Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase at Bitcion 2014
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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.