Dan Kim Interview - Coinbase Listing Strategy, Partnerships with Google & BlackRock, Custody, NFTs & Web3

Dan Kim is the VP of Business Development & Listings at Coinbase. In this interview we discuss Coinbase’s listing strategy, partnerships with BlackRock and Google, Web3, NFTs, crypto regulations, Coinbase Australia and more. Dan Kim is also the founder of Red mango, the American frozen yogurt and smoothie chain.

Transcript

Welcome back to the Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With me today is Dan Kim, who is the VP of Business Development and Listings at Coinbase. Dan, it’s great to have you on.

• Glad to be here. Excited to talk about crypto, excited to talk about listings. Let me know when you’re ready to start.
• Yeah, Dan, I’m excited to speak with you as well. Coinbase being the largest US crypto exchange. You guys are doing a lot of great things, and I got a lot of questions for you on the listings front, and your partnerships. Let’s start with your background. Where you from? Where’d you grow up?
• Born in Korea. Spent about the first five years of my life there, and then immigrated to the United States with my parents. Grew up mostly in California, L.A. went to school in the Bay Area and then moved back to L.A. Did a couple of stints in Dallas and New York, and now I’m back in the Bay Area. So yeah, it’s primarily a California kid.
• And what did you do before working at Coinbase?
• I started my career in finance or structured finance and derivatives, and then really got into tech really quickly. Just kind of started to see a lot of the tech boom back in the early 2000s. So worked for software companies, worked for hardware companies and optical networking. Took a little bit of a break, decided to move away from tech and get closer to consumers. So open up a frozen yogurt and smoothie chain called red mango. Did that for about seven, eight years and then got back into tech. And first into automotive working at Tesla, which was really cool. And then that led me to a Coinbase doing crypto.
• Wow. Interesting journey. Going from red mango to Tesla and then to Coinbase.
• Yeah, no, it’s a good way to confuse people whenever they ask, hey, tell me a little bit about your background? I always tell them it’s not gonna make sense, but just hear me out.
• Well, you know, it’s, the great thing about it is I kind of industry hopped in my early days as well and it gave me a great perspective on business and understanding different facets of business as well, so I’m sure it was great experience.
• Yeah, you know, I’ve, except for my first job in banking and finance, every company I’ve worked for has been led by a founder. And you know, if you kind of look back at my career, I think one of the themes that starts to emerge is, I love building, I love operating, I love creating, I love connecting with customers. And I like just doing everything across business, not just one thing. So that’s helped a lot in terms of just at least explaining why I’ve done so many different things in my career. But the common theme is always about doing something that’s new, interesting, innovative, and things that are gonna just change the ways we live and make that better. So I’m really into just helping people access a better quality of life using technology. And that’s kind of been my theme since I discovered tech 20 years ago.
• So when did you first come across crypto and what was your aha moment? When did it click for you?
• I’ve always been fascinated with crypto as a financial instrument or a, just in terms of people being able to just buy, sell, trade, and thought it was a fascinating alternative to, way money works in this world. And it was, there’s a lot of kind of technical literature you can read, a lot of white people as you can read. And I was definitely fascinated by that. Didn’t really have that aha moment in terms of like how it can apply to real life or everyday life beyond just financial systems. Until I discovered this game accidentally called Roblox. And my daughter was spending so much time and my money on it and I started to just kind of look at it. I was like, like what exactly is going on with Roblox? Obviously not a Web3 game, but you kind of took a look at how it’s built and the way to design some of these games with limited edition items. The ability to kind of buy things and like track its value over time, ability to trade things. And you know, just looking at that plus how many hours? My daughter, she’s 14 now and her friend spent in this screen just living life. That gave me the aha moment. I was like, wait a minute, if Roblox is creating its own little ecosystem with fake money, imagine what you can do with real money and imagine what the power of NFTs can do as an example? So Roblox ironically was kind of the moment in time where I said, wait a minute, gaming could be what really launches Web3 and crypto and two everyday life.
• Yeah, and on that note, certainly a lot of digitization happening. I often talk about the token economy and everything running on the blockchain. And to your point of these different games and different ecosystems, maybe having your own NFTs, own tokens on different blockchains and an interoperability between all these different tokens. You know, it’s kind of crazy when you think about it and what will be, come to fruition and we’re still early, but yeah, I mean, do you have any thoughts on that token economy and what that might look like for your kids as they get older?
• You know, it’s a good question and I think it’s a question that has, is gonna be answered in many different ways over the next many, many years ahead of us. I do think that the idea of a digital token is going to revolutionize a lot of things about the ways we live. To me, it’s not just about a cryptocurrency or it’s not just about a token based economy. It’s really a new operating system for life. If you take a look at all the things that are happening right now where people are investing, it’s not just about defi. I think you’re seeing a lot of innovation in what I’ll call social sphere, right? Or gaming or things that we do every day. On commerce, loyalty programs. And these are all huge businesses that any company can get into and companies will need things like digital tokens and cryptocurrency. The whole idea of Web3 is gonna really transform how that’s all done and make it much more decentralized, much better in terms of just being able to do things with a greater degree of control and just really amplify everything that we’ve seen to another level that I don’t think this world that’s really experienced, but we’ll experience very shortly. So I’m super excited about this, not in terms of just one thing, but it’s really an operating system, a new way of just connecting life. And that’s what excites me most about Web3.
• For sure. Let’s talk about Coinbase, and I would love to get into the details of the listing process and how it all works on your end. Maybe you can take us behind the scenes a bit.
• Yeah, look, our, the way I describe our listings process is, the best way to understand it is to look at our mission and our values. And our mission is really to increase economic freedom in the world. And it’s not just economic freedom, it’s economic, it’s social freedom, right? It’s ability to just do a lot of different things you couldn’t do before. And as a result of that mission, one of the things that we have committed ourselves to doing is making sure that all the assets, that all the tokens that you see across the crypto economy are, that we’re looking at as many as we can and that we’re listing every possible asset where it’s legally where we can, or it’s legally safe to do so. So for us, it’s about going out there and making sure that we can do everything we can to really pursue our mission of achieving economic freedom by giving people as much choice in terms of which assets they should buy, which assets they should support, and really looking at whether or not, hey, is it legal for us to do so or not? We don’t really take a subjective point of view in terms of this asset being better than the other, or we don’t really pick winners or losers. We really go out there, apply our objective framework and our goal is to really list every possible asset where we can.
• And can you tell us, and this number is probably fluctuating as we’re speaking, but the total number of tokens and coins you guys have on the site or the exchange?
• Yeah, I’ll get you, I think it’s over 200. It’s listed on our website and we’ve done that across obviously Ethereum and some of the core more, the larger networks across the ecosystem, but we’re doing a lot more even on new networks, whether it’s Solana or Polygon or Avalanche, these are all networks that we’re supporting. So yeah, I think we have about a little bit note of 200. We can get you the exact number, but, and we’re adding more and more every week, right? So there’s a lot of projects that are coming out and we’re constantly monitoring, we’re evaluating, we’re assessing, we’re applying our rigorous framework for risk and just doing all the, where we apply the same model no matter what the project is. And our goal is to make sure that we’re capturing as many of those projects as possible, evaluating them such that we can in fact list every asset where it’s where we legally can.
• For sure. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about the red flags that you guys look at. And I know it’s probably a long checklist and so forth, but maybe you can highlight, I don’t know, the top five or so, and I think this will be helpful for users because there are a lot of new people to the crypto market and we’ve seen there have been scams right in the market and we have to watch out for that. So I’m curious, what are the red flags that you guys look at when a project comes to you?
• Yeah, so the words that I like to use when we talk about kind of how we look at assets is very similar to doing due diligence on a company. We do extensive amounts of research and due diligence on our project, and there are are things that we look at that are much more structural, meaning, hey, does it pass our requirements for compliance and money laundering? Or what we call AML guardrails. So we look at things like who’s behind the project team? What are people saying about the project? How has it been used? Are there any things that we need to be aware of as far as like regulatory infractions? So we’re looking at compliance as one of the pillars we look at. Another pillar that we look at that’s more structural is security, blockchain security. Is this a safe, smart contract? Are there things that are in the contract or the code that’s gonna be harmful to our users? We have a massive library of what we call code signatures, where we look at things that just are off or have been proven to be harmful in the past. So we do a lot of work reviewing smart contracts and doing a lot of just technical due diligence on whether or not the code is safe. And then we also look at our legal analysis to make sure that we don’t list securities cause we don’t. And those three things are probably the things that we look at the most across every project we look at. We also look at what we call business risks or kind of other risks that might not be captured in those three pillars. So we’ll look at social chatter. We’ll look at what other projects were people involved with in the past? Have there been allegations of wrongdoing with people involved in the project? And we’ll look at utility, like what does this actually project actually do? And we’ll evaluate everything and form an opinion on whether or not this is an asset we’d like to introduce to Coinbase users. So it is a very sophisticated process.
• Sure.
• One that, involves a lot of different disciplines across the company. A lot of the information we find is available, but a lot of the information isn’t really hard to, or easy to get to. So we have a lot of just digging and interviewing and talking to people. We even meet teams all to protect users from scams. And to make sure that these are not projects that are just gonna disappear in a day or two. So it’s a very, very difficult and challenging process just because of the nature of how quickly this industry moves, but one that we become very good at by virtue of just being very disciplined about how we do due diligence.
• Yeah, I’m sure it’s very difficult, especially with all types of coins out there, different blockchains, and it sounds like you guys have a rigorous process for it. On the security note, and I know this is a tough question to ask, and it’s not just a Coinbase specific challenge, but every exchange out there, the security question, and I know you guys probably have security lawyers and so forth, but how are you navigating the waters given that the SCC hasn’t officially put out maybe an updated. How do we test or they’ve only given Bitcoin, let’s say, the green light as a non-security. And while your securities lawyers may, they have what the lingo, the language, the measuring stick, so to speak, they don’t have the updated version for crypto.
• We don’t list securities. And we made that very clear. I think our, there’s some, there’s a blog post that our chief legal officer wrote that does a really good job of saying it in very plain English. And I’ll tell you this, we have probably one of the most rigorous processes to analyze and determine whether or not a digital asset can appear on our platform, on our exchange. We have a lot of very experienced individuals who kind of understand how to navigate this. And to answer your question about whether or not there’s a regular regulatory framework anywhere, and it’s not just the US, it’s anywhere in the world. We welcome working with regulators and we want there to be clear frameworks, but in the absence of a clear framework or in the presence of a framework that kind of changes from time to time or a policy that’s enforced via enforcement versus an actual framework, we have to… As a company, we have to kind of rely on some rigorous framework, and that’s the one that we’ve developed. So if there is frameworks or regulations and guardrails that do get articulated by regulatory agencies, yeah, we’d love working with them. And obviously it’s super important for us to be able to work with these agencies to make sure that we meet their requirements and standards. But in the absence of that, or as agencies are starting to formulate that, we have our process. Which we believe is extremely rigorous and is very, very good at making sure that we do not list securities.
• Got it. Got it. Let’s talk about custody, because in today’s day and age of crypto, I’ve often talked about, we are in the web, I know we’re talking about Web3, we’re in crypto 1.0 and there’s a lot of hacks and a lot of exploits and so forth. And over time those things will be fixed, the technology’s gonna get better and so forth. But what does Coinbase do to make sure the tokens, the assets, are custody and protected?
• We as a, I think the only publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange in the United States and a regulated one, we’re also the most visible. And we have to make sure that we invest in the things that make us unique, special, and matches up to the, our value proposition that we’re promising the customers. Security and just making sure that we have the best in class security. Whether it’s our hot wallets that are self custodied, whether it’s kind of the semi custodial wallets we have with our retail accounts or even our cold storage that we do on behalf of a lot of clients. We probably have the best in class when it comes to security. And it’s something that we take very seriously. We don’t ever sacrifice on things just for the purpose, just for speed, right? You know, or the investments and just the brain power and just the thought and all the work that goes into making sure that we have the safest and most trusted platform. I live and breathe that every day. Even getting onto this podcast via Zoom, we know we can’t use Zoom. So had to like kind of figure out a way to use my personal laptop to make this work. But it just speaks to how important and pervasive security is customer protection and just taking care of our Coinbase users. And that’s, we hear that the most in everything we do. So it’s just part of our ethos and part of our DNA is safety and security is super important, and we have the best people you can possibly ask for an industry.
• Yeah, I mean, you guys have partnered with some very big names who are using you for custody, so I think that speaks to the great technology and work that you guys have done. And on that note, you oversee a lot of partnerships at Coinbase. What are some recent partnership announcements that you’re excited about? I know a lot of people definitely want to hear about BlackRock and how that came about as well.
• Look, a lot of our partnerships are focused on just making crypto and Web3 as mainstream as possible. And one way to do that is to partner with companies that aren’t necessarily leaders in Web3 or are native to crypto, but have done a fantastic job over the past 10 plus years. Establishing tools and applications and things that the world needs just to kind of spin. Google’s a great example of that. We just announced a partnership with Google. Google Cloud, where we’re allowing, or Google will be allowed to build their customers and customers will be able to pay their invoices with crypto. And there’s a bunch of other things that we’re doing with Google in terms of just nodes and providing them with information that they need to kind of enhance their search across all these blockchain protocols and networks. So yeah, our partnerships are really focused on two areas. One is kind of the Web2 space, whether it’s with the BlackRock of the world and introducing their customers to crypto and being able to invest, buy, sell safely. And in the Googles of the world that are trying to do more with Web3 or in Web3 and need a partner to do so. We’re also doing partnerships with Web3 or more crypto native companies. So two that we’ve done recently that I’m super excited about are all in a gaming space. So there’s a Solana based game called eeb.io where we did a deal with them to where they’re gonna be building their stack on Coinbase cloud. We also did a really cool deal with a very popular game in Asia called Fayton Arena, where we did something a little bit more fun, which is creating a custom loot box for Coinbase customers who connect to the game and perform certain tasks within the game to get a special NFT that allows them to enhance their gameplay with something they couldn’t get elsewhere, right? So we love partnering with companies both on, in Web2 and Web3. We think it helps accelerate growth, it also helps introduce our partners to the things that make us really cool and special and unique. We also get exposed to a lot of entrepreneurs and innovators who are doing a lot of cool things that are cutting edge that we wanna be a part of. So we’re really proud of our partnerships team and we’re really proud of the fact that we we’re doing really cool deals with both Web2 and Web3 companies, and that’s gonna be the one of the ways we really help this industry grow.
• Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, amazing job that you guys have done. And you and the team have done with getting these partnerships. Google, as you mentioned, and BlackRock. I mean, I don’t know if you can take us without giving away too much. What is it like talking to some of these traditional finance companies and even tech companies like Google and are they at the point where they get it or you have to do a lot of educating to convince them or to get them to understand what’s happening?
• I was talking to a blockchain club at a pretty good university yesterday and they said that membership in their club typically has an inverse relationship with the price of Bitcoin. So, or I’m sorry, direct relationship, right? So the lower the price goes the less a fewer members they have and vice versa, except for this past year. They said for the first time in its history of this blockchain club, even though prices have gone down, the number of members have gone up. We’re seeing that in Web2 companies in terms of their level of interest in crypto. I think in the past we’ve seen kind of the ebbs and flows of interest depending on whether or not people are talking about crypto and largely whether or not crypto as an asset category is doing well or not. I will say that this time around the, just the sheer amount of interest and curiosity in the space has not been correlated with asset or digital token prices. And we’re seeing a lot of companies just very eager to do something. I have not met a Web2 company who doesn’t have some form of Web3 operation or center of excellence or person on their team. And I have not met one that isn’t planning to or already has invested heavily. So, number one, great degree of interest in wanting to do something. Number two, these are large multi-billion dollar companies that are often publicly traded and they just can’t pick and choose to work with anybody they want to.
• Sure.
• So they’re looking for the most trusted partner. The ones that really respect regulation and have good relationships with governments. So they’re naturally coming to Coinbase for that. So that’s been a really cool thing to kind of see. It’s like, hey, we’ve done a lot of things to do this the right way. And now Web2 companies are finally seeing the value of that investment in trust and safety. So number one, again, or number two is all about wanting, this interest and wanting to partner with credible players in the industry. And then number three, there’s a significant desire to just learn and learn in two areas. One is like what’s happening with the broader market? How to see the industry moving, and then what can the partner do to kind of participate in this? A lot of questions around, hey, how do we get into this space? What’s the best space for us to enter Web3? What kind of guidance can you give us so that we can be successful in this area? So there’s a significant interest, significant desire to learn and a great degree of respect for just people who understand the value of trust and safety. And that’s what I’m seeing a lot of.
• That’s really great insight. And you mentioned the fact that there’s growing interest despite the price being down. It sounds like we’ve hit a tipping point where it’s not about the price anymore, it’s the technology and how can we adopt it and build with it.
• You said that’s the word. It’s a technology and I don’t think people quite understand that just especially in areas outside of the US where crypto really hasn’t taken off as much as it has here. I was talking to pretty large company a couple of days ago in a country in Asia and we’re kind of going through the cycle of, hey, what Coinbase is doing, what we think is gonna happen in the future in Web3? And then it kind of got to the Q&A session and it was pretty fascinating the types of questions they ask. One of which was, is crypto gonna be around in five years? Like, wait a minute, I just talked to you about why it’s great. Number two, I don’t get NFTs, why would someone pay a million dollars for a jpeg? And then number three, it’s like what exactly is the purpose of digital tokens beyond being able to like buy and sell stuff? So those types of questions show me just how much more work we have as leaders in the industry to help people understand that it is a technology. This is not about a jpeg. This is not about a digital token that just kind of fluctuates price every day. This is really more about an operating system for life. And once you start to paint it that way and start to explain just like how many, many years ago people were deciding is it Apple or Microsoft? Who’s gonna win? We kind of have a version of that now across different networks. And once people kind of get that, then their curiosity starts to anchor itself to something a little lot more, based on like, okay, how could this help me? Whereas before they kind of just read the sound bites and form an opinion because they don’t understand. So education is so important and just helping people understand and frame this the right way is something that I’m really passionate about.
• For sure, and it just reminds me of something Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful. And I remember just earlier this year, he started framing the narrative as this is all software.
• Yes.
• And I thought that was just a great way to frame it be for people who may not understand it yet. And it’s like, hey, these blockchains are just softwares you can build on them and adopt them.
• I was telling somebody, it was a controversial discussion, but it was kind of funny. He was like, you know what? Think of it this way. It’s like Ethereums, like Microsoft and Solanas, like, Mac, OS, or whatever. And obviously that sparked a series of debates too for people who are passion about that. But like that kind of discussion right around understanding blockchains for what it can do versus like what it does today, is so important to just leveling the plain field for understanding, especially with regulators and policy makers who are working on a bunch of other things. And it’s just one of those many, many things.
• Oh yeah, I mean the point of regulators, ’cause I’ve spoken to some members of Congress and so forth, I can imagine. Yes, look, I’m not an ageist or anything, but the older generation in Congress, there’s a bit of friction there for them to grasp this. And it takes some time. And I know there’s a lot of advocacy groups trying to bring that education factor, but yeah, you can’t just go out there and talk about some of the crypto lingo or blockchain lingo. You gotta bring it to what they know.
• And I think that transformation is happening and for example, like my parents still don’t know what I do exactly. They kind of know the space that I’m in. But you know, as in the very beginning, I was trying to like explain this to them in a way that a Web3 or crypto native person might explain it to another person. Like, let me explain to you how this particular network works. Let me explain to you what taconomics are all about. And I started to like find myself kind of like, wait a minute, why am I doing this when they don’t even understand kind of the very basics of what exactly we’re working with here? So I started to change my dialogue a lot when speaking with folks who are not in the industry on a day to day basis. Focusing more on, think of this as more of a tech that we can use to make our lives better versus a digital currency replaced in design to replace like Fiat. You know it’s more than that, right? And that’s what I try to talk about, which is one of the reasons why I love the word and prefer the word Web3 as opposed to crypto. And people just tend to be a lot more open to having discussions when they hear the word Web3 and are less intimidated by that versus crypto. So it’s all about how we explain and how we frame things up and just making it relevant for whoever you’re talking to.
• Mm, yeah. Absolutely. Tell us a bit about your recent travels to Australia for a Coinbase’s Australia launch and how did that go? Any takeaways that you can share?
• It was a fantastic launch. I think I met a lot of governments throughout the world and I will say that the Australian government and kind of their points of view on crypto and Web3 is a refreshing one. And it was a very, very cool opening in a sense that everyone that we invited from government were excited that we were there. Had a lot of supporters from both Web2 and Web3. Unfortunately it was like the rainiest week of like in Australia.
• In Australia.
• Yeah, when we were there. Not supposed to be raining, right? But, that’s a massive rain. It was just really, really refreshing to do what we did there. But more importantly, to really start to engage Web3 communities and blockchain clubs all throughout Australia, that’s been waiting for kind of a global beacon like Coinbase to come in and start to activate and start to get people interested again. And that’s what we can do as a company that’s respected around the world is to enter markets like Australia, partner with people who are very interested in proliferating the broader Web3 ecosystem and get people the confidence to do what they want and knowing that as a leader like Coinbase there to support them. So we were super excited about it. We also got our license in Singapore that we recently announced and we’re gonna be doing more and more of this around the world. This is really about us partnering with governments and countries to make sure that we do Web3 the right way and to shed light on all the policies and procedures and all the frameworks that we built to become the most trusted platform in crypto. And we take that very, very seriously and that’s one of the reasons why our listings process is probably one of the most robust in the industry.
• For sure. So you shared a lot about what you guys have been doing. Is there anything on your roadmap that you can allude to or hint to? I know there’s probably things on the wrap and saved for announcements, but anything, any bread comes you can share with us for the remainder of 2022 and into 2023?
• I’ll say this. Gaming is super interesting and I personally love it. My team loves it because it’s one of those things that aren’t gonna be, nor do they have to be entirely on chain. And game devs and players, those who build them, those two, those who partake aren’t like fundamentalists who want everything to be completely decentralized or on chain, right? Gamers are, they understand the value of user experience and perhaps users don’t care which network a game is on. All they wanna do is be able to play and have fun and earn and do all the cool things that you can’t do in Web2 without crypto. So I think you’re gonna see a lot more from Coinbase in the area of gaming and in the social space. You’re also gonna see a lot more interesting things in our NFT marketplace. Couple of drops that were, that are coming up that I think will be very well received by people who love not just NFTs as a technology, but the whole entertainment and social art form. So we’ll see a lot there. And the third thing that you’ll see from us is a lot of focus on education and education done the right way. One of the things that really is starting to bother me is a very simple question, which is, how do we know if a Web3 developer is good? We know what they’ve done and we know what they can do, but how do we know if they know everything they need to know to create the safest web three experiences in the world? The analogy I give is like, imagine back 20 years when, you know networking was a big thing, right? Physical networking and there’s a bunch of like Cisco switches you could buy and you can probably just buy them and figure out how to program them online and it’ll quite work. But at some point you’re gonna need to make sure that it’s done the right way, especially as you scale, which is one of the reasons why you have these Cisco certified developer programs or engineers, right? I think we’re gonna need that in Web3 and I think there’s gonna have to be some credibility signed to people around whether or not they can build safely. And once we, I think you’re gonna see a lot from us, from Coinbase in advocating for learning how to develop Web3 the right way and to use tools that we believe are gonna be the kind of tools that publicly traded Web2 companies need in order to really do Web3 safely. So that’s probably gonna be a third thing that you’re gonna see is a lot of focus on education and certification.
• That’s great. I love the education aspect ’cause I feel like this technology’s coming at us very fast and the world is changing as a result and there’s a lot of the population that is not aware, they’re not educated about it and they don’t realize jobs. There’s a lot of jobs here and could be even high school kids who can start learning how to code a blockchain or something, right? And including college having curriculums for that.
• You know, look, it’s, whenever there’s a, so I remember the very beginning of Tesla when I was there and we had launch model three and you know the, it wasn’t a perfect execution, right? It’s a brand new product with a lot of passion from both the company itself and those who are buying the cars. And obviously over time it gets better and better ’cause you learn more, you produce more, you get more feedback and you know, that’s the kind of industry that we’re, or space that we’re in now I believe. Where there’s a lot of innovation and anyone can get into start building Web3 just by virtue of just being passionate about it, right? You can go and like log on and watch videos and start doing things. But is the idea of like being able to build your own decks in five minutes, like something that people should be proud of? Or should it be more like, hey, let’s like kind of take a step back and figure out like, okay, for the next generation of builders and developers, what needs to happen in order for those developers to learn how to build the right way in the safe way? Getting really tired of all these hacks that we hear about and we kind of like peel the open the hood a little bit. I think a lot of these could have been prevented with just better education and just better thinking about how these are designed. And that’s one of the reasons why developer education not just an introductory one, but one that actually kind of goes to the entire gamut of whether or not, hey, can you build for Web3 or not? And that’s why I’m so passionate about that and I think you’ll see a lot of that next year. I think a lot of what’s needed in Web3 to get it to the next level and to proliferate it to the next billion users, is gonna require mainstream adoption and advocacy. And I think a lot of that’s gonna come from leaders like Coinbase, but also partners who’ve been in tech for a very long time, who need trusted players like Coinbase to help them get into the space and education and just making sure that people in are informed the right way, are super important success factors for making that happen.
• Mm. I’m excited to see those updates and would love to have you back on as those things roll out.
• Of course.
• I want, few more questions here and then we’ll wrap it up. What are your thoughts on crypto winter? You know we’re in a bear market, they’re macroeconomic factors, what do you think we might see crypto springing? And I know that’s a hard question, but you know.
• No, it’s not. It’s a hard question because I think, I don’t think anyone knows right now given how unique this particular winter is, and I don’t even know if crypto winter’s the right word to describe what’s going on given all the macro economic and sociopolitical issues that the world is facing.
• Sure.
• If anything, I will say that the microeconomic environment that we’re in probably provides more reason and rationale for why Web3 and crypto makes sense, especially in the face of inflation. Brian Armstrong recently reminded us, Bitcoin whitepaper was born after the 2008 financial crisis and you know we’re going through a unprecedented crisis now, like coming out of a pandemic and just what we know. I don’t think the world’s kind of experienced that in modern day, right? So this whole idea of like crypto winter, I think it’s different this time just because there’s a lot more things, many things going on and you know the explanation I gave you earlier around or the anecdote around the relationship between people interested in blockchain, having an inverse relationship with prices for the first time. I think that’s just a signal to how crypto has become more of a technology and an operating system than just an asset class that people invest in. And to me, I think to answer your question, when are we gonna get out of this winter? I think it really depends on when the economy in the world is gonna get out of the rut that it’s in. I don’t think it’s gonna be a separate event. I do think though, that it’ll validate and reinforce the importance of Web3 and crypto as a technology.
• For sure.
• The importance of that in global stability.
• Yeah, I’m excited to see how governments adopt blockchain and some of these blockchains that exist out there in the open market and what that will look like. But I know we’re coming up on time, so I want to give you, well wanna ask you some wrap up questions here. First, rapid fire, favorite food.
• Sushi, hands out.
• Favorite musician or band?
• I don’t have one. I get asked that question a lot. I will listen to whatever like I need to listen to in order to get through the day.
• Sure. Favorite movie?
• Gosh, Top Gun Maverick. I seen it like 10 times already, yeah.
• I have not seen it and I’m a fan of the original, but just a busy dad life, you know.
• Yep.
• Favorite book.
• Oh man. The Changing World Order by Ray Dalia. I’m reading that now actually. It’s a fascinating like, perspective on the macro macroeconomic view of things. And then reading that in the view of like Web3 and crypto’s been fascinating, so yeah.
• Yeah, Ray’s been on a role lately just sharing some amazing thoughts and what’s happening with civilization and technology and all that, it’s been great.
• Brian Armstrong, our founder is a really big advocate of that book too. That’s why one of the reasons I got into it was, I kind of like getting into the heads of innovators like Brian and kind of what’s inspired, what motivates them. And that’s one of those books that he referenced on more than one occasion, so.
• Mm, and when you’re not working at Coinbase, what are you doing for a hobby?
• Man, I’ve explored. If you asked me this before the pandemic, I would’ve told you like riding my motorcycle and kind of going out there and just like playing sports with my friends. Now I got into gardening and raising tomatoes and like this whole farmer life that just kind of happened because I couldn’t go anywhere. So as embarrassing as that sounds out as my current hobby is gardening.
• No, absolutely not. I actually, similar thing when I finally bought a house during the pandemic to move out the city, I ended up doing a lot of gardening and yard work and things like that, which I never thought I would end up doing.
• It’s such an interesting, ’cause there’s a part of it that it’s creation. There’s part of it that’s like keeping something alive and it’s part of, it’s like, if I can do this then maybe like I can survive if there’s another pandemic.
• The zombie apocalypse too, right?
• Yeah, yeah.
• Final item here. If you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
• Oh man, it’d be just again, having fun. I think like we’re just always in a grind. We’re working, we’re having meetings, we’re traveling. I just don’t have a lot of time and I have less and less so over, as I get older to have fun. And that could be watching a movie, going to a concert, or just shopping and there’s a way to do that without having to leave the home and still have an engaging experience. I think that would be really, really cool.
• For sure. Dan, pleasure chatting with you. I appreciate you taking the time and the information you share. Thank you so much.
• Pleasure to be on and hopefully we’ll be on again in the future.