Coinbase CEO: Almost every sector of the economy is struggling, and Bitcoin is exactly what people need at this moment

Editor's note: This article has been edited without changing the author's original intention.

Leading US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase recently held a remote employee meeting to update its employees on the company’s strategy during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the meeting, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that Bitcoin was designed to deal with the crisis the world is currently facing.

Some speculate that Satoshi Nakamoto’s main motivation for creating Bitcoin was to build a new financial system with greater resilience. In response, Armstrong said:

“The good news is that Bitcoin was built for this… Bitcoin is amazing — it’s global, it’s inflationary, it’s digital. It’s the money people need right now.”

Armstrong noted that governments in the United States and around the world are pushing for massive expansions in their respective money supplies through stimulus packages and bailout programs to counter the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Almost every sector of the economy is struggling. People in manufacturing don’t want to go to the factory if they can’t social distance, and retail has been wiped out. Business travel is really struggling. We may even see some of these investment banks needing to be bailed out, so to some extent we’re very fortunate as a tech company to be able to continue to operate because almost every sector of the economy is struggling…”

“So what does this actually mean? When you have a lot of money in the ecosystem and the quantity of goods isn’t really increasing because of the slowdown in manufacturing, over time the price is going to go up. Basically, you have inflation. When that happens, people try to find alternative investments that are inflation proof, that basically guarantee scarcity. So this is a great case for Bitcoin and other asset classes that are inflation proof, real estate and things like that.”

Armstrong also compared the current state of cryptocurrency to the early days of the internet.

“The crypto industry is going through all these growing pains. It needs to become more scalable. It needs to become more useful to the average person, and that’s how we’re going to make it accessible to 100 million and 1 billion people, and that’s the infrastructure that Coinbase is really providing.”

“Economic freedom means money for everyone. It means property rights. It means free trade. It means being able to work for the company you want to work for and start the company you want to start… We will use cryptocurrency at this unique moment in history to build a more open financial system and create economic freedom for people around the world.”

With all the rapid change and upheaval caused by the coronavirus outbreak, Armstrong said immediate expectations need to be tempered.

“There is a new top priority… You and your family should prioritize your own safety. That’s the number one priority. And we also need to make sure that we can continue business as usual throughout all of this. Some of the things that we had high ambitions for 2020 may need to be scaled back given this new reality.”

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