“We have a large stable of lawyers and regulatory folks who help us navigate this stuff,” says Emilie Choi of Coinbase. 

Coinbase COO on operating amid outside skepticism 

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Coinbase COO on operating amid outside skepticism 


federal regulators don't necessarily feel the same way when it comes to crypto so far. Emily coin base especially has been on the front lines of this, you recently had to cancel a lending product that you were trying to introduce because the FCC wasn't on board. And your ceo brian armstrong has been very vocal and aggressive in his criticism, calling me of the FCC in particular, calling the agency pretty sketchy. Mhm. So I guess it's a two part question. Do you see, what do you see changing or and if federal regulators continue in the skepticism of crypto um is direct confrontation going to serve your business well? Mm. So congress has a really rich heritage of having leaned into regulatory even, you know, when the company was formed, it was not a very intuitive thing for a crypto company to lean into regulation and that's actually what are two co founders, brian and fred did I think that, you know, we feel like we have a bit of a responsibility to the crypto ecosystem. We have obviously a very um large stable of lawyers and and regulatory folks who help us navigate this stuff and we honestly want to help both ourselves as well as the crypto ecosystem because we want innovation to flourish in the U. S. Um I think the U. S. Has had such a rich history of entrepreneurship and of innovation and tech innovation and what we're feeling right now is that there's this kind of paranoia around crypto because it's not as easily understood. And so what we're seeing is a lot of the activity has actually moved offshore, which is like the opposite of what you want. You actually want, just a very healthy, stable clean transparent system in the U. S. So that the innovation flourishes here, we want fairness, We want to be treated on an even playing ground with other financial services institutions. We want transparency. We felt like if we were experiencing this, that the rest of the crypto ecosystem was probably experiencing it. And so that was why are our founder and Ceo brian went out with a tweet storm about the experience we were having and will that do you see any signs that it's changing minds? You know, I'm really bullish. I'm really optimistic about how things are going to kind of evolve here because I think that even when we saw with the infrastructure bill, I think that it kind of came out of nowhere that there was this little piece of legislation that they were proposing for crypto and it was a bad piece of legislation and the whole crypto like community rose up and and they were like, why why would why would we do this specific thing? And I think that lawmakers were like, whoa, this is actually a big phenomenon, this there's something big happening. It's growing and it's a vocal community of people who are really passionate about the attributes of Cryptocurrency. And so I'm actually really optimistic that we're going to get to that place and and to that end coin base will be proposing a new regulatory framework for crypto in coming weeks, which we think is a really fair kind of blueprint for how legislators should think about regulating crypto.