Despite fighting what must be an incredibly cost-draining battle against the top U.S. securities regulator, Coinbase (COIN) is in a period of fluttering activity. Last week, the biggest publicly traded crypto company launched a new blockchain, Base, which has seen a surprising amount of uptake largely due to a couple viral apps. And today it announced the formal founding of Stand With Crypto, an “independent nonprofit organization for advancing pro-crypto legislation.”
At a time of low crypto volumes, meaning low cash flows for a company that historically has derived almost all its revenue from trading fees, Coinbase has started talking more and more about what the future of crypto adoption will look like. First, notably, as transaction fees have slipped Coinbase has seemingly found a more sticky revenue source with a subscription model.
This is an excerpt from The Node newsletter, a daily roundup of the most pivotal crypto news on CoinDesk and beyond. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.
CEO Brian Armstrong talked about the three pillars of adoption during the company’s recent public earnings call, including blockchain scalability; utility, meaning non-financial crypto use cases; and righting the wrongs of incomprehensible crypto regulation in the U.S. Or lack thereof, a topic it knows only too well. Considering Coinbase is one of the few companies ever to actually leap over the trust and knowledge gaps keeping people out of crypto, it’s worth tuning in.
In a sense, the first two “themes” are two different sides of the same coin. Or, at least, they are ways of addressing issues that are closely related. Armstrong seemed especially bullish on current scaling solutions, including Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and its own Ethereum scaler Base. No surprise there, especially considering the company has been signaling a Lightning integration ever since Bitcoin NFTs clogged up the chain — but it still attracted attention.
See also: Coinbase Exec: ‘There’s No Playbook’ as Public Company to Launch a Blockchain
Blockchain scalability and utility are tech issues, and technologists can easily imagine technical solutions. It’s possible the crypto industry, in its 13 years of existence, has over-indexed that type of thinking about infrastructure — the “build it and…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Cryptocurrencies Feed…
