1 billion people will be involved in the cryptocurrency ecosystem within the next five years, the CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong has predicted.

In his opinion, cryptocurrency is set to experience tremendous growth and that within a five-year period, global interest and involvement in crypto will have grown from about 40 million today to a billion people.

He also predicts that within the next couple of years, the number of cryptocurrencies will increase significantly due to the rise in the number of commercial organizations developing and issuing their own tokens.

According to Armstrong, these tokens will be utilized alongside equity as alternative systems of investment.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Armstrong said that Coinbase will play a very big role in the overall growth within the system.

Brian Armstrong (Coinbase) says crypto regulation will result in the next version of the stock market #TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/2kyxAmhPSZ — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 7, 2018

His conviction is that the leading fiat-crypto exchange will become something akin to the New York Stock Exchange in the near future.

The U.S-based platform that has massively expanded its services in the last few years will host an ever-increasing number of digital currencies, he added.

He then explained that it only made sense that any of the companies out there would think of creating their own token. As a result:

“Every open source project, every charity, potentially every fund or these new types of decentralized organizations [and] apps, they’re all going to have their own tokens.”

That is where Coinbase will become a crucial player in the expanding industry. Their goal would be to act as a bridge that connects people from every corner of the world.

It aims to become a platform that will allow everyone the opportunity to use their fiat currency to buy any of the different cryptocurrencies available.

This is the scenario that could see Coinbase host several hundred tokens within the next few years. In the future, the increase in tokenization will see that number potentially grow into ‘millions’.

Crypto regulation crucial part of the growth

Regulations within the crypto industry will play a big role in the expected growth, and much of that will be crucial in creating a market similar to the stock market, but bigger.

Even though the regulatory environment around tokens remains clouded due to a lack of clarity, the Coinbase CEO believes it is “a big open question,” of what it should be like.

According to him, it’s unclear whether the regulatory bodies will recognize the majority of these new tokens as securities or not.

He, however, said that Coinbase believes most of these new tokens will definitely be securities. The platform will, therefore, ensure it fully complies with regulatory requirements in order to offer investors an opportunity to trade these securities.

To achieve this end, Coinbase has sought and been granted registration approval to operate as a fully-regulated securities broker-dealer. It allows the top exchange to offer services like trading securities tokens and over-the-counter (OTC), and margin trading.

Coinbase’ expansion efforts have also seen it announce that it would add four more cryptocurrencies trading against the Pound (GBP) to its trading platform for the U.K consumers.

Bitcoin (BTC) is already available for trading against the GBP, meaning the four assets to be added are Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and the latest addition Ethereum Classic (ETC).

The rollout began on September 7 and will be done gradually depending on the particular trading pair’s order book.