Srina Armstrong once feared he’d been born too late. As a teenager growing up in the late 1990s, he could play video games and chat and surf on the burgeoning internet. But he was too young to take part in the dot-com startup boom happening all around him, transforming the economy along with how he spent his days and nights. “I didn’t know if something so important would come along in my lifetime again,” he says today. • Something did. • And Coinbase is the company he co-founded to do something about it. For most of Coinbase’s nearly 10-year history, Bitcoin and its cybercoin kin were not so much investable assets as they were the focus of a philosophical and economic argument. Old, fiat money asked: How can any store of value be based on an algorithm that solves a cryptologic problem tied to something called a blockchain ledger created by a pseudonymous code ninja named Satoshi Nakamoto? Could a hash function really replace cash?
Crypto’s tech bro-libertarian-anarchist evangelists viewed things much differently. (So, too, did criminals and terrorists.) Removed from the clutches of governments, central banks, and big financial institutions, crypto, they proclaimed, was the perfect transaction medium, especially for digital nomads job surfing the global economy. By the mid-teens, crypto fanboys had formed the next wave of support, and a growing cadre of day traders gloated in subreddits and on Twitter as the Bitcoin they bought for $226 in April 2015 rocketed to $13,062 in December 2017. Then along came “crypto winter” in 2017-18, which saw prices crashing more than 50 percent, and crypto’s many doubters began enthusiastically writing its obituary. (Not for the first time, either.)
That debate is now done—and crypto has won. Bitcoin’s price eclipsed $67,000 in early November, and even after cooling a bit, it is up nearly 300 percent from the year before. Trading volumes are soaring, and nonfungible tokens (NFTs)—unique digital assets tied to music, sports, the arts, and the stupid—generated around $4 billion in sales in August 2021 alone. The crypto market cap is now some $2.7 trillion.
Crypto is dominating the startup culture, too. There are blockchain mining startups; crypto trading platforms; crypto finance outfits. And decentralized finance—DeFi—is on the cash is dead.
