The Pomp Podcast - Catherine Coley, CEO of Binance US: How the Leading Crypto Exchange Plans to Take on the United States

Episode Date: November 7, 2019

This is episode #2 in the Automation Series. You can learn more about the Automation Series here. You can learn more about IOTA on their website. Catherine Coley is the CEO of Binance US. Catherine started her career in traditional finance with Morgan Stanley working in both Hong Kong and London. She went on to advise Silicon Valley Bank’s foreign exchange before leading XRP institutional liquidity for Ripple. This year, Coley joined Binance to help facilitate the exchange’s ever growing expansion into the US. In this episode, Anthony Pompliano and Catherine Coley discuss Catherine’s past experience with FX trading strategies for exotic currencies, Binance’s partnership with BAM trading, money transmitter laws from state to state, and the future plans of Binance.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. The following episode is part of the Off The Chain automation series sponsored by IOTA. The goal of this special series is to explore the intersection of distributed ledger technology and automation, specifically around digital currencies, digital wallets, and machine-to-machine transactions. My core belief is that every stock, bond, currency, and commodity will eventually be digitized and distributed ledger technology will empower the full potential of automation to be realized. IOTA is the sponsor of the automation series. Their mission is to support the research

and development of new distributed ledger technologies, including IOTA Tangle. The IOTA Foundation encourages the education and adoption of distributed ledger technologies through the creation of ecosystems and the standardization of these new protocols. You can find out more about the automation series and IOTA in the show notes. Catherine Coley is the CEO of Binance US. In this conversation, we discussed her background, how she discovered Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, what led her to take the job at Binance, and some of the feature requests like interest accounts, derivatives, and mobile apps that may be coming to Binance in the future. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well.

Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang special episode alert i don't even know if that's a thing but we're going to start that um i have katherine here i'm super excited to have this conversation

i've actually known her for maybe a year or so uh pre getting the job at binance uh so one congratulations on that thank you so much extremely excited before we get into all the fun stuff um and the over 200 questions that i got on twitter about what to ask you uh which we will not cover all of them um let's go through your background kind of what you did pre uh ripple pre binance etc sure sure so my uh my story or my journey starts a little bit earlier than uh most even cypherpunks um shockingly when i was about uh eight years old my family went to disney world quite a lot um i grew up in orlando florida and every sunday we would go to epcot every sunday Every Sunday. There were good deals back in the 90s where Florida citizens would get free tickets.

So we'd go to Epcot about every Sunday and I'd go to Morocco, I'd go to Japan, I'd go to Canada, France, all in an afternoon. Really painless, struggle free, able to experience the world. And I kind of thought that's how the world worked. And then I was proven really, really harshly wrong when I decided to move outside of the U.S. and so that kind of tipped off my love of global markets and understanding how the world wasn't efficient and we could make it more efficient and so I kind of kept on this journey for learning how I could make that a better make it a small world after all so I leapt into foreign exchange trading and Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong right after college experiencing some

of the least liquid markets out there I was trading all the onshore Asian currencies so you think about the small ones indonesia malaysia pakistan even um and so just really experiencing how difficult those markets were super nuanced uh very tricky and then moved with morgan stanley on to london to see some of the deepest pockets of liquidity so you've got all right hold on before you get to london all right explain currency trading in asia because i think a lot of people hear that somebody had that as an experience in their career but they don't actually know what that means and kind of like what the day-to-day is yeah your day-to-day is uh downloading the entire news of the world and then realizing how it's going to affect the prices of your one

country's currency against another and then you're handling that with the largest money managers of the world so uh any call it 3 a.m on a monday morning when the wellington open would happen you'd be waiting on the phone and reaching out to people about 250 clients or so and they could call up anytime and say you know i want to buy two yards of dollar yen which is two billion dollars of dollar yen and you'd have to work their order through the liquidity at that time so you couldn't just get a price off the hand there you'd have to you know manage the order make sure that was going through smoothly uh deal with the fact that they were probably unhappy they were moving the market or trying not to move the market and constantly trying to evaluate where there was value left in

the market for you to go after. So I covered kind of global hedge funds and then traded the onshore pairs. So you're trying to get all of your orders through before market closes, which onshore markets have closes. The rest of FX is kind of a 24-5 market. And so that was just a full adrenaline rush, standing up shouting, you know, buy, sell, that kind of Wolf of Wall Street style. But in Asia, you're doing it with a much smaller team with much trickier markets and just a ton of responsibility early on. So I really thoroughly enjoyed it. Got it. And so when you go to London, what was the role there? Yeah, London was covering global hedge funds, really bringing my expertise from Asia into the European market. So we were at the time China puts were a

very popular thing. That was the idea of betting on China blowing up. And so you were protecting your risk either to the equities market or to another exposure that you may have had by buying a protection on the price of dollar cnh or cny um going higher so the numbers that we're seeing now like i think uh remedies now at 714 are strike prices which were where the where the market might have gone were like six so the market's blown up since so it's uh it's rewarding to know that a lot of the guys I helped get into those trades um it was it was a worthwhile endeavor but in London we were really just focused on educating them on what Asia was like and seeing if they had appetite for engaging in that type of uh investing in those markets and what type of investors would

that be when you say hedge funds are these really large well-known type hedge funds are they more small mom-and-pop you know two three person operations no I had this uh kind of unusual ability to be the outside American in these different markets and then cover US groups. So you think about your hedge funds in New York and Connecticut, even California, I was able to be their kind of liaison correspondent on the ground, telling them what was happening, even if they had never been to Asia or London at that time. Most folks had though. So you think about average AUM or assets under management, that one of the funds I was managing would be around like 14 to 16 billion yeah it's very large so very large yeah um and the average size of trades uh kind of a

small day trade one off would be 300 million a large day would be you know anywhere between two and three four billion so a lot a lot larger size tickets uh you see in the fx world than crypto for sure for sure two to three billion is like uh one to two percent of the entire market Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. Okay, and so when's the first time that you hear about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, etc.? Yeah, so because I was in the FX markets and they were moving me to another country, I had to personally move my Hong Kong dollar. And there I was, you know, 24 trying to figure out if I was going to pay HSBC, my competitor, 8% of my hard-earned lady salary. And I really just didn't want to do that.

um so i looked into bitcoin um back in the day it was arthur was beginning his early love affair with bitcoin um and so kind of dug into it and some of the some of the inefficiencies didn't really work for me i don't know if i wanted to pay that much to take that transaction on um a lot of my hedge funds had tinkered in it in 2013 and then got got goxed um so that was unfortunate but uh i was still kind of learning how what would be the best way to get money across the world in the fastest way without me losing actual value. And so that's when I looked into crypto and kind of kept my eye on all the processes of how Bitcoin was working, what was the pricing, like, was this liquid in Hong Kong dollar, which not a lot of exchanges are live in

Hong Kong dollar on ramps. And then kind of had to do the same thing when I moved from London to the US again. So constantly was looking for the best means of moving money around the world. For sure. And Bitcoin is a natural, I think, tangentially related asset for currency traders, right? It is a currency and it has a liquid market. I give such credit to people that come into Bitcoin without having any foreign exchange experience, because to me, it's just an obvious, you know, I can put this asset class and move it just the same way I've moved other things. my understanding of you know how thick an order book is is the same that i would be using for understanding markets and cryptocurrencies uh the ability to know just the etiquette around buying and selling on an otc side and then understanding managing your own risk those are all things that i natively learned in foreign exchange so kudos to people that are

translating other jobs into this and being able to understand the dynamics of the market It took me about five years and a lot of hard hours in order to just get a good sense of things. But I think the biggest lesson we can always learn is the market owes us nothing. For sure. And so when you moved to the U.S., what was the job? Yeah. So I moved to the U.S. well, pre-Brexit. Morgan Stanley was kind of getting a little worried about the fact that they had some expats on the other side of the pond.

um and so picking up from brexit realizing i could potentially be left homeless in uh in london without a job uh moved over to san francisco um mostly on a on a whim i i went to a wedding and it was lovely out there and i said you know this weather is perfect and i i went to la and la the weather was dismal that week for some reason and said oh god okay san francisco wins and i felt that there was a level of of folks there that would intellectually stimulate me for enough for me to realize that I could translate my job into the tech world. I wanted to be as adaptable to the next generation of careers as possible. And FX certainly felt a little dinosaur at that time. We were automating as much as we could. So I like to make my job redundant as I go on in life,

because I think that means we're progressing. And so I began looking at different tech companies, different FinTech, and I kept finding myself worried about their FX exposure at the end of day, which I was like, you know, you're addicted when you're worried about, you know, some company's exposure to India or some company's exposure to China and how are they balancing that? Um, and so for the longest time I'd had an alert on ripple, uh, for on LinkedIn because I knew that their XRP moved significantly cheaper than Bitcoin. Um, and if they were ever going to open up looking for someone to, uh, expand the Hong

Kong market, that was my ticket out, uh, to get my money away, um, out of the Hong Kong market. So fortunately, one day after a year and a half of this LinkedIn alert, something popped up that fit my expertise. And so I jumped on that one. Got it. Before we get into Ripple, San Francisco, we got to talk about. Yeah. The wedding you went to was in San Francisco?

It was in San Francisco. It was one of my best friends from Carolina. We actually lived in China together. So she had had kind of that global experience and excitement. and it ended up that about 14 of my uh friends from my hong kong shanghai days are relocated to san francisco so it's a you know maybe it's the easy transition back into the american life or maybe they just have really good dim sum i uh i laugh because san francisco is the tale of two cities for sure where uh you get um probably the area where your friend got married which is nice

and beautiful and they get the photos and and this great experience and then if you went to market street in the wrong area you might have stepped in some human feces it's a tough it's a tough city for sure um and and so many people say like oh why would you you know you know the city shuts down at 9 p.m etc i mean hong kong was a seven like 36 7 type of city like it was you were out running hard working hard playing hard um and so for me to be able to really focus on whatever work i was going to be doing i didn't get the FOMO i was missing out on things and i could relax uh, go, you know, hike, uh, swim, cross the river, play golf, you name it in California pretty easily without the temptations of New York city. Missing something derailing my career

success for sure. Um, and so, uh, what role did you take at ripple? So a ripple, I started off as their head of investor relations actually, um, which was a total switch for me, uh, having been mostly to driving markets and, uh, dealing with direct customers, transaction size. Um, and I kind of over the course of a couple months said, yeah, you know, we're not a public company. And at the time we were not fundraising. So I said, can I, can I be on the markets team? Like I kind of, it's hard for me to turn that off. I'm constantly thinking about it. I know the guys that would be having an appetite for this. I naturally speak their language, um, kind of put me in the game coach. And so I, I jumped over to the XRP markets team to run the institutional

liquidity. Okay. And so let's start with the investor relations. This is mainly a role where you're interfacing with the investors in the private software company, Ripple, not XRP? Correct. Correct. Yeah. I was working mostly with the financial community, a lot out here, a lot in California, just referencing it as if it was a non-deal roadshow, teaching them about a tech company called Ripple. Got it. And so when you jump over to the capital markets team or the institutional liquidity, describe a little bit about what the goal of that team would be. Yeah, so we were a scrappy team that was really, our purpose was to make XRP as liquid as possible.

One of the things in order for it to work through the system was that it would be the conduit between transactions around the world. And if you looked at FX being that conduit around the world, that average volume a day was like five to six trillion. So if we were going to be able to make transactions of that quality go through, you would need to have a much more liquid mechanism. So that's where you can either see the price rising to accommodate for the volume necessary, or you can see the liquidity increasing for volume necessary to handle. Got it. And so as you think through those mechanisms, I think one of the big questions that a lot of folks have just across Bitcoin, crypto, etc. is um how much of the we'll call it market making or liquidity uh providing is done uh by teams themselves versus by exchanges versus by like institutional type um i don't know if clients partners market participants etc but just you know i kind of think of it as three buckets right so

it's the teams themselves in some cases do market making or liquidity sometimes it's the actual exchanges and kind of like off balance sheet type stuff and sometimes it's uh external third parties are more like funds that are set up to do this stuff yeah we break it down to kind of if you similar to that if you've got one structure being infrastructure so that's like your exchanges your otc desks kind of that core venue that you're going to be trading on and then you've got the speculators which can be anything from you know a retail uh day trader all the way through to a you know significant endowment or a fund um and then you've kind of got the the third leg that doesn't really exist yet and that's corporate flow which is a significant reason why the fx markets move

you've got is that you've got that consistent need for a company in one area to make a transaction repeatedly based on their needs from a corporate perspective so you think about toyota and their dollar yen they have to repatriate all of their revenues from overseas every quarter or every year in order to clean up their balance sheet and prepare for a fiscal year ahead so those flows don't exist yet in the crypto markets but we're working on it and so that's one of the things where if you have that consistent flow then the speculators will be able to take advantage of those different seasonalities of corporate flows but you also just always have momentum in the market taking place so i think that's one of the factors that ripple is really working on was being

able to provide a mechanism to which corporate flows would be consistent so you'd have people using the mechanism of xrp in order to send flows from one country to another at a consistent pace or at least a repeatable one and then the speculation or that arm would be able to go as they please but that way you'd always have kind of two-sided markets naturally got it um all right so you're doing this for a year and a half two years two years yeah at um ripple uh and all of a sudden there's this announcement that surprise that you are going to become the ceo of uh is it binance america or binance us finance us our twitter handle is binance america okay but we'll maybe test what do you guys like if it's on the internet it's true

so we can call it either one um let's start with what was your first in time that you heard about binance your first impression you know before you met anyone on the team etc what was kind of your take sitting in the seat at a ripple of finance yeah so i mean we were working with uh all the exchanges possible in order to see if xrp could be listed on those the increasing amount of access liquidity you can kind of think of it in two ways one of them is access to market the other one is depth of the market so access would be as many venues as possible listing or providing um quotes of your your pair um and so we've been working working with all the exchanges and then personally had been trying to interface with all of them to understand and there was something that i kind of

respected about binance having popped up right before kind of the the major hype um we both kind of started our crypto storyline around the same time summer 2017 um and so just seeing how nimble they worked and and how accommodating they were for the appetite of the market during this um kind of hype cycle initially or one of many that had happened um i just had a huge respect for them um and so about a year ago i've met um we zhao on a bus in singapore um and i sat down next to this guy and and just kind of as i who he is i had no idea who he is okay all right um as as you do kind of or as i do i sit down and like tell me about yourself hi how are you i'm coley like uh what's going on um and he ended up being the cfo of finance he's incredibly kind

insanely kind like you would never think that this is the guy who's who's making this whole thing run alongside and the two of us hit it off and he was like wait how do you know these guys i'm like they were my interns at morgan stanley and he's like well this doesn't make like what are you doing knowing our region our market like how does how does this make make sense so uh really enjoyed each other's uh company and and kind of kept in touch on checking in on the market what made sense what didn't um what was the path that was happening with xrp uh you know where was finance headed etc and uh really wanted to make something work uh between the the two of us in terms of we both appreciated our work styles so um about six months ago or the beginning of january

or so i kind of got the tap on the shoulder that said we'd we'd like what you do and we'd like to go to america with you um and it kind of was floored and then said like bring it on like all right so hold on before we get into the america plans uh when's the first time you meet cz cz i'm same time so we after we got off the bus he was like i gotta introduce you to a couple people and so he introduced me to cz helen hive who runs finance charity foundation um you know kind of a great group of them that were there at the cumberland summit in singapore last year um and and cz was just you know so well spoken such a such a visionary um very kind of lucid in his his plans going forward so i had a huge amount of respect do you have a binance hoodie on

i think they were yeah i think they were beginning to do the binance hoodies i mean it's so hot in singapore i'm pretty sure it was a t-shirt uh if they were doing hoodies that would have been one of the questions that uh i got over and over again is when uh when do the retail investors get binance hoodies so we'll get to that yeah i mean we designed the u.s hoodie and it is sharp um and i i uh i've made a i made a couple requests for uh some other some other u.s swag that i think will get the market excited but at the same time i'm like yeah do we come uh do we have a scarf for sure they they uh for the second anniversary they they got us necklaces so that's pretty nice what what is the initial pitch from cz way and kind of the binance team in terms of yeah they

want to come to america but what exactly does that mean for you know what what is a business that back in january is probably what two years old or so uh gone from relatively non-existent in 24 months to hundreds of employees you know 30 40 different countries um hundreds of millions of dollars if not more in revenue and ebita and just this massive thing that got created out of nowhere and they call you and they say hey we're coming to america well yeah what's the plan even like they didn't have that much of a vision they were like would you be our partner in america up to you you figure out how you want to you figure out how you want to do it we've got this technology um if there is a plan to provide access for crypto markets through binance around the

world uh avoiding the u.s is an obvious thing that you cannot say you have global reach if you were leaving out the u.s um and so i think that was uh you know a bold step for them to say let's figure out a way to do it we gave it to you if you can make it work we can make it work if you can't make it work we now know that we can't be in the u.s yep um and i said you know what's a better canary in a coal mine than to say if i can make this successful fantastic if i can't wonderful way to leave the entire crypto industry yep and find a new job yeah for sure um okay so you started when i started in the role is ceo binance us yeah ceo binance us uh i run bam trading services which is the private company that i'm responsible for um we do business as

binance us significantly more catchy than bam trading services so uh kind of transitioning to just saying binance us um and so i started in june um i had a you know wonderful time off in between ripple and uh no i flew down from consensus to uh have monday my birthday and then tuesday on the job awesome it was a great gift um buckle up yeah all right and so um as you get started what you uh in june what's your first impression of binance and kind of how they operate in this super decentralized, fast growing company? Yeah, I had always for some reason struggled when I was even at Morgan Stanley that the pace to which I wanted to operate was always held back. And the ideas that I wanted to execute on were always questioned. And that's just part

of growing up, you are of course going to be tempered by authority. When I came over to binance the ability to provide an idea and then route the execution of it and do it was applauded so it gets you to really find a problem create a solution execute it put it in production independently which is unlike any other company i've worked for normally it's you know paralysis by committee or emails on emails on emails and so this was just a wonderful pace to say all right i'm going to be running the u.s i'm going to need this this this i'm going to go after that um it puts a lot of the responsibility on your shoulders um you can't just say you're going to build a team and then wait for someone to build it for you you kind of have to then

begin the grassroots of recruiting people and going through that process and writing up your offer letters to them i mean the whole soup to nuts kind of version um is all yours but that's amazing the runway is there um so i really appreciate that and still to this day i'm so grateful for the idea that that's the culture that I get to kind of bring over for sure and let's go through kind of an overview of where you guys are today with Binance US kind of what are the product offerings and what are the services that if I'm a user or trader here in the US I want to go in create an account what's available to me yeah so Binance US is a digital asset marketplace we get a license the cutting edge technology of Binance for the matching engine

for the wallet software a lot of the key features that they've already built out I'm able to license and bring to U.S. users so I think about it in the ways of what do American users want what have they been missing in the market and what can we really adapt for the regulations that we have in place here and for the the gray areas as well so we launched on Tuesday of last week going live with trading and we have several pairs and then the one of the best parts about how we're rolling out is this two-way conversation with our users and there was a great demand for bitcoin pairs and so then 24 hours later we launched with a couple bitcoin pairs as well so we have a list of 30 tokens that we are exploring and we've already launched in about 12 of those and so

will be continuing to provide variety to the market, as well as lowering the hurdles in order to understand this space. All right. So before we jump really, really deep down into the products and offerings, how do you look at Binance and what you're bringing to the market as kind of a competitive landscape in the United States, right? Because I think the international markets are very different than the United States markets, or I guess the United States market. uh and here in the u.s i think that uh there's a number of well-known brands um but they all offer different things right and some of them have gone uh really deep in the u.s lots of different options some have said we're gonna go deep in the u.s with very little trading options

and everything in between that so kind of how do you see that competitive landscape compared to what you're trying to do yeah i i come from a insane position right now of i have to say privilege. I'm able to watch several of the top U.S. peers having spent six, seven years already figuring out the recipe for success for them. So, I'm able to enter the market having that awareness and then being able to modify on it quickly with a substantial brand behind it and great technology that the rest of the world sees as a good fit. So, coming into the U.S., I have a huge advantage for that, but also significantly still the underdog because we are so late to the game, you can call it. So I think there's a couple of aspects that we really want to round out that I think the crypto community has almost began to silo itself in some respect.

So the idea that the U.S. is saturated, why would I enter it? It's so many other peers in that space. I think we still have a lot more in order to get crypto to be an everyday thing for the everyday user. The intimidation level of crypto has kind of gone back up. So that's one of the things that I want to make sure we can bring that back down and lower the hurdles to entry, whether that is cost, whether that is understanding. Let's educate, not intimidate, and begin to provide an offering that people really want. They've had enough time to figure out what works in terms of a product side and know what they really care for.

And we can build that for them. And how do you leverage the relationship with, I'll call it Binance Global, as an advantage versus maybe other folks who don't have that kind of relationship or that backing them, if you will? Yeah, it's as if I kind of put it in the scenario of an older brother or older sister. they forged the way they've done things in a fantastic route and I get a draft behind that momentum but I am my own human so like much like my older sister like she did a great job making my reputation seem great I got the benefit of the doubt when I walked in the room because I looked just like her but I was definitely the remix version of her and could stand on my own and and create my own path so I think that's what we're kind of looking for is the the ability to

realize that Binance has been adopted by a great, great number of people and has educated the markets in a way that people are hungry for all of that information they're able to provide. And each product they roll out, which they roll out all the time, enhances the experience that the global community has. And so we are going to be able to spin up as quickly as possible on those different products and features. For sure. And then last question before we really go into Binance US is, how do you look at exchanges, both yours and others in the US, as kind of the role of soliciting these US based institutions, right? So whether they're financial kind of Wall Street type institutions, like the major banks, etc. Or there are more like institutions that I deal with

on a daily basis, which are the pensions, the endowments, the foundations, etc. How do you see the exchanges that are very crypto specific, right? So it's not NASDAQ, it's not New York stock exchange. This is, you know, Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, etc. What's their role in soliciting that institutional interest and participation? Yeah, I mean, for starters, it's very unusual that you would type into your browser something that would give you access to financial instruments. So in most scenarios, you've got a bank's GUI or system that you've downloaded to your desktop, and it takes up real estate on one of your sell side analysts or buy analyst platform. So a very closed loop and normally in financial infrastructure for having

that single dealer platform or even an aggregator for pricing. So the ability for crypto exchanges to bring that to the mainstream through just a simple website is a remarkable innovation on how you can access financial products. The other side of it I see is infrastructure or crucial elements of the exchanges is it is providing that ability to go and buy and sell digital assets and then begin to explore rolling out different products to those users. So without it, you would have a combination of peer-to-peer or OTC. And I think both of those elements can also be wrapped up

into the exchange model. It's just an element of trying to go after one thing one at a time versus being one for all and having a little bit of a hard time being able to handle that much. For sure. Well, and you bring up a great point around the assets are different. Some of the business models are a little different. Some of the user experiences are different. And so I think if you look across the ecosystem, both domestically and internationally for the United States,

people kind of, it's like a buffet, right? And they really do choose, you know, what business model am I going to combine with what user experience, with what assets with you know what jurisdictions and and you get these really unique offerings and i think that answers the question of like why are there so many because it's different things for different people yeah i mean if you think about like bestbuy.com selling only electronics that made sense so you go that was your marketplace for electronics and then amazon comes around and you can buy you know eggs salad dressing socks and electronics and you're kind of like okay there's there's ability to have one marketplace with multiple offerings now.

And people are not as afraid of that. They don't need to go to a specialized store. They don't need to go to a specific dealer for it. They can go, you know, to a, to a broader marketplace. For sure.

So I cheated and I, I'm against, I pulled Twitter for a bunch of questions. I told him that we were going to do this. And frankly, they came up with a lot of much better questions that I would have come up with and a lot of also uh much more stupid questions that i would have come up with so i'm only going to focus on the good ones the good stupid ones are okay too well the stupid

ones are uh maybe we'll throw one or two of those in at the end but um in terms of the good ones uh there's a lot of questions probably almost 25 of the questions uh centered around two ideas one is um and they're they touch on regulation but they're uh one why only available in certain states to begin with and kind of what does that look like going forward and then two is what is the framework you use to evaluate tokens or assets kind of what is the the kind of path forward there so let's start with first the states so you guys are in how many states today what's kind of keeping you from going to all 50 and kind of how do you think about that evolving over time yeah there's nothing more frustrating than realizing that you cannot deliver to your home

and to your university town the product that you've built and worked so hard on um so i i feel your frustration uh i call it the hurricane corridor because it's the florida georgia north carolina louisiana alabama texas crowd um new york of course as well uh we're not able to serve among a few others so there are about 13 states we were yet to have the licensing for and that's the real reason you're in about 37 states about 37 states yeah we just good math on my part good work uh and then we just uh opened up for puerto rico as well so um is that ever going to become a state i feel like i feel like we should just make a decision here they're humans there the president's trying to buy other land what are you trying to buy greenland iceland whatever

the humans but can we get puerto rico in as a state i feel like they might get a little bit more aid and might actually you know actually treat them better if uh if it was a state well they they have access to finance us so we treat them we treat them as as uh as a great community for for crypto um and so uh you know the reason behind the rolling out gradually rather than doing it uh with all 50 or i think it's only 49 hawaii is a pretty tough one regulation wise um is we wanted to get to market quickly um there's not a a reason for us to wait on the sidelines until we had all of our licenses when we could um start providing liquidity to and this all money transmitter licenses money transmitter licenses state by state state by state um and it's

a long process but um with that it's one that should be you know pretty methodical we've seen several other groups be able to do it um go through you've seen most when people say oh i'm able to do this on this exchange it's because they've had um either seven years advanced notice um and have been getting their licenses in advance or um you know we're grandfathered into to a lot of these things what goes into applying for and ultimately getting approved for money transparent license at the state level like i think a lot of people have heard that but they don't know what exactly that process looks like a lot of it is just clarifying with the state your nature of your business understanding your financials understanding what you intend to do

and what your customer interaction is going to be like so really just sharing our story and our kind of proof of what we're doing to those states state by state so a lot of paperwork a lot of paperwork um so we you know we've got a great team that's already done this before for other companies so it shouldn't be a problem but um do do uh appreciate your patience uh it a lot of uh instead of win moon it's like win texas um and i you know it was actually texas and florida were the two states well you think about it they've got a lot of a lot of great people yeah the uh the the uh other part of this question was around uh the assets and the framework that you use And I'm guessing, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's probably two aspects to this.

So there's assets that Binance US would like to list, right, in terms of they meet some kind of quality threshold. And maybe you can kind of shine a light on that. But then also there's the regulatory component of there's probably things you want to list and you don't want to list there. So kind of what is that process? How do you vet these? And then how do you ultimately make a decision as to what gets listed and what doesn't? Yeah. I mean, you have to kind of think about the advantage for an exchange could be around so many things. I've, I've done the research of the front pages of all these exchanges and they

have their taglines of, uh, you know, longest standing exchange or longest, uh, most trusted, easy to use, uh, at your fingertips. Um, all those are qualities that we were trying to figure out what, what's our, what's our advantage here. Um, and for us, variety is one thing that has been a successful model of allowing anyone to find what really gets them uh understanding crypto it might not necessarily be bitcoin for me it wasn't um i've grown to learn but you know the beauty of it eventually but um that's also because the price of transacting in bitcoin has come down substantially so it fit more into my understanding of how the world should work but uh we don't really want to discriminate against that for the everyday user to find what makes them click what

makes it click. So we've established the digital asset risk assessment framework, which really walks through each pair into an understanding of is it proper and fit for US users. So breaking down, you know, key components within the regulation framework that we've received, although it's a very kind of gray area, are to our best ability to assess whether this is a viable offering for the market. And I've seen just recently today, there's been kind of a consortium put together to establish a rating system as well. And we would see fit to compare ours as well as be part of theirs. I think this is one of the things where collective forces can be good, but also if it is our ability to stand up and say U.S. users do deserve this variety in

the market um let us see and push that that boundary as much as we can so in that process like what are some of the things that would come into consideration is it things that are um maybe i'll break it into buckets of like the structure of um of the asset is it uh the way that it was brought to market is it kind of the um the state that it is in today is it all of those things some of those things like how do you yeah you've kind of started one through three and there's probably you know a handful more of the criteria that we go through pretty good guesses i should be on the legal team at binance us or higher no you don't want me on the legal team you want to make it through that framework but um the the the breakdown is really this the state to which the

coin or token came into the market, the team itself behind it, whether they have a long-term vision, whether this will be in the markets through perpetuity, whether the mechanism to which it is operated can sustain that. The liquidity elements in the US, some places have zero liquidity against the US dollar and maybe are only traded through Bitcoin. The community behind it? Is there a substantial group of active traders or is this, you know, one guy in the corner shouting like, please list this. Um, and it's fine if, if he's going to be doing serious volume. Yeah. But, uh, you know, there, there's a, there's a need for, um, healthy markets. And without that, you create kind of this tail, um, that occurs in, in the market that might lead

for patchy liquidity or prices that gap. And that leads to inability to actually put utility behind these things. So imagine if you were a corporate trying to transact through a currency and there was no liquidity and you gapped in price from like 6 to 32, you're not going to come back to that shop and keep trying to go through that mechanism. So I think a lot of it is how is it used? How can we help projects that need a venue point to increase liquidity?

That's something that's crucial. If it's going to help a project or a purpose kind of continue in the space of digital assets, we want to be the open vendor for capturing that. Got it. And so what would be one or two of the most common reasons why something would get rejected from the process or kind of not pass? oh i think well one would be false infrastructure uh so what do you mean by that they are a shell there's no one behind it there's no real thought behind it it was a you know a color scheme and a

four-letter pair of words so i think that's one thing we can easily throw out um so really digging under the ground of saying let me just put that in like scam yeah yeah scam coin um but a shell is a nice way to call it a scam i'll just yeah you call it a scam i'll try and sound a little bit nicer to those people so i don't get harassed on on twitter uh you just have to embrace we'll get to twitter but you've got to embrace it we'll get it yeah at least at least somebody's paying attention um all right so that's uh the states and kind of the assets um in terms of uh today you simply offer what i'll just call kind of spot market trading right so i can come in uh and there's different pairs that I can trade. Um, and there's bid asks buyer seller off to the

races and that's all that's available today. Right? Yeah. You've got your orders. You've got an order book, a full, um, exchange set up against USD, USDT and Bitcoin on some pairs. Um, and so that Fiat on ramp is something that we're really excited to be able to offer. Yep. And, uh, I believe I remember correctly, all trading is free until November. That is correct. All trading is free until november 1st um and if you're worried about your state not being live we will also be looking into keeping those um exciting things for those states that when they do go live so you won't be left behind um and then also if you have friends which i think the big thing about crypto is maybe we've lost some of our friends um so now's the time to earn them back or or work

with them teach them what you've been up to and why the rabbit hole is fun to be in um you'll get $15 and so will they, um, if they both start, if you both start trading. So got it. Um, that's kind of the, the great plans we've got so far. Um, but free trading is an exciting thing for those that are looking to figure out how this works. A lot of the earlier on ramps for them have been expensive and they didn't know, you know, why am I paying such a percentage on a volatile asset already? Um, I'm afraid of it. Um, just get in, get, get messy as a, as negative yielding debt has become popular in the world, will we see negative exchange fees so I get paid for trading? If you're good. There's a world that we are going to be growing into with the negative

rate. It might be a new norm. People might expect to be paid for things. It feels a little entitled right now. I won't call the person out by name, but there is a ridiculous person on the internet who continues to argue that negative yielding debt is not only normal, but makes sense because you should be paying somebody to take care of your money and there's no risk in putting your money in the bank which is a thing we won't get into but uh somebody needs to explain to this person about uh 2008 yeah all right so uh there was a whole bunch of questions around uh what i'll call product or service offerings that are potential for an exchange offer so i'm just going to run through these uh feel free to say yes something you're working on no you're not

or elaborate uh the first one which was my favorite one was uh a robo advisor i saw that it was that um tyrone yeah ross shout out shout out tyrone ross uh great idea um there's nothing better than automating what you're doing anyways but um i certainly had to put my kind of thinking cap on like how would that work okay so are you are you allocating someone to then just manage on behalf of you and i think the ability for binance us to be a platform that allows for new job creation and new kind of a modern day private wealth manager can exist um so certainly going down that brokerage model is something fascinating we've seen binance.com roll out a broker uh partner platform as well so anything that binance.com is able to launch i'm able to

license awesome um tyrone let us know if you want clarification on that you know where to find us on twitter uh interest accounts uh so the idea of having a savings account that it earns yield uh i think that's very attractive a lot of things that i'm doing are earning no yield and that's a difficult part of uh of dealing in crypto or dealing in something that will not return unfortunately my banks also don't return anything so um you know for for being able to provide that is a is a really great added added advantage for sure for it uh derivatives yeah so it's a big bucket it's a big bucket but people also forget that like the derivatives market in regular fx is about like three times the spot market so it is a massive beast if you can get 100x leverage

on binance us i know it wasn't a no for the record that wasn't a no it wasn't it wasn't a no i've got to do my homework i've got to talk to the talk to the right regulators figure out what's the process it's it's a but it's something that you guys are at least interested in if you can figure out the right way to do it and provide it in a safe manner you definitely want it absolutely i mean you think about if any corporate is going to be using crypto and using a mechanism of having a balance sheet in crypto you're going to need some form of protection on that so hedging is a concept that i don't think crypto has really been a part of because we've been so speculative one way or the other. But hedging is pretty normal.

Yeah. So hedging is a way to look at derivatives in a risk management model. I think most people in crypto, to your point, they always ask how high can it go? And so they look at derivatives as leverage. So yes, if you're using it correctly, it should be used as a hedge. Should be used as a hedge. That will help for a healthy market. But if you're looking just for, you know outsized returns or upsized risk then yeah so we'll try to we'll try to cater to your needs got it can't let uh arthur have all the fun with his 50 and 100x leverage um are there any that you think are uh shorter term like it as you guys pushed into derivatives you would say hey like these are the ones that we would actually want to go after first or is it still something

where it's more blank slate and in your early stages i mean i mean i like to zoom out a little bit before we start getting all hopped up in derivative land and realize that financial literacy is not something that is 100% guaranteed across the United States. So if we are able to provide a way to which people are now getting smarter about learning how to manage their money, owning their own lives, you know, that's a significant step that I think needs to happen before we can start dialing up derivative land. You can, we can, we can dial up derivative land, But you're really going to be isolating the exposure to just the crypto elite or the, you know, the folks that are already in the space. And I think that's too soon for us to close the door and already sound like, you know, you're the varsity team.

So I'm bringing it back. We're going back to the beginning of making sure that people are aware, not intimidated by it, understanding what, you know, what is a buy? What is a sell? How does this market work? Why are things going up? Why are things going down? while also educating them we don't have like a dumbed down system it is a still an order book so you'll see everything that in a regular trader will see got it um making your taxes easier was a

huge one so a number of these exchanges have tried to help in various ways what was kind of the plan there yeah that's a that's a u.s major issue um of okay i want to be doing this but i'm going to be penalized on all fronts given the taxes. And so that was a high priority of mine to make sure that you had a very quick way to download all of your transactions, even for pattern recognition on your own front. Being able to assess your P&L in a way that you can dig into your own data a little bit more was an important thing. So there's super easy ways to download custom amount of time, three months, six months, one year, year to date, custom dates, and that'll allow you to to keep your taxes a little bit cleaner um as well you know there are a great

amount of tax providers now in crypto um and so we'll be trying to help folks uh even before october 15th and april 15th um get get in the right direction got it that one uh is a huge one because uh one of the things that people i don't think realize is when you go and you sell into some of these order books uh it doesn't get executed in one trade and then sometimes it can the two three five ten twenty trades uh and each individual one of those if you do the taxes to the exact accuracy counts as a taxable event and your or your accountant will have a lot of fun with that yeah the market owes you nothing so you have to make sure you do taxes right absolutely um all right the big one mobile app everyone everyone was talking about this on

twitter uh it's coming i i think i've heard yeah i feel like i went to school without my backpack um so they were definitely getting an app up and up and off the ground it was a case of we wanted to go to market before we had all of our school supplies um that's okay that's actually a good thing it's a good thing you know if i made it through the first day of school or the first week of school without my backpack i'm gonna do okay but um no there is gonna be an app we're gonna you know try and increase the functionality of that app as well um our users are on the go America is on the go. Mobile saturation is huge. We want to put it at your fingertips. Got it. iOS and Android is the plan?

I think so. I have both. Just making sure. This one I did not understand, but USD withdrawals and USDT trading pairs, I'm assuming that those are either already there or on the way? They are there. Are they there already? Yeah, so we have all of our current offerings against U.S. dollar and USDT. I think we'll probably hopefully see more crosses come in the way. Sorry, crosses for that example is just different pairs of trading.

Got it. Credit cards. Credit cards. America runs on credit most of the time. I think it's great. You could be a politician with that. some financial services firm

that will definitely donate to your campaign that is your slogan well it's funny my sister and I hedge our careers so she works in corporate credit cards

at a large US bank and I work over on this side I embarrass my brother he works at J.P. Morgan oh yeah well she's at Citi so yeah

if you think of all of my tweets now while one of my brothers is sitting at J.P. Morgan you can imagine his buddies there are giving him a hard time quite often

are you the older or younger I'm the oldest of all of my brothers okay that throws a loophole in my theory in life but two of them are in financial services and you know they get a good laugh every now and then they do all right so credit cards are coming to binance us they're coming one of the tricky parts is when she said it's coming so if you're listening you can tweet and say credit cards are coming when you when you look at uh the credit card

industry which people haven't dug into that as much as they've dug into understanding proof of work i think uh there are huge fees that are not even driven by the end user or the end provider. So translating a merchant processing fee of 3% to our customer when we're providing free trading still feels pretty gross. So we want to be able to provide access to these things in a cost effective way. And currently credit cards are still not cost effective. So thinking through that is something that we want to be very cautious about. But I understand people want to be able to use their debit and credit cards so do you think it's they want it because of the uh kind of user experience just no they just want to be able to go do the same thing that they do but they want

to be able to spend crypto rather than spend dollars or do you think it's something else that's really driving the uh the interest there you know sometimes it's it's as funny as so we offer right now ach and wire payments um and right now you have to either know your bank login or know your routing number and your account number okay oftentimes people don't have that when they're you know, on the road or somewhere else, but they will have their credit card on them. So it's a ability to say, I know how to access my funds through a plastic device that's on me most of the time versus I know by heart my banking number. But ACH up to a thousand dollars is instantaneous delivery. Wires you can do up to a significant amount based on your verification

levels. So don't think there's not a way to get dollars into the system. It's just not a credit card security tokens so these are for those that are paying attention at home uh essentially assets that represent we'll call them digital stocks digital um equity they could be in real estate and traditional stocks but it looks very similar to a traditional security but it's just simply in digitized form again zoom out start small this is just the beginning i think we're a little bit pushing the envelope ahead of our skis to say we're going to go down the path of security offerings when you don't have 95 of the u.s using market in involved um so so baby steps get get get more of the world involved and then we can start providing those products to the right people but uh still

zooming out zooming out starting at the beginning i think there's a lot of land to grab um verse expand upon what we've got. Got it. Are there any products that people did not speculate on that you're excited about thinking about or worth mentioning? I mean, I've always given wonderful kudos to finance engineers who came up with the idea that after you type in your 2FA, you don't have to click enter. But that's a very small, small thing that no one notices. It is very good. When you use a site where it auto uh processes after you filled out the full number of characters beautiful so a couple of things we want to really be able to provide best practices this is not a easy

transition to get into the market like it is to go from a bus to an uber so we want to you know equip people with the right tools that's including security so learning how 2fa works learning how Google Authenticator works. That's just kind of part of the growing up case that you need to have in order to access digital assets. It's going to help you be smarter about your decisions and keeping all of your items very secure, which I think is first and foremost. We can't have reckless behavior taking place. For sure. All right. You've been on the job now 90 days? All right, three months. So I want really hard-hitting answers to what is,

let's start with CZ. Best attribute, worst attribute, and funniest story. Okay, best attribute is his clarity on a vision that is not in this decade. I think that's- I agree with that. That's something that if you can align your personality with where your soul deserves to be,

that is the answer to success. And that's something that I've found day one on the job, being able to completely align where I want to grow, where I think I'm suited for the purpose of, and it fits in with CZ's plans. And so that's something that I really appreciate him having. That's best. Best. Worst.

Worst. No backhand compliments. Worst is like, do men still wear flip-flops? there's only two people i know that wear flip-flops on a consistent basis charlie stremm and cz and then they celebrate with each other on the internet whenever there's a picture of one of them in flip-flops i'll let it i'll let it slide but like come on no what did he wear uh when he's in the bahamas he wore shorts flip-flops and a binance uh i think a collared shirt or a hoodie a collared shirt or a hoodie yeah he did start the bermuda shorts

trend so i appreciate him for that or a couple people have been there too i guess before but yeah that would probably be my only knock is uh oh man it's a flip-flop stick but he wears it all around singapore too right well i mean you have to it's really hot there yeah yeah um all right funniest story you have funniest story um you know i'll probably get a message on this whether i was allowed to reveal this or not but um we were sitting down for lunch and tell me told me yeah yeah they were sitting down for lunch and uh somehow got on the conversation of oldest youngest sibling debates okay and CZ and I immediately realized like oh this is why we see so similarly and it's because we're both younger siblings of an older sister um and

therefore there's this uh unusual and not not welcomed just uh organic competitiveness in the younger sibling that uh says we need we need to be here on this earth to make an impact um and honestly no one no no one in my family has ever said like i'm not worthy or it's it's not the case of of what i need to do i just i feel it in my bones that uh i was out always out to serve uh and be competitive and uh that that's kind of what cz and i both laughed over that it's not because our siblings are mean to us or anything they're both super achieving people we just all just wanted to outdo them just want to outdo them i love it i love you who is the uh one person at binance that you say they are a unknown rock star and people should know who they are but they don't

today who's one person who comes why would i reveal that now no no come on um no one's allowed to go recruit this person for at least 24 hours yeah seriously um i'm a i'm a huge fan of of my regulatory in the u.s um he was the first hire i had and we had a wonderful week in san francisco kind of going through the the roadmap of what we needed to get in place to be operational and we had a we had a moment where we were both standing up we by the way our office was and kind of still is at the time like a closet sized room with bay area view i mean a gorgeous window but very much so we had to open the door because we ran out of oxygen um so we stood there watched the sunset and he goes coley i think i'm going to be a part of something significantly bigger

than i imagined and i said that's my guy like just i i really enjoyed aligning with him his creativity and resourcefulness on getting things done um he thinks about things so thoughtfully lawyers and the legal side don't have it easy. They also serve as advisors to the maniacs that are sometimes the business leaders. So for every irrational idea that I might come up with, he is a way to either temper it or provide a viable way for us to do that. And so I give him huge credit. Christopher Robbins. I was waiting for the name. Oh, yeah. Christopher Robbins. And And he does have a dog named Winnie. So I appreciate that he leans in.

The number of LinkedIn requests for him just went through the roof. He's a great guy. Don't waste his time, though. He's working. So sitting here 90 days after you started, what's the one thing that you did not realize that has surprised you the most? I think it comes from the excitement of the full process of getting something launched. i'm i'm not a mother so i don't really know how the process of motherhood works yet i'm not a mother either yeah well lost on that one probably most of crypto probably is not a mother but if

you are a mother in crypto shout out that's awesome but the entire detail required to have a company up and running and not only a company but a viable product and not only a product but one that goes into a highly competitive market and is live and the bugs are working i've i've done customer support for uh binance us for the past 72 call it 80 hours uh you're talking to me when you uh put a complaint out there um or there's a support ticket so i've had the joy of seeing what's what's buggy for a person and how we can fix it or what is not an intuitive process that my brain said clearly steps one through three um and it's really helped us get a sense of where the product is missing the mark and we can adjust it immediately so within just a week of going live

we've fixed and adjusted some so many small things that i hope uh will ease the path for for folks to come but i also just enjoy seeing who our users are uh getting to know them a little bit more being uh being available to someone that is a first-time user a frequent user of crypto i've had so many people say i'm on you know six exchanges in the u.s and you guys are you know i'm gonna be myself and i'm like why you know tell me what's what's what's your reason for adding a new one um what's your reason would you move all your funds over um you know how how was the experience was it was it was it good until the point where something didn't work for you and oh yeah it's super super easy i like that it's like all right well what are we complaining about but i've just

really enjoyed meeting our users and being a part of that experience um which you don't always get when you're a a small fry in a big company for sure um let's do rapid fire questions to end this thing uh most important company in crypto other than your own can't say binance global either um probably blockworks isn't an answer thanks guys for the podcast uh thanks for making a digestible experience for all users around the world i might say that i think communication is a huge key um if we're able to break this down for ears and eyes and make people be able to understand it that's a huge step for all companies going forward it's a fair answer yeah uh what is the one regulation you would change or improve in the united states if you could wave a magic wand

having a driver's license dedicated to your own state wait what do you mean like why do i have to be tied down to my place of residency i mean i get it this is opening a can of worms on identity on identity and driver's license etc but like how many people drive these days oh you're saying that you would change the fact that you have to have a new york state driver's license or a california state driver's license like it's it's a state by state it's a state by state thing and it's a driver's license like we don't offer uber licenses so are people driving as much these days or are people well i guess the u.s passport would serve as like the federal so we allow that right we allow for passports um as well so that works but uh it's it was always a tricky one for me i was

like what my florida id i had to go in the dmv and sit for like three hours right before i joined binance us because i was like i need a california id my my personal favorite is uh concealed carry permits okay oh gosh oh no we're going guns hold on so uh you can get them in states but they're reciprocated in states oh and so there's this whole game for those that have ever looked at concealed carry permits where florida is the answer because florida is reciprocated in the most states so if you get a concealed carry permit in florida then you can get it in the most number of states yeah uh with that one application but do you think that you have to go to florida to get the concealed carry permit probably not you do not oh my god well so the

processes are very weird around something that is a sensitive issue obviously in the united states driving is a whole different thing right yeah but there's actually some some would argue a much more strong process around the driver's license state by state yeah everyone should go to florida once in their life i think i was born there oh no way okay i mean hollywood florida hollywood florida we left pretty quickly but well it's one of those places where i look at my experience and i realize not everyone that i've worked with in my life grew up knowing how to run away from alligators and seeing rockets go into outer space after school and so maybe my imagination might be a little bit more stretched a little different because my environment around me was such but

no it was a wonderful wonderful time what's your most controversial thought in the industry and if you don't say controversial thought i'm gonna make you say one so you have to say something that's controversial women can do anything that's that's not controversial okay oh in crypto what's your most controversial thought so when you say it people are going to be like ah she's fine i think ledger nano's font is too small ledger nano is too small yeah the font is too small you're alienating the use use case oh boomers are left out of being able to store their crypto securely that that was an expert way to not answer the question i appreciate it it's controversial they haven't created a larger version they they they won't uh i don't think

they're ever going to change it make a bigger option just like a brick big buttons but i think that's their point okay well just to not have it be a big i have to i have to click it for my dad because he can't see those numbers that's fair i i do appreciate uh when i'm on the subway or just walking somewhere and you ever see an older person and they have their phone up their text messages zoomed in the text is just it's like what are you reading all headlines right you're Like, why do you need the text that large? Yeah. But it makes sense.

All right, most important book you've ever read. The Little Book of Economics by Greg Ip. What is that? I'm assuming it's about economics. It's a tiny, tiny book. All right. And you can finish it in an easy afternoon. For those that don't read, can't read, don't like to read.

And it walks you through how this world works. And I think it's something that we take for granted, understanding supply and demand and why the markets exist. and so highly recommend this book you think you understand crypto you have no background in economics you have no background in business you are not even interested in that just read this book and it'll help you just get a little bit of a sense of why the world moves the way it does i love it i always end what you asked me one question but first aliens somebody rightfully so guest on twitter that i would ask you about aliens so here we are real or not real obviously

obviously real obviously real but uh we can go down in the path of uh you know farming paradox if we need uh just if we do think things exist i think we do need to make space to listen and we haven't and you can translate that over to crypto we talk a lot we barely listen to people so let's all take quiet for a little bit and and listen to our surroundings and do you think that our inability to listen is driven by technology or desire oh desire desire but you think we have the technology available where we could i think we have the technology available to listen but do you think aliens have come here before i'm here right uh no uh i i do really yeah you think aliens have come to earth and they've had contact and just somebody hasn't told everyone because

they don't want to freak them out yeah they got like denied a a metro card and left left and went back uh home my whole thing is just uh i forget who said this on the podcast and they really it's like stuck with me they're like well just so we're clear like in most instances in the world where one group of species went and adopted the land of another group of species it didn't work out so well for the people who were originally there right like maybe we don't want to have contact yeah maybe we don't want contact we do have will smith maybe we already have contact and we just don't know or maybe we're looking at this all wrong and it's not what's in outer space but what's under the sea that's been my thing all along is we know more about mars than

we know about what's under the sea i'd like to go there first there's a uh i think he's brazilian or russian billionaire i need to i need to get this guy on the podcast he uh has personally funded the building of a underwater vehicle which is a one-seater that goes to the depths of the ocean i think he's been to three or four of the seven oceans the absolute deepest point and he gets in the vehicle and does it himself through richard branson yes and uh i don't think there's been that much reporting on like what he's seen right and so to me why would he why would he tell anyone no well like hey man you went to the bottom of like the indian ocean like what's down there right is it just sand like at the bottom of the man no there's some critters

that you've never seen and never want to see exactly so we'll see what uh what one question you have for me oh um oh sorry that's my law and order text text sound um what is the biggest distraction for you in your dynasty building the biggest distraction honestly the people who say the positive things on twitter oh okay i should stop the people who say the negative things i love it like god you're you're you're not helping this world out come on i love it no i respond i usually just thanks hope you're having a great day like i love it i do love to turn a hater into a lover that's a significant so i used to be i used to be like the end goal is to get them to like see the light yeah now i'm not that's not even my goal my goal is literally just to let

you know like i read your nonsense just like you know a little like or you know flame whatever yeah i should actually start flaming the haters that'd be a good one um maybe there's a gif where the guy's got a flame right i've just started with like i i hear you i see you oh you're too empathetic i'm i'm much more uh ignorant um yeah i think that the people who uh what i did not realized two three years ago is how the tribalism the enthusiasm the all of this stuff that makes crypto bitcoin etc what it is uh i think we all think of like the the quote-unquote toxicity right um i recently interviewed somebody who made an argument that like it's actually a good thing right yeah there's arguments that it's a bad thing whatever tribes have helped momentum occur with

most movements yeah and i think that we see when we talk about it we talk about it from a negative connotation i think that the opposite is true where there's a bunch of positive and you can look and see i mean look i think i'll pick on cz for a second right like he is the beneficiary of there's a bunch of people who think very positively of him right and there's a cz tribe if you will um and it's not a bad thing he didn't ask for that he just he did his job and that's what happens i think that if you asked him and a number of other people in the industry if you just pay attention to that like you very quickly think you could walk on water right and like it can very quickly become this distraction of like you've achieved a goal you've done something i think

what i've noticed is having the detractors having the like hey we want to do this deal but we lost the deal to another investor and having to like go back and fight for some allocation and it's like these little daily reminders if you're just like this is a really really long game and like that random you know twitter account whether they're saying positive or negative things doesn't really matter at the end of the day right and so i think people don't want to listen to the quote-unquote trolls when they're saying negative things but want to prop themselves up mentally when they're listening to the trolls say positive things yeah so it's kind of keeping a uh reminder that they're the same yeah still a random twitter account that's that's true no cc's cc's motto is

humble hardcore freedom so is that what it is that's what it is humble hardcore freedom i like that so we like to go after that yeah well and you can do it in sandals so he's killing it yeah you can do it in sandals that's great all right thank you so much for doing this i really appreciate it where can people go to find binance us to find you www.binance.us Binance.us. No.com. No.com. .com is another marketplace.

Somebody has BinanceUS.com? No, no, no. Someone has Binance.com. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's just Binance.us for us. And then you can find us on Twitter at Binance America. You can find me on Twitter at Crypto Coley. You can join our community telegram group driven by the community for the community.

And then you can also follow all our announcements on the website. awesome but other than that get ready humble hardcore freedom it's happening right all right thank you so much thanks so much guys hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain home page scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain