Coinbase's Plan to Revolutionize Global Finance

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, believes that crypto will power more of the global GDP and create sound financial infrastructure with lower fees. He has launched Base, a Layer 2 platform designed to improve upon Ethereum, aiming to process thousands of transactions per second at a cost less than a cent each. While Visa processes 65,000 transactions per second, Coinbase aims to reduce transaction costs from the current average of $1 per transaction on Ethereum. Merchants like Anheuser-Busch and Wharton Business School are being onboarded using Coinbase Commerce, which charges only 1% compared to PayPal and Visa's fees up to 3%. However, consumer adoption has been slow with the network processing fewer than 2,000 transactions daily. If Base becomes successful, Coinbase will need to share control and revenue, diluting its current earnings from being the sole sequencer. Despite this, Coinbase shares have nearly doubled in the past year, driven by the soaring price of crypto and trading activities.