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mission today of coinbase yeah our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world and if for people who aren't familiar with that term economic freedom is kind of an economic term like gdp but it looks at the measures of different countries of the world and looks at factors like are their property rights enforced how stable is the currency how easy is it to start a business you know is there corruption in bribery prevalent and things like that and what's really cool about economic freedom is that basically countries with higher economic freedom um you know like singapore and the united states and ireland they tend to correlate with all kinds of things we want in society not just better economic growth but even higher self-reported happiness of citizens better treatment of the environment better income for the lowest 10 in society gender equality all that stuff yeah gender equality and then yeah countries with net low economic freedom you know cuba north korea sudan these are some of the lowest they tend to have you know even things we don't want like higher corruption higher war higher infant mortality so it's basically when i read the bitcoin white paper back in 2010 i had this thought eventually that was like maybe cryptocurrency is this unique moment in history this unique technology that allows us to inject economic freedom into the countries all of the world especially now that more and more people have a smartphone and we can basically put good financial infrastructure good property rights you know global trade a stable currency into 200 countries all over the world as one small group relatively small group of people and hopefully it has all these positive downstream impacts so that's the mission of coinbase when you look at the regulatory environment uh it has been far from clear what's allowed here in the united states in fact you had a pretty um strong lee worded uh tweet storm back in september of uh 2021 some really sketchy behavior coming out of the sec race recently story time maybe you could talk a little bit about the sec's approach to cryptocurrency versus securities xrp comes to mind and knowing your customer you've obviously taken a very conservative approach to what tokens you put on the platform and then you have competitors who are offshore who it's kind of yolo anything goes um what is the current administration doing right wrong and what needs to happen here in the u.s to for us to be competitive in crypto while still protecting citizens from you know being bag holders yeah it's a big question so you know as a startup you're always trying to thread the needle here you don't want to wait too long for clarity because sometimes these things take five ten years and so you'll just never launch a product but if you if you're too aggressive you can blow the place up and so what we always did in the early days of coinbase is we said we wanna go do what we think is gonna be required in the future go get licenses go do kyc go do aml anti-money laundering and so we tried to basically do the right thing go and talk to these regulators practically now the u.s has actually been pretty forward thinking on this i'd say every year we get more and more clarity so coinbase is now a very regulated financial service business you know i can go through the whole list we have a license from the cftc a federal regulator we acquired some broker dealer licenses which the sec regulates we have money transmission licenses we're a bit licensed in new york et cetera and that's just in the united states so we're in many many countries around the world so how do we get more clarity well one thing i'll just say is it's actually better for there to be lack of clarity than to be clarity that is um punitive or bad so it's good that there's a little bit of lack of clarity as long as it's not curtailing the industry but would be even better is to have clarity that does provide that right balance of good consumer protection you know make sure that there's a fair level playing field for all the players and then it allows innovation to flourish and so what's good now is that in the us um you know dubai administration put out an executive order recently kind of asking all the different agencies and departments to come back with a clear plan and they did recognize the potential innovation in crypto in that in that executive order which i was really pleasantly surprised to see um so what's happening now is that there was a little bit of jockeying i think there where the sec said hey these all look like securities to us and i don't think that's quite true you know the cftc is regulates commodities while some cryptos are going to be commodities i think here's here's what i'm realizing is that crypto is going to be many different things it's not just going to be one regulator um doing it so you know think about cryptocurrencies like bitcoin that's pretty clearly a commodity or ethereum right like many of these are ethereum commodities that probably should be regulated by the commodities regular the cftc now if people want to raise money for their company a security token that should be regulated as a security by the sec that'd be great to have more clarity on that let's have we would love to keep working with the sec to make that a well trodden path that any company can go raise money and that's how it would get listed on an exchange like ours and we could register as a broker dealer or whatever license is needed um separately there's also some cryptocurrencies that are going to be currencies like stable coins and you know maybe the treasury should regulate those and finally there's going to be cryptocurrencies that are none of the above their artwork or something that's probably shouldn't even be regulated and so the u.s with various financial you know international bodies like g20 and fatiff and all these imf are probably going to put some policy papers together we're going to eventually end up with some kind of a test that says is this cryptocurrency a commodity a security a currency or something else like artwork and then maybe maybe five more things we haven't even thought of that it'll end up being in the future what would you make the test for this is a utility token versus specul speculative security because that seems to be the one that's really hard for people to figure out if 99 of people are buying a token on coinbase because they want to see it appreciate and they want to see it gain value and only one percent are using it for the actual utility of it is it then a security is it by the percentage of people who use it how how would you as the the you know the leader in this industry you know uh actually define it what's your definition yeah so i think look i i don't want to be presumptuous here i don't i think that we can we can put some policy papers together but i don't want to be you know it's the policymaker's job to to come up with the policy so i don't want to step on anyone's toes but that being said i think there's some existing casel out there like you know the howie test is something from a long time ago we could probably build upon that so the howie test kind of says you know is this an investment in a common enterprise with an expectation of profit and that would make it that would make it a security so there's a lot of pieces to that you know is it an investment well if you're just giving the tokens away i guess people aren't investing right is it a common enterprise well maybe if it's decentralized and you don't actually control this entity like um you own you know less than a majority share or something maybe then that's not a security right or if there's not an expectation of profit people are using it for something so every startup right now in the space has basically had to hire a bunch of expensive lawyers to go tease apart these old old rules that some of them were created in like the 1930s you know before the internet and everything and try to understand where they're falling and so i think building upon that howie test but it could be something that includes a commodities definition something a currency definition i you know i think we should basically it's on us and the other crypto companies out there to go hire a really smart lawyer who has drafted legislation before and a bill and actually get a draft of it out there and then we can start to circulate it with various policy makers and get their feedback and maybe they take it and run with it maybe they say thanks we have it we've got it from here but that's our next step freedberg saks jamath would you go with the howie test um or do you have thoughts on how to how the government here in the u.s should say this is a security this is a utility token i think what the eo did was basically kind of give people enough regulatory safety in the sense that something reasonable will probably happen in the reasonable future so that people could keep building and iterating my big takeaway in the last sort of like nine months is that this thing is now too big to fail and the government basically has to just find a reasonable framework to enable something because the alt the real big issue jason would be if they did something crazy and now you know retail would just get completely smoked because i think they are the what do you think is reasonable i think congress has to basically pass a sensible set of legislations that clearly demarcate exactly what brian said this realm of stuff goes to the cftc this realm of stuff goes to the sec now you guys go and implement and if left to their own devices those two will use these arcane laws and try to negotiate amongst each other who should be covering what but they can't arbitrate that decision and so as a result nothing will nothing reasonable will happen um so i think that's what has to happen congress has to get together and write something reasonable freedom you are building companies at the production board every year you build a couple companies uh you have to go through securities law you have to you know raise money from accredited investors you do it in the traditional way um but you must be looking at crypto saying well i could launch conor munich whatever project and have a token associated with it and raise money and raise it globally or start a dow what do you think is a reasonable way for people like yourself who are playing by the existing rules to be able to embrace this new technology and these new platforms and paradigms i think how should the government handle it well some perspectives important which is you know go back to kind of the 1920s in the united states and there were pre-1920s folks would go around and tell tall tales about interesting business ideas or business concepts or things that they were going to do with if they got a bunch of money from investors and investors gave them money and they didn't actually deliver on what they said they were going to do and they got swindled and there was swindle story after swindle story that you can read about
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