Brian Armstrong

Enjoyed this conversation with @davidsenra Big fan of his @FoundersPodcast as well

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Built by @fabdarice Track the progress here: x402everything.ai

How long until agentic payments overtake human payments?

Love the behind the scenes look at our recent ad. Incredible work to deliver an important message: the average person is stuck inside an inadequate system, and they don’t realize there’s a way out. We're providing a way out.

@dfinzer Well said. Ignore the haters and keep building. And good reminder that some in MSM wish us harm.

what a delightful, well-timed photoshoot in all seriousness: - i’ve lost count of how many times i’ve heard “opensea is done.” we’re still here. - if you start a business you can and should make money from it. but if you actually know our team, you know that our focus has always, from the start, been building products that people love. that will continue to be the case - my wife got into bitcoin in 2011 (years before nfts were a thing), has always paid for everything herself and started multiple non-profits while advising me. she’s never used the term “product mommy”, but she’s the most brilliant person i know and has built me into the person i am today. marry someone who builds with you, learns alongside you, and who is deeply dedicated to your growth no matter the ups and downs - our industry is still small and misunderstood. for crypto to scale it's eventually going to feel invisible and permeate all of culture. that's a big part of opensea's vision. we saw an opportunity (not without risk) to share it with VF but what that article became wildly misrepresented our industry and our own story. that's a bummer, but we'll have more shots at this - it's not the critic who counts. to create anything of significance in the world takes time, pain, mistakes, courage, the willingness to be both deeply misunderstood and disliked, and glass-chewing. luckily the glass-chewing make you stronger. onwards

Brian sold 2% of his Coinbase stake, about $110 million, to co-found a company called NewLimit in 2021. Its mission is to reprogram old human cells back to younger states. So when he tweets that aging is a “disease,” he’s not making a philosophical argument. He’s talking about a market he’s personally betting nine figures on. About 150,000 people die every day worldwide, and roughly two-thirds of those deaths are age-related. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, dementia, all conditions where age is the single biggest risk factor. NewLimit has raised about $250 million total. Kleiner Perkins led a $130 million round in May 2025. Then in October, Eli Lilly put in $45 million, pushing the valuation to $1.6 billion. What the company actually does: it uses AI models and lab experiments in a cycle to discover drugs that reprogram liver cells to behave like younger versions of themselves. Three prototype medicines so far. No human trials yet. Armstrong isn’t alone. Sam Altman put $180 million of his own money into Retro Biosciences, which is raising $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation with no clinical results to show yet. Jeff Bezos was among the early backers of Altos Labs, which launched with $3 billion in 2022. Add NewLimit’s $250 million and the total capital flowing into just these three longevity startups tops $4 billion. Longevity funding hit $8.5 billion across 331 deals in 2024, more than double the year before. By late 2025, half of all that money was going to cellular reprogramming (turning old cells young again), the same approach NewLimit and Retro both use. The catch: the FDA doesn’t classify aging as a disease. The WHO almost did but reversed course in 2022. So none of these companies can run trials targeting “aging” directly. They target Alzheimer’s, liver disease, immune decline, and hope the anti-aging effects follow. The track record so far is rough. AbbVie walked away from a $1.5 billion decade-long partnership with Google’s longevity arm Calico late last year. Unity Biotechnology once had a $700 million valuation, then dissolved entirely last year. When a CEO says aging “will be optional,” check where his money is. Armstrong’s is exactly where his tweet is.

New podcast dropped - great conversation on progress with @Keller and @fuelfive - they didn't sugar coat it Nice editing also, taking out the umms and pauses

Getting old shouldn't be viewed as inevitable, just because it happens to everyone. It's a disease that kills over 100,000 people a day, and hopefully it will be optional in the future.

Finance was built for humans, but the agents are here now, and we’re building the new payment infrastructure that they need. Big week for x402 - stay tuned!

🚨 Here is the full 40 minutes of my crew and I exposing California fraud, Minnesota was big but California is even bigger... We uncovered over $170,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters live in luxury with no consequences. Like it and share it, the fraud must STOP. We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for this to be happening. These fraudsters have been able to defraud American taxpayers for years without any pushback from the public and politicians. It is time to EXPOSE IT ALL and end America's fraud crisis.

The cloud stack for agentic commerce is coming together. AWS just published a deep dive on x402, with reference architecture for both agent and provider apps on @AWScloud: → 402 response with payment instructions via Lambda@Edge → Agentcore deployment sends USDC micropayment on @base → Request completes automatically HTTP finally has native payments.

Working on something ambitious is like climbing a mountain that’s covered in fog. You can't see a clear path to the top. You have to take a few steps into the unknown to be able to see the next few steps in front of you. Inevitably, sometimes you’ll end up a local maximum and have to backtrack. That’s fine, just keep moving.

Trade March Madness on Coinbase. Pro tip: use our prediction market data to win your bracket.

Learn more: coinbase.com/developer-plat…

A good example of our crypto-as-a-service (CAAS) integration: Webull used CAAS to bring crypto trading to millions of users. By working with us, they didn’t need to start from scratch on custody, trade finance, and regulatory compliance. Faster shipping, and better products for users. Everybody wins.

Where do AI agents settle their payments onchain? Base and Solana. That's it. 97% of all machine-to-machine transactions. 🔹 Base: 59% (70.9M txs) 🔹 Solana: 38% (45.3M txs) 🔹 Everything else: 3% (3.9M txs)

Better financial services

Everything you need in one app.

Operating in stealth mode is almost always a mistake. Talk publicly about what you're building. You’ll build momentum, get real feedback, and someone will reach out with the other half of your idea you didn’t realize you were missing.

Spotted!