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The next wave of cryptocurrency adopters won’t care about the asset class, argues Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. They’ll arrive because of new innovations from startup companies creating interesting applications. When developers design these platforms and services for crypto only, people will opt in.

Armstrong writes,

“The next 100M people who get exposure to cryptocurrency will not come from them caring about cryptocurrency, but because they are trying to play some game, use a decentralized social network, or earn a living, and using cryptocurrency is the only way to use that particular application.”

As a key driver of adoption, new “crypto startups” are poised to set off a decade where entrepreneurs use crypto to raise money on a global scale while issuing tokens to early adopters of new products, ramping to build global marketplaces that outperform the pace of traditional startups.

“I believe that by the end of the 2020’s almost every tech startup will have some sort of cryptocurrency component.”

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Rapid growth will create a snowball effect, enticing bigger and bigger players.

“Eventually just about every financial institution will have some sort of cryptocurrency operation, and most funds will keep a portion of their assets in cryptocurrencies, partially due to its uncorrelated returns. Something like 90% of the money in the world is locked up in institutions, so this will likely drive a lot of demand for crypto assets.”

The next decade will also be characterized by major strides in maturing market structure, central bank digital currencies such as the digital yuan, basket digital currencies backed by consortiums like Libra, Centre and possibly the International Monetary Fund, and scalability – a critical catalyst.

Says Armstrong,

“Once we see blockchains with several orders of magnitude scalability improvements, we will new applications start to develop more rapidly.”

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