The Pomp Podcast - #504: Michael Shaulov on Crypto Infrastructure

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

Michael Shaulov is the CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks, a secure digital asset infrastructure company. Prior to Fireblocks, he co-founded Lacoon Mobile Security, which was acquired by Check Point, and was then appointed the Head of Products, Mobile and Cloud Security for Check Point. In this conversation, we discuss an overview of the Fireblocks business, legacy financial infrastructure, decentralized finance, stablecoins, and the recent surge in interest across the crypto industry.  ======================= With over 5 Million users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell over 90 cryptocurrencies. They are giving away 4 Teslas! To enter the Lucky Draw, download the Crypto.com App and trade at least $100 of Bitcoin before March 8th. If you’re new to Crypto.com, you’ll also enjoy 0% credit & debit card fees in your first month. Download the Crypto.com App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/thepomppodcasttesla. More details about the Tesla Lucky Draw: https://bit.ly/2Z1OsRE ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 135,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Michael Shulove is the CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks, a secure digital asset infrastructure company. Prior to Fireblocks, he co-founded Lacoon Mobile Security, which was acquired by Checkpoint and was then appointed the head of products, mobile and cloud security for Checkpoint. In this conversation, we discuss an overview of the Fireblocks business, legacy financial infrastructure decentralized finance stable coins and the recent surge in interest across the crypto industry i really enjoyed this conversation with michael and i

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international purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Michael here. Thank you so much for joining me, sir. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Let's just jump right into your background before we talk about Fireblocks. But where did you grow up and what did you do before Fireblocks? Yeah, sure. So I grew up in Israel. And I guess fairly typical for an Israeli entrepreneur, I actually spent the first two decades of my career in cybersecurity actually started in that domain when I had to do my mandatory service in the Israeli army. So I was working for the Israeli cyber command about, you know, 20 years ago as part of my military duty over there. And about 10 years ago, I started my previous startup that

was focused on mobile cybersecurity. So if you guys remember the days where people were buying iPhones and Android devices and they would come to work and ask the IT to connect those devices to the to the network or you know to get emails and documents something is like completely trivial today uh when that happened about 11 years ago uh the i.t guys will get a heart attack and will freak out uh so we built the first platform to basically secure those devices from cyber attacks and you know work with a lot of the fortune 500 companies and about four years into that venture we got acquired by a company called checkpoint that is one of the biggest cyber security vendors i was running their mobile and cloud security portfolio so basically their transformational

unit that um was supposed to take them from from traditional uh it infrastructure into you know modern age um so i've been there for three years and then uh basically there was something quite interesting that happened in 2017 that basically drove us into into crypto into this uh super exciting world of uh you know the new finance what was that interesting thing so uh early in 2017 there was a hack in south korea that basically 200 million dollars worth of bitcoin that disappeared in from for exchange in south korea and reappeared in north korea uh and so there was a pretty significant hack over there and part of that hack was actually done through mobile devices because we had the the best team in the world in terms of doing investigations around the mobile forensics

uh we we assisted that investigation and you know i've seen a lot of bad things happen to many people or many organizations through my career but you rarely see people lose 200 million dollars over overnight and so that was you know really eye-opening for me and i basically went down the rabbit hole and and started to talk with a lot of the financial well you know financial institutions or, you know, crypto fintech companies that were operating in the space to understand what are the gaps they have, why that happened, you know, and sort of understood the lack of infrastructure, I guess, that we had back in 2017, 2018, which really attributed to a lot of those hacks and to all the crypto that was lost in the last decade.

and so that basically what happened and i think it was you know really what drive us to into this space to to come and you know what to fix the problem that initially i think we saw we thought it's just a bit you know very fundamental operational security or cyber security problem but eventually what we discovered is that we are much more of a fintech company that is basically building the builds the the plumbing you know for uh for how crypto can can flow. Absolutely. And so if we kind of talk through fireblocks, maybe walk us through the evolution of the business, right? So kind of what was the original idea and then kind of how has it grown over time with the product suite and a number of the things that you offer to customers

today? Yeah. So interestingly enough, I guess the product or the fundamental idea didn't change much since we basically contemplating what we're trying to solve. So the idea started from a fairly simple observation that there was lack of, I would say, secure hot wallets that are suitable for institutional usage. So that was problem number one. And problem number two that we recognize is that actually the problem is not always with the storage or with the walls themselves. It's actually how do you meet or how do you send the payment? Because it was very evident that when you're sending a big transaction, when you copy paste the address, you basically, they're like five seconds where you get a heart attack right that you don't actually know if the

crypto i think like when you press refresh on the block explorer to see if it's actually going to the to the address on the other side um and you know some of the first customers we started to work with were genesis and galaxy and some of those big otcs that were doing hundreds of transactions per day and it was very clear that this is a huge problem for them and i guess you know when we thought about how the space is going to evolve you know i think we had in our mind something that looks like what how it looks today right there is big big money flowing around that you know left and right and and at scale and this need need to be solved so we basically created a very secure uh hot wallet offering which we call the firebox vault that is based on

multi-party computation with hardware security and the second part which we are i guess most famous for is the firebox network that is basically serving like this um institutional authentication layer or basically the swift for crypto for institutions to make sure that they authenticate each other from an address standpoint that was you know how we started you know this time i think it evolved to a much more comprehensive offering which is almost like a crypto back-end as a service um so any financial institutions whereas that you know hedge fund or otc desk or market maker or payment provider or bank and or exchange they need to basically set up like a full stack of services that goes from a wallet to settlement to compliance to

um you know reconciliation and then to the more advanced use cases like defy and and staking And now Fireblocks is basically more or less that, I think everybody would like to give this comparison, but a bit like the AWS for if you need to do crypto, basically a platform where you can activate different components and start sometimes from something that is very basic, but then just activate more and more components and essentially take advantage and bootstrap your business into then full speed where you do everything possible. in crypto. Absolutely. So one of the things I want to talk about today is just like the comparison between the legacy financial infrastructure and then what you're building with Fireblocks and kind of digital asset infrastructure. Some of it is similar and there's a lot of comparisons and then some of it is very, very different. And obviously you and I believe that some of those differences are advantageous compared to the legacy system. So maybe what we could start with is just the similarity. So when you look at the legacy system and the digital asset system

specifically uh with fireblocks what are the similarities between those two systems yeah so i think that to a certain extent there will be similarities in terms of the participants in the market right i think that um many years ago people would say you know a few years ago maybe there was like a notion that uh crypto is going to disintermediate everything I think that we realize more and more that the players that own the end user are probably going to stay, right? So you will have neobanks and banks and payment providers that will still basically hold the end customer relationship and they would basically provide some kind of wallet services or account services. I think that this is pretty much, you know, I don't think that eventually it will be that or for the next, for the foreseeable future, I don't think that the entire world population will work with ledger nanos in their pocket, you know, unfortunately, I guess. So I think that that part of the market infrastructure will survive.

And then, um, you also have, uh, the market makers that need to basically supply liquidity to, you know, to interact with the different protocols. So I think that's, so the perimeter of the, of the environment is, is going to be pretty much, uh, the same, um, what's definitely going, or I hope like, you know, that what what's going to basically be changed is I think two things. One is the counterparty risk and the transparency that people have into actually what's going on behind the scenes. And the second aspect is sort of some level of disintermediation or, you know, flattening of the pyramid of trust that exists, you know, inside of the ecosystem. When it comes to just having, you know, today there are just too many layers that, you know, eventually constitute a lot of, eventually a lot of risk, right?

A lot of dependencies that on normal days, they work fine, you know, but on a bad day, when the market is stretched, they break, right? And when they break, there is sort of this ripple effect that goes through the market. And eventually, by the way, it propagates to the end user or to the end customer. Absolutely. And let's talk a little bit about the big differences, right? So obviously similarities are clear and there are great opportunities for those. What are the major differences and why do you feel like the digital assets and Fireblock system is superior or advantageous compared to a kind of legacy system? Yeah, so I think that there are basically two, you know, the base layer.

I think there are two components that should be significantly rethought, right? The first one is what is really the concept of custody or account management in some ways. And the second concept is basically around the settlement or the clearing layer. Basically, how do you connect or how do you move the assets in the marketplace? um you know so so for the first part um you know we were very i guess we you know we we developed probably or we progressed a lot the utilization of um this idea of using mpc basically multi-party computation for for wallet protection but beyond the math that goes beyond goes around and beyond the security actually one of the most the advantages uh aspects of npc is that you sort

of remove the counterparty risk and and a single point of failure and the um trust that you actually need to to put in the party that is servicing you so that party can still be your you know back end they can still enforce some of the policies but at the end of the day formal sort of like you know a final operation risk so for example our customers if fireblocks goes down and disappears tomorrow morning their crypto is safe there is a way for them to recover it right whereas if you look at other custodial models and that is actually not the case and that also like you know forces us to basically operate in a very different way right so all the accounts are segregated right we don't commingle things uh and and at the end of the day

what people see in our ui is also what people see in their address on the blockchain right and those things are actually fundamentally different from the way that the traditional system works where you will have uh you know an account in a bank is just like a a top ledger that represents something that you actually don't have any idea what's going on behind it right it can be full reserve it could be partial reserve it could be like a 10 reserve it can be you know invested in a lot of different things but eventually you don't have any idea what it actually represents beyond you know what you see in the ui so that's that's i think like you know component number one i hope it makes sense no no it makes complete sense and so like i want to talk about certain aspects of

the crypto industry. And I figured I can kind of just throw a topic out there. And then you can give me an update in terms of what are you doing at Fireblocks? And then kind of how do you think about the overall kind of subsector, if you will? And maybe the place that we could start, we are recording this on the day that BNY Mellon is announcing all of their custody and kind of the oldest bank in America. And they're talking about everything from Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and digital assets one of those uh i likely think will be stable coins how do you think about stable coins for your business and then how do you think of it from a kind of industry sector that seems to be getting a lot of attention from legacy yeah so i think that actually also relates

to the second part of the question of how why it's different than why people are excited about stable coins so i think that um at the end of the day one of the really fascinating things here is how stable coins are going to intermediate people like Visa, right? In my opinion, right? And I think this is some of the reasons why you see Visa and MasterCard sort of like, you know,

rushing to figure it out because, and I'll just tell you like our personal story. So we accept payments from our customer. It's basically a monthly license or a quarterly license that they pay us. And those are pretty high numbers, right? It's like in the thousands or tens of thousands, right?

And, you know, before we started to use stable coins, so nowadays basically 30% or 40% of our customers are actually paying us with stable coins. They're paying us with USDC or Paxos. That's basically what we accept. But before that... 50%? Just so we're clear, 50% are? Yeah.

5-0. Wow, that's a very big number. Okay, keep going. Yeah, somewhere between 40% or 50%. I'm not sure exactly. but uh more and more we're actually pushing more and more of our customers to pass with stable coins and we get to the point why right so uh before uh before we we started accepting stable coins uh we uh we were basically accepting either wire ach or stripe right and then at some point and you know wire ach okay they're reasonably cheap but it takes you for ach it takes you 24

hours until it clears into your bank account and for wire you know like basically wire international wire takes three days and occasionally being lost like you know somewhere in the mid-atlantic and you never get it and you know people need to figure out which bank your your payment is stuck so it's more inconvenient but it's not like awfully expensive and when when it came to but at some point basically we had a customer that told us that they want to pass thirty thousand dollars over stripe in a credit card and my sales lady asked us asked me hey can we process that oh hell no i'm not paying stripe like you know ten thousand sorry one thousand dollars which is like three percent of the transaction right in as a commission for getting a payment so we told them

to basically send us it in in usdc and and it's really convenient because they're basically sending it over the fireblocks network uh but in reality like you know what i was supposed to pay but what I was supposed to pay to Stripe for like, you know, $1,000 commission and hopefully get it clear after 48 hours, I paid, you know, we paid, I think 50 cents, like back in the days, the ETH price was low. So we probably paid like, you know, 50 cents on that transaction. And it cleared with like, you know, five seconds. And basically we sent it to Coinbase, you know, off-ramp it using Silvergate into our bank account. It was just magical, right? And once that happened, we basically told you know all of our customers we basically put on the invoice this is like you know

the firebox network id pass and usdc and packs and we're trying to push more and more now then comes the question about ach and wire and the thing is that because it's truly digital you can actually build automation right so you can build hooks in terms of getting those payments and reconciling those payments you can look at the blockchain and you can use defy so we're actually depositing into compound and and we you know we're getting like a pretty significant interest you know if i'm trying to basically put it as a you know put it and deposit in my uh in my silicon valley bank account we're getting i don't know like yeah quarter of a percent interest rate uh when we deposit the usdc clearly you know depending depends on the day but it's it's uh

orders of magnitude higher so you know overall i think that stable coins are just this phenomenal thing and i think that the traditional players they see it they also essentially need it regardless of their specific initiative right so whether they're planning to do bitcoin custody or they're planning to basically tokenize securities they need a settlement leg and that settlement settlement has to be digital because digital in a sense that it has to run on blockchain, because if it's not running on blockchain, it actually reduces all the beauty of why they're doing it because they basically want to do atomic swaps, which they call DVP, but basically those are atomic swaps. And that just reduces the counterparty risk between those institutions. And it's very,

very meaningful for them. Got it. And so if we talk a little bit more about DeFi specifically, How do you see either your existing customers, like where is the demand for the DeFi products? And then how do you think about what is centralized versus anything decentralized that either you're interfacing with or things that you guys are building? Yeah, so, I mean, personally, I'm really a big promoter of DeFi. And I think that this is definitely the biggest price of crypto. um but i don't think it i mean it's definitely one of those areas that are emerging um funny enough we released our support to compound literally a year ago i think it was like beginning of february 2020 and no one cared we we had a we had like a press release i think the only

the only publication that covered that was the block and even on that article you know we had some of our customers that basically commented yeah we're not going to use it um and then like may came and and liquidity mining uh started and it basically i think propelled uh initially i think everybody thought that it's just like a speculative uh activity and once the liquidity mining will will dry uh it will basically disappear and you know things will go back to c5 but i think the most exciting thing is that it's here to stay so people continue using it now i think it basically moved the market to be much more acceptable and you know people understand the risk that they also understand how to use the tools and maybe the most important

thing is that it really built the on-ramp into those protocols or at least like the from my my perspective the institutional rom on ramp because it forced us and to be honest like also some of our competitors to really devote strategic resources to create uh institutional uh browser extension apis for defy and now our customers can basically securely access anything from uniswap to to curve to to you know compound avi you know any any of those protocols and the amount of interaction that we're seeing over there is overwhelming. So when we released our initial set of capabilities around the generic capabilities two months ago, we thought it was going to be a niche use case and we'll have five or 10 customers that are going to use it. Like 90% of our

customers basically want to use it. So that's pretty amazing. Absolutely. And so when you think through the most surprising thing that's played out over, let's call it the last 12 months. So Obviously, we've had a public health crisis. We've had a massive kind of government and central bank intervention. Most of the crypto industry has exploded in growth from a user standpoint, from a value transaction standpoint. I'm going to go on a limb and say Firebox has done very well during the last 12 months. But what's been the most surprising thing to you as all this has played out?

I think that the most surprising thing was actually how, you know, there are two things. One is the propagation into mainstream. Right. I mean, of course, it basically tied to the health crisis that is tied into the concerns from inflation. but 12 months ago and again we we always played in the what we call the crypto native space so those are like you know our core customers you know block fight celsius and genesis and you know all the all the folks that you know we we know and love and we were also very close or at least we were trying to work with all the big banks, right? In the big banks, it was always sort of, yeah, they were interested, but it was unclear to when they're going to do it

or why they're going to do it and what's going to be the trigger. And of course, there was always like, you know, the regulatory concern that that was basically an element that no one had nothing, like there was, you know, you were sort of like at the mercy of the regulator, right? When are they going to approve it?

So I think that at the end of the day, the triangulation of those three things, basically the, I think the overall transformation, then the real, I think, economic force behind, you know, behind why Bitcoin and why cryptocurrency important. And then I guess surprisingly, basically the timing with the regulatory clarity from the LCC and the SEC eventually is what sort of drove almost like the speed in which those banks have changed from. it's sort of like a niche group of you know in their innovation department or a few folks that they have like a vp of blockchain to a mainstream conversation where the literally like you know the number two or number three in the bank are driving and this is for them uh the most important thing you know not only the banks but also you know i see it with mastercard and paypal and all those uh and big players that for me the fact that it happened so quickly it's really surprising you Now, I would expect that this will be a really gradual process that will take maybe two to three years.

The fact that it basically happened literally in their, I guess, speeds, you know, overnight, I wouldn't expect it. Yeah. And talk a little bit as you kind of think through, you know, the customer base that you've built, you're serving as kind of this amazing infrastructure. How big is this? Right. And I know that it's a little sensitive in terms of like what data points you want to share, you don't want to share. but just like what can you share with folks that they understand just kind of how much of a critical piece of infrastructure you guys are becoming yeah so we now have about 200 customers uh in our space uh it's always hard to say how much is that you know from a percentage standpoint but you know it's uh it's decent i guess and interestingly enough we have a lot of big i mean i don't know if the big big guys but we do have the mid big guys uh in the in the space that are using us and

partnering with us and um you know just to give some interesting numbers in the last 30 days um to be honest i didn't check today because i assume that things have changed overnight but in the last 30 days maybe uh 31 days we we've we've we were our infrastructure was responsible for about 80 billion dollars of on-chain settlements and that sort of represents somewhere between you know three to five percent of the overall on-chain transactions so i think it's already quite decent you know in terms of what you see as a as a market activity and i think one of the things that we continuously think about is how to make sure that we are not becoming a critical risk right for the for the for the for the industry or for the for the market and you know

we have quite an interesting approaches over there that we're going to evaluate in the next 12 months for sure and then when you think through like the obstacles to the business as you continue to grow what what do you see as um the largest obstacles or challenges is it something that's internal in terms of scaling and just building or something that's external that you've got to be aware of but might actually be outside of your control. Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the interesting, you know, there are a lot of challenges to be honest, because we are really scaling quickly at the beginning of, I mean,

12 months ago we were 30 people in the company and now we have over 90 or maybe like, you know, we're approaching 100 people. Right. So scaling like three fold in 12 months during COVID was not an easy task, but hopefully we've managed that well. And also from a customer standpoint, clearly making sure that all of our customers are happy and they're getting the SLA and the services that they need. And, you know, we do serve as a really critical component for them. That's also a challenge to continue and perform. But, you know, strategically, I think that we are at this point where the market and the use cases open up, right?

It's almost that every scaled company right now can be everything for everyone, right? So, I mean, you don't need to take specifically Fireblocks as an example. You can even look at players like Coinbase or BlockFi that you can see how diversified they are, right? In terms of the use cases that they are serving. And, you know, same applies for us, right? We have use cases that are around trading and we have use cases around payment and we have use cases around prime brokerage and we have use cases around lending and now you know there

is this amazing use case around treasury management for for corporations and the their use cases around um you know merchant merchant sorry cross-border remittance and one of the i think like you know strategically for us the the challenge is is really how to navigate and how to time um which one of those pockets we want to go after and address at every given moment and because eventually i believe that you need to have the right product and you need to you know have a quality product to serve a specific niche um so timing it and putting the the resources is something that we you know i see it as one of our challenges for the next uh like three or four years. Yeah. And in terms of kind of the macro environment of the industry, talk a little bit

about how you see this collision course with Wall Street, right? Is this a world where they're all going to capitulate and they have to support digital assets and it'll coexist alongside the legacy world? Do you see it completely disrupting them and they're eventually all going to be built and playing on top of like open decentralized protocols? Just when you kind of zoom out from just fireblocks and you think industry and you kind of meet wall street you know at some point in the future how does that play out yeah i think it's a good question you know i've always been sort of a strong believer in like very disruptive innovation right so i think that people always think that uh you know people over sort of underestimate how long it will take for the

change to trigger and they always um overestimate you know how i mean they don't really able to understand how quickly that change when the change actually comes how quickly it's going to disrupt them right um and you know traditionally you've seen it with companies like you know ibm and create like you know blockbusters and others that basically it took way longer to something to happen but when it happened it happened so quickly that they just couldn't react so um i think that overall uh this change is actually going to happen you know fairly quickly for them and i think that some of those institutions will be able to react and accommodate so i guess they will be the microsoft's of the world you know yes like you know the cloud is going is it will be a disruptor

for them and for some period they will lag behind aws or amazon but eventually they will be able to to catch up and they will become as powerful as them and i think some of those guys will be the ibms and they will basically you know uh over time become will become less and less relevant because they won't be able to modernize modernize their infrastructure and by the way the the modernization of their infrastructure is really really deep because you know just to give like stupid examples um if you to to for their systems to even deal with the precision that you have with bitcoin or ethereum right basically like you know six digits right precision right they don't have systems that know how to do it today right basically they need to replatform everything

including the web interface of the bank um so as you can imagine you know some of those guys won't be able to catch up with uh with that at all yeah what is the thing that uh you're spending the most time thinking about as we move forward right you uh founded and run one of these critical pieces of infrastructure what keeps you up at night right now or like what are the one or two uh data points or milestones that you're looking for from an industry perspective yeah i think that um there are two things that are keeping me up at night one is uh or maybe like you know three um the first one is um just day-to-day operations right that you know to make sure that we as i said make sure that we everything functions properly right the uh the system is uh

system is up and running and and all those things work for our customers and the second is really the strategy of sort of how to make sure that we i mean again there is sort of like the five years strategy but also there is like the 12-month strategy of how do we really go about um the newer play the newest players that are coming in right like the fintechs of the world the neobanks that clearly that they're going all of those guys are going to move in the next 12 months and they're going to provide services so for example revolut is a customer of ours but it's also very clear that all their you know competitors are going to do something in the next uh uh 12 months or so and we need to basically be ready to to to set an infrastructure for them and the last piece is

actually talent right so hiring and and scaling and making sure that we have the best talent there is in the company is also something that you know as a ceo is very important for me i i'm like a strong believer in the a player brings in a player and like you know b player brings a c player so fundamentally the reason why we were able to execute so quickly was because we have great people and we as we scale you know to maintain it is always something that you need to be very thoughtful of absolutely before i finish up i always ask everyone the same three questions and then you'll get to ask me one question to finish up uh the first one is what is the most important book that you've ever read um professionally or personally either what

whatever whatever comes to mind i think you know personally one of the best books that i read is catch 22 and uh and i think you know i write it to the period that uh when i was sort of like you know uh uh toward the end of my military service and it's sort of like you know changed my perception about uh the world and you know uh i guess the some of the uh you know things that we the perceptions that people have about how the world works and, but like, you know, what, what really matter. And like, you know, how, I guess, uh, uh, you know, how we, we perceive things that are absolutely not the real truth. Right.

That was basically, uh, and it's sort of like, you know, it goes about in a very sarcastic way. Right. So that was basically, I think one of the most, uh, uh, interesting books that I read, it was like 20 years ago and uh i think you know professionally probably a book called four steps to a fifth and eight which is really like a bible of how to develop product and you know achieve product market fit absolutely second question is more personal sleep schedule uh i've been using the new eight sleep thermoregulated bed uh i used to be like a five six hour sleeper now i basically sleep like on an ice cube and uh and get much better sleep and it's been like

life-changing for me uh with the the eight sleep stuff but uh what what is your sleep schedule and how has that uh kind of changed over the years so i guess like you know before i had kids i would sleep like you know 12 hours i really like to sleep um you know nowadays my five years old unfortunately like you know comes in the middle of night and kicks me like you know for the rest of the night so i wish i i could say that i have like you know a six hour sleep as but uh yeah maybe I should like, you know, bring a big ice cube and then he will like, you know, stay in his bed. Last question is more fun. Aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer? Oh, that's a good question. Uh, I think that, uh, you know, like real aliens, like, you know, green aliens that

come to visit us or like, if there are like, you know, uh, other forms of life, uh, whatever you think yeah so i think like you know b i definitely you know i studied physics so i definitely believe that like you know b is definitely a good probability that there is like a another life form uh in uh in in the universe you know like area 51 conspiracy theories are i guess like you know i'm i i you know i think that uh after i stopped watching um you know x files when i was i don't know 16 or 17 years old i i sort of dropped that conspiracy theory i i i love that people now have to say you know are we talking about green men or not right when they talk about aliens because people are getting smarter about the whole thing

uh what one question do you have for me to uh to finish up actually that's a good question so like aliens what's your view i i've talked about a million times uh so i i think that they there's other intelligent life that exists somewhere in the world but it is so far away that you and i in our lifetime won't come in contact with which you know kind of kind of calls into question does that mean that they actually exist or not right if we don't get to engage with them then maybe it doesn't matter yeah but maybe like you know our grand grand grandchildren we like you know have some kind of crazy technology that we'll be able to propel them through wormholes and they will be able to meet them absolutely uh how can we find people to find you on the internet um or where

Can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Fireblocks? Yeah, sure. So on our website, fireblocks.com and LinkedIn, you know, pretty active there. Michael Shalov. Awesome, Michael. Listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

I think people are really going to enjoy it. You've built some amazing technology and a great company. And I hope that you keep going and we'll have to do this again in the future. Sounds good. Thanks.