Right.

Um, I think a lot of companies say, like, "We wanna be active, uh, uh, and acquisitive," but aren't actually set up to do M&A well.

Uh, because, like, the deal part of M&A is actually, uh, for most part, the easier part.

Like, actually integrating the companies, assessing the culture, and making sure it's a, uh, the right fit, that's really, like, the hard part.

Um, and so Tagomi really stood out to me because that was, like, the first acquisition that we did, which was, like, truly, like, a full business with technology team.

And it came at an interesting time because it happened, like, right in the middle of a bear market and right in the middle of COVID.

And, uh, it was a very, like, hotly debated topic at that time because, you know, we were trying to figure out, uh, for us as a business, like, what does the next year look like in the markets? Can we actually absorb this acquisition right now? And then COVID happened, so then you have to think about, uh, just from, like, an operational perspective, like, how are we gonna integrate this company and these people into our company and our culture? Like, are they gonna be able to learn the ways that we work in a fully remote world where we can't spend time together? And, you know, ultimately, we ended up going forward with that acquisition, and it's turned out very well for us because, um- Uh, Tagomi formed the foundation of what's now Coinbase Prime, which, uh, is kinda the cornerstone of our entire institutional business.

Right.

And I – really curious like how did you choose you know what what drove you into neuroscience and like how how is that extrapolated into into what you're doing today

yeah um good question not so different from your experience on you know i when i was a kid i always wanted to be a doctor i thought i wanted to be a doctor so i studied neuroscience and uh you know i was always fascinated with the brain and with the central nervous system because We still, even to this day, we know a lot about the body and every human organ and process, but there's still a lot that we don't know about the central nervous system and about the brain.

And when it comes to things like sleep or cognition or perception or any of those types of things, we know a little bit, but we don't have it down to a science.

And so that always fascinated me.

And what I realized in college when I was shadowing a few physicians was that the actual practice of being a doctor was quite different than what I had made it out to be in my head.

And I realized that a lot of the job, it tended to be a little bit more administrative.

There was less collaboration and relationship building with the patient.

I love that because I've often thought about like how simulations like in games enable to, like, I feel like that's, simulation technology is underutilized in like the real world in terms of like being able to play out different scenarios and like sort of see like i i i'm that's something that i'm sort of thinking you know five ten years out like i i think we we will probably see a lot more of that kind of stuff and it might sound a little bit crazy but it's it's like so so when when thinking about like even coinbase like how are there things you know what are there thinking out like five ten years ahead Are there any crazy ideas that you have in your mind? Not even for Coinbase, but broadly for the economy.

Mm-hmm.

... or insensitivity to loss.

But, uh, the perverse side of that equation is it potentially locks a lot of people out from the most compelling investments that, uh, are out there.

And we wanna help people be early basically, and give people the shot at being early.

Um, and so obviously we, you know, we need to follow accreditation rule, uh, r- uh, rules as they stand.

Uh, but hopefully those change over time as well.

And with Echo's infrastructure, you know, anybody can invest in a seed round or a series A round, starting with crypto tokens, and then even beyond that, uh, looking at traditional companies as well.

Mm-hmm.

And then we can get into Echo, the M&A strategy of Coinbase, all that fun stuff.

Yeah, for sure.

I started at Coinbase in May of 2018.

The company was about 150 people at that time, working out of a relatively small office in one front.

I first got into crypto before Coinbase when I was at a venture capital and early stage growth firm called Greycroft.

And I was investing in a lot of fintech and media.

I was always interested in kind of like what was up and coming.

I'm sure you guys have those metrics, but tell me how the venture strategy and then how it ties into M&A.

Yeah.

So, John, I think to your first question, the- the pain point is really I want dollars or a safe stable currency.

And then Jordy, to your point, it's like I want it as quickly as possible, uh, in a wa- in a form factor that I know and I trust.

And, uh, you know, we started to see this quit- kind of organically a couple of years ago where a lot of people in Argentina and a lot of other countries were just like natively finding their way into, uh, dollars, stable coins.

And in those countries, you know, we- we spoke with a lot of customers and it's- it's normal, right? Like, you look for different stores of value, whether that's, you know, buying real estate in the US or gold or Bitcoin and stable coins are just a- a natural and, uh, more relatable form of store of value for a lot of these people.

Can you talk about the significance of the Deribit acquisition that you guys just completed?

Yeah.

We're really excited about it, we just closed it.

Tell us a bit about that and how you'll be working together and so forth.

Yeah, totally.

And then today is actually a big milestone day because we just announced the closing of our acquisition of Deribit as well very early this morning.

So, yeah, a lot of good momentum on the M&A side.

So OpenMarkets is a team that was one of the early innovators building an on-chain perpetuals protocol.

And like we have talked about for our business, for Coinbase, we started mostly off-chain, but providing access to customers to hold crypto assets and buy and sell them.

But with Base and TBA and increasingly more of our efforts, our goal is actually to pull more of Coinbase's business on-chain.

Now, Sean, you went through a lot, but I'm going to ask anyway, what's on your roadmap? You know, what can we expect in the next six months or so?