On The Brink with Castle Island - Zac Prince on growing BlockFi through a pandemic (EP. 114)

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Zac Prince, CEO and Founder of crypto lender BlockFi, joins the show once again to talk their recent growth and milestones. Today, BlockFi announced a $50m Series C round of financing, capitalizing on their recent growth. We dive into the fundraise, BlockFi's eye-popping growth, and what is driving interest in the crypto lending space today. In this episode:  Blockfi announces a $50m Series C fundraising round What it was like raising a Series C during covid BlockFi's insane traction and what is driving that growth Zac's big picture vision for the company as a global bank The growth that BlockFi has seen in stablecoins on the platform and the role they play What is really behind the high yields that BlockFi is able to offer The risk profile of lending BTC with BlockFi Zac's taxonomy of stablecoins BlockFi's plan for Tether – and why Zac decided to support it Zac's view of current institutional participation in the lending market How Zac thinks about DeFi and the rise of decentralized lending – and whether it competes with BlockFi What positions BlockFi is hiring for and who they would like to apply

What's up, everyone. This is Nick Carter. Welcome back to On the Brink with Castle Island Ventures. Today we have a great episode with Zach Prince, the CEO and founder of BlockFi, which is a crypto asset brokerage company. Today, BlockFi is announcing a $50 million series C round of financing around that we are thrilled to be participating in. And so we got Zach Prince back on the show once again to talk about their traction, what it's like to raise a series C in the middle of a global pandemic. what they're seeing on the institutional side of the business, and to get his thoughts on the stablecoin phenomenon, which is an increasingly big part of his business, and D5, of course, and whether he views it as a competitor or mutualistic with BlockFi. We couldn't be more excited to be participating in this round, and I think it's more evidence of their amazing growth as a company, honestly, probably one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest growing company in the entire industry. We always love having Zach on the show, and here he is. Lehmann, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep! The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of constituted easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin.

Bitcoin. Zach, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. Yeah, great to see you guys. Glad we have an exciting thing to chat about that prompted us to record an episode together. We've done, I've been on your show, you've been on our show, and now I'm back. So you'll have to also come back to BlockFile Live at some point in the future. We would love to come back on BlockFile Live. That was, we got a lot of views on the last episode.

Do you guys have quite the content business in addition to the financial services business? you have to it's like modern marketing you have to build you know content uh in addition to whatever your core product and services these days so um yeah i got a bunch of great feedback on that episode because we talked about some really you know interesting and relevant stuff especially on the stable coin front so people were like oh these are how you know these are the types of investors that you have they seem really smart and like i really enjoyed what you were talking about on the stable coin front and uh it was great oh that's great to hear. Well, there is a lot to talk about today. You have a big fundraising announcement,

but I guess before we get into it, for those who might be living under a rock and haven't heard about BlockFi, which I think is the fastest growing company in the history of the industry, can you just set it up and tell us a little bit about BlockFi? What does the company do? What are the products and services you offer? Yeah, sure. So we're a financial services provider for crypto market participants. We're most well known for our suite of retail products and services. So using our mobile app or our website, you can earn interest on your crypto and stable coins at pretty attractive rates, 6% for Bitcoin, 8.6% on stable coins.

We also have a retail trading feature where you can buy and sell cryptocurrency without fees. And then we have a loan product where you can borrow cash secured by the value of your cryptocurrency holdings. On the retail side, we're also going to be launching a product soon that I'm incredibly excited about, which is a Bitcoin Rewards Credit Card. So you can earn Bitcoin instead of airline miles or regular cashback based on how much you spend on the card. And then we also have a suite of institutional products and services. So we're one of the largest providers of financing solutions to institutional market participants in the crypto sector, which today are primarily market.

market makers and proprietary trading firms, but we're also expanding into some different types of corporate credit. And yeah, that's what we do. About 175 people now, which is crazy because the last time I was on the show or probably less than 100. But things are going really well. We're one of the fortunate businesses in the world where we've actually seen our growth accelerate pretty substantially in this COVID world and kind of weird macro.

economic world that we find ourselves in. So yeah. Yeah. And certainly people are, you know, much more aware of Bitcoin and obviously stablecoins also plays into this quite a bit, which, you know, we'd love to talk about a little bit. But I guess before we do, you're announcing some big news today of a new financing round. So what's what's happening? What's the news? Yeah. So we're announcing that we raised a Series C round of funding. It's a $50 million round, our biggest yet. And we had a great group of investors. It was actually led by Morgan Creek Digital, Valar, who led our Series A and Series B rounds

participated in a big way. And then some other existing investors like Castle Island Ventures, thank you for your participation, Winklevoss Capital, Akuna Capital. And then we added some new investors, including S.C. CB 10X, which is the venture arm of the largest bank in Thailand, Siam Bank. Matthew Deladova, who's an NBA basketball player, and two university endowments who were not able to say their specific name, but they're both pretty prestigious universities.

One's Ivy League, one's not an Ivy League, but really excited to have folks from that caliber of the traditional investing world on board as direct participants in the round as well. What an amazing announcement. And, you know, if you had been told several years ago when you started the company that you'd have two university endowments investing in your company, what would you have thought? Things must be going pretty well.

That's the case. I mean, I probably wouldn't have believed you. I was probably like, no way. So what was it like to be out there on a fundraise during COVID when you're not kind of, like, able to meet anyone in person. How was that process? Yeah, so, you know, we kind of, it was a very opportunistic fundraise for us. You know, we closed our series B in January of this year. So, really, we decided to see if a fundraise was viable based on the trajectory of the business, which pretty handily exceeded the aggressive expectations that that we had set

for ourselves. And we talked to a very short list of folks. Like I think our list is like 15 firms. And we knew almost all of them ahead of time because we had met in person before, talked to them about other rounds of financing that we had worked on. Unfortunately, we received a couple of different term sheets

and ultimately decided to go with a term sheet from Pomp and Morgan Creek, who are also already investors in the company. They've been so helpful in terms of amplification of the Block Buy brand and message. And their conviction in the business has only increased. And it was, you know, the fastest and easiest fundraise that we've ever done, which is funny because it's the largest one that we've ever done. But I think it would be weird if we needed to go talk to 100 people like we did for,

you know, like the seed round. to try and do that in this environment where you know you can't it's just so hard to build a connection uh in the same way as you used to be able to uh taking meetings in person and going to see people in their office or hosting them at your office and so um yeah it's just all over zoom we we didn't have that many meetings fortunately like three of them went really well and then uh you know we got we got things done that's amazing well i guess to some degree the the numbers just speak for themselves. And so maybe just talk a little bit about the revenue growth that you've seen in the business. And, you know, what is driving this? Like, what is happening in the broader ecosystem

that is making, you know, this such a growth story? Sure. So, you know, a couple like high level stats. So, you know, in December of last year, we did less than a million dollars for the month in top line revenue, just under a million. In July of this year, we were just under 10 million. in total revenue. We had at the end of last year, around a quarter billion, like between 200 million and 250 million and assets on the platform. Today, that's over $1.5 billion. And what's driving the revenue growth is the growth in assets on the platform

and the expansion of products that are available for our clients to use, specifically the trading product. So the feedback we got in the third and fourth quarter of last year as people started to get really comfortable with and using our interest account was that they wanted to be able to trade on our platform too because it was a horrible experience to take their Bitcoin off of our platform, trade it for some Ethereum and then bring the ether back onto our platform because they want to earn interest on that as well. And so we built a compelling trading product that is starting to see some pretty significant volumes. And that's been the largest single driver of the revenue increase, but also the growth in the asset base provides more capital for us to have available to lend to institutional borrowers, which has been a big driver as well. So, Zach, for a long time, you and Flore have been talking about an even grander vision than building the kind of preeminent. crypto asset brokerage institution. You've been talking about effectively banking the world. So tell us about that kind of bigger picture vision and where potentially this business could

go. Yeah, well, if you start to put these pieces together of what we're building, which right now is still primarily cryptocurrency market activity driven, you've got an ability to you know, pay folks' interests that you're creating yourself from lending to other folks. You've got an ability to, you know, trade between assets globally, an ability to, you know, extend financing to folks denominated in a variety of currencies. And you're running this whole thing on, you know, blockchain payment rails, which aren't constrained by, you know, the same constraints as the traditional monetary system, that could be something that could be something that is incredibly powerful for things like accessibility of financial services, for things like, you know, being able

to get out of Fiat currency regimes that maybe aren't as strong as other Fiat currency regimes. And we've always thought that, you know, over time, because we saw this in other industries, like the online lending industry, which Flore and I came from, we always thought that over time, if the crypto world sees success, it's just going to become part of the bigger global financial system

and what we really want to do with BlockFi, if we play the opportunity out and make it as big as we possibly can, is just take these things that we built initially for the crypto ecosystem, for the crypto ecosystem, but then apply them to the traditional financial ecosystem. So, you know, what that looks like for us over the next year or two is that we're still very focused on, you know, crypto consumers or crypto interested consumers. But if we look, you know, two, three, four, five years out from now, we're going to start to market to an increasingly mainstream consumer who may not want to own Bitcoin.

They may just want to do things in dollars using stable coins or the digital equivalent for euros or some of. other currency. And we're going to need to start picking areas of traditional financial services where we want to compete with traditional providers like banks and FX brokers and other firms by doing things better, faster, cheaper, you know, with a more streamlined user experience than what they've been able to do. So on that topic, the kind of blurring of lines between the crypto industry and the just, you know, regular. the financial services industry, stable coins kind of sit at that intersection, and they're one of the fastest growing kind of collateral basis on your platform. That's also a topic that we've been

really focused on in the last year or so, and we think it's potentially stable coins are the first true killer app of this industry. Tell us a little bit about the growth of stable coins and what, in your opinion, is driving that kind of user traction on the platform. So there's a couple of things. You know, for us, one of the things that's driving the adoption of stable coins right now is the compelling yields, which exist because we are offering financing in a sector, the cryptocurrency sector, that doesn't have access to the same levels of traditional financing as more established industries. So we're leading with, you know, 8.6% interest.

on your stable coins, and that's a phenomenal hook to get someone to switch from holding dollars in a bank account to holding stable coins on a platform like BlockFi. From zooming out and looking at the ecosystem more broadly, I think that stable coins offer people the ability to transact in something that is oftentimes less volatile than what they're able to transact in on a day-to-day basis, especially if you're. You're talking about places like China or Russia or parts of Latin American markets. And there's tremendous benefits in terms of the cost and speed of moving stable coins around when compared to the traditional system.

So being able to send kind of any amount of money, not like $2,000 or a $10,000 limit or something, but any amount of money for less than a dollar on Sunday. day at 3 a.m. New York time, that that simply isn't possible using the traditional system and stable coins have made that possible. So it's kind of partially driven by that, partially driven by just increased adoption within the crypto world for trading and speculating and financing and earning interest. And it's grown tremendously. You might know the stats better than me, but I think at the end of last year, there were like three or four billion, maybe five, stable coin market cap, and now it's well over 15 and shows no signs of slowing down. So

I think it's awesome to be along for that ride. So it is interesting to see the conversation around stable coin yields because some people will have a bit of a reaction of that when they see high yields on stable coins and they think it must be compensation for some sort of hidden risk which maybe they're not perceiving. Obviously you compare that against, you know, the yields on treasuries, for instance. But I kind of, in your view, it's more a function that this can have been an under provisioning of credit in the crypto industry, which is sort of siloed off from the financial services industry. And so those yields are just compensation for the lenders that are willing to kind of provide credit. Is that kind of an accurate way to put

it? Yeah, I mean, I generally think of, you know, things on like a risk-adjusted return basis. And when you, you know, add that risk adjustment, I think you're incredibly well compensated for the risk that you're taking on a platform like BlockFi where you basically have, you know, the corporate risk of us being good actors and, you know, managing our own finances the way that we're supposed to. And having the proper, you know, know, operational and security protocols in place to not have any of the money just be stolen. And then you have the risk of our lending activities. And on the lending activity front, the best analogy for what we're doing is securities lending, where most of your, most or all of your lending positions are collateralized with liquid collateral from the counterparty. And it's one of the least risky types of lending that exists in the traditional broker dealer or banking world. And, you know, know, as a result, your risk-adjusted return on that type of activity, you know, getting 8.6%

for it versus what's the, you know, what do you get in your money market or your risk-free accounts and banks now sub-1%. So you're getting, you know, 8x, 8x the return for, you know, maybe marginally more risk, but certainly not eight times the risk. Yeah, it's great. Effectively negative in real terms. for those money market accounts. Your target is 2% inflation and you're earning 80 bibs a year or whatever. So it's like...

So in terms of the actual stable coins that you support on the platform, it's interesting. We talk about them with these kind of homogenous, you know, terms, stable coins, crypto dollars. But I would say there's a fair amount of heterogeneity in terms of the ways, the various projects target the return of the dollar. And also the assurance. that you get with them, the transparency and the convertibility assurances.

So, you know, tell us about the potential growth in different stable coin types on the platform and how you expect that market to emerge, whether you think maybe we'll just have a single winner or lots of different kind of constructs to the same flavor of risk. Yeah, so at a high level, I think you can kind of put stable coins in three different buckets. you've got, you know, reputably and verifiably backed by dollars in a bank account, um, less reputably or less verifiably backed by dollars in a bank account, but kind of intended to be backed by dollars in a bank account. And then you've got pegged where there's no dollars in a bank account anywhere and you're,

you know, uh, in some other way, uh, holding something's value, uh, to the dollar. Right now, we're only active in that first bucket. So the Gemini dollar, uh, USDC and the Paxos Pax dollar is what's currently available. And those are all, you know, verifiably backed by dollars in a bank account with regular audits and all of that good stuff. By the end of Q3, we'll be adding tether to the platform, which falls into the second bucket of, you know, a little bit less. And sorry for the background noise, a little bit less verifiably backed by dollars in a bank account. But tether is the most widely adopted stable coin.

And we're actually going to treat it a little bit differently on our platform. So the way tether is going to work versus the other stable coins is kind of how like a dollar euro would work. We're actually not going to treat it as always interchangeable with a dollar. It's going to have a floating rate based on the market price for tether. You will not be able to get a loan denominated in tether. Loans will stay denominated in dollars, but you can have it full. funded in Tether as the payment rail if you want to. And we think that, and it's not going to be available to U.S. consumers at the outset.

So it'll only be available for BlockFi clients that are outside the U.S. But we're really excited about that. And as of now, we don't have any plans to move into the pegged stable coin world. That's actually the one that, you know, I get the most concerned about long term, only because the incentives to, you know, break a peg can get pretty compelling. And, you know, there are people who make a living off of, you know, doing things like breaking currency pegs or arbitraging scenarios that haven't been, you know, battle tested in capital markets. So, yeah, that's where we are. That's a really pragmatic choice, I think.

Obviously, you know, taking note of the fact that Tether is by far the biggest crypto dollar. but historically it has departed from its peg in both directions. So you're breaking the linkage between unit of account and and medium of exchange, which makes a ton of sense. I heard an interesting, you know, what really converted me into thinking we just had to support Tether was Duffy Wan's logic that she shared with me at like a dinner table around, you know, if Tether was going to be illegitimate or, if it was going to, you know, lose the faith of folks that are transacting in it and, you know,

treating it like a dollar. It's had so many opportunities to do that, you know, between BitFinex hacks and, you know, banking issues that they've had. And they've just kept chugging along and it's kept growing. And that's really admirable, frankly. It's different than, you know, being a. reputably verifiable stable coin like USTC or the others that are in that bucket. But it's incredible what they've accomplished in my view.

So, Zach, since the last time we spoke, I think it's been pretty wild from our perspective just to see the pace that institutions are kind of deploying capital into this industry. And primarily with Bitcoin. And I'd even extend that to individuals at big institutions. Like we're having an unbelievable amount of embeds. just from folks that are at some of these bigger institutions or might be LPs in various funds. And they're saying, well, I have some exposure to this industry, but I need to buy X million dollars worth of Bitcoin within the next a couple weeks because I'm worried about what's going

on in the macro environment. And I think the Paul Tudor Jones sort of typifies this. I think a lot of people took note of that. So, I mean, have you seen that impacting your business at all? Definitely. I mean, look, I think we're very fortunate to benefit it from a couple of trends that are much bigger than blockfi. The first one is just that everything digital first is doing great right now.

And it's pretty obvious that cryptocurrency falls into that bucket. And the environment that we found ourselves in with folks working from home has created a scenario where people have a bit more time on their hands to day trade in their brokerage account or, you know, decide to go buy Bitcoin or read about Bitcoin for the first time if they haven't yet. Second trend is the macroeconomic environment with the unprecedented levels of central bank fiscal stimulus. Historically, things like gold have done well in times like that. And, you know, Bitcoin to a lot of people is digital gold. So there's a ton of interest coming from, you know, kind of that angle.

And then the last thing is that you've got this ecosystem around cryptocurrency that's stronger than it's ever been before. And it's a combination of, you know, companies like BlockFi who are kind of cryptocurrency-specific, adding more products and services and functionalities around these assets. And then also crossovers like Fidelity Square, Robin Hood, CME, you know, building products for folks to access cryptocurrencies on their platform. all of those things, like as a standalone, could grow the space by 2x from where it is now easily.

And they're all happening together at the same time. So I've never been more bullish. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, you captured it well that there's various things that are all happening at the same time. It's really helping, you know, crypto assets like Bitcoin, but it's also happening with US dollars in the form of the stable coins. One of the things that I've noticed is just that the institutional lending conversations are changing and they're evolving really rapidly. And it's probably a function of some larger institutions

holding long exposure to Bitcoin for the first time and seeing some things that they can do with it in order to, you know, free up capital and to deploy that in other areas. What are you seeing right now just in that institutional lending market? Well, look, the, you know, the challenge that we originally thought of from a retail point of view at BlockFi of, hey, I've got this asset. that I can't do the same things with as traditional assets, whether it's stocks or real estate. Institutions have that exact same problem. If I wanna have a million dollar position in Bitcoin

as a hedge fund manager or a long only institutional investor or a family office, I'm thinking about the capital efficiency of that position and I don't necessarily want it to be fully funded with equity capital. I might wanna finance a little bit of that position in my portfolio if, you know, leverage and financing as part of my, you know, general approach to managing my assets. Additionally, folks generally after they've had exposure a little bit longer might start to say,

is this capital, you know, generating a return for me above and beyond, like what the base asset generates? And, you know, there's things like the Blockify Interest account and other. other strategies available to folks who want to create a yield kicker now, which are generating a ton of interest on our end. And then lastly, I would say you've had a pretty impressive uptick in derivatives volume across both futures and options, which creates a need for incremental financing from some of the market making and proprietary trading firms who've been here for a while. But now they're just

able to do so much more in this market because different trading products are growing in terms of their popularity and volumes. Yeah, I was saying this to someone earlier today that just the derivatives volume and the open interest is just going off the charts over the past few weeks. Why is that? Is that just people getting or institutions rather getting long exposure via the futures. What do you think is driving that? Well, a lot of folks, you know, kind of out of necessity, start with futures or GBTC just because they can, you know, transact on venues that they're familiar with. So if you're a family office or an RIA, that's probably GBTC because, you know, most of what you do is in the securities world. If you're a macro hedge fund, it's probably

futures on the CME. And, you know, those. There's some drawbacks to getting exposure that way in terms of your implied financing cost, if you're accessing the futures market or the premium that's embedded in the price of GVTC. So, you know, then you kind of, you get in and you start to think about those exact points and whether there might be, you know, other markets where there's a different type of exposure to be had or capital efficiency. for those positions or arbitrage opportunities for those positions. And, you know, hopefully you end up talking to someone like our institutional services team

who has a ton of, you know, different strategies and options available to help people with those different objectives in this market. The other thing, so kind of back to the point of a lot of different things happening at once, one thing that's happening just is defy. So this is something that, you know, in the institutional conversations that we're having, we're barely talking about this. I think the awareness of defy in kind of traditional finance

is extraordinarily low. In the tech world, it's really high. So I guess I'd be remiss if I didn't get your opinion on just the growth of decentralized finance and how you're viewing that space. Yeah, I love it. You know, I think my overarching view is that, We're all kind of one team, one dream in crypto land today.

And the objective is to grow the market. And so anything that generates excitement and attention and has, you know, a compelling value proposition for users is great for BlockFi as a result of being great for the space overall. We think that we have some, you know, fundamental advantages to defy in terms of our ability to, you know, control rates, know who are. customers are, operate in a regulatory compliant manner, which enables us to, you know, transact with certain firms that, you know, have that as a requirement for anyone that they do business

with. But lately, you've had an explosion in defy interest, primarily because the protocol started, you know, printing their own tokens, which were assigned, you know, value by the cryptocurrency market, which might be really high or really low, depending on how you view valuation for these types of things. And the numbers got pretty crazy. So, you know, you could, uh, steak die, uh, and, and lever up a steak to die position on a certain protocol, borrow something else, put it over here and, you know, earn like 150% APR in yams or like, you know, some, like, like, like it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, fast because of the, you know, creation of, you know, new coins from the protocols and then the

incentivization of users to use the protocols by adding those into the yield that was generated from interacting with it. So I think it's great. There's a lot of stuff that has to get worked out. And we've never thought that, you know, incentivization via a utility token. type model was something that made sense for us long term. But it's a lot of fun to watch, that's for sure. When you look at Defi, probably the first real breakout project was a solution

which allowed you to effectively lever up against some liquid collateral, you know, which is Maker. I mean, it allows you to kind of transform risk in a variety of ways, but that was one application of Maker. And then, you know, the other really big kind of blue chip defy product is compound. And there's a kind of variety of ways to describe compound, but some people call it a lending facility. Do you consider these to be in any way competitive with what you do or synergistic or just not the same form of activity at all? I would say, you know, a little bit of all three.

So, you know, certainly competitive in the sense. that they're competing for, you know, mine share with consumers who are, you know, active in the, in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, synergistic in the sense that, you know, we can potentially leverage these protocols at times as a user. We haven't done that to date,

but we certainly, you know, monitor the space very closely, and I wouldn't rule it out long term. And completely different in the same. sense that there's very fundamental differences in terms of how we operate. So to use MakerDAO as an example, in the middle of March, you know, when we had a pretty, you know, steep bout of downside volatility, there were some, you know, real issues with how the Maker protocol operated.

And everybody was treated the same, regardless of whether you, you know, borrowed $2 million or $2,000, the prices at which positions were closed out for folks were, in some cases, you know, very bad. And while, you know, a lot of our risk management is completely automated and rules-based, we maintain a view that, you know, some level of discretion and certainly an ability to, you know, make a decision that might be short-term bad for all. bottom line, but long-term good for our relationship with our clients is an ability that we want to, you know, have and maintain. So, you know, there's little moments like that where people realize

the differences. Another one is when, like, like we'll commit to rates, you know, as a baseline, the rates that we pay to folks who hold assets with us only change monthly. And when we're lending folks dollars, we lock in the rate for at least a year. Whereas a lot of these protocols have variable rates on a block-by-block basis in some cases, which can be challenging for, you know, managing certain objectives. Like another thing that had happened to Maker before is people, you know, got loans from Maker and they were like, this is awesome. I'm only paying 1%. And then like all of a sudden one day, like the rate, you know, started pretty quickly ticking up and they're like, oh my God, now I understand what a floating

rate loan means because I went from paying 1% to paying like 23% like this sucks. It's like homeowners in 2007 or something. Yeah. So, you know, I think it's great. I love the, you know, the innovation concept that, that, that, uh, that, uh, DeFi has where literally everyone can access it, you know, like we're more global than your traditional FinTech company at BlockFi, but we're not 100% global. We've got regulatory requirements that prohibit us from working with folks from certain regions, and Defi doesn't have that.

And then on the user experience, as a result of those regulations, we have to ask folks for their name and driver's license or passport photo or social security number or whatever. And like, you don't have to do any of that on Defi. So that's kind of cool. So but it's different. So along with raising capital, I assume this means you're going to be hiring more and more folks onto the team. So just talk a little bit about what your plans are with hiring. And you've made some splashy hires over the past couple weeks, actually.

Yeah, we're, you know, we're hiring across the board. So if you're if you're someone that's been interested in working in the cryptocurrency sector and you're interested in the intersection of crypto and traditional financial services, I would definitely encourage you to check out our jobs board. One of the things that's new is that we're hiring not only in the U.S., but also now in London and Singapore, where we also have teams. And then on the engineering side, we've had outposts in Poland and Argentina in addition to our engineering team in the U.S. for a while. And everybody's kind of nebulously everywhere right now because we're not going into the office. So we're much more amenable to hiring folks that aren't based in, you know,

exactly the location where we already have physical presences. And I think our projection right now has us at like 200 and around 250 by the end of the year or 175 now. So I have been just constantly amazed at, you know, the speed at which our people ops team has been able to bring in great new folks to business and then also even in this you know fully remote environment maintain what feels like almost the exact same culture that we had when we were all coming into the office together in terms of I think we like have it maybe written down somewhere now that like our onboarding policy is is literally just throw people into the deep end of the pool and like

my favorite piece of feedback is when people are like yeah that's you know my second week and I've got more work than I can handle but like I love it And so, yeah, we're continuing to hire across the board. And like some people worry sometimes that like they haven't worked in the cryptocurrency sector before. That's not a problem for us at all. We're happy to educate folks on the crypto sector and be the first job in the cryptocurrency industry that someone's had. And sometimes that's preferred for us depending on the role because the way you manage risk when you're doing the type of lending that we're doing. or the way that you market to consumers and build trust and manage things like payback periods

for B to C marketing, they aren't different because we're in crypto. We just kind of happen to be in crypto. We need to take the best strategies from traditional markets and apply them here. That's well said. We are really excited to be investors in the company and really excited to be customers on the platform as well, by the way. So where can people follow you and learn more about BlockFi? Yeah, so our website is really easy. It's blockfi.com.

We also have a mobile app now, so you can download it in the iOS or Google Play stores. I'm BlockFi Zach, ZAC, on Twitter, and our company handle is at the real BlockFi. So we've been doing a lot of cool stuff on social media lately, so definitely check us out there. And yeah, we really appreciate the ongoing support of Castle Island Venture. and you know the help that you've given us along the way and the feedback and everything it's been awesome working with you so we'll see you on block by live soon that sounds great thanks a lot Zach