have a “crypto component” by the end of the decade.

Talking about emerging markets, Armstrong, in the latest blog post, said,

“I think over the next decade we’ll see a blockchain, that is both more scalable and includes privacy features, reach about 1B users by the end of the decade [up from about 50M at the start of the decade]. Adoption will happen both in emerging markets, where the financial systems are most broken, and from a crop of new crypto first startups producing products people want. “

Despite the fact that investment in blockchain and crypto-firms declined in 2019 after the ICO craze, Armstrong is confident about a reversal in this trend in 2020. The CEO claimed that there will be an emergence of “crypto startup” in the new decade. According to Armstrong, like how the dot com bubble started the idea of an Internet startup and a decade later almost every tech startup was using the Internet in some way or the other, by the end of 2020, this new type of startup will become mainstream.

While defining a crypto startup, the exec said that it will first raise money using crypto, utilize cryptocurrency to achieve product-market fit by issuing tokens to early adopters of the product and then, unify global communities and marketplaces rapidly and more efficiently than its traditional counterparts. He added,

“The next 100 million people who get exposure to cryptocurrency will not come from them caring about cryptocurrency, but because they are trying to play some game, use a decentralized social network, or earn a living, and using cryptocurrency is the only way to use that particular application.”