Brian Armstrong, the CEO of one of the worlds most famous cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, predicts that the number of people in the crypto ecosystem will grow from the current 40 million to 1 billion in the next five years, according to TechCrunch.

Everyone in the crypto space today’s uses or knows about the exchange Coinbase. They are one of the big innovators and work hard to make cryptocurrencies mainstream. A few weeks ago Coinbase reported that they had created a crypto payment option plugin for WordPress that could support millions of E-commerce stores. The exchange has launched this new plug-in for the ‘WooCommerce’ platform that is currently being used by almost 28% of all E-commerce stores.

They are also trying to get institutions into the crypto world by creating a custodian service that they released earlier this year. However, they are now considering to add another 40 cryptos which they started about a month ago. Coinbase plans to add around 40 new cryptocurrencies to its custodial services. The biggest name that came out in the list of cryptocurrencies to be considered for the custodial services was XRP (Ripple) that previously had a love-hate relationship with Coinbase.

Besides the custodian service, they might even get into the ETF game with the help of the asset management firm, Blackrock. Coinbase has already held numerous conversations with the representatives of BlackRock’s blockchain division, hoping to gain valuable experience from a company that made its name via ETFs and hedge funds.

The most recent news stated that Brian Armstrong predicts the market to grow tremendously over the next years, from 40 million to 1 billion. He thinks that it will become a standard for companies to create their token to use in their respective ecosystems.

“It makes sense that any company out there who has a cap table… should have their token. Every open source project, every charity, potentially every fund or these new types of decentralised organisations [and] apps, they’re all going to have their own tokens,” Armstrong said.

He continues by explaining that the aim is to create a bridge between the Fiat currencies and the cryptocurrencies.

“We want to be the bridge all over the world where people come, and they take fiat currency, and they can get it into these different cryptocurrencies,”.

At the moment, Coinbase only supports the major cryptocurrencies but could in the future support millions of tokens. That would make it way bigger than the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that is also currently getting into cryptocurrencies.

The big questions to make his vision come true is regulation and Armstrong comments on that as a “big open question” over whether the majority of the new rush of tokens he foresees will be securities or not.

Armstrong adds that blockchain is a natural evolution of the internet and that this, Web 3.0 will be all about how to transfer value over the internet and that it is rather a matter of when not if cryptocurrencies will become mainstream.

“Web 1.0 was about publishing information, web 2.0 was about interaction, and web 3.0 is going to be about value transfer on the internet because now the web has this native currency and so applications can be built that instantly tap into this global economy on the internet”

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