Airbnb co-founder Brian Armstrong reminds world why crypto was invented.
Legacy rails still slow, expensive, censored and geo-fenced in 2025
Coinbase CEO uses his pre-crypto scars to school 60k viewers on real utility.
Some messages hit harder when they come from someone who bled on the old system first. Yesterday Brian Armstrong, the guy who co-founded Airbnb before he ever touched crypto, dropped a casual nuke that cut through more noise than a thousand paid shills ever could. In a single tweet he reminded 60,000 people exactly why Bitcoin and stablecoins were born: because moving money around planet Earth in 2025 is still an absolute joke unless you use crypto. He lived it.
Back when Airbnb was exploding, trying to send payouts to hosts in 100+ countries meant dealing with constant delays, insane fees, arbitrary freezes, and entire nations where the rails simply didn’t exist. Traditional finance wasn’t “slow” – it was fundamentally broken for a global, internet-native business. And guess what? Nothing has changed in 2025.
SWIFT is still a dinosaur. Banks still KYC you to death for a $200 transfer. Remittance corridors still skim 7-15%. Countries still turn the tap off whenever they feel like it. The only difference now is we have a working alternative that ignores borders, censors, and closing times. That’s the part normies still don’t get. Crypto isn’t about lambos and laser eyes. It’s about sending $1 or $1 million to anyone, anywhere, any time, for pennies, in seconds, without asking permission. Armstrong didn’t discover that from a whitepaper – he discovered it after years of getting rekt by the legacy system while trying to build one of the biggest marketplaces on earth. When the co-founder of a company that’s paid out tens of billions globally tells you the old rails are garbage, you listen. This isn’t marketing. This is battle-tested scar tissue.
Coinbase’s stock might swing, regulators might bark, but statements like this are why crypto keeps winning converts who actually understand money. Armstrong isn’t preaching from a yacht – he’s speaking from the exact pain that forced him to help build the escape hatch the rest of us now use daily. The irony is delicious: the same broken rails that once strangled Airbnb’s growth are now the reason Base is one of the fastest-growing L2s on the planet, processing billions in stablecoin volume with near-zero friction. Legacy finance had fifteen years to fix cross-border payments.
They didn’t. Crypto did it in one cycle. Next time someone asks “but what does crypto actually do?” just send them Armstrong’s tweet. Some truths only hit when they come from someone who paid the stupidity tax in fiat first.The revolution was never about replacing your bank. It was about replacing the banks that were never built for a borderless world.
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Nikolai Carter
