According to Avichal Garg, co-founder of venture capital firm Electric Capital, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase will probably not need to mention the word “crypto” in the future.
Garg predicts that “probably in the next five years,” Coinbase will not “really mention crypto” as part of their advertising, as people will just know that you can “buy stuff on Coinbase,” similar to how people view trading platform Robinhood. He thinks it will just be known as another financial instrument that investors can buy and gain yield from.
“The reason I think that is there’s this adage where people overestimate what’s possible in two years, and they underestimate what’s possible in 10,” Garg tells Magazine.
Over the years, Garg has made early investments in several crypto companies, including NFT platform OpenSea, Lightning Network developer Lightning Labs and crypto bank Anchorage Digital.
Garg thinks the introduction ofspot crypto ETFs this yearhas helped repair the damage FTX wrought upon the cryptocurrency industry’s reputation.
“What the ETFs do in my mind is they offset the damage that FTX did. I think SBF really destroyed the brand of crypto and burned a lot of people,” he explains.
“BlackRock coming in and Bitwise pushing the SEC and getting all this stuff through, along with Grayscale winning in court — all these little things have now ticked the ETF. What has happened is you now have approval basically from big chunks of DC and big chunks of Wall Street.”
Meanwhile, Garg believes that even crypto enthusiasts underestimate how mainstream crypto will become in the next few years.
(X/Avichal Garg)
“Crypto is starting to be this sort of substrate that is going to touch a lot of things, and I think a lot of crypto people still think about crypto as its own side thing,” he explains.
“I think that’s not the right way to look at this stuff anymore. I think it was…
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