Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says SEC’s Spot Bitcoin ETF Approvals Will Attract New Pools of Capital to Crypto

The chief executive of Coinbase is weighing in on the impacts of the approved spot market Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds.

In a new interview on CNBC Squawk Box, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says that the spot BTC ETFs will bring into the crypto market new sources of capital.

“This is a monumental step for the crypto industry and for Coinbase too. And the reason is that there’s 52 million Americans who have been using crypto over the past decade. And I think they’ve been hungry for some kind of acknowledgment from the government and the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) in particular that this asset class is here to stay. And they finally got that. It took a long time.

I want to give a big shout-out to Grayscale, which is one of the firms that pursued this in the court to finally get it to fruition, but it finally happened. We had a number of ETFs approved [Wednesday]. And of course, it was a big day for Coinbase too, because we were named as the custodian in 10 out of 13 of these applications. So, I think this means that over time we’ll see new pools of capital come into Bitcoin.

But more importantly, we had a huge regulatory milestone that showed the legitimizing power of this industry.”

Armstrong believes that once new users come into the crypto space through the spot BTC ETF product,  their involvement in digital assets will soon expand.

“This ETF is really about unlocking new pools of capital that weren’t previously available. They didn’t have a way to get exposure to crypto and so now they can come and get exposure to Bitcoin. That’s great. New pools of capital come in. But that’s kind of the first step in people’s journey around crypto…

 I think many of them will graduate from ETFs to actually holding it directly and then starting to use it directly.”

The Coinbase CEO predicts that the spot BTC ETFs are going to lead to a wide array of additional crypto-related financial products.

“I do think that this will, hopefully, pave the way for other crypto assets to have their own ETFs. And then, frankly, we should have index funds for crypto assets too, just like the S&P 500. Hopefully, maybe one day it’ll be the Coinbase 500 or something like that.

And you can even imagine different index funds that focus on DeFi (decentralized finance) or staking or NFTs (non-fungible tokens) or different subsets of the crypto market. This is a really important new area of the financial markets and I think that it will have all kinds of new products come to market after this.”

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