Hey, hey, hey, welcome to this week's episode of Blockhead's Blockcast. I'm your host, Takatoshi Shibayama. I'm also the head of APAC for Ledger. I aim to uncover the creative, intelligent, and radical minds who are shaping the crypto industry today. I'm as crypto curious as anybody that's tuning into this show. We're doing this together, guys. Let's go. Mr. Hassan Ahmed, Country Director of Singapore for Coinbase. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, we love to talk about Coinbase, what you're doing, various business lines that you have, your market expansion into other parts of APAC. But first, I really love to understand your journey into crypto. You have a very long history of working for investment banks, then you moved on to fintech companies, and then you moved into crypto. I'd love to kind of learn more about your journey into this space.

Yeah, my journey into crypto has a few different dots that connected along the way. So all the way back when, when I was an undergrad, I wrote my math honors thesis on elliptic curve cryptography. At the time, I'd just done it on a lark. It was an area I was interested in, but eventually went into consulting when I graduated anyway. So it became a piece of paper that was sitting in my closet for many years. And then fast forward to 2013 is when I first read the Bitcoin white paper. And I understood just enough of it that it stuck in my mind. And then it was just an idea that I couldn't get rid of. And just a lot of it started from there. In parallel, I had progressed my career sort of on the risk curve. So I was in TradFi for a while, both consulting, banking, private equity, was at Venmo for fintech. This is post PayPal acquisition. So I started their business operations team and then also helped them scale up and then eventually landed a role with eToro when they were coming to the US and they wanted to come in with a crypto first product offering. And I just saw it as a really great opportunity to be able to take at least a market from zero to one and learn all the foundations of how do you build a crypto brokerage on top of a regulated stack. So that was my most of my US career and then come to 2019, my wife and I decided that, you know, we wanted to change. We'd looked around, we did this top-down exercise. We looked at London, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Singapore just made sense to us for a whole host of reasons, both professional and personal. So we actually got here two months before COVID, 2019. So when I first got here, I was with a company called GoToGroup, which is one of the large super apps in Southeast Asia, was just known as GoJack at the time. I was running strategy for GoPay which is the largest e-wallet in indonesia and also got a chance to be the ceo of coins ph which was a both crypto brokerage as well as an e-wallet service out in the philippines that was a really fun experience put me in core leadership positions for the first time to run a whole standalone unit including the product engineering site for coins ph and i got to in some ways speed run the southeast asian landscape because i got exposure to singapore to indonesia to philippines a little bit of vietnam as well and really opened my eyes to just the enormous potential, not just around e-money, which is what I had first come in for, but for digital assets and crypto as well. With Gojek, they wanted to divest CoinsPH eventually because it wasn't core to their holdings before they were going public. So we ran a sale process and eventually sold that off. And then Coinbase had asked me if I'd be interested in looking after Southeast Asia and starting the Singapore office for them. So for me, that was an opportunity of a lifetime, frankly. Even back when I had opened up my Coinbase account in the US, it was one of the companies I always wanted to work for. I would have the privilege of starting their Southeast Asia franchise was not something I was going to say no to. And it's been four years since I started.

Yeah, what a journey. And what got you into Bitcoin? Because you didn't say that you learned about cryptography. You looked into the white paper. What kind of stuck to you at that time? Like what made you feel like, oh, this is a very interesting product. And, you know, you eventually work for eToro and then maybe something clicked there.

Yeah, there's a few things, as you know, that, you know, crypto is very multidimensional and it's also just very intellectually fun. fund. So some components of it were just the core, you know, cryptography element of it. How is Bitcoin secured? How does mining work? What is like the shelf 256 algorithm and encryption scheme actually mean? So it poked around a little bit there. Along with that, in New York, there was a community forming pretty rapidly. There's a spot called the New York Bitcoin Center. It was actually in Wall Street, right next to the old Deutsche Bank building. So a few of us would just gather there and just, you know, talk about these wild ideas of what Bitcoin could do and change the world one day. So that was a lot of fun as well and then finally you know just as an asset itself right it had already had a lot of appreciation and so at that time I was like oh man I missed most of the gains but being able to invest in it and just having skin in the game also just you know further intensifies your commitment to it and your willingness to want to kind of go that extra mile.

For me when I read the white paper it kind of stuck to me because I was at Hong Kong at the time and obviously here in Singapore as well we have a lot of workers that come to Singapore, come to Hong Kong, and they need to go pay their families after their payday, they use Western Union, etc. And at that point, it kind of clicked to me. And this is just one factor that really got me into it is that they can actually send their money without using these kind of middle men, I guess, and they can use crypto, maybe not Bitcoin, but they can use some sort of, you know, digital token and then send it to the other countries. And if I lived in Japan, I would probably really never think about that too much. But because I was living or fortunate enough to be living in those countries, it really clicked. You worked for Venmo, you worked for Indonesian company that, you know, does payments, etc. I mean, did that kind of like really click to you on that side? Like, maybe this is great for payments? Or were you still more on the kind of this is digital gold kind of concept.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, payments, especially cross-border payments, is one of the vaunted use cases of crypto. And that's what the Bitcoin white paper references in its title as well. It's a goal that the industry, to be honest, still has yet to achieve. But we're getting closer every day. At that time, really, Bitcoin was the only game. But, you know, after Ethereum also came out and this new surface area opened up with composability, programmability, and just all sorts of interesting, you know, applications that could be built on blockchain. I mean, that was super interesting to me. I was I was pretty excited about it early on. I do remember being on the Ethereum ICO page back in the day, but then I sort of didn't go forward. But once that whole box sort of opened up, I was very excited for this next kind of wave of potential applications that developers were starting to build on it. Definitely in Southeast Asia, you know, having more access to financial services is a national and policy goal for many ASEAN markets as well. And this is something that we see everyday consumers just learn the technology themselves and just get started, which is pretty incredible.

Yeah, I think a lot of the countries around here, they kind of leapfrog technologies like, you know, having a laptop and go right to mobile. So I think they're a lot more tech savvy than, you know, our generation, I think. And then you got into Coinbase. So let's kind of double click on that because I really like to understand Coinbase. Obviously, everybody knows it's a US regulated exchange. It's publicly listed. What else does Coinbase have?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked. So I think we sometimes use exchange as shorthand and vernacular, but the reality is that Coinbase is so much more. It is a true global crypto platform. It's multi-product, it's got core infrastructure and liquidity, and it's multi-market. So sometimes it does get a little hard to sort of decipher it from the outside. So maybe I can give a little bit of a breakdown or a teardown for what it looks like. And a lot of this is also in our 10K and annual reports and whatnot. But at a very high level, we're organized across these three or four different product groups, as we call it, which are effectively business lines. So it's consumer. institutional and developer, which is the user segments that we service as well, because we really like to keep the end user in mind as we're designing our products and services. So on the consumer side, we have our classic Coinbase app, which everyone knows you can download from the Play Store or App Store or access on web. We also have our Coinbase wallet, which is a self-custodial wallet. And then we have a few other specific features and products within the Coinbase app. So offerings around like USDC, staking, the ability to you know, access trade 200 plus crypto assets to be able to send and receive them. So those are all specific verbs of actions that you can do with digital assets and crypto that we are providing on our platform. For institutions, their needs are slightly different, you know, around these specific functions. So one of our core infrastructure offerings around for institutions is custody. So Coinbase is the largest asset custodian in the world. We have about 400 billion of assets under custody. And we have qualified custodians in New York, Ireland, and other jurisdictions as well. Along with that, we have our Coinbase Exchange, which is sort of a primary marketplace where users can trade. And then we've recently wrapped that around with an offering called Coinbase Prime, which is more of a kind of high-touch, you know, multi-product service that institutions can access, similar to like a Prime model that exists at investment banks. We've also helped institutions go on-chain as well. So we have offerings around our wallet, which are institutional grade. So things like Axis, access management, controls, specific types of reporting that institutions require. So we're providing those services. And then finally, on the developer side, this is one I get really excited about because we're enabling builders to really go on chain. Our keystone offering there is base. So that's our layer two, which is built to help scale Ethereum. And then we have various SDKs and APIs along with nodes that builders of different flavors can access in order to abstract away some of that complexity.

So it seems like Coinbase is kind of running towards more of an ecosystem play. here where you have retail, you have institutional clients, you know, you kind of give them the whole custody solution and exchange access. And now you're developing base, which is kind of more like an OS. To me, it sounds more like a Apple play where you have the users all on the iPhone and you have the app store where they can access all the applications. Maybe that's a little bit more for the retail side, but even for the institutional side, you're giving them exactly what they need. They need custody. They can build dApps on top of base. So is that the kind of play that Coinbase is looking at?

Yeah, yeah, that's well put. You know, we are an ecosystem. We have many different types of users on our platform. And so that really makes for interesting interactions that we can have amongst our platform as well. For example, a lot of builders, when they come to base or choose base versus other chains, one of the reasons they cite is, hey, Coinbase has this great top funnel. It has a lot of retail distribution. And we really want users to use our DApp. Like we've spent years building this. So we are helping them figure out a And some of that is also in the shape of like an app store type of discovery where we can feature dApps. We can surface those in a targeted way to our consumer base and then, you know, hope that there's some magic happens over there. So there's a lot of interesting experiments that we're running around these to really kind of bring out the ecosystem flavors of what CoinBiz offers today.

And what are some of the dApps that are being built on base? So obviously we heard a lot of these meme coins. Maybe that trend is kind of disappearing at the moment. But what other functionalities or what kind of services do you see or for that are being built on BASE?

Yeah, the way we think about BASE is we really want to make BASE for everyone. And the vision that we have around BASE is that we want a million developers, a billion users, and a trillion in assets on BASE because we think that's the level of ambition that we have to aim for in order to bring the world on chain. So today, we've really spent a lot of time with BASE on just some of the core infrastructure side. So things around security, Coinbase is some of the best security engineers in the world. So just making sure that our infrastructure is secure, things like that. around like throughput and gas. We've been kind of raising our gas targets on base progressively. We announced something recently called Flashblocks, which takes our block building time from 100 milliseconds now. So those are super exciting developments that unlocks more and more use cases that wouldn't have been feasible before. So things like, you know, streaming payments or micropayments, those suddenly start becoming more real. In terms of the ecosystem, you know, we have a very healthy DeFi ecosystem that provides internet capital markets to base. Probably some of our flagship dApps here are Aerodrome, which is sort of a native DEX on base. You've got Morpho and Moonwell, which are lending markets, and then a few other things as well. I think there's been interesting kind of more Web3 verticals that have spun up on base as well. So most recently, Agentech AI on crypto rails was pretty big. There's been a few flavors of Web3 social with Farcaster. And then if you remember Frentech back in the day. So those have all come and gone. But I think what it really signals is that High quality builders are coming to base because they understand that Coinbase has made this a long term commitment. And if they stick around with us. They can trust us to do the right things. We want to decentralize more over time as well. And we will also help them go viral and just get more discovery.

And that discovery process happens through Coinbase's wallet. So I'm assuming that retail or institutionals, when they have assets in those wallets, they have access to those applications as well.

Yeah, wallet is definitely one big entry point into base. For Coinbase and Coinbase wallet, we are somewhat chain agnostic because we want to support a multi-chain ecosystem. But we do make it easy for users to get onto base by default, especially if they're new to the on-chain ecosystem. But we have struck up deals with other third-party publishers as well, because different types of platforms have different audiences. So we do figure out publishing deals and commercial deals where base dApps can figure out how to find distribution in many different ways. One interesting acquisition we did recently is this company called Spindle, which is doing a Web3 ads platform. Some of the folks there were former Coinbase people who have now boomeranged back. But that's, again, just a signal of our commitment to, hey, let's figure out ways to make discovery and how do we just make the ecosystem much more resilient and vibrant for these builders. I see.

And is that available worldwide? So obviously, I'm sure a lot of it's done on a global basis, but let's say like I'm a Singaporean user of like Coinbase. Can I get access to all these type of apps that are being built out there?

Yeah, yeah. So the cool thing is that both base and Coinbase wallet are eventually open source software products. So they're outside of the scope of financial regulations. So that just means that they're available for anyone. Now, you might have some applications that might put geo-restrictions for their on-chain application to be used in different geos. For example, like Polymarket, which is not on base, but they, I think, had geo-fenced Singapore for some time. So application level, there are probably idiosyncrasies, but broadly, you can access the base ecosystem from anywhere, including in Singapore.

I

see.

Well, I mean, obviously, you know, blockchain, crypto is global. So I'm guessing that most people can access. There are regulations around even coming into kind of the, you know, exchange spaces and all the different business lines that you may have. But in Singapore, obviously, Coinbase was probably the first exchange to get a license from the MAS. I know that you have licenses in Australia. How do you see this market?

Yeah, so Coinbase is a global company. And so we've always had international ambitions to be a truly global company starting out from the US. So about seven years ago, we opened up our UK office. And then since then, there's been a lot of work that we've done in the UK and just EU as well. And about four years ago, we opened up our Singapore office. So that was our signal that, hey, we're now as an organization mature enough that we want to start entering the Asian and APAC region as well. We chose Singapore as our APAC hub, as many multinationals do. But for us, the key things that we saw are one is just it's an easy hub to do business and to be able to access some of the regional markets. There's availability of top talent, things like the tax regime is fairly business friendly. But the critical things for us were also that there was regulatory clarity here. And especially if you rewind back a few years ago in the US, that was just not there at all. So that was something that was very attractive about Singapore. And then finally, one of the things with Coinbase is that our mission is that we want to increase economic freedom around the world. And according to the Heritage Foundation, Singapore is actually number one on the economic freedom index. So that made us very values aligned and made an easy decision to put some of the ground over here.

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. And for the regulated exchanges, I find that the services are really bound by what the regulator says. about what services that they can provide. So like in Singapore, you know, you don't have derivatives, you don't have staking. There's a lot of things that you would see on a more global exchange. There's a lot of global exchanges that have like a global presence, so to say, and then they have regulated exchanges, each of the jurisdictions that they wish to be. So how do you find like Coinbase like similar or like different from that?

As I said, having regulatory clarity is a good thing. Having a clear fit for purpose licensing framework that spells out exactly what the rules of the road are, is much better than ambiguity and regulation by enforcement and those kinds of unproductive mechanisms. So we were very appreciative that Singapore was forward thinking and had already started doing the work when we entered. So they had announced the Payment Services Act under which crypto is classified as what they call digital payment tokens. And so we had applied for that license as well. So within that construct, we do offer regulated services in Singapore. We offer to consumers, we offer to credit investors, and we offer to institutions. Now, there are probably on the market margins, some activities that we wish were more permissible. So products like staking, for example, they're not allowed to be offered to retail clients anymore, but offshore companies can offer it. So that's something that we are having discussions with the policy teams as well, and maybe we can make progress on that. But I think the key thing to remember is, especially for consumers of these services, that Onshore licensed companies provide additional protections that offshore companies and offshore services do not. So in Singapore, we are obligated to safeguard client assets and client crypto, and we have to keep them segregated from our corporate accounts, which we do anyway. But that's sort of a good regulatory expectation to have. You don't get that protection, you know, when you go offshore. So I think those are the good parts of having the right set of consumer safeguards that consumers can benefit from.

You know, having worked at Copper before as well, we've spoke to a lot of institutional investors and generally their preference At least from, you know, the people that I spoke to were to trade on exchanges with the most liquidity, right? I mean, that's what their most feel like that's important. Obviously, regulation is obviously important to them as well. But, you know, deep liquidity is something that they really look at. And also, you know, various services that the exchanges can provide. In terms of Coinbase, when you look at the institutional side of the business, how do you run it differently from the retail side of the business?

It boils down to the needs of institutions, you know, being markedly different. from the needs of retail clients. They, I think, are much more methodical about how they assess which platforms to use, what level of counterparty risk to take, because many of them have fiduciary duties or they're just managing funds that aren't their personal funds. There's also additional controls, things like maker checker functionalities that they have to abide by. So when they kind of go through what I would call like an RFP process, they have a checklist of these are my core requirements. These are just my absolutes. And then after that, these are like areas where if I get like a better deal or like just a better grade, like that's good, but I can't compromise on these core set. So depending on, again, you know, what is the nature of the institution, because there's many different types of institutions, you might just have different grids. And so generally what we find is for institutions that are managing LPs or external capital, they're very sensitive to counterparty risk. They want to make sure that, you know, they can defend themselves in case something were to happen, did their diligence. So that's one aspect of it. I think around liquidity, where we find institutions being particularly sensitive are ones that are active asset managers or even market makers. They are much more attuned to liquidity, especially if their bite sizes are much larger. But what we also see is that they also spread their trades around. And so they do use many different platforms, partly also to diversify, but partly also just to get best execution.

Yeah, makes sense. And we talked a little bit about Indonesia, a little bit about Singapore. I'm sure Coinbase has ambition in growing the business in the APAC region. What are some of those plans?

Yeah, we want to take a measured approach to our market expansion. And then also just keep in mind that Coinbase has a variety of different ways and products that we can use for different types of go to market motions. So we have this concept where we call like tier one markets. where we will say that, hey, we want to kind of go deep. We'll set up local entities, get the licensing, have fiat rails, and then localize our platform. So we have about 10 markets around the world, Canada, Brazil, UK, EU markets, Singapore, Australia, and a few others, where we have committed ourselves and we're here for the long term. For many other markets, you can either sort of go on a reverse solicitation basis, especially with institutions that are a little more sophisticated and somewhat have different entities that can paper to different counterparties. That gives them a little flexibility to paper depending on what is their need. We also launched our purpose exchange about a year and a half ago. So that's also been getting a lot of traction. And that's all international. It has no US liquidity and no US nexus. And that's something that we are also finding getting a lot of traction, especially with active traders in Asia. Because in Asia, the market structure is such that you have a lot of personal capital and then some family office capital. But depending on especially which markets they're in, they're go out on the risk curve. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I've dealt with a lot of them. So yeah, I think your core markets are Singapore, Australia, and those are your tier one markets for Asia. But how do you see their trading styles, their affection towards crypto or how they deal with crypto? How do you see them different from, let's say, what you saw in the US?

Honestly, I love this region for crypto. I think it is so dynamic and so vibrant. And even when you talk about APAC, it is very hard to actually say, hey, we're going to do this in APAC because it's just a collection of so many different markets with their own dynamics going on. But overall, what I find is most markets, people are very crypto forward. If you look at just the analysis indices that come out every year, if you look at the top 10, I think seven out of 10 are usually based out of Asia. And I think it's just a tribute to the fact that to your point of like leapfrogging technology, a lot of large consumer bases here, they just picked it up themselves and they learned it. They saw that there was opportunity. Like one of my kind of favorite examples from the last cycle was that Vietnam was building Web3 games and Philippines was consuming it. And so it was a really interesting Southeast Asia phenomena that was happening. So we find that, again, we have just many different products for different types of users. So you have wallet and base for people that just want to go on-chain directly. For some of the more what I would call tech executive, but not like crypto forward type profiles that may be high net worth in Singapore. Our USDC program has been a resounding success. We offer now about like 4.2% on rewards. And, you know, that's something that stacks up better than most sort of, you know, bank reward programs. So a lot of users just come to us and they park a lot of USD in the form of USDC with us. So that's been very helpful as well. And then finally, between perps and just our, you know, 200 plus assets that we have, we got a lot of people who want to trade and get long exposure.

You touched about stablecoins. And I think this year is going to be like the year where stablecoins is going to explode. I mean, obviously, Trump talked about the stablecoins. There's so many stablecoin projects that are being built out. I think this market really speaks to that because of the remittance needs from people who are working in different countries and they want to remit back to their families and such. I mean, what do you think that, you know, Coinbase involvement can be in this space, especially around Circle? What do you think is the winning strategy

Yeah. Overall, the payments and especially cross-border payments journey, I think has had a few gating factors. So I think there was regulatory clarity. Then there was aspects around like infrastructure and just things like gas costs. And then there's also one aspect around last mile distribution. So we've made a lot of progress on all of these fronts. But I think people sometimes forget that even though the blockchain rails can cut out all the correspondent banking middlemen, there's still a lot of these factors like, you know, the last 10% taking 90% of the time that is sort of playing out. That's partly why it's just taking more time. But one of the themes that I'm very excited about is this rise of on-chain FX. So USD stablecoins will continue to be dominant, but we're seeing, you know, XSGD and XIDR and PHPC and, you know, all of these regional stablecoins really come to life as well. You've got market makers like Cumberland that are really kind of putting their hat in the ring and saying, hey, we want to start making markets in these. Hopefully there's some arbitrage with traditional FX, you know, which provides a lot of alpha and just encourages more participants to come in. And so I think once we have spreads that are equal, if not better, to traditional FX, we're really going to see this thing explode, I think, in a way that we're not ready for. For USDC itself, I still see, you know, our partnership with Circle and USDC just being a very long tailwind that's going to take years to play out. Just because the dam is just so huge, right, of kind of what we're playing for. And we're excited to provide that retail distribution and the institutional side as well. And with Circle, we're going to build in core infrastructure. So it's both a great business line that diversifies against our trading revenue, as well as just a ton of utility where you can build quasi-banking services and bring this utility to life. Right.

Yeah. And I just mentioned about Trump and using state coins, but he also mentioned about the strategic reserve. So I think that's a very interesting topic to talk about because for me, when I heard about that, it didn't really sound very natural to me because Bitcoin was created, I wouldn't say anti-government, but an alternative to fiat money. And bringing that back into the government didn't sound quite natural to me, to be honest. I mean, what Do you think about all this kind of moves? And do you think that other countries, especially in APAC, will start to kind of adopt similar type of reserves around crypto?

Yeah, this certainly is the topic of the day. So the US Bitcoin reserve, to be honest, if you look back even 18 months ago, it would have been unimaginable. Right. That's still when the Gary Gunther era was reigning supreme. And so, you know, glad to be kind of past that. But I'm also astonished by how quickly the administration has moved with these executive orders. And here we are. The reality is that Bitcoin is an open permissionless ecosystem. So anyone, any type of participant can start acquiring Bitcoin. In fact, you could argue that retail has had a 15 year head start. So this is a movement of the people. And, you know, hopefully a lot of just everyday people around the world have had a chance to at least accumulate a little bit of Bitcoin and maybe are continuing to do so before perhaps the cap table of Bitcoin significantly changes and irretrievably changes. So I think from a game theory perspective, Trump is very much a crypto president. He's very pro-crypto. And I think they decided that, look, if the US is going to acquire Bitcoin at some point or at least not sell the ones they have, it's better to be first than last. And I think it's going to have a cascading effect across the G20, other financial hubs, hopefully Singapore as well, to start considering that if we were to you know enter some sort of this kind of macro regime or geopolitical regime where this thing really just you know was a neutral credible asset that is you know now digital gold it's better to have some before it's too late

yeah absolutely and as you mentioned you don't want the cap table to be all institutional in countries and i think that bitcoin's price itself is already kind of like a little bit too expensive for retail to get a hold of but you know buying as much as possible maybe when you have time that window's kind of closing if it needs to be like the currency of the people then you know we do want to see potentially maybe holding other crypto for reserves or maybe not even doing that you know in particular if crypto needs to be like for the people you know i think it needs to say with the people if you understand what i'm saying it's not really for like a big corporation to the gobble up where you know countries to decide okay we're going to you know print more money or like you know use taxpayers money to buy more bitcoin it just kind of goes against kind of all that in my view

yeah it's one of those things where because it's just open you know again any can start acquiring. If you look at like just global estimates, you know, somewhere between three to 500 million crypto holders around the world, my guess is a big share of that are still Bitcoin or even Bitcoin only holders. So you can estimate that maybe a hundred million people already have access and exposure to Bitcoin. That's great, right? Like that would have been unimaginable with any other asset class. So I think in some ways it's already happened, right? Because retail has had 15 years to front run everyone else. It's very true.

And further on, when Trump does kind of lay out his regulations around crypto and God knows what they're going to be, do you think that other Asian countries are also going to follow suit with that? Or do you think that they're going to hold their independence and create their own regulatory, you know, kind of regimes around

it? From what I understand, Trump has asked congress to really propose and hopefully pass legislation before the august recess so i do think that you know with the pro-crypto senate and pro-crypto house this is as good a shot as we're going to have to get clear rules of the road in the u.s now in many ways actually most asian markets have front run the u.s on this matter singapore korea indonesia philippines thailand they've all had regimes for a while i'd say that the eu block actually is the one that is currently sort of a little further behind they are working on the me a program actively, but this might get them to move a little faster. For the other countries, especially some of the bigger markets, I'm hoping that this also is a signal to them that this is not something to be outlawed. There's not something to be feared even. It's just an agnostic technology. And the faster you can just set out a framework for the industry to thrive, the faster you can harness the benefits of it.

Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of businesses will go back to the US who have kind of moved to offshore. And now that there's potentially some clarity, they'll move back and they'll see the benefits of the economy running based on chain. They'll see the innovations that will happen in the crypto space that maybe other countries who have been very restrictive might want to kind of capture that as well. I'm pretty much done with my questions, but is there any thoughts that you want to share with the rest of the audience that we haven't touched about?

Yeah, I think overall, I continue to be extremely bullish on the industry and just the potential of this technology. I think we've never been closer to realizing that potential. A lot of these gating factors that I mentioned, regulatory risk, you know, core infrastructure, security, we probably still have some ways to go. Better UX just with easier to use wallets. That's also coming with abstraction that's happening at the wallet layer as well. I think those are all, especially for industry participants who are watching, those are all happening real time. And where my eye now is just focusing more on utility and keeping an eye on for, you know, where are these sort of super interesting pockets of utility that are starting to emerge and they're being adopted perhaps by larger platforms as well so that like more and more participants have a chance to come on chain. But overall, it's looking like a very rosy picture. But as an industry, it's upon us to demonstrate that utility. Because I think if we just keep focusing on tokens and speculation as its own goal, I think that really distracts us from the broader mission. So Coinbase is in the thick of this all, you know, we're stewards for the industry. We have a long-term vision that we're trying to accomplish. You know, we really want to grow the crypto economy 100x and we need the community to come with us, to support us. And we're very excited to be in Singapore and Asia because this is also where a lot of this revolution is happening. on the ground.

I couldn't agree more. Well, thank you very much for your time. Where can people follow you or Coinbase's revolution in this space?

Yeah, our Coinbase Singapore Twitter handle is at Coinbase SG and my Twitter handle, or should I say X handle, is Hassan underscore NY.

Thank you very much. Great, thank you. Stay tuned for the next episode.