Coinbase CEO wants to ‘overthrow some corrupt dictators’

Image: Christie Hemm Klok / The Washington POST / getty

Look, we all have dreams, but this is kind of a lot,  even for a cryptocurrency billionaire. 

An April 2 Q&A livestream featuring none other than Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong briefly veered into the absurd when the 36-year-old told viewers that he’d love it if his company could help topple some governments. Yes, you read that correctly. 

Armstrong was responding to a seemingly innocuous question from Telegram about the company’s more ambitious plans. Obviously, the co-founder of a company dedicated to creating an “open financial system for the world” doesn’t think small. 

The question, which Armstrong read aloud and you can find around the 36:45 mark in the below embedded video, was straightforward enough: “What’s the most ambitious thing Coinbase wants to do in the next five years? Any weird moonshot stuff?”

The CEO had some thoughts, ranging from giving cryptocurrency to people in Venezuela to the aforementioned regime change. We bolded the fun part for you. 

One of the ambitious things is like, with GiveCrypto, we want to give 100,000 people in Venezuela a little bit of crypto like in the next, you know, roughly 12 months. And so, I want to see if we can spark a bunch of uses there and actually have a country in the world tip. In other words, like 50 percent or more of all transactions in the economy are happening in crypto. Like, that would be amazing. Maybe, you know, honestly like overthrow some corrupt dictators in the world, that would be awesome.

Importantly, it’s worth noting that Armstrong appears to be referring to what he believes is the power of cryptocurrency to bring about large-scale societal change, as opposed to arming some militia with bitcoin to take down a dictator or something equally bonkers. 

Still, overthrowing a corrupt government is not typically the stated 5-year plan of your average San Francisco-based tech CEO. But, then again, nothing about cryptocurrency is ever average.