Coinbase CEO's Top 3 Crypto Trends for 2026 + More from Davos!

Jason Calacanis interviews Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman, and Gecko Robotics CEO/co-founder Jake Loosararian at Davos about crypto, AI compute, and robotics becoming economic infrastructure. Their companies respectively supply crypto rails, wafer-scale AI compute, and robots inspecting critical assets.

Crypto has crossed from outsider asset class into mainstream financial infrastructure. Five of the top 20 global banks use Coinbase to build crypto products, making institutional adoption—not crypto’s survival—the decisive issue.

Stablecoins are now the main battlefield between crypto firms and incumbent banks. The GENIUS Act requires regulated stablecoins to hold 100% reserves in short-term Treasuries, while Armstrong calls bank-group efforts to reopen its rewards rules a red line.

Coinbase wants crypto rails to absorb far more of finance than coin trading. Its fastest-growing use case last year was B2B cross-border stablecoin payments, where businesses can replace week-long transfers and high FX fees with on-chain settlement.

AI is already changing Coinbase internally and may eventually transact through crypto itself. Coinbase connected an internal model to Slack, Docs, and company systems so it can flag hidden disagreements to Armstrong, while he expects AI agents to use stablecoin wallets.

Cerebras’ wafer-scale approach argues that inference speed—not just model size—can unlock new AI products. OpenAI placed a 750-megawatt cloud order after Cerebras demonstrated enough speed to materially change the user experience.

Power, not chips alone, is becoming the hard ceiling on AI expansion. Feldman says electricity is now the limiting constraint for large data centers and warns China has moved ahead on grid build-out even while the US remains ahead in chipmaking.

Industrial robotics is where AI can turn from software promise into measurable physical-world productivity. Gecko says its technology has delivered up to 90% manufacturing-speed improvements in defense work, showing why proprietary field data—not generic internet data—is the key advantage.