The Pomp Podcast - Danny Kim, Head of Growth at SFOX: The Technology Behind Cryptocurrency Trade Execution

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

Danny Kim is the Head of Growth at SFOX. In this conversation, Daniel and Anthony Pompliano discuss what liquidity in crypto markets looks like, how best trade execution technology works, and how operations at a place like SFOX is actually executed. -----If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

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. Danny Kim is the head of growth at SFOX. In this conversation, we discuss what liquidity in crypto markets looks like, how best trade execution technology works, and how operations at a place like S-Pox is actually executed. 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 i've got danny here with me i'm super excited about this episode because danny and people over at s fox have been uh really working uh on the ground for four or five years now so they lack the theoretical uh intellectual olympics and much more into um just here's what's been going on here's what we've been doing here's what works and here's what doesn't So, excited about the convo, and I appreciate you joining, Danny. Thanks for having me, Pom. For sure. Let's get started with your background.

What you were doing pre-crypto or Bitcoin stuff, and then maybe get into how you eventually discovered and got hooked. Yeah, sure. So, after I graduated back in 2007, I went straight into banking. Like most folks, people were going in for the money, banking was secure, or whatever they say, and then that's when the financial crisis hit, right? I was more on the operational side, back like middle office, handling trade, trade reconciliation and so forth. And, you know, to be honest, like that just bore the hell out of me.

It's a cycle where you're doing the same things every day and every day. And so while I was doing that, I was actually working on a startup. It was like an e-commerce site. And that just kind of always kept me, piqued my interest. I was always kind of involved with learning more about what was going on in the tech, like the fintech or tech industry, like following Wired or looking at TechCrunch back in the day. Um, and then while I was working on the startup, uh, which is called, um, what do you call style dig?

Um, you know, the biggest pain point with the e-commerce site was that when I was talking to potential customers or vendors was that it was payment processing, right? Like for fashion designers, um, if they were to sell a good, there'd be a charge back. And in the event that when there's charge back happens, especially with credit cards at ACH, the merchant loses the item. Um, and then they also have to pay back, uh, the credit card company or the bank. Um, so it's a double loss. um from my background that didn't make any sense so i just kept looking more and more into it

and then one day uh this was back and i think around like 2010 or 11 uh there was a article in wired um about bitcoin i think it was like the the rise and fall of when it went from about like 13 cents to like 18 like 18 dollars and dropped um and then i started reading more into that and that's really piqued my interest a lot and i started diving into more into that and then It actually turned out that one of my buddies, my friend Bobby, who just recently resigned from Cumberland, started, you know, was actually doing OTC trading at Second Market, now Genesis. And we were in Vegas one day. We were just talking about crypto. I was telling him, like, you know, I was like looking at the Bitcoin.

He was there. He was talking about, like, you know, he was at Second Market, what he was doing. And so I just kept nagging him about that. And then it turned out that, you know, a couple of months later, he was leaving second market to go to Ipbit, now known as Paxos. And he was like, look, like, you know, we are moving headquarters from Singapore to the U.S. We need some, you know, people who have like banking backgrounds, operationally and so forth. Like, are you interested? And he told me that was like immediate.

I was like, yes, definitely interested. Send me the resume. Sorry, not the resume. The jobs, the job spec. And the funny thing was, like, and he sent to me, it was on like a Craigslist ad, immediately thought I was skeptical, like I was immediately skeptical because I was like, what kind of company sends out a job ad in Craigslist, right? This is special, this special event was around like, you know, 2013, 14. I look at it. I'm like, you know what, look, I'll take the job without even interviewing with anybody.

I go to my boss. I tell him, like, look, at the bank, I'm like, I'm quitting. I'm leaving. I'm joining this thing called Bitcoin. I love it. And I think it's the future without even realizing I had a job. Right. And in retrospect, now I'm thinking about it like, damn, I probably I probably should have, you know, probably confirmed I had a job that confirmed if I had a job yet or not. But anyway, I went into it, got the job, if it managed operations.

And then from there, you know, I was with them for two years going from, you know, heading up the operations to becoming the director of client services and sales. And then over those two years, they started pivoting over to more of the blockchain side of projects with their investors. And so while they were pivoting, I looked at other opportunities, which was around like 2016, 2017, and Gemini was available. And so I moved over to Gemini as the head of sales. And for a couple of months, kind of saw after speaking with all the institutions or quote unquote institutions, early adopters, high-network sophisticated traders getting involved in crypto. you know one thing I kind of saw was you know people kept saying regulation at the time was the one blocking everything but then I kind of saw that it was actually like infrastructure and so when I was looking at what's actually available what's actually going to help people

adopt crypto and I came across SFOX they were one of my first clients that I adopted when I was in IPIT around 2015 so I left Gemini and spoke to the co-founders at SFOX at Akbar and George And I was like, look, I love what you guys are doing. This is kind of where the market is going. And that's where I am today. Got it. And so when you first started in the crypto side with Ipbit, what was the biggest difference you saw in operations from legacy Wall Street finance organizations in the Bitcoin crypto world? Yeah. So, you know, the biggest thing, honestly, it was reconciliation. And keep in mind, like, you know, with Ipid, you know, this was a startup. You were trying to reconcile daily of incoming deposits from, you know, the blockchain and not, you know, and then there's nothing to reconcile against like a wire deposit or record. Right. And so that's such a huge different mechanism because you can't use spreadsheets, you can't use what's available, you know, in the public market because everything was set and used in, you know, for wire transfer or something else. So for us, it was the biggest difference was, you know, trying to figure out how do you reconcile it? Like, what do you do operationally to make sure that as an exchange, you know, everything is being done correctly?

And so what was really cool about IPIT was that they want like we've learned everything in the past and the issues we occurred in banking operationally back in the day. Right. So we want to take all of that, all those processes and transfer that into it, into the exchange to make sure that as a financial product or potential financial product, there's going to be that very similar reconciliation or that control. So it's trying to figure out how do we adopt those type of similar controls so that it kind of meets what eventual regulators or auditors would want to see. Got it. And so as you move into the S-Fox role, maybe describe first what exactly is S-Fox? What are you guys trying to build? Yes. So what we've actually built is an electronic prime dealer. To give you a better or more easier explanation, say you are a high net worth individual, a business, a fund. We're very similar to a interactive brokers for crypto. If you are a retail individual investor, we're like a kayak for crypto.

Basically, ultimately what that means is we provide a platform that provides you the most efficient and competitive way to buy and sell crypto. But in order to do this, what we do is we provide an executable aggregated order book. We avoid you having to have a need to open an account at every single exchange and have a wallet and try to manage that. We aggregate all of that so that in one single platform, you see the best available, most competitive public rate on all the exchanges into one platform. And then you're able to execute across it. With that, we also give you algorithms. So you become a little bit more competitive. For instance, if you're trying to buy a million or two million dollars worth of a Bitcoin, if you do that on a single exchange, there's a lot of hidden costs. There's a slippage. But if you do that across multiple exchanges and add a, say, smart routing or an iceberg order, that gives you a better competitive price execution. So what we are doing is ultimately providing a seamless gateway to buy and sell crypto, but making it very, very efficient and competitive.

What is an iceberg order? So an iceberg order, what that does is, you know, again, like if you're trying to buy, sell a large size, you don't want to place that large size on an order book, especially in the crypto market where you're seeing there's a lot more transparency. You can see someone placing a large order. If someone sees that, someone's going to try to take advantage of it. Right. So the best way to do this is to hide that word. What you would do is say, let's say you put a million dollar order. The system will break it out and only show you that you're looking to buy, say, you know, one thousand or two thousand dollars worth.

And as that gets filled, you'll start trickling out that order more and more so that the open market doesn't really see the full size behind it. Got it. And so you mentioned the hidden cost, right? Let's kind of attack or uncover the problems that most of these institutions or even just large individual traders might not understand about the crypto markets. um describe more what those hidden costs are what are the inefficiencies that maybe exist in trading on other cryptocurrencies that you wouldn't expect if you're coming from traditional markets yeah sure um man there's like there's actually so much i think that the first part is with operations right um we're still we're still in the early stages of crypto i would say i mean infrastructure has definitely improved um since 2009 to now but it's still very early

And when I say infrastructure is still early is that, you know, every exchange, there's no uniformity across each one. Every exchange has a different API spec. Every exchange has a different reporting spec. They have different fee structures, different ways of funding. So when you consider all of that, you know, you have to actually hire a team of three to four or five people just to manage that operational aspect. Making sure that one, there's a security engineer understanding how each exchange operates, what the withdrawal process is, deposit processes and logging credentials um then you have a financial person looking to what are the fees of each exchange what are the the volume tier discounts um and then you have you know you have your your your ops or reconciliation person looking at audit person

looking at how are you know how are reports being you know being um how excuse me how are trades being reported you know are they showing the the trade execution size are they showing the time stamp and so forth and then you have the engineers that need to integrate with every single unique api code because there's this there's a separate spec now so that's one aspect of it and then there's the liquidity um you know there's still not a lot of there's it's definitely liquidity is definitely improved especially with bitcoin ether today than it was before but when you're trading on a single exchange and we've seen this in the past where you've seen major drop-offs with like say on coinbase or kraken or so forth is that you know a trader

may accidentally place a large size order or a large size market order and that may just eat up through straight through the um the order book ultimately at the end of the day your net affected price just gets killed because you know although the top of the price that that spot price at the market may have shown 10 000 if you're trying to execute a million dollar trade that might have gone through multiple different levels that ultimately cost your trade execution to be on average around like $6,000 or even less. So those are the hidden costs that people need to be aware of. Got it.

And so how do you guys think about solving that problem and maybe really get into kind of from the technical standpoint as much as you can, you know, the use of different exchanges, breaking up the orders, et cetera? Yeah, sure. So, you know, it's actually kind of quite interesting. We did, like, an analysis a couple weeks back of taking a snapshot of every single exchange on their order book every five minutes. We did this for Coinbase, Ipid, Gemini, and Bittrex and a few others just kind of to see, you know, how many basis points down you would go on depending on the size, right? and then it kind of showed that like you know one to five to ten twenty bitcoins you'll you'll you'll

go down anywhere from you know two basis points all the way all the way up to like you know 15 basis points even more so for us to avoid that what we did was we took every single exchange we have an account set you know our own accounts our own funds on every single exchange we combine the order books into one so that when you are executing you're not executing on one individual exchange we're placing orders across and smart routing them across every single one and it's not a matter of you know which exchange we prefer we like better it's all about the size and price that's available and we just combine it so when you look into say our order book which we're very transparent about you'll see that every every trade or every exchange is kind of overlapping each other

and in fact there's actually a a a unrealized a unrealized arbitrage opportunity where because of that price difference. And so when we have that merged order book, we're also adding in algorithms so that it can actively trade on every single exchange. Because if you trade it on one single one, it would impact that order book and cause a ripple effect. So we're actively just using the algorithms or just actively placing orders on every single exchange, depending on your size, depending on the order type you're using, and that's being executed. I see. And then when you think of the obstacles for building out the smart order routing, liquidity, and those types of either functionality or benefits of the infrastructure, what's the current challenge, right? So when you go to work every day, you're like, this is the thing that we need to solve in order to keep scaling and really kind of take the business to a level that makes it more valuable to customers.

Yeah, I think the biggest thing to solve for infrastructure-wise, when there are a lot of trades being done, again, I think exchanges, APIs are still trying to improve their structure and is making sure that they can handle that frequency. And so, you know, when we're operating on a day-to-day basis, you know, we're working closely with all of our partners. You know, if there is a latency issue, we try to speak with them and try to fix that. The other side of it also is, you know, when operationally, when we are, you know, trying to help and understand, like explain to our customers of knowing, you know, how Bitcoin operates, what is Bitcoin or even generally whatever crypto is, how you secure it, how you send it back and forth. That education process is still needed and something that we're actively doing day-to-day. And on the operations side, I think most people understand there's technology at work here, right? But they probably don't realize what goes into the operations. Maybe just unveil a little bit how an infrastructure player like SFOX thinks about operations and then what that looks like on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah, got it. So from that side, you know, we're on from a day to day basis and operationally, we're looking at every single exchange on, you know, how much cash, how much capital we're keeping across. We're also looking at what the uptick and maintenance time is across every exchange, you know, looking at saying, you know, is are there any status issues with, you know, each exchange with their with the APIs or the platform itself and keeping and trying to understand that on a day to day basis. you know for us the biggest problem with you know with anyone trying to trade on on a you know in a non-platform like ours is that you have to actively manage your own accounts on every single exchange and when you realize oh you know i have all my capital on one exchange a but then you see that the price is a lot better um we're more competitive on a different exchange what you have to do is you have to withdraw those funds on your bitcoin or your u.s dollars um which takes about anywhere

from one hour to four hours, depending on what you're using, and then transfer it over to the other platform where you then have to wait for that company to then credit your account. For us, we actively have to make sure that we're maintaining a strong balance of all funds while also maintaining and reducing our exchange and counterparty risk. So it's really a strong balance of the api cash management um looking at you know ensuring that all orders are being processed correctly and keeping that keeping that uptake time um you know to what to what people need where do you see uh or what do you see from customer interest right as you guys are building this out obviously having been doing this for four or five years now you've kind of seen the

evolution but today the customers that are coming in and don't name names necessarily but just like types of customers are we talking about uh individual uh retail traders are we talking about crypto funds uh family offices institutions a mix like what do you see yeah um good question so we actually see people across the spectrum um i'll talk about just you know s fox but also you know from what i've seen outside as well with speaking with partners and so forth like you know with s fox and everywhere else you know we're seeing interest across from your your average you know your neighbor john and jane sitting or you know right across right across the street to high net worth individuals to um you know early tech investors or early adopters

um or even you know you could say like more adventurous vendors say like you know life enthusiasts or people who are looking at and how to improve their self-life and self-earnings who are a little bit more adventurous in spending um and then you see a lot of funds and businesses um looking to get get to looking to get exposure to it because right now like with crypto you know there's still so much there's still so much to do and so much to see you know from a from an investor standpoint there's still a lot of speculation of where the value is going to come right and you have therefore you have a lot of that individual sophisticated investors looking to to get a piece of it or to hedge themselves and get that explosion portfolio um you do have

have those retail guys as well that we that we that we bring in um where they hear from their their aunt their uncle or their aunt or their friend saying you know bitcoin is the next big thing and that's going to make them rich or that you know they actually needed to pay their their their relative or friend across country because it's the easiest way um in fact we actually even see people um buying bitcoin or crypto in order to pay for goods and services because um they'll actually get receive a discount rather than if they paid with a credit card or a debit card um and we also see businesses who are using bitcoin where they are using it in order to pay their you know to pay their international employees you know in this day and age there's a lot of you know

remote workers you have you know specializer or fantastic engineers across the globe but in order to pay these people like using fiat and using usd or or any local currency it's still a difficult long process and costly um we're seeing people using it instead than using bitcoin because it saves them time and it saves them a lot of cost um so that's those are kind of individuals and investors that we see today do you see anybody not coming in like any type of uh investor or group that you talk to they're like uh you know thanks but no thanks we're gonna sit on the sidelines for now yeah i mean i i think like what we've seen and people have spoken to it's it's a lot of the very very i would say the larger like larger institutions um or the more conservative

funds just because not not not a matter of because they are they don't believe in crypto um it's more of the infrastructure still needs development right um and there still needs to be some clarity on on what needs to be done in crypto what like you know what is crypto what is bitcoin how will it be regulated um the other side of it also is is that you know if you are a more conservative fund you know you have to change your investment prospectus as well so there are certain larger you know institutions or companies out there who you know are still look are looking to crypto as is right now they can't because there's still a lot of ambiguity or no no clear direction on you know what the what the regulation or how like you know how everything would be

managed and so there's that part um and as well as like you know i think infrastructure is still needed right i mean we are still looking into custody and the fa like i think it was um what is it um i think the sec and cftc came out recently and saying you know that they're they're looking at a broker dealer and what's required for custody um and so i think there is still a lot of clarification that's needed in order for these larger businesses or enterprises to come in i see and so as you look at some of that guidance from uh from the sec is there there that you think affects the way that you guys see uh the company unfolding in the future or the market i mean i think right now like every everything that every i think every everything

that they say it's always helpful because it's regardless if it's negative or not it's been helpful because it provides a little bit more clarity and allowing you to you know figure out as a business not only for s fox but for anyone really in the industry to figure out what they can and can't do or how they should go and approach it because before what everyone was really doing is you know saying you know if i want if i want to get a security token i need to get an ats i need to get a broker dealer but the government really or regulators never really clap but that's exactly what you need right so people are just hoping that's the right process um so any any news that you know that the sc or the regulators come out is better than nothing

um i from what we can tell or at least what i can what i see is that you know um bitcoin ether is not security it's still available it's going to be used for you know many different reasons um either speculative or or for a medium of exchange um and you know in terms of security like in terms of security tokens so forth you know there is a lot of interest um of digitizing you know crypto or sorry, digitizing information that's being done today, which is why the SEC and other regulators are getting so heavily involved, right? Because, you know, in the financial industry, they're a little bit more slow to act unless it's needed or demanded by a lot of people in the mass, right? And I think what we're seeing is that so many people are

trying, are getting involved, are so curious that they're kind of pushing the government regulators to provide a little bit more information. So I think what we're going to is more of digital world um we see that you know technology has been improving and a lot more investors a lot more individuals are getting more keen on just trying to understand you know blockchain decentralization um the the verification just pure information um that's kind of like where we're kind of going so that's what i kind of see right now and so you look you've been in bitcoin and crypto for a while now and you've worked at a couple different companies so you get kind of various perspectives, experiences, what's been the biggest one or two changes that you've

seen in the industry, whether it's market conditions, you know, perspective, or maybe even the types of people that you've worked with? What are those changes been over the last couple of years? You know, I think that there's over the changes, there's been a lot more sophistication coming in, and intelligence. And I mean, like, it is, we are seeing smarter and smarter people coming in. People are learning, you know, pretty much dropping everything they're doing and trying to learn as much as possible. And, you know, people are growing in life speeds. I mean, we're seeing, you know, peak kids who just graduated or are still in college just becoming super knowledgeable in this space. When before, you know, it was really a core group of folks.

And now this is expanding to a whole mass of individuals. And then now we're also seeing a lot more sophistication of financial firms, like, you know, a lot more finance, like, sophisticated trading firms getting involved doing a high frequency trading and they're getting more involved with different types of trading products like derivatives or like, you know, for instance, futures and options. We're seeing a lot more sophisticated products being developed for crypto as a speculative product. And, you know, that's two parts of it. It's the sophistication of interest and that growing interest in crypto, but as well as the advancement of trading products that are being done for Bitcoin and the others.

What's your most bullish outlook on Bitcoin and crypto? And then what's your most bearish? Most bullish outlook on crypto? You know, I could see personally, I'm a bullish guy on this, that I could see Bitcoin being the store of value, the digital gold of the future. and I could see it being worth

a lot more than what it currently is and this is investment advice this is just my personal view but I could see it as digital gold because if you take a look at this when you compare it to any other crypto out there anywhere in the world people know what Bitcoin is

anywhere in the world there is an exchange that has Bitcoin as the underlying or with a local currency people have individuals have become a little bit more aware of how to use it and there's more parts being built on it. And that's kind of why I see Bitcoin being that digital gold in the future.

Bearish, I see that there's going to be a lot of – we've seen this with the ICO. We've seen this with a lot of the altcoins. A lot of that, 95% of that, I think has already been removed, and there's probably going to be a lot more removed after that. um and i probably say that there's only going to be a like a handful of coins really um available that actually have a use case that will be there and you know that there will be a loss with the people who are investing to the other coins i think that's fair um all right so uh i usually end each podcast with a rapid fire set of questions what uh what do you think the most

important company in crypto other than sbox is yeah i mean in terms of you know let's say like a single point of failure i i would say like to be honest i think coinbase right i mean they have such a huge brand they have such a huge outreach if anything negative would happen to them but everyone everyone that buys bitcoin has heard of bitcoin or they do they typically go to coinbase because they have the best brand strong brand um you know they've been they've been a leader in a lot of things and so something negative would happen to bitcoin that would be a huge setback which is why I think that they are a firm that's extremely important within the space. What do you think is the one regulation that you would change or improve if you could?

I don't know, to be honest. That's something more I've got to think more about. For me, frankly, I just want to see a little bit more clarity. I just want to see more clarity on exactly who's going to be regulating, Should Bitcoin be regulated by a governing body or should it be a self-regulated organization? My thinking is that there should be a self-regulated, an SRO, right? Because Bitcoin crypto is a whole separate animal. It's something that requires a lot of education, a lot of sophistication that people have experience with.

And it's a decentralized system that needs to be a self-regulated body. And that's kind of where I stand. What do you think your most controversial thought in Bitcoin or crypto is? If you said it, the most amount of people would disagree with you. Yeah, I mean, look, I think a lot of there's always been an argument of is Bitcoin a medium of exchange or is a store of value, right? Quite frankly, or like, you know, is there even a use case for it? Frankly, I believe that Bitcoin is all of it, right? It's both a store of value and a medium of exchange.

the great thing about bitcoin is that for us you know in the u.s we may see it as speculative product but somewhere in the world somewhere in like say an emerging market or somewhere else it's being used for something else that we don't we may not even be aware of and that's kind of the beauty of not only bitcoin but just crypto itself because there's a use case for it and people are being used that we may not be aware of and can be used any way that we want and so that's that's that's that's my view and i think that i think people push a little too hard saying bitcoin is this or this is a specific use case it's it's a use case to how you would want to use it it can be used for any single way that you need that needs to be used for um that's the beauty

of it it's the fact that it can be spent controlled any way you can use that store value you can use it as a payment um i don't think there's going to be one specific use case for bitcoin it's just going to be an overall you know expanding thing for anybody and everybody for sure what uh what's most important book you've ever read most important book um it's actually uh the dalai lama art of happiness i read i read this back in um in in high school i was going through my teenage angst i was so angry you know like i'd go after like everybody like get into fights and everything i don't and i actually don't know how i came across this maybe i was going through a troubling time or something um and and i like i started reading it like i kind of just got

i just like i think that was actually one of my first books i fully finished and sadly i could sadly say that i fully finished when i was that young um where i read it from you know front to back and it really honestly changed me because after reading that book i had a whole new outlook in life in terms of you know like how do i maintain happiness like who do i what do i care about what's actually important and it really just changed my whole like aura to be honest i love it man it's uh i always say a good book is just as much about what's in the book as when you read it right right exactly all right before i let you ask me a question to uh to finish up i always talk about aliens uh you believer non-believer you know i i really do believe there are like so aliens are

anything that's non like not human or outside of this this world right um i i and you know i think that definitely there definitely is what i think though this is even crazier um like you know there's definitely aliens out there 100 i believe but there's also like we haven't even explored we've only explored about like i think what's like five or six percent of our of our own water of our own globe right and so that water space there's probably even aliens down there too um i think that there are other species other animals or creatures that we've never even seen or heard not only in our own waters locally but like you know in the universe that you know unfortunately i don't think we'll ever be able to see because the universe is ever expanding um we

probably you know there's something there's probably something there but i unfortunately i don't think we'll ever come across it in our lifetime i think that's uh that's my always my big question is after you get to uh do aliens exist or not then it's will we ever discover them or come in contact so uh we'll uh we'll see there what uh what one question you have for me to to wrap it up yeah um all right so i like to get a little personal with a lot of people when i when i speak with them um so let me see um you know if you look back um what's the one thing you miss in your childhood like from now to like when you look back like you know saying what you missed like what's that one thing so i grew up with uh four younger brothers and uh and we were wild man

we used to do some wild ass shit to be completely honest and uh it's one of these things where like i remember like the summer times uh we were all out of school what you just wake up it is like what can we you know screw up today what trouble can we get into what chaos can we cause uh and it was never like really bad stuff but it was just you know whatever like young boys could figure out to do that is fun that their parents probably don't want them doing uh we did we did it pretty much like every day uh and so there's definitely uh you know look part of it is like that stuff isn't as uh entertaining as it once was but but if i think back to uh you know a bunch of different childhood memories that's probably one of them where it's just like me and my brothers roaming

around just frankly doing nothing while doing everything all at once that's funny you know i i like that kind of it's kind of the same thing for me it's like back in the day like with you and your brothers you probably had like there was no worries it was just pure joy and happiness right you guys were just looking at how to explore how to how to like how either like how to get like in trouble or find out what you know what's gonna get in trouble or just try something different i imagine right like for me it's kind of like the same way like i grew up in the outskirts of the city around like jackson heights queens and like our day-to-day of me and my brothers and like people within the neighborhood we would just travel around all across cities on on foot or

rollerblades get into trouble trying to see you know what else is new out you know back in the day yeah you didn't have an uber or anything right like what you had to do was actually run bike or travel and like you know see what's actually across that that next city because your parents wouldn't drop you off um and that was like that that pure joy of fun because it was you know it was natural it was genuine yeah it's uh it's one of these things where like um the curiosity takes over right and uh and once you find something new you know some of the stuff you like some of the stuff you don't like and you start building out habits and all that kind of stuff so uh look it's um i tell folks all the time that the one thing i'm super grateful for

was growing up uh very early on i think uh all of my brothers and i uh discovered that life is just uh more enjoyable when you're having fun right you're kind of joking around and laughing etc and so thankfully we all continue to try to do that today but i really do think a lot of those memories um kind of you know formed that uh that perspective on life yeah man i mean couldn't you say it's also kind of like how at least for me that's kind of what kind of also drew me into crypto as well like i think one of the things that i really loved about in the early days was that the crypto community everyone was doing it as a pure joy like people weren't really getting paid of it it was more of you know everyone was so collaborative like everyone want to try to

figure out you know how like you know whatever business you were doing how we could help out and build that community um and it was just that that natural enjoyment of trying to build this future right like you imagine like you know back like in 2011 2012 where you know this even earlier people just had this idea and then you know one was getting paid but people were just collectively coming in you saw this like family grow even larger and larger uh and that's kind of like where we are today right like everyone that's involved loves it so much that they're just like you know, jumping ship or just trying to focus on this? Yeah, I tell people all the time that Bitcoin, I think, is a great example of there was pent

up energy, right? Both that was negative towards legacy system and it was positive towards a desire for a new option or a new system. And with the advent of Bitcoin and blockchain technology, it just unleashed what was already there, right? And that's part of the beauty of it. Okay, I hear that, man. I agree. All right, man. Listen, I really appreciate you doing this.

I think what you guys are doing at SFOX is awesome. And we'll have to check in again later as we kind of get into this bull market that's coming and see how things are going. Thanks for having me, man. Hey, everyone. Pomp 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 homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars.

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