The Pomp Podcast - Matt Galligan, Interchange CEO: Portfolio Management for Crypto Investors

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

Matt Galligan is the founder and CEO of The Picks and Shovels Company. In this conversation, Galligan and Anthony Pompliano discuss crypto custody, crypto data, trading, and what needs to happen for crypto to continue progressing. ----- Join the Off the Chain newsletter. Pomp's daily email analyzes the crypto market for institutional investors. Simply, it’s the best crypto newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning. No frills. No bullsh*t. Just everything you need to know in a 3-minute read. https://offthechain.substack.com/ ----- BlockFi BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. ----- 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. Matt Galligan is the founder and CEO of the Picks and Shovels Company. In this conversation, we talk about crypto custody, crypto data, trading, and what needs to happen for crypto to continue progressing. Matt also shares a company secret, so you'll definitely want to listen. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Before we get started, I want to talk about one of our sponsors, BlockFi. These guys are doing really interesting work in crypto lending. What they allow you to do is keep your crypto, put it up as collateral,

and receive a US dollar loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10 million, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. You should visit BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, that's BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, one more time, type it in, BlockFi.com slash Pomp, if you'd like to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. Definitely do it. 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, I'm super excited. We've got Matt Galligan here. So thank you so much for coming, sir. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. All right. So many people probably don't know your background, actually. Let's start there and how you got into crypto. Totally. So I'm a multi-time entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, whatever kind of title you want to give it. I got my start in 2007 with a company called Social Thing, social media aggregation. It was a time when everybody was using a bajillion different social networks and we just had a

dashboard for you to see everything in one place. And I got in through Techstars, had a great experienced and ran for all of 15 months. And then we got acquired by AOL, which was a pretty wild ride from start to finish. Spent a bit of time at AOL, then started a second company called Simple Geo, which was back-end geolocation for app developers. And that company, just a quick note on that company, had some really great employees there. One of which was... Or team members, I should say. One of which was Zuko, who went on to found Zcash and be the CEO of Zcash company, which is pretty awesome. It was amazing working with him back in the day. Third company was one called Circa. It was a mobile news product that allowed you to stay

in touch with the stories that you cared about, followed them. And as they progressed, you would get updates on them over time. And that was a lot of fun. Ultimately, though, we had issues monetizing. So that one unfortunately shut down, um, which was really tough. Uh, and I spent a number of years kind of, uh, coming out of that and figuring out what was going to be next for us. Um, but once we, uh, once I kind of got my feet back under me, spent a little bit of time at Postmates leading design. And then after that started getting into crypto. Um, so that was a pretty crazy experience. Um, everything prior to that, but crypto was a really wild journey. Uh, I'd learned about this stuff when I was doing Circa because we had these stories that you could

follow. And when you followed a story, you would get updates on whatever was happening, whatever new kinds of information. And every time there was like a major price swing, I would get an update. Um, and so I always had eyes on crypto, but I was not at all interested. But then I had two friends, Brian Ford and Tom Sarris, who started introducing me into this really early on. The two names were important because Brian Ford actually was one of the first crypto candidates. So he ran for California's 45th district for a seat in the House. And he was accepting crypto donations. His background being that he worked for the Obama administration and then did MIT media lab. He was the director of digital currency there in 2015. And he told me about Bitcoin and I

kind of just rolled my eyes, but I was impressed that he was getting into it and maybe crypto is going somewhere if somebody that I trust that much is doing it. And then my buddy Tom, shortly thereafter, told me about Ethereum. And again, I was like, this all sounds crazy. But fast forward to very early last year, January, February of last year. And my girlfriend at the time told me she had a Coinbase wallet. And what is interesting about that is my girlfriend at the time, not wife, was a physical therapist, not interested in tech hardly, didn't really do much with that. But she had this Coinbase wallet and had Bitcoin in it. I was like, okay, that's really interesting. Now it's time to learn. And so I did everything I could, did the deep dive, read the white paper,

white paper, got into Ethereum, read the white paper there. And then, as they say, went down the proverbial rabbit hole and never came back out. That's how I kind of got into crypto. Everything after that is just been an extension of a lot of curiosity. I'm a product builder. I love product and design and building beautiful things. And so crypto, I felt like was a really great opportunity for me to, you know, kind of use those skills and build great things. But once I caught the bug, I knew that I wanted to spend the next 10 years in this space. Got it. And so when you first discovered crypto, and you were kind of paying attention to it, maybe not a full enthusiast, what was your general take?

And then what was that tipping point? Was it just education that got you from, you know, Hey, I'm aware, but not enthusiastic yet to kind of going all in on it. So in the beginning, I thought what it was, was just a magic internet money. And I didn't understand the primitives. I didn't understand what the basis of this thing was or what made it special at all. And when I read the Bitcoin white paper, and I began to understand this concept where two parties could transact without an intermediary, it started to blow my mind a bit. This was coming at a time when there's questions around data privacy and your data being stored in all these places. And I think

whatever it was, I think it was Equifax or whoever it was that just got hacked. The idea that little bits of you are hiding out everywhere, being stored in some place. And the idea that there was this thing where you could be your own individual, you could transact that anybody in between was really fascinating. And I think Chris Dixon said it best, where this was a new primitive. If mobile was a primitive, a new building block, if you had social as a building block,

I mean, the internet was a building block before that, trust was now the new building block. So you could build software that could be in and of itself trusted without that intermediary. And it just changed the landscape of what I thought could be possible in tech, whether that was voting or, of course, everybody that's interested in blockchains goes down the supply chain rabbit hole. But then it all came back around to finance and I was just, I was blown away. I couldn't escape the possibilities. Of course. And then what is, um, you know, kind of the, the, as you dug deeper and deeper into it, at what point do you go from, I'm interested in this too. I want to start a company. And then, you know, did you know exactly what you want to start or, or did you do a lot more, uh, kind of digging through? I did a lot of exploration. And you laughed at this supply chain part. And now in retrospect, it looks so obvious. But at the time, I'm a coffee enthusiast. I'm a beer enthusiast. And I thought of those things as specialty supply chains, ones where there's a lot of complication.

And, you know, in beer, there's hops and there's been all these kind of like shortages and crises and times when, you know, one big company buys up a bunch. And I'm like, man, how do you really get to a world where the smaller purveyors are going to be able to succeed? And it went into this whole, like, again, supply chain thing. And so I actually went down this path of, okay, what could a supply chain look like if you had everybody participating in a network, a specialty commodity supply chain? And looked into hops, coffee, cocoa for a long time. This was all over the course of a couple of months. And the conclusion that I came to was just, okay, this is not for me. I don't have the power in those respective industries.

There's way too many things in play. And frankly, couldn't figure out how to easily root those things onto a blockchain. So abandon it. Again, looked at the industry and said, okay, what are the use cases? I got excited about digital assets, about say virtual goods, virtual land and in-game purchases and all of these things. And somewhere along the way, just decided that, okay, sure. All of these things are really impressive and are going to be very interesting in the future. They are not today. And they are not reality today and will not be for some time. But what is? Finance. And this was around the same time that we were diversifying the portfolio. I was helping Carrie get into other things. She came back home from

a trip with a slip of paper from somebody that was sitting next to her on the plane that just said ETH LTC XRP. And we took the BTC and started getting into some of those other assets. Um, I was helping her do those, uh, those investments. And, uh, at the end of the day, then I was like, okay, cool. How much is it worth? And plugged it into an Excel spreadsheet, actually, sorry, Google sheet, got it connected to all these APIs to do real-time price checking. And then I was like, man, this is a nightmare. And I asked around, I was like, okay, guys, what do you guys use? Um, all my friends that were investing in it and everyone just said, oh yeah, I built my own custom Google sheet. And I was like, all right, this is a terrible

user experience. We have billions of dollars being invested in this. What the heck are we doing managing all of this in sheets? Of course, come to find out later that most of the financial world actually runs on Excel, but that's neither here nor there. So I just got super interested in the finance side and felt like that was the place to dive in. Got it. And then let's talk about what you guys are doing today um with interchange and and picks and shovels fully so to clarify uh picks and shovels was the cheekney name that i came up with uh that actually didn't happen to have any other registrations in the state of delaware um and we kind of stuck with that for the uh foot in the door um kind of thing but interchange is the name of the product and

And Interchange is a solution for any business working with crypto to do accounting, portfolio management, reconciliation, deal with pricing issues, all of this stuff. So all told, it is a front to back office solution for businesses that are investing in and operating in crypto. And we got it started because it came out of that problem. I mean, both of my co-founders had been in crypto since 2013. I'd been really excited about crypto and obviously investing a little bit, but could not figure out what to do with all this stuff. So we wanted to build a solution that was going to not only work for us, but we got really excited about institutions and what that might mean for the whole of the space if more institutions got on board and had

really quality software to manage this stuff. So that was the path we had headed down. interchange as a solution is primarily accounting. And then we get a little bit into portfolio management next year. Got it. And so from that, as you start to build that business, I think most people in the crypto space would agree with you. It's super difficult to do portfolio management. The tools that are all built today are really hacked together and frankly, just poor in general. And there's a lot of man hours being wasted. There's people who are sitting there who are manually entering in the data and just very tedious, slow work. What is the vision in terms of that ultimate solution? Does this look similar to traditional portfolio management

tools outside of crypto? Are there specific things in the crypto space that lend itself to be a little bit different? Just walk me through that really far out vision as to what is possible here? Yeah. So if we narrow the scope a lot, you can think of much of what we wanted to do around the user experience to be more like Mint. Prior to Mint, you'd have your credit card account, you'd have your bank account, you'd have all these disparate things. And Mint just made it easy to see it all in one dashboard. And when we started this thing, we were like, all right, it's got to be as simple as Mint. In crypto, if you've done your crypto taxes, if you've tried to track your portfolio, you'll know that one, you have many, many,

many inputs to deal with. You have every exchange that you operate on, every blockchain wallet that you have to deal with pumping in all those addresses. You have so much data. Every single one of those sources has totally different ways of handling its data. These CSV exports that you get to be able to do your taxes. They look terrible. Mostly, they're difficult to understand at best. When you put it all back together, though, it has to be right. You have to have all the data or else you don't actually add up. And that is where we felt like we could really shine, which is pull all the data in as much as possible, have this semi-automated process of reconciliation, where to the extent that we can actually know what is going on,

then we can present it to the user and say, hey, can you confirm for us that we're right? Or let's just say you sent some crypto from Bitcoin from this address into an address that we don't recognize, then at least throwing that up and saying, hey, we don't know where this is going. Please help us figure this out. And so doing as much as we could to be automated in that mint world, but leveraging a lot of the advantages that crypto brings, for instance, like blockchains, that they are public, that we could look at the entire chain of events and then know all the different transactions that were in and out of a particular wallet. Got it.

And that's different than the traditional financial world. The other thing that is different is in the traditional world, you have decades and decades of precedent and software and standards and all this stuff, and none of that exists in crypto. So we're reinventing literally everything. And is the thought here that the traditional portfolio management tools, they don't know how to do this. It's too small today. It's just a classic innovator's dilemma. Why haven't they really come in and solved this problem yet? It's a combination of all those things. I mean, to put the space into perspective here, when we look at the totality of, say, global institutional assets and management, $110 trillion. Crypto is maybe $5 billion institutional. And so it's just minuscule to a lot of those that are building software solutions for those parties. The other thing is, it doesn't map one to one. In a lot of ways, these other assets, they settle back to fiat. If you sell your stocks, you're settling back to fiat before

you move into some other asset. In crypto, you could sell your Bitcoin for Ethereum before you then spend that Ethereum in some sort of ICO, right? That was the very common example from last year. And what a lot of people got shocked by is, holy crap, there's a taxable event in the there's tons of nuances around those multi-hop transactions, as well as you have forks and airdrops and chain splits. And you just have so much nuance in the space that goes way beyond what the traditional space has to deal with. But to me, it just seems like one, it's small for a lot of these traditional software providers. And two, there's just so much that has to get built for them to be even able to come to parity with something like what we're putting together.

Got it. And so with this, the interesting part about portfolio management and blockchain is portfolio management is obviously the data of your portfolio, but also there's elements of what else is going on. So it's not just the assets that you hold, it's just the market and benchmarks and assets that you could buy and things like that, right? In that situation, how do you look at like what I'll call on-chain data or digitally native data

that can be delivered from nodes or research, stuff like that, versus like more legacy or traditional data sets, right? Is that stuff that you think will be really defendable for crypto native portfolio management tools? Or do you think that this all kind of becomes relatively table stakes over time? Look, a lot of it is about the money. So the table stakes are going to be to make sure that the accounting works, right?

So there's a lot of inputs on that as well. And it's not just the on-chain data, but it's also like where you get your pricing data from. And even that, there is no globally recognized price for Bitcoin, period, right? You ask somebody on the street what the price of Apple is, they're going to be able to tell you what the price of Apple is. but Bitcoin does not have that at all. There's so many different venues. And even then the output that's coming from those venues and then put into these pricing aggregators like on-chain effects and coin market cap, they're all very different. So one, that will be table stakes, but it's still

challenging. When it comes to blockchain data, there's a ton of interesting stuff that can be grokked from that. We're going to have to see where the space evolves though, because if there's some sort of greater focus around privacy, for example. If you want to track things on Monero, Monero is a totally different kind of beast than, say, Bitcoin. Bitcoin, there's tons of stuff you can do around... I don't know. You want to track an exchange's address so that you can look at the inflows and outflows of crypto into that address. If you see huge, old wallets starting to move Bitcoin, that can be sort of a precursor to some sort of major market movement. And that can be important for a fund manager who's going to make decisions based on that data,

could be integral into software. For us, we would like to work with some of the best research around this data, but we will help out at the intersection of that on-chain data and your data. Yeah. And so let's talk a little bit about where you guys are today. And then obviously, you guys have some news to share in terms of recent moves that you've made. In companies past, there is this iterative quality to it where you can start small and just build and build and build from there. To do property or portfolio management right, accounting right, you have to have so much in place before you can even turn the system on. And so we've been building accounting systems. We've been building just literally the math, the fetches for all the different exchanges, all of that stuff. And so we've been building for a long time. Very excited about what we're building. We've been showing the product off to some fund managers and folks. And it's really great. Um, along the way though, we realized just how important, uh, some of the accounting side was,

as well as, uh, the relationships that may exist in the space. Um, and there's this other component of crypto or I guess just institutional investing in general, which is fund administration. Um, when we got started, we didn't know what a fund administrator was. The funds that we were talking to didn't know what a fund administrator was. And this is this service provider that essentially becomes your accountant, right? They sit in your back office, or they're a service provider for you. You essentially give them your various information for your accounting, and then they handle everything from there. Send out the reports to your LPs, stuff like that. And we realized at that time, then, okay, it's not just us that has to have this data. They're going to have this data

too. And they're going to be the ones that provide the books and stamp the books and say, this is this source of truth for you. And so we now realize, okay, there's this other party in the mix that we're going to have to deal with. Along the way, we kept hearing this one name pop up over and over and over again. And that was Angie Stover. Angie Stover was the earliest fund administrator in crypto. They were the largest fund administrator in crypto, had the most funds under administration. They were definitely the 800-pound gorilla in this space. And we had some great conversations early on. Hey, we're going to do portfolio management. We're really excited. We're going to have a lot of similar clients.

They, at the time, had actually been spending a number of years building out their own software solution for accounting. And they called this CoinVantage. And CoinVantage was going to do the automated retrieval, reconciliation, all of that in the interest of getting the proper books so that MG Stover, as an administrator, could put everything together and have accounting pretty much taken care of to then send out reports to their LPs. And throughout the summer, we had great conversations with those guys. Matt Stover and I had spent a good amount of time talking about where the space was going, ways that we could work together. Are we going to be competitive in the future? Don't know. But really kept a good conversation rolling. Culminating to about a month

ago, I had this itch in the back of my neck of like, man, what could it be like if we put these things together. What could we do in the market? What kind of software could we build together? And so I reached out to Matt. I was like, Hey, this is a crazy idea. But what if we put these companies together? What if Picks and Shovels acquires CoinVantage? So CoinVantage was a subsidiary of MG Stover. They've been the ones building the software that they use to do the administration. And so with that, we had a few hours of phone calls, kind of gut checked it with everybody and decided, hey, let's go down this path. The team and I flew out to Denver. We sat down and that's the path that we got on. So we are finalizing process where CoinVantage comes in.

Their employees, their team members, a couple amazing engineers will join our team. The software will now be a part of the interchange family. And we will now have the front to back office solution. So everything from accounting to pricing, reconciliation, and then we'll be able to facilitate the portfolio management to the future. But we're really excited about this partnership. All right. Before we continue with this conversation, I want to mention our sponsor again, BlockFi. Remember, they do crypto lending. So you posted your crypto as collateral, they give you a US dollar loan, and you can use the US dollars to do whatever you want. You should visit BlockFi.com slash Pomp, and then tweet at me that you went. If you tweet at me after you went to

BlockFi.com slash Pomp, maybe I'll throw you a like, a smiley face, or the fire emoji. The fire emoji is the best. Remember, go to BlockFi.com slash Pomp, and I'll see you on Twitter. Yeah, look, I'm incredibly excited for you guys. I think this is a big step forward, obviously it gives you guys a, uh, um, a nice foothold into the market. And, uh, you know, we, we obviously, um, my partner, Jason and I invested previously out of one of our old funds and then what you're doing. So, uh, so congratulations. Yeah, thanks. We're, we're super excited about it and it just makes sense. Um, I mean, Matt has an incredible amount of experience in this space. You know, the, the team that's been building coin bandage

has this wealth of knowledge of just operating. You know, the one thing about building software is that everything prior to launch, you're in this beautiful vacuum where everything works and there are no problems. There's no bugs, everybody gets along with it just fine. But then the moment that you launch, there's all these kind of edge cases that can pop up. And in this space in particular,

with all the data differences and all the different exchanges and blockchains, there are so many edge cases. And it's why the manual process of this is such an undertaking. And so one of the great things that we're going to benefit from is just years of accounting for this stuff and going through audits and standing that sort of test and bringing that knowledge into the team, pairing it with our software prowess, our design, all of that. I think it's going to be a really great matchup. Yeah, let's definitely hope so.

um and so let's talk a little bit about uh the funds in general in the space right because i think you know i've written a bunch about and there's a lot of talk now around um funds shutting down you know new funds being raised now and kind of the deep bear market what's your general take on how the fund landscape evolves over the next you know let's call it two years and then maybe kind of longer term like 10 years it's it's an interesting subject you know we got into this knowing very little about how investing worked frankly um we knew personally we knew the retail investment but you know we had to learn along the way about about uh investing in this space uh from an

institutional standpoint and early on a lot of the conversations that we were having with these new funds that were popping up, they too didn't know a lot about, say, the specifics of how this stuff worked. They didn't know about administration. They didn't know about custody. They didn't know about anything that actually made this, say, a legitimate institutional process. And so with that, we looked at the space and said, okay, there's going to be a number maybe that have been in the space for a while that are going to be wildly successful. And we really believe that. And then there's going to be a bunch that were the, you know, just sort of folks popping up on the fringes, raising, say, 10 million bucks and, you know, essentially saying, hey, I'm a crypto fund manager, all because, you know, they got lucky at one point and had, you know, a little bit of crypto and wrote it up and then could now market themselves that way. So we sort of felt like there was going to be a maturity that would take place, and it was going to happen after the next bear market. So our belief is there's going to be plenty that survive. Granted, down quite a bit, but will survive and then come out the other side stronger. There's going to be a number that get washed out, and maybe the crypto market becomes stronger as a result.

But then the next class, I think, is what gets really interesting. It's folks that missed the boat the first time around, are learning more about the space, are learning more about the technology, getting excited about it, raising these new funds. As you mentioned, there's a bunch of funds that are, I think, prepping to launch. We hear little bits and pieces from different folks. And from what we understand, there's a lot of dry powder waiting. Now, what exactly? Are they waiting for the bottom? We don't know yet. But there's a lot that's waiting in the wings. It's down right now, no question, but we're excited about the prospects of more institutional investing in the future here. Got it. And so as this market continues to mature from an infrastructure and a kind of sustainability standpoint, but also at the same time, prices are dropping.

My general take is that's when the entrepreneurs are really digging in. There's less hype, less distractions, and they're building these companies. You've obviously built a number of companies over your career. What's your sense of what's happening right now? Is that actually true on the ground with founders who are able to focus and build? Or do you still see some of the craziness of the 2017 bull market? Definitely not the craziness of last year. No question. I'm going to put it into two camps. On one hand, you have, unfortunately, a number of projects that raised with ICO funds last year that are just going to explode in glorious fashion. And that's because they raised their funds. They did not diversify quick enough into Fiat or other things. They held on to their ETH or BTC or whatever. And they felt like buying high. And especially as the prices were moving up and up and up. And they went out and hosted lavish parties and hired a bunch of folks and went crazy on marketing and all of these things, only to then have their treasuries struck 80%,

90%. And so you have this dearth of projects out there that are now crawling back to venture capitalists and saying like, hey, let's do an equity round now. And that's going to be a phenomenon that we're definitely going to be seeing end of this year, coming into next year, and you're just going to see a bunch get wiped out. That's one classic project. And I don't know how, you know, how successful they would have been without the bear market anyways, even if it would have stayed on a bull run, maybe they would have made poor decisions. What I get excited about is the other class. If you look back at the last, at the last market, you know, kind of bear market into bull market, you saw some of these companies hunkered down. In some ways, it went into that

whole like blockchain, not Bitcoin thing. But they survived and they survived because they just stuck to their guns and they built and built and built. And I think this is going to be the same kind of thing. In our case, you know, we believe that it removes distraction, right? If the market was nothing but crazy hot, then we'd have all kinds of folks coming into a thing like demo, demo, demo, and I need this feature and this feature and this feature. And I think what this allows us to do is get really tight on the things that we need to accomplish because, you know, Essentially, the funds, the exchanges, the OTC desks, all of our potential customers need this. And we're just going to find this period of less distraction.

I think that's the key to everything. It's just, we're not looking at the prices all day long. We are not going to look at the notifications rolling in on what's happening with price debt. I think it's just going to allow the teams to focus in a way that they wouldn't have been able to with a bull market. Previously. Yeah. The other piece too, I think, is the media coverage, right? Totally. Kind of into the hype cycle, you get the, how high can it go?

How, you know, is this a bubble, all of that. And then when it crashes, you still get tons of media coverage. It just happens to be of the negative nature, right? Totally. And that's tough, right? Because the media sometimes is in it for sensation, right? And especially in crypto, where so few people understand what Bitcoin even is to begin with, when you see these flashy headlines of, you know, this thing is up to 20,000, I mean,

it gets everybody interested. I can't tell you, and I'm sure everyone in this space has had this experience. Like last year, during the bull run, I had everyone asking me, what is this? Should I get in? You know, what's XRP? You know, what's BTC? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when things turned, the teeth come out. It's the same sensational headlines, just in reverse.

It is, the world is collapsing around you and everything is terrible and Bitcoin has dropped and it's probably dead. And again, this has happened before. But because of the run-up last year, you just have more eyeballs on it. And short term, it's going to... I do think it's going to hurt the market a bit as far as, say, retail investors' excitement about this long-term, but I do think, or in the short-term, but I do think in the long-term, this is just going to be another blip. Yep. It is, hopefully for both of us, going to play out that way.

Well, we're placing our bets on this, right? Both of us. And we really, I believe in the space. I believe in what possibilities exist around the technology and, uh, so many of the different things that, um, that can happen around, you know, this B even Bitcoin is just store value, medium exchange, whatever you, whatever you want to think of. There's so much possibility and it's just got to survive. Um, but I feel good about that. For sure. For sure. Um, okay. And so, uh, usually before I wrap up, I do kind of quick fire

questions here um and then at the end i allow you to ask me one question um to start though what do you think is the most important company in crypto other than your most important company um you know that's a really tough one because there are so many that are doing so many different things. I'll just say that for now, maybe Coin Center. Interesting. Why that one? They're doing such a good job with staying level-headed and trying to educate lawmakers, right? Lawmakers and the public trying to get away from the FUD and trying to get away from the sensational headlines and have a very measured approach to how these assets should be regulated, how we should treat them.

And I think that's really important. We need to have a voice like that speaking for the space. For sure. The part I like about them is they've got a group of different types of individuals. They all have a way of communicating differently. So like Neeraj is all over Twitter. He's got the memes, he's got everyone laughing and quite a good audience. And then some of the other folks as well. And I think it's a really strong kind of multi-strategy approach to communicating the ideas of crypto, but also the importance of it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's an incredibly important partner in the space. And I really hope that they continue and thrive on their mission because it's just good for everybody. For sure. All right. If you had a magic wand and could waive it and change or improve one

regulation, what would it be? Yeah. So the previous guests have knocked out some of my answers before. So Andy Bromberg and Cornlist was the accredited investor rules. And then you just had Josh Stein with Harbor and he had the number of investors. And so your list of other options are starting to dwindle. But there was some legislation um last year that was trying to be pushed through in the house um representative jared polis who's now the governor of colorado and um david schweiker um of arizona um did you know for instance there was something called the congressional blockchain caucus i did not i did not either they were the they were the co-chairs and they tried to pass something

called the cryptocurrency tax fairness act of 2017 and the and the gist of this thing was that for purchases under $600, they would not have to report capital gains. And it seemed, it's so simple, right? And frankly, there's a ton of flaws with it because you kind of have to really make sure there's a separation between, well, if you spend under $600 and that's not a taxable event, then are there going to be just a bunch of bots that are going to be programmed to buy positions under $600? You've got to figure some of those things out. But the premise of it is very simple, which is that for cryptocurrency to become a medium of exchange, for it to become a thing where I can just go out and spend my Bitcoin, we have to fix the tax situation around

it. Because I don't... I mean, first off, spending $5 in Bitcoin for coffee may seem a little bit ridiculous. But if somebody wants to do that, then calculating the capital gains on that $5 spend is kind of ridiculous. So if I could change anything, it would be, you know, looking into that, solving that problem, because in a number of years, you know, if we are able to spend our cryptocurrency in public, then that would be a challenge, right? It would be a barrier to that happening. I agree with that. What's the most important book you've ever read? most important book I've ever read. Um, you know, the one that changed a lot for me, and it's kind of a, uh, kind of a weird answer, but, um, John Krakauer had a book called into

the wild and it was about this, you know, this one I do. Um, it was about this crazy kid, trust fund kid who, you know, wanted to, uh, get away from everything and civil life and, go explore the wilderness. And he ended up making a ton of crazy decisions on the way and lost his life as a result. But what really intrigued me was just this idea that you have this kid who is willing to forego everything for exploration, for the adventure. And this was a time where I'd had experience with some health issues and was sitting in a hospital bed reading this book. And really feeling like maybe up until that point, I hadn't done a lot with my life. Granted, I was like, whatever it was, like 20 years old or something like that. So there's

not too much you could really do. But I grew up in Central Illinois. I grew up in a thousand person town with cornfields on every side. And it just wasn't... I didn't have that sort of big world experience. But the internet really put me there. And so when I read that book, I was like, man, what if this life that I have here in my small town is not the one that I'm just going to always have? What if I can take more risks and try new things and find myself elsewhere as a result? So it was important to me because it just cracked a little opportunity for me. It just cracked a little bit um of my brain open uh and open my opportunity or open up my uh mind to other possibilities i think they made it into a movie didn't they they did and the book as they say

was better uh you know if you want to if you want to skip to the end just go watch the movie and it's pretty decent yeah all right so as long as uh as long as it gets like 80 some people will go watch the movie right right totally totally that is so that's fair um all right so uh one non-crypto question and then you could ask me a question and this thing um let's admit that there are aliens and they exist uh we always hear about um you know human-like aliens normally i ask if there are alien pets i'm not going to ask that question this time because i started thinking about something a little bit different oh i like it the world is really really big right and the world and there's so many different galaxies and unknowns there's over a thousand planets at

some point right um what are the odds that there is another more advanced civilization somewhere out there that we don't know about, but they know about us. And they have to feel super high, like crazy high odds. Um, I mean, so one thing for them to know about us, we have to think about the speed of light. Right. Um, and you know, the, the vastness of the universe means that when we look out into the universe, we're looking back in time, right? When we look at that star, we're looking at that star at a fixed point in time that was, you know, however many years ago, right? We're not looking at real-time light from that star. And so, you know, on one hand, could it be radio waves, right?

Could the radio waves that emanate from this planet eventually reach, you know, another place and then they can understand, hey, there's another civilization out there? you know, there are so many variables. It's like, we have interstellar travel now, right? We have satellites that have gone out beyond our own solar system and have been collecting data. So is it possible that there were, you know, other satellites from other civilizations that have now reached, say, where our signals could reach? I think the likelihood is super high. You know, the only thing is what if, what if their state of being is one that we can't even begin to understand? You know, there were these crazy stories about when, when Western, uh, settlers came to the United States and met the indigenous population that the indigenous population didn't

actually understand, right. It couldn't, couldn't even fathom their brains. Couldn't even put together what a ship was because they'd never seen it before. So their brains constructed something different. Right. And they saw ripples in the waves, but they didn't see the ship. Right. And so, you know, what I wonder is like, uh, you know, is alien life so beyond that, which we can comprehend that our brains are not filling in those gaps and not allowing us to understand or see anybody else. They could be among us. That's a pretty, uh, that's a pretty good answer. That might be the best answer we've got yet. I like the question change. Honestly, I was really struggling to think of how I could come up with a different

answer for the, for the alien pet. At some point we got to change it up, right? Oh, totally. Totally. All right. What, what, uh, what question you got for me? Yeah. So you've had a bunch of interviews now, right? And, uh, you have talked to tons of different people, uh, from all kinds of different, uh, you know, companies and experiences and all this.

What do you feel like is the thread that exists between everybody you've had on the show? Thread that... What puts everybody in common, right? So entrepreneurs, it might be their ability to take risk, right? What do you see as the thing that might be in common amongst all of your show guests? So there's two things. Uh, one is, I would say one is I actually don't think that most people think what they're doing is that risky. And then two is I think most or every single person has a propensity for

innovation and action, right? And what I mean by that is humans by nature are risk averse, right? And entrepreneurs don't actually take that much risk. I think they take very calculated risks, but they're not nearly as risky to the entrepreneur as they are to maybe somebody looking from the outside. Sure. Right. So, so I think that's a thing that plays out for sure in the crypto space where, you know, look, you have people who are saying this is absolute garbage. It's going to zero. This is ridiculous. You know, all of that kind of stuff. And the people in crypto have like this just absolute hell bent belief. This is going to change the world. Those are such opposing views that the people in the industry don't think it's nearly as risky as the

people outside so i think that's one you know core piece and the second thing is of this propensity for action and innovation um if you were involved in venture capital entrepreneurship you know etc obviously you are going to uh like innovation think about innovation participate innovation you know etc but i think what separates the current members of the industry maybe from the people who will participate in the industry in the years to come are the individuals today have to have a propensity for action right and what i mean by that is they're the early adopters they are the people who you know show up uh on a new land and they burn the boats and they say i'm going all in um so that propensity for action and innovation um i think is rare um it plays out you

know across uh entrepreneurship obviously but but this industry specifically just because i think the outsiders do see it as risky versus the people internally don't, or at least not as risky. You can see that even though people are doing different things from investing to building different types of companies, it is that common thread that I've seen in various forms and every single guest. I like it. Burn the ships. Definitely burn the ships. If you don't burn the ships it's really hard to uh to to stay committed right for sure um all right matt listen this as always it's a pleasure talking to you this is uh super um interesting insights on the industry and then obviously the big news uh with the coin vantage uh acquisition um we are we're

cheering for you and we'll have to do this again soon awesome really appreciate it and if anybody wants to check us out it's just interchangehq.com or on twitter we're interchangehq and i'm just at MG. Let's do it. All right. Thanks so much. Cheers. All right. You reached the end of the podcast. Congratulations. I appreciate you listening all the way to the end. You deserve a trophy. But before I hand out the virtual trophies, remember to go visit BlockFi.com slash Pomp. They're the crypto lending leader in the US. They do it in 45 states, interest rates as low as 8%. And you can use the US dollars funded directly to your bank account to do whatever you want. You should definitely go visit BlockFi.com

BlockFi.com slash Pomp. You know you want to do it, so just do it. BlockFi.com slash Pomp. 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. 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.