Wrapping up Global Crypto Press' on the ground coverage of this year's Tech Crunch Disrupt in San Francisco we're ending on a big note on the future of cryptocurrency from the CEO of the biggest exchange, at least as far as user base size - Brian Armstrong of Coinbase.

What he sees coming is massive, and he compares it with NASDAQ, envisioning hundreds if not thousands of tokenized digital assets being traded around the clock.

It's a topic he's probably sick of hearing... to be honest, even i'm sick of hearing (or reading) in every cryptocurrency communtiy online - when will Coinbase add new coins, and which will they be?  But this time the answer was a lot more exciting than the 'you'll have to wait and see' that Coinbase usually gives us.

Host of the discussion, Fitz Tepper asked:

"I still feel like... everyone's watching for what you guys at next, like, do you think that's a problem? And how do you move past it to where you can just add 100 and not have the price freak out and not have people watching like that?"

Coinbase's CEO responded with:

"I mean I certainly look forward to a day where we add a new asset to Coinbase and it's a non event and it almost becomes routine and boring." and continued "It will get there... because I think there's going to be, you know, hundreds of on the platform within, you know, years and I think there could be millions someday."

Millions of tokens? To take that literally seems a bit crazy, but tens of thousands? Absolutely possible! But how would we get there? Armstrong believes in the somewhat-near future, a company tokenizing assets and making them available to the public will simply be standard, saying:

"I think in five years, most startups that are created will have some kind of at least tech startups will have some kind of token associated with it, because that's just how you move value around on the internet now.

It makes sense that any company out there who, you know, has a cap table, they should have their own token, every open source project, every charity, potentially every you know, fund or these new types of decentralized organizations, these new types of decentralized apps, they're all going to have their own tokens. And so, you know, we want to be the bridge all over the world where people come and they they take fiat currency and they can get it into these different cryptocurrencies."

Of course, before we can get excited about what may come in the future, first we must deal with the reality of where things stand today.

Until regulators define the rules on dealing with digital tokenized assets, the majority of which fall under the classification of a 'security' and therefore bound to oversight from the SEC - Brian Armstrong, like so many other are forced to keep their dreams on hold.

Decisions made by the SEC over the coming months will decide if these dreams become a reality.

The exchange took place today as part of a wider discussion on the topics of blockchain and banking.

Hosted by TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher, the discussion included Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Michael Arrington who is one of the original founders of TechCrunch in 2005 but has since moved on to other ventures, including some in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.

Turns out Arrington and Garlinghouse go way back as well - when TechCrunch sold to AOL, the current Ripple CEO was one of the people inside AOL who helped make the deal happen.

As Editor of Global Crypto Press - i'm all too familiar with what comes next - it's something not only our own team here is split on, but the entire cryptocurrency community. 

On one hand, you have people who see banks turning to blockchain as part of a natural evolution of the technology.  On the other hand, die-hard cryptocurrency enthusiasts who see this tech as a means to an end for corporate controlled banking altogether - and anyone helping bring them into our world is undoubtedly evil.

To my surprise, TechCrunch's Mike Butcher chose this as the first thing to address, asking the Ripple CEO:

"The crypto libertarians to this day rail against ripple and XRP, and anyone who will deal with them... some of them actually literally called you the devil - so, are you?"

Garlinghouse responded:

"Look I think it's interesting place to start in part because I think there are a lot of religious zealots in the crypto space. And I think people believe things in a way that you would kind of describe as religious zealotry, ripple took a contrarian view pretty early in our evolution and said, look, if you want to really revolutionize the way payments work, if you really want to revolutionize the way transactions work in this regard, it's not gonna happen by everybody giving up their existing infrastructure and just switching to something new as much as I am actually a bull on Bitcoin. 

The Bitcoin blockchain is not trying to be one ledger to rule them. All ripple invented, is series of technologies built upon the XRP ledger that allows institutions, banks, and even in some cases governments, to take advantage of these technologies and dramatically accelerate the nature of transactions fully into talking points. But I'm trying to explain the thing I'm getting to is simple. The idea that the people who say that ripple is somehow that your word the devil, it's because we were partnering with the man we decided, if you want to enable an internet of value, got to connect the repositories of value - and the repositories of value are the banks."

Now to be clear, I own no XRP - and wouldn't call myself a fan.  But i'd be lying to say I think Garlinghouse is wrong. 

Just pause for second and honestly consider how ridiculous someone sounds making the case that blockchain is a superior method of both transferring funds and record keeping - and then saying they expect banks not to use it. That's literally everything a bank does, so of course they're keeping up with the latest tech that does it the best.  People expecting anything else are among this childish part of the cryptocurrency world that occasionally makes me cringe - your heart is in the right place, but it's a fantasy.

Point is - Ripple or some other company doing the exact same thing was bound to pop up, and when it did I couldn't have been any less surprised.  If Ripple is evil, it's an evil that would have happened with or without Brad Garlinghouse.

This isn't to say everything the Ripple CEO said had me nodding my head in agreement.

At one point, host Mike Butcher asked Garlinghouse about his 'general view' on Ethereum, in which Garlinghouse responded by pointing out that virtually all of the projects built on it's blockchain so far have proven only to be largely "experimental" and have "solved no real-world problems".

That's a statement I don't take issue with - I take issue with who's saying it. 

A deep look into Ripple's relationships with the banks, and it seems pretty damn experimental too.  When you look at the specifics of when Ripple announces a new relationship with a bank, more often than not you learn that 'experimenting' is exactly what the banks are doing with Ripple.  They're agreeing to try it out, not replace what their doing with any of Ripple's tech, and never by using the actual XRP token.

To understand where Ripple actually stands currently, compared to how they are hyped up by their fans, see what Garlinghouse himself recently told CNBC "You know, by the end of next year (2019), I would certainly hope that we would see you know in the order of... dozens  (of banks using their technology)" - that statement makes Ripple's true position today a bit more clear.

Our coverage of TechCrunch contines through the end of the week, with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstong wrapping things up on Friday.

TechCrunch Disrupt, the world’s top technology and startup event, is taking place in San Francisco on September 5-7, 2018. For more information and to tune-in to the livestream, please visit techcrunch.com

The first of 3 days of the annual Tech Crunch Disrupt just wrapped up! Global Crypto Press' team in Silicon Valley was there covering it all - those reports are being produced at this very moment and will be up soon.

But for now, we have obtained the full video of the SEC's Jina Choi appearance at the event - courtesy of our friends at TechCrunch.

TechCrunch Disrupt, the world’s top technology and startup event, is taking place in San Francisco on September 5-7, 2018. For more information and to tune-in to the livestream, please visit www.techcrunch.com 

Our Silicon Valley team lead by US Editor In Chief Ross Davis will be on the ground reporting the latest from this year's TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco!

Guest speakers include CoinBase CEO Brian Armstrong, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Jina Choi of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The event takes place this Wednesday through Friday. 

Full information at https://techcrunch.com/events/disrupt-sf-2018/

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