In a recent tweet, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong highlighted the ultimate goal of crypto being owned by 1 billion people.
Armstrong had taken issue with a tweet from an X user stating that crypto really wins when it’s in the hands of a billion people. This, he says, means a completely abstracted experience and one app that replaces all financial apps.
Coinbase’s CEO responded and said it was being worked on. In the past, Coinbase’s CEO had revealed the goal of making Coinbase the No. 1 financial services app in the world in the coming years.
Working on it with @baseapp https://t.co/vRdoYqP1TS
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) April 4, 2026
This week, Coinbase received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Coin, or OCC, to operate as a trust bank, the company said Thursday.
If completed, the crypto exchange will also be able to operate payment products under federal supervision in addition to its custody business.
Coinbase already serves as the custodian for most US-listed spot crypto exchange-traded funds and for asset managers entering the sector, putting it in a key position in facilitating institutional access to crypto assets.
Coinbase Expands Payment Push
Last year, the crypto exchange launched Coinbase Payments, a product for platforms and merchants that includes wallet integrations and stablecoin checkouts. It also launched a payment protocol with Shopify built on the Base blockchain. Separately, it worked with Shopify and Stripe to get their merchant partners to accept USDC.
This week, Coinbase announced that it has teamed up with the Linux Foundation to launch the x402 Foundation, an industry group created to oversee the development of a new standard for internet payments.
The foundation will manage the x402 protocol, which allows websites to request and receive payments as part of normal web traffic, after Coinbase contributed the technology to the Linux Foundation.