Coinbase CEO pushes back against pivot to AI, calls it a “zero sum, scarcity thinking"

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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has pushed back against calls for crypto founders to pivot to AI.

In a post on Sunday, Armstrong took aim directly at the years-old slogan “If you’re in crypto, pivot to AI,” which seems to have become popular in recent months, amid the growth of AI.

“It’s zero sum, scarcity thinking,” he wrote, saying crypto is a general-purpose technology.

"If you're in crypto, pivot to AI."

I used to hear versions of this, and it's the wrong way to think about the world. It's zero sum, scarcity thinking.

Crypto is a general purpose technology. It's infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It…

Coinbase CEO says crypto will power agentic payments

Armstrong put crypto in the same category as electricity and the internet, saying it’s an infrastructure that doesn’t compete with AI, but rather underpins it.​

“AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto. If anything, it makes crypto more important,” said Coinbase CEO.

He noted that the opportunity lies in crypto being a real-time programmable money, a new sector coined as “Agentic Finance (AiFi).”

According to Armstrong, AI agents will eventually need their own financial infrastructure to trade, hold funds, and pay for items, among other things. He believes crypto will power most of all agentic payments.

“They can’t open a bank account, they can’t wait three days for a wire, they reside in one country,” Armstrong argued. “They need real time programmable money (and that’s crypto).”

Bitcoin miners are already jumping ship to AI

The crypto industry already sees a trend of participants shifting focus to AI, especially in the mining sector.

Core Scientific, CleanSpark, and DMG Blockchain Solutions, among others, have rented out their facilities to serve clients, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and other hyperscalers chasing more computing capacity.

Adam Sullivan, the Chief Executive at Core Scientific, said: “The opportunity for miners to convert to AI is one of the greatest opportunities I could possibly imagine.”

In fact, the company plans to stop all mining operations by 2028, as Cryptopolitan reported in December.

More recently, in July, Grayscale announced it would rename the Grayscale Bitcoin Miners ETF ($MNRS) to the Grayscale AI Compute ETF, effective September 15. The fund will now target the AI and high-performance computing sector.

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