Coinbase. Coinbase; Alyssa Powell/Insider
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, said that NFTs could make cryptocurrency trading more difficult on the platform.
Armstrong stated that he would like the NFT platform of his company to look like Instagram and not eBay.
He spoke out on the company’s third quarter earnings call, in which the trading slump was evident.
Coinbase's head believes that NFTs will one day surpass cryptocurrency trading.
Brian Armstrong, chief executive officer of the company, made these comments during a conference call regarding the third quarter earnings. The platform experienced a sharp drop in trading volume. Armstrong stated that nonfungible tokens (digital artworks or tokens validated on the blockchain) will be a "very important area for crypto in future."
According to a transcript obtained from the Motley Fool, he stated that "it already is today" late Tuesday. Coinbase has always been focused on FTs, fungible tokens, but we are equally excited about NFTs. It could be just as big, or even bigger.
According to DappRadar, NFTs logged $10.7 billion in trading volume in the third quarter compared with $2 billion the previous quarter.
Coinbase said it would launch its NFT trading platform before the end of this year. Bloomberg reports that the largest cryptocurrency exchange in America has received 2.5 million emails asking for users to sign up. DappRadar reports that OpenSea, a NFT marketplace, has 234,000 unique active users over the past 30 days.
Armstrong stated that he would like Coinbase NFT be more like Instagram than an auction-type website such as eBay. "This will be a worldwide phenomenon. We want our NFT platform to be interoperable with all other platforms.
On the call, Emilie Choi (Coinbase's president) stated that the company has been working hard on NFTs in metaverse because there is "just an abundance in innovation in this area, and that we will continue to double down on those opportunities."
Since Facebook changed its name to "Meta," the concept of the "metaverse", has become mainstream. Andrew Steinwold (crypto podcaster) is a managing partner at Sfermion digital token-focused company Sfermion. He believes that NFTs are the missing piece to the puzzle to enable the metaverse to start.
He previously told Insider that "now that that's enabled the metaverse is actually coming into fruition."
