In brief
- Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pushed back on advice for crypto firms to “pivot to AI,” calling it “zero sum, scarcity thinking.”
- He argued crypto is infrastructure that underpins AI rather than competing with it, and that AI agents will need “real time programmable money” to transact.
- Armstrong branded the vision “Agentic Finance,” or AiFi—months after Coinbase cut 14% of staff to become “AI-native.”
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pushed back on the idea that crypto companies should “pivot to AI,” calling the advice a case of “zero sum, scarcity thinking” in a tweet.
Crypto is a general-purpose technology, he argued—”infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is”—that doesn’t compete with the next big thing…
