While speaking at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 conference in San Francisco last week, outspoken Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong talked about his expectations and predictions about where cryptocurrencies as a disruptive financial technology will be in the next five years and beyond. He believes that crypto users will grow from a current 40 million to 1 billion over the next five years.

During the interview, Armstrong explained that he expects the overall growth of the crypto industry and ecosystem, as well as the total number of cryptocurrencies, to grow substantially over the next five years due to businesses and other commercial entities creating their own tokens and platforms.

The limiting factor preventing businesses from doing this currently is a lack of regulation, says Armstrong, calling it a “big open question.” He believes, that in a regulated environment, these companies will issue their own tokens backed by their own market caps.

Armstrong said:

“It makes sense that any company out there who has a cap table should have their own token. 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.”

Armstrong added that Coinbase could eventually operate more like the New York Stock Exchange, listing “hundreds,” even “millions” of these tokens in the future. He and his team also believe a “substantial subset” of these tokens will be deemed securities, and are making preparations to become a fully-regulated broker dealer.

Coinbase recently acquired securities dealer Keystone Capital Corp., Venovate Marketplace, Inc., and Digital Wealth LLC so Coinbase could offer tokens that could be deemed securities by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in the future, and to expand its offerings into traditional financial products.

Armstrong added:

“Our approach has always been to be the most trusted [cryptocurrency exchange] and the easiest to use. So we want to be the legal compliant place where you can start to trade these tokens that are classified as securities.”

Coinbase was recently reported to also be seeking input from investment firm BlackRock in order to potentially launch a Bitcoin ETF in the future.