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Transcript58 lines
- [00:00]
Namil Dalal
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Bryce
Everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. I'm your co host, Bryce, as always, joined by my good buddy across the country, Mr. Brendan Veeman. Brendan, how are you doing, my man?
- [00:23]
Brendan Veeman
It is a fantastic day over here. It's 2025. We got big things in store and we're kicking off the new year the right way. Bryce.
- [00:31]
Bryce
No, I couldn't agree more. I'm so excited to bring on Namil Dalal, who's the head of Coinbase's developer platform. He's got an incredible story, he's building great products and we're really excited to bring him on. So, Namil, happy New Year and how are you doing?
- [00:47]
Namil Dalal
Happy New Year, Bryce. Brandon, really excited to be on the show. I've been doing great. We had two weeks to recharge at Coinbase. Crypto, as you can imagine, is pretty frenetic. So Coinbase gives us some time off at the end of the year. It was really fantastic. Went to Hawaii, did some swimming, which I absolutely love, and excited to be back and added with you guys.
- [01:05]
Bryce
I love it. Yeah. No time like the present. Let's. Let's jump in, man. There's a lot of crazy things. Bitcoin was above 100k, it crashed down to 90k. Now it's right around 100k. I mean, things have been really wild. But in Coinbase does a lot of things right. They've got their hands in a lot of pies. They do custody, they do trading, they have wallets. We want to know exactly where are you focused and what are you building on? But before we get there, to the developer side of the Coinbase platform, we want to go back in time. I like to take a time machine with our listeners and with you because you've got an interesting crypto origin story that, you know, it's no secret that you're working as the head of the developer platform at Coinbase, but how did you end up there at Coinbase? Take us all the way back.
- [01:53]
Namil Dalal
Yeah. So if I go back, summer of 2012, I've been Mountview, California, and I've been working on my own 3D printing startup. So 3D printing was a big, hot thing, you know, at the time, it still is. And I was in this incubator called Y Combinator and I meet Brian Armstrong and Fred Ursam, who are the co founders of Coinbase. They're walking around Y combinator. There's about 200, 250 people, you know, in the incubator at the time. And they're handing out bitcoin. So they're giving everyone 0.1 bitcoin. I think it was at the time, I think it was, you know, less than $5 a Bitcoin today, like more like $10,000.
- [02:27]
Bryce
Yeah.
- [02:27]
Namil Dalal
But they're going out, just handing it out. And candidly, almost all of us, we were seeing it for the first, you know, many of us were seeing it for the first time, and they gave it to me and I was like, oh, this is really cool. What is this thing? Eventually had me read the white paper, got super, super excited about it, and then went from there. And so I think that's for a lot of the joke I have is like, tell me why you're in crypto and I'll tell you when you join crypto. And at that moment in time, it was about replacing the dollar, making something that was like, not as inflationary. Another big thing was about replacing payments, cutting out all the fees that are typically charged, 2, 3, 4% for merchant processing in the ecosystem. And then making payments global was another really big part. And so I met Brian at the time I had my own startup, had to go through my own journey where that failed. And that's probably the most successful failure for me. And then I went further and further into crypto.
- [03:19]
Bryce
Wow, what a story. And, yeah, for those who are at home listening and they're like, what's he saying? Y Combinator. Y Combinator is, you know, one of the most, if not the most sort of successful, you know, incubator and accelerator for startups in Silicon Valley. They've birthed, you know, you probably know a handful of them, but they've birthed a lot of big guys. And it's really exciting. Sam Altman is part of the, you know, the guy from OpenAI is part of that. And so, you know, what I'm. What I'm so interested in is what was it about crypto that made you say, you know what? My startup failed. But I remember those guys, those crazy guys who were giving me bitcoin, you know, a few years ago. You know, I think that crypto thing is actually going to be big. You know, 3D printing is going to be big, or some of these other technologies. But what was it that made you hone in on crypto?
- [04:10]
Namil Dalal
I think there are two things. One was, for a long time, I felt like financial services were broken. I'd worked in East Timor, I'd worked with the Gates foundation on microcredit and microfinance. And so we were thinking about Ways at the time, like mobile banking was starting to be a thing in various developing markets. You're using mobile apps instead of actual money. And this was, you know, the early the 2000s when this happened. And I also saw the financial crisis up close. I'd been working with Wall street banks at the time, just seeing how to me how like poor the current system was serving our financial needs. So that was one part of the coin for me. But the other part was that the joke I have is if you want to see the future, just go talk to some developers. They see the future early. And so where developers are going is where the space is going. And so at the time I was a developer, I started looking at the bitcoin white paper and then started building on top of Bitcoin. And you know, other people I think came in because it was going to replace the dollar, even payments for a lot of people. You know, they were saying that was the original genesis of the bitcoin. For me, there's actually something else I got excited about and that was that there was a smart contracting language which made allowed you to program money. So before this is super hard to program money. And if you wanted to do it candidly, almost always you needed to work at a large bank and you needed some license and some connection to the government to be able to do it. But the power of the blockchain was you could create these really trusted, safe, secure apps and you didn't need that. You could just be a solo developer in a garage. You could be anywhere in the world and be able to provide really secure financial services. And so, you know, today Ethereum, Solana get a lot of the focus in terms of programmable money. But it all started with Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a smart contracting language built on top of it. Again, it's relatively rudimentary, it's much harder to build on. But that was the thing. When I saw that, I was like, this is it. The world will never be the same again. And then relatively soon after that, I saw Ethereum and I said, look, they're taking what Bitcoin did, but making it simpler. So the way we might explain it would be like JavaScript, like, which means it's a really simple, easy to use language for a lot of developers, while Bitcoin was much more complex. And so that was a really, really pivotal moment in terms of like the power of cryptocurrencies. And that's how Ethereum started taking off and Solana and others in the future.
- [06:22]
Bryce
Yeah, pretty crazy. Super incredible kind of coming up story and a lot of really, you know, unique insights. And I'm curious now if we kind of take a look at, you know, what's different between Coinbase and Coinbase's developer platform. Are you building applications that people are, you know, trading with? Are you helping the exchange get lower latency or is it really building out new unique experiences for users? Tell us a little bit about what the developer platform is.
- [06:53]
Namil Dalal
Yeah, so if you think about Coinbase generally, it started with one simple mission, which is to make it easy, safe and secure for you to be able to trade cryptocurrency. That's how it started. And so what we're doing with the Coinbase developer platform is taking that same focus, simplicity, trust and applying it to developers. So if you're a developer, you want to build an application on chain, you want to build a DEFI app, you want to be able to build a money transmitter app, like a remnants app that allows people to transfer money around the world. These are all things that you need different primitives to be able to build. So let me go through an example. Let's say you want to have people be able to hold money and earn some yield using DeFi. You need to be able to get people's dollars in their bank accounts, move them on chain. So you need some type of on ramping product. So that means someone who has some banking licenses who can get the money from the user's account, deposit it into a wallet, then you need to hold it securely in a wallet and then you need to be able to interact on chain with that. So this is all the things that Coinbase developer platform provides, provide things like super secure wallets, both self custodial and also sharded wallets that can be hyper secure. We offer an on ramp that makes it super easy and free. If you have USDC on ramping, so you can move money from dollars on chain and you'll be able to do that. We offer things like staking commerce. If you want to be able to accept crypto payments on chain, we allow your users to be able to pay you in crypto. And so these are all the premiums you need. And I think one analogy I give is that in traditional Web2 development, Amazon Web Services, Stripe, these are really famous companies that make it super easy for developers to be able to build applications. And as a result, the entire economy we interact with today is built on those applications and primitives that they designed. In the same way we're making that for the on chain ecosystem. And I think that one other thing maybe your users may not be aware of is just how painful it is today to build on chain versus building on web 2 spent the last 20 years making it super simple with a few lines of code fork this. Look at this Stack Overflow article, go to this AI coding agent and deploy this in a matter of minutes for onchain development. Often it can take days or weeks to be able to do that, and our job is to bring that down to minutes and seconds. And again, the issues here are security is super critical in building on chain. We've heard of so many different hacks in crypto, so if you're not designing it cloud clearly and correctly, there's one big risk of like security. Licensing and regulatory is another really big issue that on chain development has that a lot of the reforms of development don't have. So that's the goal of Coinbase developer platform. We want to make it easy to go from basically init of an application to on chain deploy in a matter of minutes.
- [09:43]
Brendan Veeman
And I think the crypto industry as a whole, especially Coinbase, has done a really good job at accomplishing that. It's easy for people to look back maybe a year ago and say, hey, you know, it was pretty easy to buy cryptocurrencies this bull run, last bull run, but if you go back even a cycle before that or a cycle before that one, and you try to just do something as simple as send cryptocurrencies from one exchange to a wallet or bridge a crypto or you know, interact with the blockchain and vote and do like a lot of these things that we take advantage of today, it was a lot harder. And so the infrastructure for doing this, the developer kits and all the kind of modern day stuff that we have really has done wonders for revolutionizing the crypto space. And so I want to dive into this a little bit deeper and real.
- [10:34]
Bryce
Quick just to on that point, because it's a good point. Like every cycle it gets easier and easier and easier. But also what Namil said is it gets more secure and more secure and more secure, right? Like a lot of the times, like in that past cycle, there were times you would send money through a bridge and you wake up the next morning, the bridge is gone. Like your money's gone. Like they're like. Or you have your money on an exchange and that exchange goes completely defunct and takes all your money and spends two years in a bankruptcy process. Or like there's like all these things that like end up being over time, like the, the security and security like because, you know, there's good actors like Coinbase in the space that are building with security first and pushing, you know, pushing the boundaries forward. But yeah, it's a good point that each cycle, you know, it gets more secure and it gets easier to use. But it's not just, you know, for, for a random sort of reason. It's because there's actually, you know, builders that are out there that are doing it and focused on it and it's pretty crazy.
- [11:25]
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- [12:07]
Brendan Veeman
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- [14:46]
Bryce
But yeah, what were you gonna say?
- [14:48]
Brendan Veeman
Well, I think that's the ultimate goal is having people feel as comfortable and safe. And those are. They're equally as important, I would say is to so for someone to understand like how to use these things because that's what's going to bring in users in the first place. But then the second half of that is also making sure that people are not only comfortable and competent using platforms, but that they feel safe doing it as well. Right. You want it to feel like they are operating around their native bank account. Most people can log in, do everything that they need to. And I think that at least from my understanding and I want to get your input on this as well. But you know, the goal is to have an easier, more seamless and even more safe experience than people would maybe have with their banking interface. Would you say that that's accurate?
- [15:31]
Namil Dalal
That's absolutely goal. And so when we talk about in Coinbase developer platform is we want a billion users transacting on chain and a million developers building for them. And these are like laughable numbers in that the number of developers in crypto today are 50,000, let's say maybe total changes, you know, in a bull market. And the number of people on chain maybe are hundreds of millions. And a lot of them are just doing really basic things, they're doing trading and that's it. But if you think about all the things you can do on chain, you can earn yield, you can buy NFTs and digital goods, you can send money across the world, these are all things that people are not yet doing that we think that over the next year, the next few years, that this is going to change pretty dramatically and pretty quickly. And I think to your point, the biggest shift, like the reason Coinbase was found in the first place, was that it was hard to buy crypto in the first place. So we wanted to make it super easy. And I think one thing we talk a lot about is how do you make it so that it's just like one click or how do you make it so that it's just a few seconds to be able to go through an entire flow for a user in a way that they're used to normally. And so again, when I look at traditional wallets, I get a little scared in terms of seed phrases, in terms of the whole process and then the signing process, where you don't really know what you're signing and you're putting, you're doing something, but you're not necessarily sure where the money is going. And so those are examples where like in more traditional, any types of web UIs, any types of mobile app UIs, we're used to this, like your Uber app, your Coinbase app, these are all making it super simple to do that. So I think that's one part and I think the second part is just that like, if people have a bad experience, if they lose their money, that is a traumatic experience for people and that is like heartbreaking for them. And you saw this in the last cycle in terms of what was happening. And so you have to make sure that the products there are built securely and safely. And I think, I think what happens for builders in the space sometimes is that short term, no one cares because they're focusing on growing, they're focusing on yields and things like that. But ultimately your users are not going to stick around and they're not going to come back handily to our industry if like, you know, lack of security is a common way to interact on chain. And so those are The I think totally right, Brandon, is like those are the two things we have to get right, is a really great user experience, something that we're used to. And number two is providing that degree of safety and security.
- [17:47]
Brendan Veeman
I couldn't agree more. And you know, I want to take a deeper dive into some of the points that you've made and just kind of like learn a little bit more about them, you know, especially when it comes to like coinbase on ramp. So let's go back to that and say, like, what is coinbase on ramp for the average user and how does that work?
- [18:07]
Namil Dalal
Yeah, so I have this term, I call it satoshi dominance. And it basically means we're in this era, we're moving things from off chain to on chain. Okay, so think about 15 years ago there was zero assets on chain. The market cap of all crypto was zero. Today it is already more like several percentage of the stock markets of the world. And that is only going to grow like larger and larger. So for people to be able to go interact on chain, what do they need to do? They need to be able to move their crypto, sorry, move their fiat and then move it into crypto. And so for example, that could be they want to buy Bitcoin, they want to buy Ethereum, they want to buy Solana and other different coins that are out there. That could be one example why they move it in. Another example why they move it in is they want to buy a stablecoin and they want to just send it across the world because they're doing it as a remittance payment, they're paying for a good or service that they're buying online. But these are all things that you have to be able to move from fiat into crypto. And so that's what our on ramp product provides, is that basically for zero fees for usdc, on ramping, you can connect up your bank account, you can connect up to your debit card in a matter of seconds. In some cases, you can basically move that into usdc. And then if you want to move that to other cryptos, you can do that as well. And then you can send it wherever you want so it shows up in your wallet. And then as a developer, you can then decide and work with your user in terms of where they want to move that money.
- [19:31]
Bryce
And is there also, I mean, I guess it's not in the name, it's not called on and off ramp. But is there a way also to off ramp back to your bank account or do you need to go through the Coinbase Exchange and connect your bank account there.
- [19:44]
Namil Dalal
We provide both. So that on ramp is the thing that so many people are looking for. But underneath that umbrella, there are basically two, two products features that we have both an on ramp and an off ramp. And basically the idea is that as a developer, if you're building an app, this is the thing you, you like integrate in. It's a few lines of code and then suddenly your users, if they don't already have money in crypto will have this modal that pops up. They type in how much they want to move on chain, hook up their bank account, hook up their debit card, if that's easier for them to do it. And with debit cards, it's a matter of seconds to be able to move that money on chain.
- [20:16]
Bryce
I got it. So you're really developing the tools and resources that other software developers are going to be using to enhance their applications. Is that kind of the way to look at it?
- [20:30]
Namil Dalal
Absolutely. So we want to make it easy for developers to build anything on chain and think about, like the Internet without applications, Very few people were online. As soon as these applications started appearing, let's say for mobile apps, it was like, you know, Uber is an example, Instagram is another example, Facebook, et cetera. That's what we're trying to do is make it so that the next builders of those apps can do them on chain very easily, quickly and securely.
- [20:56]
Bryce
That's awesome. And so another one that you mentioned was, I think you called it Agent Kit. I could be wrong there, but I'm curious what Agent Kit is and is this something where. Because I'm seeing right now, over the past two or three months, there's been an explosion in these AI agents. And I think we were kind of talking about it a little bit before offline, but these AI agents are crazy. They could control your wallets if you grant them permission, you can interact with them. And the big platforms for these right now are virtuals and AI16Z, I think, is the other one daos fun? And there's a bunch of these platforms, but Virtuals is really the biggest one. And is Agent Kit kind of Coinbase developer platform's way of helping people develop these AI agents, or is it something completely different? Is that just a misnomer?
- [21:47]
Namil Dalal
Yeah, that's exactly right. So let's just take a step back. Is that when OpenAI launched, ChatGPT agents became a huge moment. And so for a lot of your listeners, I'm sure that they've interacted with different agents They've interacted with like ChatGpt as an example. Claude. There are many different ones out there. But one of the biggest issues with those agents is that they don't interact on chain. And our vision at Coinbase Developer Platform was we looked at that and said, look, AI agents deserve wallets. Think about like if they wanted to go pay for goods and services they can't open. Most AI agents can't go open a bank account, but they can all have a crypto wallet, right? And so we said, look, they absolutely need a wallet. They need to be able to do things with those wallets. And let me go through maybe a few really cool examples. One is like XMTP allows you to be able to say, hey, I want to be able to trade on chain. Here are some parameters that I want to be able to use to trade. Please go execute that on chain. And so behind the scenes you have an AI agent, it's parsing all the language of that and then it's turning down to certain on chain actions. So it could be, hey, on ramp this much money, then go put this much money into a uniswap pool, go trade this token, go trade this token. And so that's one example. Another example just today that I thought it was really fun was something called Byte AI. And so what Byte AI did was they said let's go to the fast food join, literally have a video that's on Twitter today showing about how they go to a fast food joint and they say look, if you ever gone through a drive through at a fast food joint, what do you say to the drive thru agent, what you want to order? They basically orchestrated that into a voice based agent. So you talk to the voice based agent, you say, hey, I want to buy A, B and C. I want to buy some shake and fries and a burger. And it turns that into actual order, then sends it through doordash to the provider and then actually takes the crypto, converts it and gives it to doordash to be able to pay for the service as well. So these are just two examples. I can go through many others. For example, you mentioned virtuals and we power more than 10,000 different agents on the virtuals platform using Agent Kit and using the code based developer platform. So the vision for us is that we want to make it super easy for anyone who wants to launch an agent to be able to connect it on chain. And so that's what we do is we don't build the agents ourselves, but we allow you to connect to any agent and then do all the different actions on chain. It could be things like buy a crypto, it could be trader trade a crypto, it could be earn yield, it could be just transfer the funds. But these are all things that agents can't do out of the box. But now they can do that with Coinbase developer platforms Agent Kit.
- [24:24]
Bryce
Oh my lord. It's just, I mean I was having this conversation today with, with another hedge fund manager and he was talking about just, you know, are we in a bubble now for crypto and with all these AI agent stuff and you know, the answer is probably yes. But it's the early stages like of a new bubble forming. Because this is like so cool. This is so new and it's so cool. And there are new ways to, to have decentralized ways of forming capital and managing capital and you know, distributing and sharing access to that cap. Like there's just the, the possibilities are really endless. So that imagination of the speculator, like it goes and goes and goes and I think the AI agents, I mean this is very clearly the hottest trend in crypto right now. I was looking at, it was Kaido AI. It's a, it's an AI, you know, site or whatever. It tracks the different mind share that, that different trends are happening on Twitter and stuff. And AI is like, you know, 70% mindshare right now. DeFi is like, you know, a few percent. Depends a few percent. Bitcoin's a few percent and then like AI, right? Like everybody wants to figure this stuff out. So I think for people who are at home listening, you should definitely check out the virtuals platform. I've been spending a lot of time checking it out and playing around with it. Again, not financial advice, nothing you ever hear on this show is. But, but if you're interested in this stuff, I think virtual platforms are a really great place to start. And yeah, check it out because they're, they've, they've really burst onto the scene. And I'm curious, Namil, do you think that it's going to be, I guess I don't want to do it a loaded question. So I'll ask you just point blank, what will be in your opinion, the next thing if you were to boil it down to one sort of thing or idea that's going to bring the next billion users on chain? Is it some ux? Is it some, you know, protocol? What is it?
- [26:17]
Namil Dalal
I think the biggest thing is always just use cases that people get excited about. And so like the history of crypto, like one big Part has been trading and it's because a lot of their assets don't go up. And the amounts that crypto has historically gone up has been like one big reason people have come into crypto. But now we're starting to see all these other green shoots in other ways. So I think payments would be a really, really big one. I think that like there's going to be really interesting innovations that people are going to do in terms of paying on chain. So like one example is fees are often zero for a lot of different payments you want to do. So we're used to, I like liken it to like the 90s, where like in the 90s you had to pay tons of money to talk to people around the world. Like, you know, just to do a phone call, might be a few dollar a minute around the world. And now it is essentially free using like Facetime, WhatsApp, et cetera. And that is similar to I think what's going to go on with the payments industry over time. So that's like one observation. There are other sets of things though that are cool with payments is that you can do things like on chain loyalty programs, you can see just how excited people get for airdrops, how excited people get for NFTs, especially the last boom. There are ways you can pair that together to create really unique forms of affinity and loyalty. Think about frequent flyer miles on crack because they're on chain, and put those together. And so I think that payments is one really huge use case. And the reasons we see this are, one is that the costs are going down. So with layer ones, I remember in the last bull run, I think I was paying $50 or $100 to be able to do some on chain action.
- [27:45]
Bryce
Oh yeah, there were some days at the peak, I remember I signed one transaction for like several hundred dollars just because I had to sell it. I was like, I got to get out, I'LL pay any price. I mean it was crazy.
- [27:55]
Namil Dalal
Yeah. And so that's a huge impediment. You know, that to me is like the Internet version of like, let's say that the page takes a minute to load.
- [28:04]
Bryce
Yeah, right.
- [28:04]
Namil Dalal
There's some people who are going to wait for that, but frankly most people are just going to walk away. And so that's an example with like Solana with base layer two is on optimism. These are all examples where the cost is going down basically to a few cents at most. And in perfect world, my sense is a lot of this will be sponsored by the developers themselves, which is Again, another product that we offer at Coinbase, which is called Paymaster, which allows developers to sponsor it, so there's zero gas fees for the user. And you can imagine, like, let's say, I don't know, every three minutes you watched a video on Netflix, you had to put in 5 cents into a meter. That's kind of the experience today on Chain. And that's an example of something that we can absolutely change and fix using Paymasters, using other things. So that's one, two is just the speed of the blockchain itself. So again, if you go back to the old world, 10, 20, 30 seconds, I used to wait for payments for minutes I was paying for Bitcoin. You'd often have to wait 10 to 30 minutes for that payment to go through. There's no way anyone but people who are insiders in the industry are going to be willing to do that. And so that's one other shift that's really happening is that now it's taking a second or less for you to be able to basically settle and move on to the next thing that you're doing, which makes it more competitive to other systems. So all these are the building blocks that you need to make it available to a lot more people. I think usability is probably the next big one that we're working on to make it a lot easier. So I'll give you an example, like, spend permissions every 5 seconds, every 30 seconds. Might have to say, sign this, send this transaction. If you could batch all that together. If you could say, hey, the user has agreed to allow up to $20 to go out without prompting every individual time. There's another example of something that would make it easier. So again, all these things are coming together now. And so this is why I think that the hype is absolutely, really high right now. But I actually think if you look at the technology itself, it is fundamentally changing more in the last year, year and a half than it has for maybe the last three to four, three years or three to five years. And so as a result, I do think that we're going to have more and more innovations, people going to build on top.
- [30:05]
Bryce
Let me say the hype is justified is what I hear. The hype is justified and the bull market can still rage on. Go for it.
- [30:13]
Namil Dalal
Yeah. What I would say is, like, it's always hard for me to predict this to price action. So what I will say is that people are like the things that people can build. It feels like a world where Legos didn't exist and now what Coinbase developer Platform is doing is building Legos to make it super easy. So now, as a result, the types of things people can build quickly are becoming so much easier. And so that's why I just think that the number of innovations like we often talk about in crypto, it's like the one thing for these last six months, my feeling is now you're going to have like three things and over time, more and more of that. Just like the Internet, you have rideshares entirely different than social, right? And commerce is totally different than that. So, same thing in crypto, you're going to start having more and more bifurcation.
- [30:55]
Brendan Veeman
Well, that's the fascinating thing about getting to talk about this stuff, especially with leaders like yourself who are building it, is that, you know, this is the growth curve of technology. And what's happened in maybe the last five to 10 years is exponentially, you know, faster or maybe even more impactful or more impressive than the five to ten years before that period. And we kind of see this, this compound growth effect when it comes to technology where it gets increasingly more impressive and it does stuff that we wouldn't have even imagined. I mean, if you were to go back in the time machine, let's just say even when the iPhone was created, right? The first stages of the iPhone, iPhone, 1, 2, 3, and you were to tell them about AI agents and ChatGPT and all this other stuff, or even aspects of what's happening in crypto right now, when you talk about decentralized physical infrastructure, all these other things, you know, it would blow their mind. They'd say, you know, no way, like, but that's even at a stage that wasn't that long ago, and we, we have all this infrastructure and it's just this curve when it comes to technology and adoption and security, and it's just accelerating upwards. And so it really is super fascinating. And you know, the other part of this is that we always hear about AI helping crypto, but how can blockchain help AI? And that's like one of the big questions that I have, like, why, basically.
- [32:19]
Bryce
Why does an AI agent at its best form, like, are you asking like, why it needs a blockchain or like, why it can't be done on Web two? Because I do wonder that too. Yeah, that makes sense.
- [32:30]
Namil Dalal
So I would just say one example is an AI cannot just go to a bank account and sign up for it. You're going to always have to have a human behind the scenes that is connecting that up. But people will want Autonomous AI agents that are able to do things on chain. And so I think that's like one really simple example is an AI agent wants to pay someone. Crypto is like the natural payment mechanism for machines. And so I think that's like one really good example. There are a lot of other, you know, a lot of other examples. One is you just want to allow the AI agent to do things on chain. So, like, like you said about the, I think Bryce, you mentioned like the idea of like a hedge fund or some idea of like a, you know, investing AI bot. Yeah, this is a really good example where like, AI is amazing at this. Right. Like, hedge funds have been built on that idea of AI, you know, making trades. And if you can do that on chain, that's a really powerful way in which to do it.
- [33:19]
Bryce
Yeah.
- [33:19]
Brendan Veeman
And I think it also removes bias, too. You know, if we have these agents or if we have AI that can do stuff, you know, they're not going to be affected by FUD or FOMO or emotions or bias or all these other things that really tend to mess with people when it comes to crypto. And for some people it is those extremes. For other people, it's greed. And then they never end up selling because they think, oh, you know, what's another 100%? What's another 1,000%? And, you know, that could remove a lot of the issues and even help, you know, people, institutions, hedge funds, you know, you name it, help them all kind of just create a better situation for themselves because it's removing a lot of those flaws and errors that we see the, the average person make.
- [34:04]
Bryce
Yeah, and you could even see some of these AI agents. I mean, you could interact with them. You could imagine a hedge fund manager having a, a personal crypto analyst AI bot that's delivering it alpha. In fact, there's a very popular one right now that I've seen. I, I, I started following this thing back in November. It's called aixbt. And AIXBT is built on the Virtuals protocol, and it literally goes and trolls through a bunch of different websites and telegram chats and so on and so forth. Twitter. And then it's, it's been trained on large language models and it, so it has like a little personality as well, and it could understand human context. And then it'll say, oh, hey, there's this coin that saw a lot of inflows, good volume, a lot of holders, you know, and it's a small market cap, maybe it could move higher. And it's like, it's this decentralized sort of, you know, AI newsletter in a sense that's putting out, you know, daily picks and it's just really crazy to see, you know, that's one instance. Imagine if you gave that thing $100 million and it was making trades based off of that and like what are the implications for that? So all I could say here is thank God Gary Gensler is no longer going to be in the, the securities Exchange Commission because I could see him trying to throw a wrench in all of this. But with, with a really technological and innovation friendly policymakers that we have, I think they're going to say this really is a new, this isn't a, a securities investment advisor. It's something very different and here's why and here's how. And they're going to spend the time trying to grok this stuff as opposed to just saying eh, wrong move on. So I'm really excited. Obviously the Coinbase policy team has led the charge on, on, on working with you know, D.C. and all the teams kind of, you know, the Fair Shake super pack and all that kind of stuff to, to get things on the right side of the, the, the regulatory framework. But yeah, I'm excited obviously Namil, you guys got a million things going on. I guess in closing I've got a couple other questions but like you know, what are some of the most requested features that, that you guys get to work on? Like that maybe you haven't even had time to work on yet.
- [36:15]
Namil Dalal
So I think one big thing is just how do we make more and more rich to do more things on chain? And so your agent, they want to do many more things than just trade. And we have the ability for you to do like arbitrary smart contract calls. There's specific like curated list of actions. You know I talked about Lego bricks before that people want to do so they want to be able to like add it to a lending protocol and earn some yield on it could be an example. So that's definitely one set of features that we have. Another is I mentioned the on ramp product. I think the biggest thing there as we think about 2025, you're asking me what are goals and resolutions? One is that we want to go international. So right now our on ramp is fantastic in the U.S. but if you want to use it in different countries around the world, we don't yet have the payment of rails in multiple countries around the world and we want to start offering that in more and more different countries so that anyone, wherever they are in the world can be able to come on chain relatively easily. The third one we've heard a lot about is that, like, as the dollar values go up, the amount of security you want to exercise changes. You can imagine, you know, if you have $100 versus 10,000 versus a million versus, you know, a billion dollars, and this is what Coinbase, you know, has to think about at that levels, that the security precautions you're doing are different and the types of, like, things we can allow you to set up, sharding the keys where, like, there's not just one key, but there are multiple keys and they're held in different space bots and the different security protocols around when one of them is signed versus another. And if the dollar values are more than a certain amount, we can provide that. You know, these are not necessarily the most sexiest things, but these are the things that are critical to allow that trust that users really demand in the market. And so there's a. It's probably one third one that we're really excited about for the new year.
- [37:55]
Bryce
Man, that's incredible. How do you choose what to work on? Like, do you kind of just, you know, get together with the team and say, let's rank these things in highest priority, or is there an initiative from your board that says, you know, you have to work on these three things? Or how does that kind of work? I'm kind of just curious.
- [38:12]
Namil Dalal
The biggest thing in Coinbase is talking to users and getting their feedback. So I think part one is that, like, we have a Discord. And so you can go to that. You basically go to Discord and find the CDP Discord. So it's in our. If you go to coinbase developer platform, cdp.coinbase.com, you can see our Discord link. So that's 1, 2 is we had a ton of different hackathons around the world. So as an example, we were in Bangalore, we were in Bangkok, and we were in San Francisco just in November and early December last year, maybe 500 people came up to our booth, all with different forms of feedback or advice for things that they wanted or frustration, candidly, that they had with our platform and what we can do better. Which is awesome, right?
- [38:56]
Bryce
Yeah.
- [38:57]
Namil Dalal
This is the way great products are built. So I would say that's like the intake mechanism to get a lot of that. A lot of it's about just being with your customer. And then, you know, you mentioned Y Combinator earlier. One of that is like the. One of the key things we talked about Y Combinator was make something People want. And so it's all about sitting with your user, hearing what they want and then thinking about like how to build that. So that's part one. And then part two is like taking all that and saying what's the most important thing. And it often is like what impacts the most people, what's the biggest pain point for the most know, number of people in the world. That's the type of thing that we then focus on. So that's why on ramp, as an example, or wallets are such a big focus at Coinbase.
- [39:34]
Bryce
Wow. Yeah, I love. Hey, if you want to be on chain, guess what, you're going to have to have two things. You're going to have to have A, a wallet and B, some value. So you guys are kind of getting to the crux of the issue and building great products at, you know, I think you said the word primitive, right? These great primitives that are the base layer foundation for allowing an on chain economy tokenization of all sorts of different assets. And so, man, Namil, I'm so excited and I really, really, really want to have you back on at a later point in the year just to check in on the Coinbase developer platform. And things move so quick in this day and age and especially so in crypto. And I'm sure six months from now there's going to be a whole new hot trend and new new paradigm shift and all that stuff. So we'll be interested to hear. But if, because it's the new year and we got to give some new year projections and all that kind of stuff, my one question for you is, what is going to be the word of the year, the theme of the year? What is it that Coinbase developers or crypto developers in general, what's going to be that theme that you think everybody's going to coalesce around? If you could boil it down to like one word or one sentence.
- [40:50]
Namil Dalal
So in terms of the hottest thing to me is on chain AI, that is like the biggest thing that has happened the last several months in our ecosystem. And so I think in terms of use case more and like we're just scratching the surface right now and we're starting to see more and more different primitives of how AI and agents are going to be connected together. So that's a really, really big one for me. If you had me pick just one.
- [41:11]
Bryce
I love it, I love it. I hope you're right, man. That would be very fortuitous and it'll be great. So, no, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing so much insights. You mentioned the discord that our users who might be developers or software inclined, they could go check it out. Is there any other sort of website resource link that you want us to put in the show notes for you?
- [41:35]
Namil Dalal
Yeah, probably two great places to check out. One is cdp.coinbase.com you can basically log in, see our docs, go through everything there and then it's discord. I believe it's Discord. Gg CDP is our discord and you can come talk to us, including myself. You can DM me directly, but our whole team is there and you can go product by product and talk to us. And then obviously we'll be at events around the year starting with eat. Denver is our next one. So for folks at the end of February, it's probably one of the biggest events in the us But a bunch of people in the Ethereum community especially come to Denver at the end of the winter and hang out and talk about on chain stuff and so we'll be there in force. And if you especially there's a hackathon there. So if anyone of your listeners are excited to hack there or even just to check out some of the cool things going on, it's a really great rodeo essentially.
- [42:26]
Bryce
Yeah, no, it really is. We always have some folks from our team that head out there, so I'm sure that one of the crypto 101 guys or gals will be out there as well. So we'll have to link up.
- [42:36]
Namil Dalal
Cool. We'll be excited to see you guys.
- [42:38]
Bryce
Awesome. Well, hey, thank you so much for joining us again. This was great. We'll have you back on this was Namil Dal, the head of the Coinbase developer platform. Everybody at home listening. I hope you enjoyed and come back next week because we'll have some more fantastic guests.
- [42:54]
Brendan Veeman
Thank you.
- [43:06]
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