The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Will Be As Big As The Internet, Stephen Stonberg, CEO of Bittrex Global

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Exchanges are the engines that make the crypto space run. Behind the scenes of almost every crypto transaction, countless exchange employees are working tirelessly to provide an optimal experience for users while staying on the cutting edge of technology. Stephen Stonberg has been tasked with one of the most challenging jobs in crypto - CEO of Bittrex Global. His job is focused on scaling rapidly in advance of institutional and mainstream adoption. Stonberg believes that, like the internet, blockchain is an unstoppable force that will drastically disrupt the modern financial system. Stephen Stonberg: https://twitter.com/StephenStonberg --- Harmony:  Build on Harmony, run on all chains. Harmony is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, governance. Be the ONE to bridge to all blockchains. Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. Their mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. Harmony’s secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and other chains.  https://thewolfofallstreets.link/harmony  --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Harmony. Please stay tuned for more information about them later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, music, art, sports, politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now, crypto never sleeps. Millions of traders and investors around the world demand 24-7 access to exchanges, moving billions of dollars in and out of positions on a daily basis. I think it's safe to say that running an exchange has to be the hardest job in crypto. This task becomes even more challenging when your exchange is one

of the most popular platforms in the world. In May of this year, Stephen stepped up to this challenge to lead Bittrex Global as their CEO and bridge the gap between traditional finance and the cryptocurrency world. Not only has Stephen reached the pinnacle of the cryptocurrency world, but he also has 25 years of experience in the financial services sector and has held leadership roles in major banking institutions. I look forward to him sharing a closer look at the market from the perspective of an exchange CEO. Stephen Stomberg, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me. A pleasure to be here. So actually, Bittrex was one of the first places that I ever traded when I got into crypto. And it was this sort of wild west of altcoin to Bitcoin pairs that I didn't quite understand in 2016,

2017. But I know that Bittrex Global and Bittrex are actually separate entities. Can you explain the relationship there and what exactly is your role and where? Sure. So Bittrex, it's all one big company owned by the three original founders. There's no outside money. And basically, the way I think of it is Bittrex is really a technology and a wallet company based in Seattle, where it's always been. And it supports two Bittrex branded exchanges. We also support some third party exchanges to use our technology. But

basically, you have a Bittrex US exchange, which is for US residents and US passport holders, regardless of residence. And then you have Bittrex Global, which is for our non-US clients. And that's based in Liechtenstein now. And we also have a Bermuda presence as well. We're regulated in both places. But all of our clients outside of the US are basically via Bittrex Global. The point of that is we want to be regulated, but we don't want to subject our non-US clients to the very unclear US regulation. Can you talk a bit more about that unclear US regulation? Because every exchange CEO or person basically doing business in this space sort of shakes their head and shrugs their shoulders and says the United States is impossible. But you guys are operating here.

We're operating in the U.S. Again, I'm American. I've worked in financial services in both Europe and in the U.S. And I'd say, you know, I think that when it comes to new technologies or new types of financial services, shall we say, you can hearken back to like credit derivatives in the 90s, and sort of a lot of the derivatives, most of the stuff develops in what are called the euro markets, which means the dollar markets outside of the US, the traditional sense of the word. And why? Because the regulation tends to be a bit more flexible and clear, like in London.

So a lot of the kind of innovative stuff happens there. And then eventually the US kind of catches up and regulates it. And then the stuff can come on short. I think that's kind of what we're seeing with crypto. So it's not that the US is a bad place. I'm American and we like America. But I think that in terms of financial regulations, just the way it's set up, you don't have a centralized financial regulator, right? We have separate regulators

for commodities, for securities, and then you have federal versus state. So it's kind of this very complicated beast to begin with. And then when you try to have a new technology come in, like cryptocurrency, then they're all fighting over who should be running it and between the state and the federal level. And it's just going to take time. So I mean, that's the usual thing that we see. So and eventually they'll catch up and it's such a big market, they can kind of get away with it. But in the short run, you see a lot of the innovation taking place offshore. So we can't wait for them. but we don't want to be outside of the law, shall we say. So we can choose to just, you know, have really two businesses, a U.S. only business, and we can do less in the U.S. with certainty. And we're doing that and obviously

by the law. But outside of the U.S., we can be much more innovative because there is very clear regulation in the EU. And it's again, we're not in like the Seychelles, we're in the EU, in Lichtenstein and the EEA. So that's, you know, we have very clear regulation there and happy to talk about the differences. So trying to do business in the States is effectively having to negotiate with 50 separate regulators and the federal government, which is clearly a monumental task, I would imagine. So I'm curious, what does have clarity to be traded in the United States? And what are the criteria for that? Obviously, we know the Howey test and securities, but and what can you do elsewhere that you very clearly cannot do here?

So I think the problem with the US and again, I'm not, I'm not the expert on because we focus outside. But I think the problem with the US is that you know what certain things like Bitcoin and Ethereum are definitely utility tokens, right? But there's gray area where some projects, perfect example, Ripple, XRP, that is clearly a utility token outside of the US. And I don't want to get involved in their lawsuit, but the management's taking the position, even in the US, it's clearly a utility token. The SEC is suing them and saying it's not.

And I think that's the problem. You don't want to get into that type of, that's a nightmare for a token team, for an exchange. That's just, it's uncertainty and it's unfair. So that it's not good for business. So we like Europe because the EU gives you very clear parameters around what is a utility token? What is a utility token, what is a security token, we can get legal opinion. So we get a Lichtenstein legal opinion, that's an EU legal opinion on every token that we list. And it says it's not e-money,

that it is not a security. So we have 100% clarity. You can't get that in the US. It just doesn't exist right now. So there's a bit of gray that one has to operate in. And that's not, you know, that regulation is probably good, but dumb regulation would be really bad. Someone who doesn't understand it, some heavy handed regulation, one of these 85 year old senators, you know, sort of bearing the flag against crypto. So do you think that we would see that sort of heavy handed regulation and that's a threat? Well, I think the interesting thing about crypto, and again, this is like with global finance, forget that crypto is just finance that settles on a blockchain. It's just a different settlement system. So I view it as just because the trade settles on a blockchain doesn't mean it's not regulated. So every single thing in crypto can be put into an

existing bucket. And I think that's where, so in Europe, you have clarity, they're giving you more clarity around what buckets and things fall into. In the US, they're still, they haven't decided yet. So that's the problem. It's not that there's no regulation. It's just how does things that settle in the blockchain that don't look like, you know, it's a square peg, but which, does it go in a square hole, in a round hole? They just haven't told you how the things sort of bridge the gap yet. So again, I think that regulation exists.

Regulation is, it's not that it's good or bad. It's just, it is what it is. Like it's there. You have to comply. If you don't want to go to prison, you comply with it. And it makes sense. And I think a lot of it, especially when it comes to things like money laundering and terrorist financing, I mean, it's there for a reason. So you really do want to respect these things. So, you know, I think that the regulation is going to happen and it is happening. I think the issue is, is the U.S. one of how far behind is the U.S. one to fall and how much of the technology, the advantages will just move offshore. And once they're offshore, do they come back? And I think that's the sort of competitive dilemma that, you know, again,

it's just classic case study of corporate businesses and where do they locate in different jurisdictions. That's interesting because that sounds similar to the dilemma now in China, because we've heard these bans and unbans and bans and unbans in China and India for what feels like a decade by now. But this time the miners are moving, right? And you can't imagine that even if China says, you know what, maybe this time again, you can come back. Come back.

Yeah, I don't think they're moving, you know, those tons of equipment back to China. So that's sort of a corollary. It's different, but you know that, you know, once you move, you're probably not coming back once you've committed the funds. It's interesting. So they may have been made,

unknowingly made a strategic decision around an industry. So again, this is like classic business school case study stuff. I mean, it's fascinating. We'll look back in five years and be like, wow, that was a really interesting decision that they made, you know, probably didn't have the outcome that they expected. But I always talk about like on my podcast, the, I always make the analogy because I'm old enough to remember the nineties and the whole, the internet and, you know, this is the same stuff

where, oh, it's bad and we're going to ban the internet and this is horrible. And like, look, that we know how that worked out. And I just think that it's amazing to me that we're having the same conversations now. The governments are talking about this. You can't stop it. And now we have the internet there. So how do you stop blockchain? It's not stoppable.

So it just will go somewhere else. People are very clever and the whole world can't stop it. So if it exists somewhere, it's accessible on the internet. Will it be in your country or not and will your citizens go elsewhere to buy these services and will you take advantage of the benefits of it and i think that's that's kind of what's going on right now yeah mark yusko said something to the effect on one of our conversations that you know he was always sort of pegged as being early so on the side of all the bad guys like you know internet when he was uh when he was investing early they said on the side of all the bad guys, like, you know, internet,

when he was investing early, they said, you're with the porn guys. When it was early in crypto, they said, you're with the drug dealers and the criminals on the cell phone. But really that is generally the first use case for most new technology. Yeah, exactly. But I think, you know, here with crypto,

actually, I think it got a bad rap. You know, I think, yes, there were some bad actors, but let's be clear. I mean, dollar bills. I mean, if you apparently if you like take most dollar bills and put them up, they're all covered in cocaine and they're all used for drug funding. So, yeah, I mean, that's that's just naive to say that real cash is used for that. I mean, it's just again, it's just the financial transaction. It just settled on a block chain as opposed to through ACH or through some traditional settlement system. That's the only difference. So there's nothing new here. So why do you think we still see the same recycled negative stories coming back about crypto? Because literally every time the price

drops, we have India and China, we have ransomware and criminals of some sort. And we have environmental concerns. Well, this is a highly disruptive technology. So I look at the internet. It didn't really disrupt the financial services sector that much. It just enabled them to have better and quicker user interfaces with clients. But the fundamental underpinnings of the financial services industry haven't changed since like World War II. It's this really antiquated stuff. And you have

different settlement systems by currency, by country, by like stock exchange. I mean, it's just ridiculous. And that's why it takes in 2021, like three days to send a US dollar wire from Europe to a US bank and they charge you fees. It's crazy. So the blockchain is a global settlement system that operates 24-7 for anything. I mean, you can literally, it just puts all the banks out of business. It takes away the control they have over all these cash flows. This is massive. This is the Amazon moment for financial services. They're about to be steamrolled and they don't even realize it. So I think they're beginning to see that there's something going on here, but I don't think they get the extent of it. It's a competitive threat. And when you have a competitive threat, you're going to do whatever

you can with fake news or whatever, just to stop it. And it's pointless as we know with the internet, like it's like trying to stop the internet. It's not going to work. So I think it's just the same old playbook they always use. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And anyone who's tried to send a wire of $10 to a foreign country or has ever sent a stable coin to somebody who knows that that system's dead. And as you said, even the OCC has now said, listen, banks are going to be able to custody crypto. That's one thing. But banks can test stable coins against Swift and these other antiquated technologies that you talk about. Once that crack in the facade starts spreading, it's over. And I'm going to assume that you guys primarily use stable coins. Maybe that's a false

assumption, but I would imagine that's a huge part of your ecosystem. Absolutely. I mean, that's a big one of the larger volume tokens, as you would expect. We have like 300 altcoins on Bittrex Global, but Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, USDC, I mean, the major stable coins and the major tokens are the biggest volume on the exchange, on any exchange, frankly, globally still. Yeah, makes sense. So I'm very curious. We obviously saw this massive boom in crypto over the last year before this last six or seven weeks of correction. What were you seeing as far as metrics? Every exchange employer CEO I'm talking to was like, every month was like 10x over the last month for signups. But I haven't had that conversation really since the correction

started, right? So I mean, it's, you know, I think the rising tide lifts all boats. I mean, it's been great. I think, you know, it's a combination of, you know, I think we, I think people are more and more focused on, you know, we focused on just having a very regulated platform. So, you know, we moved the business to Lichtenstein, that's an EU bank regulator, because they're EEA. So for financial services are part of the EU. So we're doing, you know, like really strict KYC, AML. So it doesn't mean we can grow as fast as our unregulated competitors. But I think that now that the business is institutionalizing and you're seeing the real world, you know, like hedge funds and banks moving into the space, they're not going to be able to take the counterparty risk of an exchange that's in the seichel. They just can't

trade with people like that. So the value proposition, I think, of what we've put in place is starting to beginning to pay off. So I think we're seeing a lot of interest from that side as they start to enter the market. They distinguish between who they're going to trade with. And we're just seeing general retail interest globally going up. So it's really helping our business immensely. We're very pleased. Has it slowed during this correction of Bitcoin from your 65 to the low 30,000s? Or have you not seen much of it? I mean, yes.

I mean, it's interesting because with volatility, that's really what drives you. We make money either way. Just I think that drives a lot of volume. You know, there's some weeks, you know, again, not every week is going up and there's definitely been some down weeks. But last week we saw interest going up again, signups are going up. there's definitely been some down weeks, but you know, last week we saw, you know, interest going up again,

signups are going up. So I think it really depends, you know, summer tends to be quiet in general. So I think I would expect a quiet period from now and that's historically based on data and Pinterest is one of the older exchanges we've been around since 2014. So, you know, that's like really old in crypto. So we, you know, we, we have data going back until then and we can see, so I think, you know, we would expect we're expecting the summer to be relatively quiet. Yeah. That makes perfect sense.

So sell and may go away is even before crypto has long been. It's more correlated to like traditional markets, I think, than people realize, but you know, it, it, it's a different animal, but I think there's some things human nature doesn't change that much. Does it? So, yeah. So outside of obviously the alt coins that you can offer that you can't offer on a U S exchange,

talk about the other products because I think there's so much more that's exciting that you guys others can do. Yeah. So I think what's really, so we've done pretty much everything you can do in Lichtenstein. We, you know, it's clean regulated exchange, you know, full KYC, up to method two levels. And Lichtenstein is even tougher than Germany in terms of the IDs they'll take. So literally, we're doing the cleanest in terms of... And every customer is KYC. There's no limit under which you can do two Bitcoin a week. And you have to be... That doesn't work. That's called money laundering otherwise. So we don't do that. And then we have, you know, a lot of altcoins listed.

We have, you know, fiat on ramps through Bank Trick. We're adding some other banks as well. We have credit card on ramps. So I think we've got a fully regulated, very highly functional utility token exchange that is regulated or supervised by a European bank regulator. I don't think there's many of those on Planet Earth right now. And then in addition to that, we've added really exciting things. We've got a second license in Bermuda and we are fully licensed by the BMA. We have an office in Bermuda, like we have a Liechtenstein compliance team there. And in Bermuda, we are trading security tokens because under the Bermuda Digital Assets Business Act, and I was just there last week, met with the premier and the head of the VMA. They're very supportive of crypto like

Lichtenstein is. You can trade security tokens. And we have started and we've been offering security tokens traded out of there. So right now we've done mostly things that are referencing existing stocks. So you can buy tokenized Tesla, tokenized Apple. So it's not actually a Tesla share. It's a token that is backed by a total rate of return swap. Someone owns, there is Tesla stock somewhere that's backing that. But basically this token trades 24 seven. You can buy it, you know, go to the New York stock exchange and try to buy stock. First of all, Tesla, you'd have to pay 600 bucks a share. So here you can buy fractional shares, pay with Bitcoin and trade 24 seven. I think it's just so innovative and it shows the power of blockchain. And we've only just beginning to scratch the surface, right? Yeah. And so does that mean

seeing how superior that is, obviously, and like, I mean, you look at the Robin Hood situation and 48 hours to clear a trade and all of these things. I mean, there's countless reasons this is better, but do you see a future because we talk about it where it's sort of tokenize everything? I think, no, we're moving to a token. I think we tokenize everything. This is scratching the surface. So I think for us, that was an easy use case and kind of just to generate some interest in some volumes. I think the harder to do things, which we are talking to teams, like what if you want to issue a security token, like a new issues token, and you can either, you can securitize real estate, art, you can do any sort of real asset. I mean, NFTs. So I look at the world in a two by two grid. So you have security token, utility token on one axis, and

then you have fungible token and non-fungible token. And I think every token can fit in one of those buckets. You know, people get confused or NFT. Fine, what we've seen to date are a bunch of digital art being put into digital tokens. That's one very esoteric use case, which who knows if that'll still be, you know, and I think that's highly speculative. We don't offer those, we're not trading them.

You know, I think that's interesting, but, you know, that's not really the end game for that. For NFTs, that just means it's taking unique pieces of assets, like a piece of real estate, which you could have maybe five investors in and it would still be an NFT, but you could sell a piece of real estate and you can put it into a token and globally syndicate that on day one. That doesn't exist right now. How about for a startup company? I mean, right now they issue, you know, utility tokens. What if you want to do issue a security token? So you can effectively IPO your company. It's not an IPO, but it's an SEO. You can do that. And it's basically venture stage funding.

You're cutting out the VC and you're syndicating it globally to investors who are then financially inclusive. They're going to buy like very fractional pieces of a startup company. They would never have access to this stuff, right? So you're just intermediating Silicon Valley. You're just, you're, you're upending the whole world of finances. We know it, but you can, people are not going to go quietly.

You're going to hear a lot more noise about how this is like evil and it's rat poison and all of that, like, you know, the usual stuff, but it's not going to be able to stop it. Right. But like Buffett and Munger, I obviously rat poison squared. It was Warren Buffett and you know, JP Morgan was trashing it the whole time there in London. I mean, Jamie, Jamie Diamond. Yeah. I mean, I was gonna say Jamie Diamond, while making JP Morgan coin is saying that if his employees trade Bitcoin, that he'll fire them and then opens Bitcoin services to their wealthy clients. But last week, Goldman came out.

So they have their trading operation, which they shut in 2017. And now they've restarted. It's like launching ETH futures. The same week, their head of wealth management said it was like toxic. So great. So the investment bank says buy it. And then the other side of the bank says it's rat poison. Like, get your story straight.

I was going to say, though, that's sort of a function of the way that the media operates with financial institutions, which I've seen for years, obviously, in the past. But they love to take the headline, J.P. Morgan says, or Goldman Sachs says, instead of saying low level analyst at J.P. Morgan, who we happen to get on the phone and probably doesn't talk to anyone else there, says that this is- No, at Goldman, it was the head of- Yeah, no, it was. That was actually a senior guy who said it was bad. I'm just saying it's funny that every time they quote an analyst,

they ask as if it's the entire bank's position, which is not necessarily- Yeah, exactly. There's tens of thousands of people working at these banks. Exactly. But yeah, they definitely do not communicate one hand in the other.

And it's pretty unbelievable to watch that. So I've argued the same thing as you that art and collectibles are a really interesting use case for NFTs. But what got me excited about them in 2017 when I first heard about them was, you know, eliminating toll collectors and third parties from the center of any transaction, a car title, a mortgage, real estate, all those things you sort

of said. In addition to like the liquidity, which imagine you can make so much, you can have secondary trading of anything, right? Like totally liquid assets have a market now, but that's, that's amazing. But then within real estate, for instance, all this titling and everything else, it's such an inefficient industry. So if you can somehow title real estate on the blockchain, cut out all of these idiots who sign papers and they charge all these different fees, it's just operationally so expensive. I mean, again, you're going to make a ton of people unemployed. They're not going to go quietly, but it's so efficient art, which is so prone to fraud. So in addition to cutting out, again, all the inefficient middlemen and costs,

you have complete security. If you put these things on the blockchain, there's no fraud anymore, right? Or they can try. It's going to be much harder to have fraudulent activities. So it's so much better on so many different levels. And then you have this liquidity provision. If you can then take this highly liquid asset, and then it just trades in a global marketplace 24-7. Fascinating. Preston Pysh, Ph.D.: It just feels like crypto. Yeah, it is interesting, but it feels like, like you said, they're not going to go quietly. But this isn't just like the mortgage guys and those people. I mean, we're talking about visas and PayPals and MasterCards and banks, right? I mean, the minute you and I start transacting in stable coins instead of wire transfers.

There's a lot of fees that are gonzo. Sometimes, you know, you've got your bank, my bank, you know, like I said, three-day settlement, whatever it is, it's crazy. I think they're beginning to realize, they don't realize the tsunami that's about to engulf them. They kind of think it's like this little waves lapping at their, oh, so like Goldman and JP Morgan, oh, we'll allow our high net worth clients to dip their toe into Bitcoin now.

So we're, you know, that's really, thanks guys. Like, you know, but it's the market just moves so fast and beyond them. They don't even realize what is happening. Guys, I'm really excited to be sponsored by Harmony. I know all of us have traded their coin one in the past, but what they're fundamentally doing is a game changer.

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slash harmony. That's thewolfofallstreets.link slash harmony. Build on harmony, run on all chains. I had Jason Yanowitz from Blockworks on the show when Morgan Stanley announced a $2 million threshold for their clients who could access crypto services. And he told me that he spoke with someone who did an analysis and like 40 to 50% of Morgan Stanley's clients held between 1.5 and $2 million there. And it would push anyone interested up to 2 million so that they would then have access and basically force them to deposit more money with Morgan Stanley to have access to the crypto services. So no surprises there that that's how something like that works. So you can then have Morgan Stanley double charging fees through Grayscale and then Morgan Stanley, where you could just buy the Bitcoin, hold it on Bittrex and

whatever. Why do you need all these middlemen to hold crypto for you? It's just fascinating. Speaking of Grayscale, one of the biggest narratives obviously this year has been, I mean, there was clearly the premium trade arbitrage for anyone who is accredited. And then it went negative. And that caused quite a bit of pain. And now we have a massive unlock coming up. Do you think that that's a meaningful event? Or you think it's just part of the cycle? I think, I mean, look, I think, again, I have a lot of respect for what they're doing. I'm not an expert on like the US stuff. So I can just give you kind of my 30,000 foot view. I mean, that's a regulatory arbitrage that they're legally doing.

They have huge demand for crypto and a lot of buyers who can't actually invest in crypto right now. So they've created it. They've wrapped it into a share. They've created, they've added some liquidity, but there's value to that because you can now have access.

So it's an access tool. And then they're taking care of all the custody and a lot of the issues for newbies to crypto who don't understand it. So that's fine. So obviously, like with any sort of wrapper, it's like a closed-end fund. You're going to have discount premium, all sorts of other unforeseen circumstances. And I think it's unclear what will happen in that market, because at some point there won't be a need for this. So it either morphs into an ETF or they change all the regulations. The need for this disappears. If everyone's allowed to buy crypto, well, let's buy crypto. Why would I pay these

Grayscale guys? Because you're paying them 2% fee. I mean, you're paying hedge fund fees for somebody to buy and hold a single asset for you. I mean, hedge funds don't even get away with charging 2% anymore. So that's crazy in terms of their fees. And I, you know, the last time I looked and then, you know, on top of that, there's other sort of fees. So, I mean, they're making a killing for not really doing much, frankly. So, you know, that's just not

a sustainable business model long-term. So I think it's unclear, like I don't know exactly what will happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if that thing starts to evolve. It's not long-term sustainable. Yeah, and an ETF is coming, don't you think? Absolutely.

And then the fees will go way down on that, right? But then they'll hope for higher volume. They'll convert to an ETF, right? They'll convert to an ETF. They'll definitely convert to an ETF. The fees will shrink because that's a very competitive space. Then they'll hope to get volume to make up for it. Okay. So you guys obviously operating Lichtenstein first, which gives you access to legally provide all these altcoins. And then you got licensed in Bermuda, which gives you the ability to securitize and sell those kinds of things. What would be the next sort of huge move that you guys would ideally like to

make? Is there anything on the radar that you think maybe average retail hasn't thought of that's coming in the crypto space for traders? I think so for us, you know, again, it's just constantly so I think you're making what we have better. So adding more banks, so we can have more fiat on ramps for our clients. Like right now we have Bank Frick for euros. And that's if you want to add money directly to the we have Silvergate for dollars. And then we're looking to add a couple of other banks, we've already you know, the hard part is getting the accounts, right? Like, of course, where, you know, because in crypto, as you know, it's like people don't like what we do, but because we're regulated by European

bank regulator banks tend to like us. So we're talking to a Swiss bank and a German bank. So we're just adding more fiat on ramp, looking to, you know, make our credit card onboarding more efficient. So I think kind of optimizing what we have. And then obviously we're adding security tokens. That's a huge new product. And we can do anything in Bermuda. I mean, like we can do derivatives, futures. So right now we're only offering security tokens

and we've offered leverage tokens, but we can obviously expand our product offering there. There, we're trying to take a sort of walk before we run approach. So we're not offering that stuff into Europe right now, only to our non-European clients. We have to get a brokerage tight agent agreement set up because those are our securities. They are tokens, right? They look like any other ERC-20, but a regulator sees them as a security. So you have to be licensed to sell securities,

which we're not in Europe. So we are working to get the licensing in place to sell those and then sort of have that offering fully baked. And then I'd say then there's so many new types of assets to securitize. That's really going to be the focus. And we're talking to lots of different teams. But we're inventing a new product class. So it takes time. It's slow. It's very expensive. So, again, that's this type of stuff that we'd like to see come to fruition this year. Then I'd say outside of that, we're looking at things where what other products and services can we offer to our customer base that are crypto related and financial services. So we're looking at insurance, which Bermuda is known for, and there's definitely a shortage of insurance capacity in this space. We see it, everyone sees it. So we're looking at

maybe doing something there. Again, that's not like rocket science. Anybody can go set up an insurance company, but we're studying it very carefully and we're looking at things like gaming which are very which we think are very interesting for crypto yeah but again you need to have licenses and we know that regulators tend to like us we can get these licenses that's where our unregulated competitors won't be able to compete because we know that regulators will not give them license you know and we're seeing yeah well the the one with who also whose name begins with a B seems to have some regulatory issues today. Oh, great.

My gosh. Yes. I mean, which country isn't censoring them today? I saw three different countries going after them today. So that's interesting. And I think that's, again, we're not doing that type of business model. So we're going to go more and more into the regulated space. Yeah.

Yeah. Obviously, you're talking about Binance and you won't say it yourself, but I believe it was as- We'll comment on a competitor. Yeah, as we're recording, they're having problems in Thailand and the Cayman Islands, I saw today. And obviously, we saw the news, whether false or correct, about the UK. And we know that there are troubles in the United States. And I think that they probably even knew that that was largely coming. So I'm curious, speaking of which I spoke with CZ on the podcast not that long ago. And he said that, very frankly, he said they were having trouble scaling largely because of customer service. When you have 10 times as many people coming in every single month, he said,

even if we could hire the people, just getting them up to speed to be able to answer the questions, it was literally impossible. He said he was taking customer service calls and so was everybody else there. So all of that said, have you had scaling issues as you've seen the growth? But if we continue to see this flood, what sort of challenges do you see for a platform to scale if say 25% of the world all of a sudden wants access to crypto? So I think the whole industry has been, and again, it's not just the larger players

that you mentioned or people like ourselves. I think even like Coinbase, everyone has publicly said like there are definitely customer service scaling issues. So we've seen them. I mean, I get people find me and DM me on like LinkedIn and I may not respond to everyone, but I will always sort of take the comments

and cut them and paste them out of- Send them where they need to go. Telegram and I'll just forward them on to the right place. And eventually our numbers have come down dramatically, partly because volumes have gone down. So we would have to catch up to our backlog. But we're actually spending a lot of money, and we're going to be investing a lot in customer service. So not just hiring internally, ramping up and working with external vendors where we're hiring a lot of people.

So I think it's something where we are going to be staffing up and outsourcing to deal with this. So we want to be able to handle the influx. I think for us, unlike some of the competitors who maybe don't do KYC, we have a smaller number of people that can make it through our onboarding. So our volumes, while we hope they will grow, we will have a more, I think, regulated growth anyway, because it will be self-selected crew. Like we don't want some of those customers or we can't have them, frankly. Also, there has to be an assumption that if you're a non-KYC customer, like you said, you usually have a withdrawal limit. So they're going to do smaller volume anyways, just, you

know, one plus one equals two. So I'm assuming a lot of people who KYC are bigger money, right? And institutional money, which you've talked about. That's not the case. I mean, I think we have both kinds of clients. And in fact, we like our retail clients and we need both because I think the retail clients provide liquidity for the institutional clients. So I don't think one can't exist without the other. I should clarify that. I should say anyone who has enough money to want the guarantee that they can get their money off of the exchange is going to go somewhere in KYC because they won't be able to even remove their assets from a platform. But that said, being a KYC AML platform, very strict, you touched on it earlier that you wanted to be prepared for this institutional sort of flood of money. We know

that it started. Where do you think we are in the process of really onboarding institutions, really seeing interest where we'll see all of these banks and hedge funds interested, endowments, pension funds. So I think they're all interested now. They have no choice, right? Because at the end of the day, look, first of all, if you're an investor, and I used to work in the hedge fund industry before, so I know how to look at the returns. I mean, or if you're a wealth manager like at Goldman, like you talk about, oh, our balanced portfolio made 8%. I mean, these people, I mean, you could have bought Dogecoin and made 10,000%. It's very hard. The returns are just at a level that we've never seen before on planet Earth. Again, these are highly speculative things, but it's very hard to justify your portfolio performance.

It's like, who cares, man? I could just retire and never have to deal with you again. So I think it's gotten to a level where they literally have no choice. And, you know, again, if the ultra high net worth clients as well, they're going to start taking their money and putting it into coin because they are smart and savvy guys and ladies, and they're just going to start to invest. And if they take it out of Goldman or JP Morgan or wherever, that's AUM that they can't charge on. And they're going to start to bleed assets, which I'm sure they are this year, and greed. So I think now it's at a point where it's going to cost them if they don't, so they have no choice. And that's how the banks always do it. They're very reactive. So I think that's kind of the phase that we're in.

And I think there's some very smart money, which tends to be the hedge funds and some of the bigger ones, they're all in, like Paul Tudor Jones, Alan Howard, my old boss, like you have, these guys have been doing it and making it killing and, and only ramping up their investing. And they're not just investing in their funds. You know, they're going to limit the amount like in a macro fund, you're only going to put so much Bitcoin. Right.

But with their personal money, their, their GP level of money, they're starting to make sort of venture capital style investments in the space, big time. A lot of these guys. Oh, yeah. I mean, Steve Cohen just announced he's hiring a head of crypto. Yeah, it's crazy.

0.72 crypto. I mean, it's crazy. We would never thought two or three years ago. Soros. Soros. Yes, even Soros announced he's going to do crypto. So I guess- Is Soros scary though?

Right. I mean, isn't like Soros' claim to fame is a pound to the ground, right? I mean, he basically broke the Bank of England by shorting the basically broke the bank of england but he can't scheme bitcoin like he can't break satoshi so i think that i don't think that we have to be worried about him um no but i think like it's it's just i think we're only scratching the surface and again we're only talking about really bitcoin or maybe ethereum a bit like it's not the real use case of blockchain, which would be everything in the world tokenized. So I think you can't think this is the end state.

It's just like, oh, the whole world's going to buy Bitcoin. Okay, that's great. But then when they do, what else are they going to do? Everything. I mean, they're going to go the picks and shovels approach most of these guys, right? I mean, it's exciting to have Bitcoin as an idiosyncratic risk asset, just in case.

And that's what I think is how a lot of them view it. But being able to invest in the infrastructure of the future of technology is probably more exciting to a lot of them. Exactly. No, and I think they'll start to, once they do Bitcoin and they buy Ethereum, they'll start to look at some interesting projects

out there like Cardano. And there's some really interesting projects with really interesting use cases that we're starting to see just start to actually become, you can see the actual utility happening in front of you now, which you couldn't two or three years ago

in the last sort of bubble. So you were talking about institutions and it's really been incredible to watch that shift where I think there was reputational risk for someone at any of these companies to even mention Bitcoin a year and a half ago. And now maybe there's reputational risk for someone at any of these companies to even mention Bitcoin a year and a half ago. And now maybe there's reputational risk, as you said, to not understanding it or being able to answer because there's demand from the customers or there's just

a stigma that you're an old and you're behind the times if you can't talk about it. Have you seen that shift? Absolutely absolutely i mean it's it's amazing when you see and and it's funny like you know before diving into crypto my last institutional had i was at goldman and like they you know i saw they whipped out all these slides about how this was the dutch tula bubble and like they had all their which is fine if you want to analyze it through a historical lens and justify your position and why it's not good because because that was their book. They were talking their book, like we can't offer this, so we'll have to trash it. And then they dusted out those same slides this time around. And I think, but then they had to very quickly reverse their position and go from, it's still

bad and we don't advise it because at some point now it's just so embarrassing and the whole world is doing it. That's just not going to work anymore. So I think that it's embarrassing for them, you know, they'll change their story. And I mean, they'll always talk their way out of these things. But I think now you're seeing just the amount of institutions going into this, there's you look like a schmuck, if you can, I mean, if Fidelity is doing it, State Street's doing it, like, how can you not offer this? Like, I mean, the most boring institutions on planet Earth, which are like the custodians are doing it. So how can you as an investment bank not be doing this? So I think it's shocking they waited this long, frankly.

So when we have Fidelity's and State Street's coming in, and now we have, I think, what people would view as safe custody solutions. And in 2017, I always kind of make this joke, but like Tesla wasn't going to buy 1.5 billion of Bitcoin and put it on a ledger and hope for the best. No, because somebody could lose, right? Right. And so I think that there were real obstacles to big money coming in for risk managers. It just wasn't really possible. But do you think that the infrastructure is now in place? Are there still things that we need to see on the custodial security side? You talked about insurance, right? I mean, the custodians have insurance, but. I think that, look, I think the pieces are there. I think what's interesting in this market, you know, if you're going to, I make the analogy

with the old, you know, the old world. So if you're looking for a bank, you're going to make sure, like, you're going to know what jurisdiction your bank is in, where it's licensed, where it's regulated. You're not just going to give your money that quickly to a bank. And obviously the licensed and regulated bank is quite secure. You can be safe with your money. And I think the same analogy doesn't take place in the crypto world. Like, so our exchange, you know,

all exchanges aren't created equal. Our exchange, again, the founders are some of the top people in security on planet earth. We've never been hacked. It's just, you know, we're not the fastest. We're not the best, but we are the safest. We have innovative products. That's just, you know, we're not the fastest. We're not the best, but we are the safest. We have innovative products. That's what we want to be known for.

And we are regulated in one of the triple a rated banking jurisdiction on planet earth. It's one, you know, it's Lichtenstein. It's where the Swiss go in to take their money. It's even safer. So it's like, you can't ask for a better jurisdiction. So if, if we're me, like that's what I would want, but I don't think that crypto users, retail, maybe institutions get it, but it's amazing to me. They'll just like take any crypto exchange or DeFi and like just send their money. It's crypto, but it's still money.

They're hard earned money and they don't understand the counterparty risk, operating risk, everything else. So I think that's the problem that we have in the crypto market now. There's just a lack of real understanding of some of the operational and systemic risks that are there. So I think to answer your question, like if you go to a place like Bittrex Global, you're totally safe and secure. But I don't think clients are making understanding the distinguished or the other exchange you mentioned. Who knows where that, where are they? What jurisdiction? What laws protecting you? Where are your tokens really? I mean, you have to look through the marketing and the hype and the volumes and everything else and understand these basic things where if you were

choosing a bank, you would certainly want to understand them. And I think that's kind of the maturity that we haven't yet seen happen in this market. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I think that brings to insurance, which you brought up and you don't hear that many people talking about it, but it would be, I think, just a massive, massive innovation. The other thing that we've seen, I think, sort of grow and bring a lot of new people in is yield. Because I joke that with my friends who I could never get to buy Bitcoin, they'll buy USDC and park it somewhere for 10%.

They understand that, right? They had a savings account once in their life that actually gained interest. Do you think we'll see a combination of those where you can have a yield bearing product that's insured? Absolutely. I mean, I think, again, with the staking examples you're giving right now, I think, again, what people are probably not, you're getting very high returns, but are people understanding the counterparty risks they're taking? So you've given your tokens to someone who's holding them. Are you sure you're going to get them back? Like, are you valuing the default risk? I mean, there's all these things you would, again, if you were like lending bonds out or doing something, you would make all those sort of

analyses because there's obviously, there's a reason you're getting that return. You're taking some sort of risk. There is no free lunch. That's the classic term for investors like in the real world. And I think that applies to crypto as well. I think it's all working when it's all going up, but at some point, the tide can run out. And that's what happened in 2008. In fact, most people that lost money in 2008, for those who were around, it was mainly from a lot of it was counterparty risk. It was sort of the operating risk. It wasn't so much just market risk that you lost your share. So I think-

Your money was in the wrong place. It was in the wrong place. Exactly. It wasn't that you had the wrong bet on, it's just you didn't structure your bet the right way. And that's when people lost, because the institutions would go down and you just lost your assets for that reason. So I think that a lot of those risks aren't necessarily understood well by crypto investors. And I think they're taking risks without realizing it. So I think the answer to your question, I think as the market matures, you'll start to see, you'll get to have your, it won't be such a free lunch. You'll be,

maybe you won't get 10%, you'll get 8%, but it'll be insured. I'd rather take that bet. Yeah. What do you think the narrative right now around Bitcoin itself as an asset is? Because we've talked about all these exciting use cases for stable coins and how it's superior to banking and all that. Well, that was originally the Bitcoin white paper, right? Peer-to-peer cash. So do you think that Bitcoin still has that narrative or do you think we're really onto the inflation hedge, digital gold store of value? I think the latter. So I think,. So I think stablecoins and Bitcoin, they're totally different animals.

I mean, a stablecoin is just a digital representation of fiat currency. So if you want to trash the Fed and you hate the dollar, like a stablecoin is just a digital way of using a dollar. So it has, in fact, it's worse than a dollar because on a dollar, you earn interest. On a stablecoin, you don't, unless you stake it out. But by holding a stablecoin, you earn nothing.

Somebody else who owns the underlying dollar or purports to own that underlying dollar is keeping all of the interest on that. And that's a separate issue with Tether, but we don't need to go into that. But then they're earning the dollar. So again, it's like apples and oranges. So I think stablecoin is just digital dollar. If you hate dollar, you hate stablecoin, right? It's just, it's like a necessary- You don't hate it. You don't hate it for the transaction. You hate it for holding it for the same reason. Exactly. Right. But you can go from dollars to Bitcoin,

USDC, send really fast, take it back out to dollars. Right. It's just, exactly. It's a tool. So let's just be clear. So I think if you're using it that way, that's what I think most of the use of it is right now. It's huge to have. But as a store of value, Bitcoin is all the things that fiat is not. It's, you know, we hate the Fed. We hate the Bank of England right now. All these ECB, they're just printing money.

They're devaluing the currency. So why would you want to hold these things? I mean, it's totally manipulated market. Bitcoin's not. Now, Bitcoin's a huge threat because you've never had a thing that operates like a store of value in a currency that's not issued by a central bank. So other than gold. So and, you know, and

but unlike gold, this is you can transact 24 seven. Good luck sending gold to your friend. Exactly. Good luck sending gold to your friend. There's huge carry cost to gold and everything else. There's zero carry cost to this. So this is something that's pretty innovative. And I think, you know, if you look at the whole thing around el salvador and i don't know if you were talking about that but that's fascinating like that's that's a real so i mean so here you have a country which you know has and again the world bank and the imf has done such a great job keeping 20 of the country in abject poverty under their watch so that's kind of their thing that's their thing they love doing that.

So let's just call it out. They love putting debilitating debt on countries and controlling them forever. You know, let's like take politics aside. Look at the facts. 20% of the country is in abject poverty. And, you know, with all this IMF, World Bank policy and suppression. And so they decide to, as a sovereign nation,

it's completely up to them. They can do what they want, right? If we believe in sovereignty and having foreign countries have their own democratically elected governments or, you know, in their own choice, they have in that country voted to make Bitcoin legal tender. Now, what's interesting, that has knock-on effects globally because they're in the web of the IMF and the World Bank. That means that the IMF and the World Bank actually have to then support that currency. And then it has to be able to be accepted for repayment for bonds. And it has it in the IMF. And they've all come out and they're repudiating this. They're not acknowledging it. So they're basically not acknowledging the sovereignty of this country. But it gets worse.

And in terms of once you start to threaten the current order, and the FUD that's coming out, the State Department just came out and said, it's a very grave threat. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of coup stage, and they replace this government. I mean, I think it could go that far. Like, this is that much of a threat to the powers that be. So I completely support them. I think it's amazing what they've done. I respect a sovereign nation to make its own choices. And I think that the world should support them in this. But it's going to be, when you're the first mover, they're going to have a lot of friction

they're going to have to come up against. So I wish them the best, highly supportive, but it'll be interesting test case to see. And watch the FUD. I think it's only going to escalate against them. Oh, I mean, I agree. And I talked to Lynn Alden about this the other day. And I said, listen, we're all like so excited

about El Salvador, but one could argue that there's as much downside as upside potentially just because of the things that you just described. If it doesn't work and they can't get away with it, then nobody ever tries again for another few years at a minimum, right? Well, they're like the canary in the coal mine. People will, I think everyone's highly supportive, but they're going to wait and see how this plays out for them let them

be the test case and i think that's kind of the thing now again i think they have nothing to lose so why not i mean when you're that poor and you know like and when people are wiring money through western union which is how they get their cash their remittances in you know these are very poor people that are leaving the country to get jobs to send money so their families can eat and they send it through western union which takes like 50 of the cash i mean it's it's it's so obscene yeah and hard and again if you want to talk about financial inclusion which i am really a big believer in financial inclusion and that's you know one of the nice things that you know by doing our jobs well and we get paid to do them we're creating financial inclusion and And ultimately that is the trickle down effect.

And that will impact, you know, these people. But you see what they're trying to do. They're trying to basically make it so their people have more money to eat food. Like that's what's motivating this. They're not trying to mess with the World Bank or anyone else. They're trying to fix their country. And by doing so, they found a really innovative way to do it. This great new technology, this great new store of value. And then you're seeing they found a really innovative way to do it. This great new

technology, this great new store of value, and then you're seeing the pushback. So anyway, the innovation will happen. They can't stop it. It's just a question of, like you say, is it another three years or is it going to happen right now? Yeah, I read a book maybe 10 years ago called The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it basically goes into the history of IMF and World Bank, you know, putting, like I said, predatory loans, basically a country supported by CIA coups. And you just said, maybe you see a coup. I don't think people realize

how controlling these organizations are and that sovereignty maybe is a bit of a myth. I, you know, again, and like we could go, this whole, these deep state theories. I mean, like, I think there is a lot of that myth i i you know again and like we could go like this whole these deep state theories i mean like i think there is a lot of that and it's a global thing i think it's entrenched bureaucracies that don't really report to anyone and they're not elected and you know it's it's you give these people power and like i just think it's classic there is power out there new technologies threaten existing power and the existing power never goes quietly

eventually it gets disrupted and but it's just you it's, you're going to watch it play out in front of you. And it's just, you know, how it's going to end Bitcoin will win, but there'll be, it's not going to be a linear path. It's going to be a very volatile. Much like price action. Exactly. Much like price action, but just like, you know, the internet wasn't such a linear, remember Amazon in the nineties, you had to have a dial-up modem and you could buy books. And that was like so cool. You could buy books 24-7. And the stock went down 95%.

And the stock went down 95%. Exactly. So that wasn't such a clear, like, you know, it was, so it looks like, oh, yes, genius. If you just bought Amazon and you would, you know, but like nothing, you know, with hindsight, yes.

But that wasn't such a clear, linear path for them. It was quite a bumbly path for them to where they are now. And I think that's what you're going to see with crypto. You know, you're going to see a lot of ups and downs and things that might crash, but long-term it's going to boom. You just don't know exactly in what format,

but I think it's really blockchain is the story, not crypto. Crypto is the most focused on use case right now for blockchain, but it's about tokenized everything. And that to me is blockchain. That's not a crypto story. I agree.

We're in it for the tech. That's what we always say whenever the price drops. Yes, we're in it for the tech. Passionate community member. I'm in it for the tech anyways. In it for the lifestyle. I'm very curious, in it for the lifestyle. So you just said that your last institutional job

before this was Goldman, right? And I mean, that's 180 degrees from running a global cryptocurrency exchange, certainly in the stigma at that time, I'm imagining of what you were doing. Do you think, what made you? So for me, I saw the boom happening and I've always jumped to sort of new,

I've always been attracted to kind of growth. I like growth businesses. Like I've always liked working with like an entrepreneur, like working within financial institutions, but kind of doing the kind of cool new stuff. And I joined. So after business, that's my whole career trajectory was like not traditional, even though I was in boring institutions, but I graduated business school and I went into sales and trading in London and I was like in 94. So nobody, nobody from business school went into sales and trading. Like you went into investment banking and nobody went to London. Like that was this backwards place in the mid nineties. So nobody, nobody from business school went into sales and trading. Like you went into investment banking and nobody went to London. Like that was his backwards place in the

mid nineties. So I kind of like did something completely off piece. And you were at Columbia, you said, right? Columbia undergrad. And then I got my MBA at Harvard. And then I went into, I left Harvard business school. I went into sales and trading at Merrill Lynch in London. So that was like, not done. That was like, Ooh, what's Merrill Lynch? Like, you know, you're not, you're supposed to go to some very highbrow investment bank and do m&a or i was in the 90s i was at penn in the 90s i graduated in 1999 you just moved up the street 60 miles or exactly 99 miles up to new york every single person and yeah i went to london i was doing credit trading which was like very like not normal then i did move to deutsche bank and credit derivatives. That was before ISDA even had swap contracts for that. So that was like very

new technology. And then I moved into JP Morgan to do that. And then I got thought that was all looking a bit toppy and decided I wanted to go to the buy side in 2006, which I looked like a genius because I left banking in 2006. I went to work for a macro fund. I went to work with Brevin Howard and that boom during the 2008 crash. And Alan, you know, really smart guy. I went to work for a macro fund. I went to work for Brevin Howard. And that boom during the 2008 crash. And Alan, you know, really smart guy. I learned so much from him. Like, you know, about how to custody your assets and like not lose money.

And like- And he likes crypto. And now he likes crypto. So, but, you know, I worked there for five years. So I've kind of always like tried to spot new things. And so in 2017, I was sitting there and just watching this crypto thing and i was like wow this is the coolest thing ever and it just reminded me of like hedge funds early 80s like

this is really new like you know 5 and 50 fees and like no one's doing it and like how do you get involved in this like it's just gonna boom and like it's so and i just saw it as being really early days and i just jumped i didn't care i just knew this was going to be but you know people thought it was nuts and you know then the crypto winter happened i just stuck to my guns so i i because i see this is this huge like 20 year cycle that we're about to enter i think people are beginning to see that now but i don't think they really understand the extent of it frankly yeah and also they i think just there's a stigma or an urge or maybe it's the age of the people who are passionate about it that it's like really going to be a get rich quick thing yes and i think some people are going to

get $20 i agree but that's not why people are in it i think you have to some people have but i think and you know some people have lost incredible fortunes as well but i think that this is still the early days you know and if you're in it like i love the i love what i'm doing it's just you get out of bed every morning and it's like so exciting and we have like years of this to build so this isn't going anywhere i mean at least for the next five to ten years we're all going to be super busy so like what else could you ask for i mean if you get rich quick then what do you do like how many rolls royces do you want to drive i think that usually ends in tears for most of those people so i actually you know if the money is a nice thing to get from this, but that's not, I think if anything

in life, if that's the only reason you do it, you're never going to be successful. Sure. So you obviously you jumped because it was exciting. But I mean, being at Goldman and saying, hey, Fed policy is damaging. And you know, money printing is bad. Like how much of a outlaw did that sort of make you when you left? It seems like that's sort of a light of match. I didn't really look back. I wasn't there that long, frankly.

I would say that was kind of like a bookend at the end of my, a transitory end to the end of my financial services career. So I think it's interesting to see sort of how they thought about things. And I think there's some very smart people there. And I think that, I think they like most though,

they're going to be very challenged because you're no longer the leading voice. Like the industry, if finance is moving into crypto and you have no experience in it and you trash it, and then you're going to have all these, you know, Coinbase,

which IPO, when it IPO, it was worth more than Goldman Sachs. So, you know, that's a company that's been around for three years. And that's in finance. That's a direct competitor. So, wow. That to me is the biggest, like, it's like, who cares about Goldman Sachs? It's like irrelevant. Like, you know, and you can see, and it's just, they're going to get swallowed. Either they're going to buy these companies or they're just going to get swallowed up or, you know, or there'll be around, but just, they're

not going to be as relevant as they might have once been. But do you think that there is like a general awareness on Wall Street that maybe money printing is bad? Or do you think that they're a part of the party and they just love the results? I think they're so in the game, they don't even, they can't step outside and really analyze it.

Like, I think the hedge funds are kind of one foot out already. So they kind of don't care. Like they're already disruptors in that industry. So know i think that they can they're much more nimble they're small organizations and they kind of don't care you know they don't really they use wall street but they kind of laugh but they want to make money and they all laugh at the banks anyway i mean yeah yeah i mean like the hedge fund guy like the bankers were the first rich people then the hedge fund made the bankers look poor and now the crypto people make the bankers were the first rich people. Then the hedge fund made the bankers look poor. And now the crypto people make the hedge fund guys look poor.

I mean, you have like some guy like Sam Bankman Freed, who's worth like billions. I mean, God knows how much he's worth. And he's like a 28 year old. So literally he's just getting started. I mean, it's amazing the wealth creation with crypto. So crypto makes them all look like schmucks, right? Like, so even if you're like, you know,

some of the top hedge fund guys, you're like two billion dollars you're king of the universe well you're not anymore because these guys make you look frankly poor and they're just completely innovating and they've taken you by storm so that's why i just think this this is so disruptive it's so exciting it's just changing the world order as we know it but i think the bankers are too drinking the kool-aid and in that they don't even understand that. Again, if you're like running the equity syndicate desk doing IPOs in a bank, well, all of a sudden this new technology is here. So early stage ventures can effectively do what's an IPO, cut out Silicon Valley. And then before they even get to the IPO phase, they're already public on day one.

Like, what does that mean for all of these people that do things a certain way? Like, are you assuming that, I think it's interesting, like the stock exchanges are all trying to get in on crypto now. And they're trying to say crypto will look like the way that they're doing it. Well, I think that's arrogance and recency bias.

Like, why should this new world of investing on blockchain just be the way that we do things now, but on a blockchain. That's incredibly arrogant and silly. So, I mean, we're trading tokens in Bermuda and we found the clients don't really care. They want license, they want regulation, but do they really care that it's in Bermuda

and not in Frankfurt? No, they're just happy they can trade, period. And they want safety, security, and they want regulation. But why does it have to be a German regulator? I mean, when we sell it, we need to have selling regulations in place so we can sell those.

But why can't they always be listed in a place like Bermuda? Like, why can't Bermuda take over and be the world's place for trading security tokens globally? Like, who's to say that it ever needs to move back on shore? So I think you have to really take your preconceived notions about the way things were, turn them completely upside down. Then you have to really take your preconceived notions about the way things were, turn them completely upside down.

Then you have COVID and working remote. So you can just figure out where a company should be and be regulated. Where should the staff be? And then where are the clients going to be? And I think that's not a way we've ever really thought about doing corporations before. So I think the whole world is really turned upside down with its head as we know it. But again, going back to your question. So I think, no,

they have no clue these guys on wall street. They're just going to milk it until it doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. So, so the greed blinds, any rational thought it's the way it is. And it'll be fine. Right. Even though it wasn't, even though 13 years ago, it just wasn't fine. Right. It's like that never happened. It can never happen. You know, as long as they have enough of their Hamptons house and their, their liquor. And they're not going to, they have the for their Hamptons house and their liquor.

They're not going to. They have the golden parachute. They'll be fine. But it's funny to hear you describe it sort of like the bankers were the first rich ones and then the hedge fund. I just love, I mean, Sam Bankman freed with his hair and the messy hotel room on CNBC. And he lives in a futon in Hong Kong. He's worth $10 billion. I mean, God knows what he's worth. More. More. I think magn know, like I think magnitudes that we don't even understand. But like, it just makes these hedge fund guys, you know, a couple of billion, you're so rich, but like, so what?

You're like, you don't matter anymore. And it's fine, Mark Zuckerberg and these others, but they're doing a different thing. Like, this is a direct competitor in finance that did this. That's what's interesting about this. Like, this is a finance guy who made that kind of money. Yeah, it's a good old meme. And the unfortunate meme, I should say, on crypto Twitter, have fun staying poor. Well, I guess that crypto, we can now say have fun staying poor to the banking

system and hedge funds. Exactly. At least one of us can, a couple of us. I have to say this disruption couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people. That's where it's so much fun. I joke, I'm a poacher term gamekeeper, but it's so much fun being on this side of it. Like, you know, I think you have to understand the regulations of the old world, but you can use this world to totally disrupt the old world and do it in a legal way. Yeah. So all of that said, I assume that you're not too concerned about the market correcting. No, I mean, that's, I think it's, it's, but again, you know, again, we're at exchange. So we have buy and sell volumes. Obviously, all a rising tide lifts all boats. But you know, it's normal. I think what's exciting about crypto, it's a Bitcoin does correct. But that shows you that's a, that's true capitalism. There's no central bank interfering in that. I mean, you should relish this, the market clears, it corrects itself. Capitalism does work when it's not interfered with. So I think it's very exciting, actually. I always argue that Bitcoin is the only free market. And that's absolutely

right. We went from 65 to 30,000 and not a single centralized authority had to step in to save it. Nope. And it didn't have to freeze the market trigger like no trading warnings and bail out the bank. And who cares? And like some people made a lot of money. Some people lost a lot of money who were doing leverage trading they shouldn't have been doing. But it all works out. It's interesting when you allow markets to be free. It truly is. I know we're up against against time. If you have any parting thoughts, anything else you'd like to share about anything you're excited about or have coming. But otherwise, where can everybody check out Bittrex Global and follow you after this?

Yeah, so definitely you can check out Bittrex Global on Bittrex.com or BittrexGlobal.com. Bittrex.com outside the US takes you to Bittrex Global. You can follow us on all of our social channels and you can also follow me directly at Stephen Stonberg. So it was great to be here. I think we touched on all the cool stuff. Stokens and security tokens are the big thing I wanted to touch on, which we did. So real pleasure. I'm glad. And I think that that, like you said, it's, I mean, barely even scratching the tip of the surface of what that looks like. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. This is a really great conversation. I think people are going to absolutely love it. So I

look forward to doing it again in the future. We'll have to.