Brian Foster

USDC is already large, trusted, widely used, and has regulatory oversight with collateral managed at large banks. As the stablecoin market grows and consolidates around a few dominant assets, USDC should benefit. Coinbase integrates USDC into its infrastructure, and stablecoin-as-a-service runs on the same rails, helping abstract fragmentation while preserving USDC liquidity and interoperability.

Despite recent volatility, Brian remains long-term oriented on digital assets. He sees the secular trend of digital assets impacting all of finance, capital markets, and payments as intact, and he views volatility as creating opportunity. Institutions are still moving onchain across access, payments, and tokenization, supporting the broader crypto asset class.

Coinbase has evolved from a retail crypto exchange into institutional onchain infrastructure. It custodies over $500 billion in assets, with the slight majority now institutional, putting it on the scale of some of the largest global banks. Brian argues the moat is trust, compliance, security, and specialized crypto infrastructure/product experience, so institutions can rent Coinbase's hardened rails rather than rebuild them. The company is expanding across crypto access, stablecoin-enabled payments, and tokenization, and it partners with banks, asset managers, fintechs, and PSPs via crypto-as-a-service rather than only competing with them.