cool thanks everyone i'm super excited
to talk my name is nimail i'm at the
head of crypto at coinbase and i'm
excited to talk to you today about defy
and scalability um but in the in as part
of talking about that i'll talk about
the landscape for crypto and why today
is just such an exciting time to be able
to get into crypto um
so to kick it off um what i loved seeing
when i was a yc founder was seeing the
journey especially the early years about
the founders um who had been successful
in coin
in y combinator and so when i saw this
was recently a tweet by fred urson one
of the co-founders with brian armstrong
of coinbase um walking through the first
version of coinbase and where we are
today one of the
largest um downloaded apps in the world
and it's been quite a journey over the
last decade to get to where we are but
we're a small fraction of the way in the
crypto industry to where we need to be
to allow this technology to be accessed
by everyone around the world so quick uh
background on coinbase and i think many
of you may be aware but generally
speaking like the core things that we
offer are we have a whole series of
different users on our platform they
trade crypto they hold crypto um safely
on our platform we have a whole host of
uh different uh employees um and we're
we're rapidly growing um and we're a
white common air company we started in
summer 2012 i was actually in that batch
and one of the reflections that i had
was unlike i think some of the founders
here today i actually shut down my
startup but while i was doing that i was
accepting bitcoin for my startup and i
got super excited about this idea
bitcoin scripting very few people talk
about today but it was an early early um
originator of the idea of smart
contracts and then when ethereum came
out i got super excited about that built
a whole host of security best practices
audited all a number of different
protocols in the space and then launched
my own d5 protocol and the journey at
coinbase has been really fantastic one
is that i used to run usdc it's today
about a 30 billion dollar stable coin
that's available around the world we
launched rosetta a way for different
blockchains to interoperate together and
we also announced the um different types
of open source funding to help grow the
crypto ecosystem
the core things i think i want to drive
home in the chat today are like one is
that the price of bitcoin is one of the
most powerful onboarding mechanisms in
the history of technology so basically
what happens your price cycle is the
price of bitcoin goes up a lot more
people get excited about it they start
signing up for crypto wallets they start
signing up for trading platforms and
then they go deeper and deeper down the
rabbit hole and you've seen that over
the course of the maybe three or four
cycles of the course of the last decade
that we've gone through but it really
has driven hundreds of millions of
people into this space um in a way where
all this technology is
today's still very rudimentary it's hard
to use um it's not super scalable and
yet the demand has just been off the
charts so i think that's one observation
is that bitcoin the growth of this asset
ecosystem has really driven people into
crypto the second thing i think that i
always explain to people is often people
think about crypto as finance and when i
and or or payments is the other quick
thing the idea that it's going to solve
remittances and i think the core thing i
just want to drive home to all those
excited against the space is not just
payments it's not just cryptocurrencies
it's not just finance and i think devon
vinson from open c is a really great
example of that nft is a behavior which
has some analogs in the pre-blockchain
world but in a lot of ways it's brand
new behavior much like the internet led
to things like social media that we
could only have a map you could barely
have imagined at the time so that's a
huge shift in how we think about this is
that anything that can be owned can be
moved um and can be held on the
blockchain
ultimately and you've heard this from a
few other folks that that talked earlier
today is where we're headed is billions
of users and millions of developers and
we're a small small small fraction of
the way there we might have 150 200
million users in the world today and i
probably would argue there are tens of
thousands of developers when for web
development there might be tens of
millions of developers
and the big shift we're slowly getting
is that if on internet we have this
whole osi model it's how we set up the
stack of how we build apps on the
internet we're slowly bringing that
together in the crypto model and it's an
exciting time because early on when i
started in crypto there was just a layer
one layer then slowly added layer two we
added base contracts and apps on top of
that and that's we're gonna talk about a
little bit more today so i think the
core maybe career advice for the folks
who are looking to get in especially for
the first time is one feedback i get
from a lot of people is like is it too
late the price of bitcoin is this the
price of ethereum is this
nft's exploded i feel like it's too late
and i just want to tell you that a lot
of us like what we see every day is a
tiny fraction of what the rest of the
world is actually using right so i would
say it's not too late this is actually
the perfect time i actually would argue
that i probably got in too early um but
the core shifts that have happened of
course the last few years are one is
just powerful primitives so we have
smart contracts we have the ability for
layer one platforms that allow all this
other stuff without you having to build
your own layer one platform just like we
don't have to build tcpip to ship a
website there's a wide open spaces like
the apps that have been created we're
still scratching the surface we tried
one form of nft digital art but there's
a host of other things that we need to
explore and that um not idmas then i
think there's critical technical and
product problems and this as an engineer
gets me very excited the scalability the
security usability and i'll walk through
a few more of these later um there's a
growing user base many many more people
are being onboarded every day into this
ecosystem and that's amazing if you're a
startup founder if you're an employee at
at a company and then at least for now
there's easy funding and again
crypto goes through cycles but um this
is a really powerful way if you want to
start a company i remember how hard it
was to raise my first round as a yc
founder and this is pretty amazing if
you're a founder to at least get started
so here's just some things for you to
think about as you think about whether
you want to get into crypto it's like
these are the types of technical
problems that we get to work on
one is scalability how do you onboard to
billions of users how do you onboard to
millions of developers how do you build
the tools so like nyc stripe is the one
that i when i started nyc i was the
company is the most excited about and
this is exactly something is like how do
we make the crypto developer experience
like stripe another example is security
so you might have here about d5 hacks
and we'll talk about that in a minute
but like this is a really really
critical problem in uh cryptos how do
you make sure that funds are safe
usability so there's so much going on
below the surface and when i go to a
website i don't have to think about
what's happening in the tcp layer i
don't have to think about what's
happening you know an ip layer and the
layers above that all i have to think
about is i want to go to a website i
want to interact with it today we had
not abstracted that away and that's a
really powerful and interesting
engineering problem and then i think one
other one that's really interesting is
interoperability how do we get different
all these different systems layer one
layer two to talk to each other
so i think quick things i'll drive home
is i'm from the speakers earlier today i
talked about d5 and i think the thing
that's important to frame is why is d5
so interesting it's open it's available
around the world that's a massive
massive shift in how we think about
financial services up till the 90s you
couldn't access a you can actually have
a bank go across state lines and yet
just like the internet did for
information crypto is doing for the
ownership and for finance it's
composable so if you're a developer
you're very used to composability when i
do my npm install i don't have to build
every single command or not similar
that's what really powerful thing about
d5 it's programmable and it's the first
time we've been able to create what i
call credible digital scarcity that
means that i can't i can't just change a
database and change a number somewhere
to change a money supply or to change a
rewards currency or anything like that
and that's a huge shift as well
and so when i compare it i think like
one example of these this is comparing
the old world lending companies and d5
protocols together is like you know
there's a process for a lending company
there's a process for a d5 protocol and
this might be the simplest version of a
bank i think i wrote this in 2016 lets
you put in money unless you pull out
money the really cool thing about this
is as a creator of this i'm the founder
why see who's creating this i can't
touch the money
and that's a really profound shift in
how we think about financial services
one of the reasons we regulate banks so
much is that the creators of that can
run away with the money and this really
really shifts that equation and so if
you think about it this is a magical
time to get into crypto you're a
traditional example of like a bank of
how it started you look at the default
lending and in a lot of ways it's
superior there are other things that we
have to figure out in this model but i
think this is a really exciting time
so i think the main thing i want to
drive home in this in this talk is this
um is that
all of this excitement will not last
unless we can solve one primary problem
in crypto which is scaling
so if you look at scale bitcoin is 45
transactions per second on the right
hand side you can see what visa has
right and there's a tremendous amount of
difference between that
the three main ways to scale a
blockchain the financial upgrade the two
pointers an example of that they're
layer twos a lot of these coming out and
then there's layer one competitors
people are trying to refine that model
and so one of the challenges that we
have to deal with as a as a company is
that the user has some currency on one
um thing layer one eve and they want to
move it to somewhere else
and this is today a very complex process
they have to pay a lot of fees on layer
one it says 20 to 30. often is 100 to
200 now then you have to switch your
wallet over you need to be able to
receive the funds and often this might
take up to a week to do
and so the vision that we have and the
type of technical challenge we get to
work on if you're interested is like
things like how do you make this
bridging just seamless and easy the same
way i don't have to think about this
website's different from this website i
just have my assets and i want to use
them wherever i want to use them and so
to us like a profound powerful end state
vision is that a lot of these d5
protocols that are looking for users
they need the ability to move funds
easily across all these different
options otherwise what is going to
happen is that a lot of this activity
may just lead to really really high gas
prices that mean that retail users
cannot participate in the process
so um that's it on my end i think the
quick thing i'll say is i'm gonna be
we're hiring um you can reach out
directly to me my email is right here
you can also come hang out with us and
you know jam on some some of the
problems i would say compared to some of
the startups i think a startup is a
super early stage startups like a super
exciting place to work i love that
experience
the exciting things about like where we
are in our trajectory is that you get to
work on some of the foundational
problems for the space as well so like
open source you get to work on how do i
solve a layer two for the space and my
hope is that if we solve certain
problems there will be a hundred or a
thousand more yc startups in this space
because of the things that we've built
that allow the entire space to grow
thanks everyone