Brian Armstrong, the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, has indicated that Artificial Intelligence (AI) skills are crucial for those working in Web3 — especially in the exchange. In a recent podcast interview, Armstrong asserted that AI skills make for an important element for the Coinbase team in terms of job safety.
In conversation with Stripe president John Collison, who also hosts the Cheeky Pint podcast, Armstrong highlighted the growing importance of AI skills across sectors.
He admitted that the Coinbase staffers, especially the engineers, have been asked to justify reasons they were not using AI as the company pushes to increase the exposure of its staffers to the technology.
“We’re leaning as hard as we can into AI. We made a big push to get every engineer on Cursor and Copilot. I mandated it,” the 42-year-old crypto mogul noted.
In an internal message to the engineers, Armstrong said while using AI is not an everyday practice yet, the engineers must get onboarded onto relevant platforms to learn using the technology. He gave the teams a week’s notice to complete the onboarding, however, those who failed to do so without a good reason were directly fired.
“Some people really didn’t like that heavy‑handed approach, but I think it set some clarity that we need to lean into this and learn about it,” the Coinbase chief added.
Armstrong further said that about 33 percent of code for the exchange is already being written by AI. By the end of this quarter in September, the crypto mogul aims to have 50 percent of code generated by AI.
“We’ve encouraged people to code‑review it and have the appropriate checks in place with humans in the loop. Some of the front‑end pieces, you can iterate faster,” he highlighted.
Other than the engineering team, the design and product teams at Coinbase are being encouraged to use AI to improve their output efficiency, Armstrong said during the interview. The company is now rolling out its decentralized exchange platform to expand its offerings to the market.
Earlier last month, Coinbase also teamed up with Perplexity AI to provide AI-generated live market insights for traders and investors.