Uh, so what, is there a, a strategy or a plan or incentives or anything to help kind of like juice the growth of the Coinbase tokenized stock ecosystem?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, first off, I'd say, like, I think crypto, uh, tokenized stocks are growing pretty quickly.

Like, [chuckles] if you just look at the data, it's like we have way more that there, than there were a year ago.

We have way more volume.

Um, and I think if you compare it to stable coins, um, you know, it took four years for us to go from, you know, USDC and Tether, uh, issued to them really starting to be real material parts of the conversation.

I think we're now, like, six months in with tokenized stocks essentially, and, um, they're growing pretty quickly, and people are trading them all around the world, and I think that that's just gonna accelerate.

We have the dullness products

Can you talk a little bit about your thesis on agentic trading and, and what that's gonna look like in the next six months to a year? Because AI's moving so quickly that it's very, [laughs] it's very difficult to predict what's gonna happen or even know what's gonna happen in, in a year's time.

Yeah.

It, it is moving really quickly, and it's been awesome to see that kind of get started and then grow quickly on Base.

And like you said, I think that something like 90% of, uh, agentic X402 transactions are happening on Base today, um, estimates of payments and trading, uh, and I think it's only gonna grow from here.

I'd say my general thesis is that, um, agents are, uh, kind of software-defined beings, and that means that the, the native form of money that, that they're gonna, you know, choose when they go to reach for value is gonna also be software.

Uh, and that's what crypto is, you know? Crypto is money as software that's running on these global decentralized rails that let anyone access it without having to sign up, or KYC, or do any of the, um, kind of laborious things we've gotten used to in the legacy financial system.

And so that means that agents can get a wallet, can get started, can transact, um, can buy content with X402 or, um, pay other agents all, um, instantly and in a language that they natively understand.

the world in which we live now.

And is the infrastructure and user experience, is it generalizable enough? Is it flexible enough where you can build one piece of infrastructure, you can build base and it can appeal to the most suited up institutional of RWA folks and it can appeal to the degenerate attention traders?

I think so.

I do think that is a little bit of the two wolves.

You need culture and you need seriousness.

And that's the kind of spectrum of conversation that we see on crypto Twitter today.

That said, I will say where base is focused is on delivering long term value.

And so I think attention assets can be long-term valuable for the ecosystem.

How do you square that, you know, opening up the institutional floodgates? Is that really what Clarity is about? And if so, how does that help achieve the mission of improving economic freedom all over the world?

So, so where is base, uh, positioned? What is the unique differentiation? Where are you guys hyper-focusing? What is the facet of the industry that base wants to dominate?

Yeah, I think the way we think about success for base is becoming the Internet exchange, basically, where every asset, whether it's stocks or crypto majors or commodities or anything else that you can imagine, including these long tail attention assets, is traded.

where you can trade and exchange those assets in every form, whether it's spot or perps or lending or borrowing, you have the right market structure for you.

And it's serving as the backend to power financial services products from Coinbase to new age wallets like Fantom and FOMO, to brokerages that are starting to leverage this technology like eToro and tons of others that are starting to come on chain.

And so that is the vision.

And I think that's what we're heading towards now.

I think the thing that's exciting to me about open blockchains is that You have space for the long tail of builders and innovators to explore new markets, including attention markets, which are kind of like my catchall for meme coins, creator coins, content coins that are all basically taking the attention that we spend on culture and on creativity and on feeds.

Um, go ahead and tell us about some of the changes that you're most excited about.

Yeah.

Um, so one thing that we, we did over the last six months is we moved Base onto its own dedicated stack that we've built.

Um, historically, we used a, a kind of third-party stack from Optimism.

Um, but as we have kind of continued to scale Base, what we've realized is that having more control of the stack lets us, um, just deliver a better product experience for the developers, for the traders who are building on top of it.

And so, uh, Azul was our first upgrade to that stack where we moved onto it.

Uh, Beryl was the second one.

You also mentioned privacy and ledgers as focus areas, and in this conversation you also talked about agentic payments, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on where you'd love to go with all three of those.

So I'm curious your thoughts on that if you think it's gonna look different than kind of how you envisioned it before.

Yeah.

And we've been through a whole journey, uh, on this and, you know, I built a consumer product for five years in the base app for a bunch of that as well.

And so I've gotten to see it, you know, in the Coinbase app, we started with no products on chain.

And then in like 2021 to 2023, we added this like web three section of the base app.

I mean, of Coinbase, uh, where you could kind of go and create a new wallet and do a bunch of things in there.

Um, uh, like, uh, you know, trade.

I'm curious if that's like the grand vision for like what Coinbase is going to be at like the very, very end state or? You

Yeah.

But as we've built Base over the last two years, which has really been a builder ecosystem where people are building apps, we've seen two problems emerge.

The first is that, um, everyday people, when they're trying to use crypto and trying to, to kind of figure out what's going on here, it's really hard to actually find things to do and that are useful.

You know, maybe they come on chain for a coin, but then they kind of get lost.

They're like-

Sure.

Right? If you look at the last 20 years, you've had so much creativity pour into the internet, but the vast majority of that creativity has been put into platforms where creators actually don't earn that much money.

Right? If you're an average creator who has less than 10,000 followers or if you're in another country like Nigeria or Argentina, you're gonna be posting and filling up this kind of content world with valuable creativity that then other people are looking at, but you're not earning anything.