Brian Armstrong Speaks About the Factors Influencing Mass Adoption of Crypto

By Kapil Gauhar

Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, spoke about the factors which influence the mass adoption of digital currencies, during an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session on YouTube.

The session started with Armstrong speaking about the 3 important aspects needed for the mass adoption of Bitcoin and other digital currencies. He said that usability, scalability and volatility were the factors that influence the mainstream adoption of digital currencies.

He stated that it would be difficult to use a digital currency as a real medium of exchange in case its price was subjected to high volatility. He added that the stablecoins are solving this problem currently.

“[…] the other thing is going to help with that [valatility] is just more and more real use cases in the world happening so that these crazy bubbles that go up and down and all the speculation in crypto will kind of get dampened out if we drive the utility phase […]”

The session was followed by Armstrong speaking about the second aspect – Scalability. He said that “luckily” there were “five to ten really well-funded teams” focused on this, citing an example of second layer solutions like Lightning Network and next-gen protocols.

He went on to say –

“[…] we need to get crypto to be not just you know [complete] 5 – 10 – 20 transactions a second but on the order of 500 a second to 5,000 a second to really beat the level of PayPal or Visa. That would allow us to get say an app with a hundred million people using it in crypto so scalability in the second one[…]”

Then, Armstrong went on to explain the 3rd important factor – Usability. On this, he said that there were still “a lot of challenges.” He added that the current applications were still “too complicated,” continuing that even if it’s a wallet, whether it is a Chrome extension or not, “it should be working like WeChat.”

“[…] where when you go to the app, it already knows who you are and it has your payment method already attached and with one tap you can then complete an action or complete a payment and so we need to get that usability, just simpler and simpler and simpler, kind of like having the Netscape moment or the iPhone moment for crypto.”