Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase at Bitcion 2014

Coinbase is three things: it is a consumer wallet, a Bitcoin wallet that helps people to securely store bitcoin and send it easily, with mobile apps and web apps. It is also merchant services, so we help businesses accept bitcoin in places all over the world. And it is also an exchange, a way for people to convert their local currency into and out of bitcoin. There has been a lot of progress on the compliance side over the last year. I think it were really four key milestones. The first one was that FINCEN, the financial Crimes and Enforcement Network at the Federal level, they released guidance on virtual currency, earlier in 2013. The price of bitcoin went up after that, I think people saw that it wouldn't outlawed or anything like that, it would be a regulated industry going forward. There was also the second thing, that there were some Senate hearings about Bitcoin where people in Government were remarkably positive about Bitcoin. And really the tone of the conversation was about how do we encourage Bitcoin companies to be founded in the United States. The third thing was that was bitlicense hearing in New York, and I think that New York State is looking at making that regulation easier for Bitcoin companies to get. And the fourth thing is that the IRS released guidance on how bitcoin could be taxed. So I feel that everything is moving in the right direction there. Two years ago it was not very clear how Bitcoin would be treated from a regulatory perspective, but I think today it is all moving in the right direction towards a safe, regulated and taxed industry. We launched about 8-9 months ago, and we saw some really amazing adoption in the last year. Today Coinbase is the price used on Bloomberg terminals, we've also integrations with other payment companies like Square, we've done the largest merchant integration to date, Overstock.com: they do $1.3B in revenues a year and now they are on track to do $10M in bitcoin sales this year. We've also done integrations with Microsoft Bing.com, Mint.com, and a whole number of other ones. I really feel that 2014 is going to be the year when all sorts of merchant integration and adoption really starts to happen in Bitcoin, which is really exciting, because phase one of Bitcoin was really about people buying and selling and now we are really just starting to enter phase two, where people are transacting with it as a real payment network.