Unchained - Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain, on Its Dark Pool, Crypto Lending Operation and Intention to Go Public - Ep.122

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Peter Smith, the CEO of Blockchain, discusses how the company got started, why the company is focused on users owning their own private keys and how that is what enables all the most interesting applications of blockchain technology. He talks about the full range of customers and markets they serve, their lending business and their dark pool. We also discuss regulation, SegWit, nation-states getting involved in crypto and why Blockchain plans to go public. Read more on Forbes.com: http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2019/06/04/everything-interesting-in-crypto-relies-on-having-a-private-key/ Thank you to our sponsors! Kraken: https://www.kraken.com CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unchained Episode links: Peter Smith: https://twitter.com/OneMorePeter Blockchain: https://www.blockchain.com Wired article on the short period when cofounder Ben Reeves worked with Brian Armstrong: https://www.wired.com/2014/03/what-is-bitcoin/ Dovey Wan tweet on manipulative trade on Bitstamp/Bitmex: https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1129246233917382656 Fortune article on Blockchain launching an exchange: http://fortune.com/2018/02/15/blockchain-google-coinbase/ SEC guidance mentioning airdrops: https://www.sec.gov/files/dlt-framework.pdf FinCen guidance mentioning hosted vs. unheated wallets: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20Guidance%20CVC%20FINAL%20508.pdf Blockchain's Airdrop of XLM: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/11/06/stellar-is-airdropping-125-million-to-blockchain-wallet-users/ The Wall Street exodus from crypto: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2019/01/143834-is-the-exodus-from-wall-street-to-crypto-reversing-jamie-selway-leaves-blockchain/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. If you find it impossible to keep up on all the news in crypto, I want a short and quick look at what I think are the top stories every week. Sign up for my weekly newsletter. Just go to Unchainedpodcast.com and enter your email address into the box right on the homepage. Sign up today. Interested in the crypto weekend retreat, I'm teaching with Meltem DeMiris of Coinshares and Jalog Chopin Kruja of Future Perfect Ventures. If so, be sure to check out of the show notes for the link to sign up. up. Also, Unchained is now on YouTube. You can find the most recent episodes there every week on the Unchained podcast channel. Within months, cryptocurrency anti-money laundering regulations go global. Are you ready? Avoid stiff penalties or blacklisting by deploying effective anti-money laundering tools for exchanges and crypto businesses, the same tools used by regulators. CypherTrace is securing the crypto economy. Cracken is the best exchange in the world for buying and selling digital assets. It has the tightest security, deep liquidity, and a great fee structure with

no minimum or hidden fees. Whether you're looking for a simple fiat on-ramp or leveraged options trading, Cracken is the place for you. My guest today is Peter Smith, co-founder and CEO of blockchain.com. Welcome, Peter. Hey, how are you? Good, good, enjoying London. So how did blockchain.com get started. We got started in 2011, so in crypto terms, ancient, ancient history, with a simple goal of making it a little easier to use Bitcoin. So we built the first Block Explorer, which made it possible to dynamically search for transactions and data related to the Bitcoin blockchain.

And then shortly after that, we released an API, which made it a lot easier for people to build on top of Bitcoin. And then shortly after that, we released the first hybrid wallet that enabled people to use Bitcoin, you know, from a mobile phone like iOS, Android, back then, even Windows phone, or web, without giving up control of their Bitcoin while still having their private keys. And, you know, today we're probably most known for the wallet and the Block Explorer. And today's wallet supports, you know, a range of assets. across different crypto networks, as does the Explorer. And millions and millions of people around the world use our products every day.

So as far as I understand, I think one of your co-founder is Ben Reeves, worked with Brian Armstrong for a short period on the product that eventually became Coinbase. And this wired article, it's kind of old, indicates that they had philosophical differences over like custodial versus non-custodial approaches. And in general, I've noticed just, you know, from browsing your website and stuff, that blockchain.com seems to like really always talk about its philosophy that users should own their own private keys. Why is this such an important tenant for the company? Yeah, so it's definitely their story and they've told that. But I think it's important to note there

that the relationship was more about using the initial traction blockchain had to apply to Y Combinator. And so Ben never worked on Coinbase, I guess in a way Brian worked on blockchain. and the difference in philosophy, as you rightly point out, 100% comes down to how you feel people should use crypto. So in our view, you know, crypto is more than just an investment or a fad or a quick way to make money. It's a way to take control of your own financial future, to be a self-sovereign financial individual. And a non-custodial solution to storing your crypto is the very centerpiece to that. And that's been our belief as a company since 2012, since long before that belief was possible, or really even a good idea.

And it's funny how things in crypto come full circle. You know, if you went back to late 2013 when people started raising venture capital, the idea that millions of people would use a non-custodial wallet was like almost a joke. You know, so you had every, and you're back in like a blog post and tweeted her accounts. You know, you had every sort of analyst in the market saying that the non-custodial solutions didn't stand a chance up against the custody stuff. And Coinbase was, of course, a big one in that category. But so was Circle and Zappa, which were experienced CEOs bringing products to market. And what was interesting about the time was it was really a philosophical debate. Like, will most bitcoins be stored in, you know, e-wallet solutions where the company has control of the money?

or will this non-custodial thing really happen? At the time, the vast majority of Bitcoin transactions were generated actually by custody products, by products where the user didn't have control of their funds. Partly this was due to how many Bitcoin transactions were being generated by Mount Cox, right? And partly this had to do with, you know, the fact that, you know, five, six years ago, using a non-custodial solution was a much bigger sacrifice from a usability standpoint than it is today. And one of the things that happened over the course of the last few years, I think very few people would have predicted is that it's actually shifted dramatically to non-custodial.

So fewer bitcoins are held in custody products today as a percentage than at any point in crypto history. and more transactions in both Bitcoin and Ethereum are generated by non-custodial products than by custodial products, which is a fascinating way that the market has turned out. And the extent to which this is true is really deep, even down to a market structure and strategy perspective, where you have folks that have long been associated with custody products, you know, with full custody products, who are now building non-custodial products. And the reason it has to do with the future of crypto in our view, which is that, you know, outside of a simple speculation product, almost everything interesting that you can build

with crypto and crypto assets and the crypto financial system relies on your customer having a private key that they control. So when people talk about defy or distributed identities or, you know, on-chain lending or all this stuff that, you know, the magical financial future that we're all trying to build, none of it works unless you have users that have their own private key. Wow, you just said so many interesting things I want to follow up on, but one was the stats that you mentioned about how there's more bitcoins now, or I don't remember how you phrased it, but there's more bitcoins now, I think, that are non-custodial than ever in Bitcoin's history. How do you know that? So we have a large team of data scientists and probably the deepest proprietary data set about the Bitcoin network in the,

the industry. And so we're able to look at where, you know, the bitcoins in circulation or bitcoins in storage are on an hourly mark-to-market basis. So we can tell you what venues are, have more reserves, what venues have less on an hour by hour mark. And we can tell, for example, like, that exchanges have less bitcoins in custody today than they did X, you know, time interval ago, et cetera. And when did you see that trend starting? And like, do you think there were any particular drivers of it? Yeah, you know, the high point for custody products was in late 2014, early 2015, I believe. I'd have to look to be exactly sure, but that was the high point for custody products as a class. That's interesting, sort of like almost a year after Gox and then

ever since then it's been going down. Correct. Yeah. Because you remember there's a big amount of Cox hack, right? But then shortly thereafter, there was also the BitFinnix hack. And BitFinnix had a huge amount of funds under under custody when that happened. And there was a major capital flight. And the behavior changed from, I'm going to open up, you know, an account on an exchange and buy Bitcoin and let it sit there to, I'm going to pull that back. And we were one of the largest beneficiaries of that. We had major, major inflow into our platform in that time period. People also generally, the idea that, like, you're going to buy your crypto and then pull it off is kind of like a generally accepted principle now. Rather than, you know, if you go back to 2014, 2013, and you're like, oh,

what do you do with your crypto? Once you buy it, people are like, let's sit there. Right. Put it on a hard drive that you later accidentally throw out and... No, the average behavior was wire money to Mount Cox or BitFenix or BitFenem, but mostly Mount Cox and BitFinnix, buy the crypto, let it sit. Oh, I see. You mean let it sit on the exchange, yeah. So, and now that sort of acknowledges like probably a bad idea. Yeah. Right. So, you know, even Coinbase, which is a huge in the market of custody products today, hasn't really seen the amount of Bitcoin they have under management meaningfully go up, despite the fact that they're serving far more customers. Yeah. Well, I'm sure both ahead of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, we know that, you know, the reserves got depleted by about half. So that was a big. Yeah, massive depletion there. Yeah. Did you guys benefit from that?

Massively. Because one of the other things about ever using having their own price. private key is that it means every user can split their funds. Right. And so it's much easier for us to split users' funds and get them access to things on another chain than it is for a custody product. Right. Wow. Yeah, this is already getting super interesting.

And I haven't even gotten to ask you a very important question, which is, so you were not one, you were not present, like in the very beginning of blockchain. So how did you get involved in this company and what did you guys do? And what did you do before? I guess one of the things is interesting about, about startups is that there's always like some pressure after the startup goes somewhere to invent a really clean Genesis story. Like this really beautiful moment where there was this insight in this co-working space.

And then we all apply to Y Combinator together. And then raise capital from SV Angel or something. And that's never what happened here. blockchain for years was more of a collective of people who cared about Bitcoin and cared about building cool stuff than it was a company. And there were lots of people that had lots of rules throughout that. In fact, there wasn't formally a company that held the intellectual property of blockchain until shortly before we raised our first venture round.

And so it's really hard to tell like where did the company start, when did the company start, the thing that we know and is important to the people internally that were there is that at some point when we decided that we were going to go from being a collective to being a company, we sat down and identified who were the co-founders of the company, you know, how we were going to be related to each other in the future and who is going to drive the company forward. and, you know, that was a very deliberate decision that we took. One, because it was clear that the company needed to scale pretty quickly at that time and needed outside capital to do so. The second being that some folks inside the company, you know, inside that group of four people, were much more excited about being sort of at the front of that drive, which has been, tough. Like being a founder of a cryptocurrency company is a stressful and personally high-risk endeavor, not just from a like normal startup stress perspective, but also from a personal security

and safety perspective. And it was becoming clear that that was a sacrifice people were going to have to make. So, you know, and this is sort of like a question of a fascination for journalists. Like what, you know, where did blockchain come from? Um, because everyone's heard the charming stories of York and like the apartment in the north that we all worked in. And the reality is like, you know, even, even most of us that were there don't really know. Um, and the sort of only salient point of like, when did we all get involved in the company is when we all sat down and decided to incorporate the thing, which was only maybe six months before we raised the lights be round. Now you've expanded well beyond the wallet. You've got your institutional vertical called

markets, which also has a research unit. You've got lockbox, which is your hardware wallet. You've obviously done the data service or the block explores for quite a while. So how do all these pieces work together? Like what is the overarching vision for the company? Yeah. So, you know, we got started with a pretty simple mission, which was like make Bitcoin a little easier to use. And had a big change up to that mission, which is basically make crypto a little easier to use. So just broaden the number of assets when more interesting cryptos came around the block, which was a controversial decision at the time.

But not every crypto company from the era were from has decided to do that. And wait, and just so I know, when did you decide to add more? About two and a half years ago now. Okay. And the challenge is that when we first started, every crypto user had basically the same needs. And, you know, keeping in mind that it's our core belief that you're not really using crypto unless you have your own private key. So, like, everybody had the same set of needs. We're like, how can we make it possible for Laura to use crypto and have her own private key?

but Laura and Mickey Malca both had basically the same requirement set back then and I don't know a lot about your personal financial situation but let's assume it's not like Mickey Malacus I can tell you that

he's a VC at Ribbock's right he's a VC at Ribbock Capital by the way for people who don't know and it was one of our very early users and once terrified us with the balance of his count and um or another person that's spoken a lot about using our product in in a very heavy way uh jim robinson at r e right so let's think about jam yeah something that's interesting is

it's funny that you mentioned milky micky because he invested in coinbase yeah yeah for sure but anyway so keep going and then kept using our products um we never we never met with ribbitt because of the conflict with zappo Oh, I see. Yeah. That's all not very interesting. But in any case, the needs diverged a lot. So, like, your needs and Jim Robinson's needs are very divergent.

We can't serve you both with the same product. The needs of some of our institutional partners that we work with to provide liquidity on specific assets and to provide liquidity inside our wallet are very different from, you know, my needs or your needs or the next person's needs. And so we've, you know, have had to deepen our product offering to basically serve specific client needs. They had to remember, we have a lot of clients who date back to 2012, 2011, and they now have huge amounts of notional value in crypto, right? Right. And our, you know, consumer brokerage trading product swap doesn't work for them. Like we do $10,000, $20,000 trades in there.

We don't do $40 million trades. And we have 2012 customers that do $40 million trades with us. So you need the markets team, right? Because you're not doing a $40 million trade inside the wallet. Right. We'd love to figure out how to do it. Compliance would kill us. You know, you have folks who are about 20 or 30% of our customers are active traders.

And they mostly use other exchange products and then sweep their funds back to blockchain. We can see them doing that constantly. So like how do we better serve their needs? How do we make it easier to enable that use case? You know, even down to like the institutions that we work with that do a lot of liquidity, so quantitative trading funds, they have a need to borrow crypto, both to hedge positions, as well as to provide inventory at venues that they trade on. And so we now run a, you know, pretty deep lending operation.

You know, we'll loan nine, like mid-nine digits of crypto this quarter, which I guess probably makes us like a top five lender in the crypto market. And so generally speaking, like we're a very product development focused company. When there's a customer need, we're going to do our best to provide that to our customers. And as it broadens the number of, you know, I think nation states will be in crypto at some point. What kind of products are we going to have to build nation states? I don't know. But I'm pretty excited to find out.

Yeah, I want to circle back to that. But so just a question. So if you're non-custodial, but you're lending nine figures worth of, or a U.S. dollar value, I guess. So where does that, where do those bitcoins come from? Magic. No. One of the great assets of the company is our relationships with, you know, crypto holders, whether that's consumers, you know, businesses, crypto projects. And so we're generally able to borrow a lot of inventory.

So, you know, we borrow from a long-term holder. We then lend out short-term loans. And that's how lending debts work generally. And we just happen to have very deep relationships to the supply side in the market. We do, though, in this is good read of point out, we do also run a custody and vault product now. And so there are clients that, you know, being entirely non-custodial doesn't make sense. a good example of that is all those clients are so secretive

so it's really hard to talk about them but like example X, Y, Z crypto project they hold, they self-custody a ton of their assets but they don't want to be single-threaded, right? They don't want to be totally exposed to one system, right?

And so they've parked a significant amount of their reserve capital in our custody system. Now, that's a very different use case from like the average person. But does that crypto project have their own private keys? Absolutely. Does every single client that we deal with have their own private keys? Absolutely. But there are some use cases where we need to have custody of their funds to enable a product or use case.

And in that scenario, we have, we have a custody in vault system that we run. And it's, you know, one of these like crazy, you know, multi-geography. multi-system, personnel redundant, like in the side of a mountain with armed guards kind of kind of situations. Like a mini-Zapo? It's heavier duty than Zapo. And the reason is that Zapo system is, you know, half a decade old at this point. Ours is not that old.

It's only maybe a year old. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, well, the current version that we're on is about a year old. And so, you know, it's a bit more of a modern system. But it's a, what the catchphrases is like geographically, politically system and technology redundant. We don't really lead like a go-to-market proposition with the custody product.

And the reason, and it's super sexy to talk about custody products over the last year in the crypto space. And the reason is it's not a very good business because almost every custody provider will custody assets for free. Like, we'll store your assets for free if you're a qualified client. So, like, you know, how much marketing and sales effort do you want to put behind something that, like, if we'll provide it for free, other people will provide it for free. Well, if you get into staking, then you can make money from that.

And we do stake. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, but your clients expect you to give them most of the staking fees. Well, still, but I mean, you can make money from it. Very small amounts of money. Okay. And it's, you know, it's like at this point in the game, the staking ecosystem is very small. But, but, so I'm confused, because you offer Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash,

like, no, Ether and XLM. And we also offer a stable coin in the wallet. So, but where does staking come in? We don't stake in the wallet. Our custody system stakes. Oh, so you allow a storage of other assets? Yeah.

Our custody system holds like 47 different assets. Oh, okay. Okay. So I was going to ask you. And our markets operation will trade anything, almost anything. Wow. Okay. So we trade, like your OTC desk.

Yeah, we trade heavy volume and all kinds of assets that are not in the wallet. All right. So I actually was going to ask you kind of a set of questions about your typical customer, but it sort of sounds like you kind of don't have a typical customer because you're serving people like me as well as like the Mickey Malcos and the Jim Robinson's. I can break it down for you. Okay. So it's basically like crypto-o-Gs.

So people have been in crypto a long time, right? Then there's like, people like you. Well, maybe you're a crypto, she, I don't know. But there's like your average retail consumer, right? And they're like, you know, 22 to 37 years old. And, you know, they have, you know, they usually bought a couple thousand dollars of crypto, right? And if they did that in 2013, now they have a lot of crypto. If they did that in 2017, they don't have as much crypto, like, you know, so on and so.

forth. Right. And those customers are served in the wallet for the most part. Then there is a group of, you know, high net worth sort of individuals. And those folks we serve out of our market's business. So OTC trading as well as investing into our fund products. So we have asset, we have actively managed products as well. Right. Like you have a venture fund. We do. Yeah, we do. Yeah, when did that launch, I didn't. Very quietly about nine months ago. Okay. Yeah, I just saw it on website and I was like, I don't remember what we're hearing about that. Very quietly. We've been investing out of it. And it has both internal capital and external capital. Okay. It's an unusual, unusual. And like, are you investing for equity or? Yeah. Okay. Equity, tokens. Oh, okay.

Oh, interesting. We'll invest in podcasts. Really? No. Not like I'm looking for investment. I'm not yet invested in a podcast. I, people, people always talk about, like, tokenizing, like an individual.

Yeah. And, like, you would be such a cool test case of tokenizing an individual. I know, but it would be, like, a security offering.

Move to Switzerland. Oh, my gosh. I don't know. I went to Switzerland once, and I was like, this place is super sterile. Yeah. I'm going back again very soon,

so we'll see what I think this time around. Maybe I like it. So anyway, we've got those clients. Okay. And then we've got, you know, what I would call like entities. And these are, you know, quantitative trading funds, crypto hedge funds, crypto venture funds,

multi-asset market makers, and then crypto projects, so like protocol projects. And we do business across that whole vertical. Wow, okay. So once you decided to go in the multi-token universe, you really went for it. All right, so we're going to talk a little bit more about blockchain's main business lines in a moment. But first, a quick word from our fabulous sponsors.

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So something else I was wondering about, like more in the wallet area is have you noticed behaviors amongst that set changing over time? Like, you know, how did they transact, what for? And also, like, since I don't think you collect a ton of information on your use it, like, how would you figure that stuff out? So there were a few questions in there. Yes. We're playing this game where you're speaking like super long. So you asked me like five questions. And I have, ask. I get you like six answers. I have way more questions than I can ask in an hour and you are taking way longer to answer every single question. So I'm trying to pack them in. So consumer behavior. So basically we have different buckets of consumers and it's easy to cut

them in two ways. One is developed world versus non-developed world. The other is crisis economies versus non-crisis economies. And then the last way to cut it is active traders versus not active traders. Okay. And all of those cuts will give you very different sort of outcomes about user behavior. And they're mostly like stuff very logical for you to guess. People in crisis countries, they keep doing what they're doing regardless of what the price of Bitcoin is doing.

Because whatever the price of Bitcoin is doing is not worse than what's going on in their country. Right. So like Venezuela is unimpacted. You know, our Venezuela metrics are not driven by the price of Bitcoin. They're driven by the disaster in Venezuela. Right. Same because it's true for your crane, right?

Okay. Then active traders have a very specific, you know, they log in all the time. It's very correlated to price. You know, they're going to log in and make trades or log in and move money to venues. That's what they do. And so you literally watch at coins from those waltz go to exchanges and then come back or something? In the aggregate. So all of our customer level analysis is done aggregated and anonymized.

So I don't know what you did with your wallet. but I know what everyone did with their wallets yesterday. Okay. Then the last segment is sort of America in Europe first everywhere else. American customer base is the hardest customer base to keep interested. Oh, really? But the fastest velocity customer base when the market starts moving. Oh, interesting.

America is like the supreme speculators in the crypto market. And so, you know, we joke that the American user base is like a blessing and a curse, because when the market's ripping, you'll do a lot of revenue off of it. But it's impossible to get them interested when the market's quiet. On top of that, there's the noisiest customers. So they file the most support tickets. Oh. Yeah.

And they're the noisiest on social media and all the way down the line. The other thing that's really interesting fact about blockchain is that we do provide a fair number of regulated services, regulated products. And for all of those products, we have to comply with relevant FCA, you know, U.S. Treasury, BSA, all the acronyms, compliance laws. Right. And so one of the things that is not widely known about blockchain is that we have probably, you know, put more people through compliance processes in the last year than maybe any other fintech country, fintech company out there. So currently today we do about, you know, anywhere from 20 to 30,000 identity verifications a day.

which, you know, because of the way you have to buy capacity at the vendors, you kind of know who's buying capacity where, and really puts us in a league of our own on how many IDVs we're buying on a daily basis right now. Some of that might be because you only started doing that recently as well, right? We've been doing it for two and a half years. Okay. But still, I mean, like Coinbase was doing it long before, so spread out. Because I think maybe you guys have, like, roughly the same.

I don't know. It's hard to know exactly. but actually just to go back, I want to know what is the theory around like why Americans are so difficult to interest in a down market and like the quickest to jump when it's in a market? They're just there to speculate. Oh, okay. Yeah, but also I think probably, maybe this is like an obvious thing to say, but just because they have like a well functioning financial system. So they sort of don't need Bitcoin for any other reason, right? Yeah.

If you're born in America, you won the lottery. like yeah i mean even the u is okay but not nearly as good as america like you know you have the dollar you have access to the dollar you choose to live in the uk i still have access to the dollar laura that's true that's true all right we're going to stop about you because this is about blockchain um so something that i'm so curious about is why did it take until january 2018 to enable buying and selling on blockchain um so if you remember early in our conversation we were talking about our mission being to make it easy for people to hold their own funds. And it took us a long time to get the product at a parity of convenience with centralized

wallets. And so, you know, we had to rewrite entire encryption libraries. We had to improve buffering. We had to, like, create, I mean, this is a huge computer science investment to get to the point where, like, you know, if you pull out your iPhone, your Android, and your web, your laptop, you can log into your wallet on all three simultaneously and stay in sync. That is something that seems like a small thing, but is actually incredibly difficult to pull off. And as it turns out, it's much easier to build a centralized solution to the problem of holding customer funds. And we know that because we have a centralized solution nowadays. But building the decentralized one in a way that is easy for Laura to use and it's easy for

my little brother to you is he's not an engineer is really challenging and it took us years and it was a huge investment to do that to invest in the data products and invest in the stuff that it powers our acquisition funnel so we just didn't get to it and our view was like do we want to be at the center of the crypto financial system or do we want to be running the toll booth at the edge of the system and we wanted to always bias towards you know even if it was painful in the short term, making sure that we maneuver ourselves in such a way that we had a shot at being at the center of the crypto financial system and not operating a toll booth on the edge. Right.

So, but one other thing, just to go back to the buying and selling, is it actually possible for U.S. residents to purchase on blockchain.com? Because actually, I could not figure this out easily. And because I'm a New York resident that was like an added hurdle. It's not possible for New York residents. Okay. But what about other states? Most states in the U.S. it is.

Oh, okay. And the number of states is sort of consistently expanding, and by the end of this year, we'll be more or less complete. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's at 22 states now. And when you say they can purchase, do you mean all the assets you offer, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum? Correct.

Oh, okay. Okay. And then I also wanted to ask. We work with, you know, we directly work with a wide variety of banking and card payment processors to do that. Okay. So let's know. But we're much heavier on the Fiat side of life in Europe than we are in the United States.

Oh, oh. So you do serve more of as an on-ramp here. Yeah. Oh, okay. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. That's not really what I do. Is that because you don't have any knees?

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across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. So I wanted to ask also now about the higher end of your customers. What kind of volume are you doing on your OTC desk? OTC volume is incredibly cyclical and spiky. So you'll have a really big month and you'll have like a month where you're like crickets. We have gradually over the last year moved away from trading with a lot of humans and more and more towards trading programmatically. So, you know, the API that powers all the liquidity in our wallets is very robust and is capable of pricing risk and size. And so we've started piping that into other platforms

and providing liquidity programmatically rather than, you know, humans. So you're talking about sort of like a dark pool? Correct. Our internal trading system very much looks like a dark pool. And then, so we've been talking. And that, and that trading system is probably interesting to talk about. Okay. It's a huge investment. It's a machine trading platform. It plugs into other venues like exchanges, but it also plugs into the largest market makers directly. And so most of the time, we're not even going to venues anymore. We're either hedging risk out at a derivative or we're hedging out at a quantitative market maker level. But almost the vast majority of our flow, like on a tip of a day, 80% plus is being cross-matched

internally within our internalized matching engine. And so it very, very much looks like a dark pool. And so you'll even see like a big OTC order is taken down against the retail flow and stuff like that, which is super fascinating. Oh, that is interesting. Yeah. And wait, and then when you said 80%, what is the other 20, is the other 20 just the wallet?

No, no. So 80% is internally matching. So I trade, you trade, Sarah trades, and we cross-knit all of that together inside the matching engine. Of course, if just three of us traded, it wouldn't be possible, but if thousands of us trade it is. And so from a scale perspective, it's interesting that we're at a point now where most of it's internalized.

The other 20% is when, like, the book gets out of balance, right? And suddenly we're like, huh, people are selling a lot of bitcoins and no one's buying them. So we got to take that risk off. We've got to go sell some bitcoins to somebody. And that's when it will ping one of those market makers or, you know, look at pricing on another venue. But basically it combines the aggregated prices and order books from all of the places plugged into the smart trading platform, which is right now. I think it's 17 venues and looks for the best price and then sprays it around. Okay, and you did that dark pool basically because it's more efficient?

Yep, it's much more efficient. It also, like, you know, most of the consumer crypto platforms have struggled with a lack of liquidity. And I think when you start offering liquidity, you have to be bulletproof. Like, you have to always be able to offer a customer trade and at a great price. And so it was really important that we built the machine trading infrastructure and all the associated data science that goes with it to be able to ensure that like rock solid, bulletproof liquidity. So something that I noticed when I was doing the research is back in 2018, you announced through Fortune that you were building an exchange. So what happened with that? I don't think we've ever announced that we were building an exchange.

Oh, there was an interview with you and Fortune where it said that you made this higher. I'm trying to remember from where, from Goldman or somewhere. And the plan was to build an exchange with that hire? It was in January or February 2018. I hired no talent from Goldman that is responsible for building an exchange. Our head of markets, Charlie McGarra, is a former Goldman partner and ran their global metals trading business. But he very much is in that markets team that runs the dark pool and all that stuff.

Okay. It's too bad that. I don't have internet here because I have the link. Well, I'll link to it. I mean, it's often, but I can talk about it. Okay. It's often been guests that we would build an exchange. And so there's been articles, and I'm not sure about this one, that have speculated that we'll build one.

You know, we have a lot of clients who are active traders. We have a lot of liquidity, and we run an internal order book. And so those facts are widely known, and people would guess, like, why don't you build your own exchange? The rally is that I didn't really want to build an exchange. and my hope and hope remains that there will be a really solid exchange developed that will serve as the spot price leader for crypto. And you don't think there's a contender yet? Look, I think, and I, you know, if you asked me like what I thought would happen five years ago that I was right about and what I was wrong about, this would be the biggest shock in the market to me, which is that no one's really built that product in the sense that. that, you know, we're very active on all these venues.

I've been trading for a long time. I've been trading crypto for a long time. The venues are really haven't evolved much since, like, four or five years ago. And, you know, for a long time, BitFinnix was the leader in spot price discovery, right? They've lost banking. You know, their banking is really for the app, for a client like us, their banking doesn't work anymore. Right. But their matching engine always worked, right?

their matching engine was reliable, it always worked. But even BitFenex hasn't really evolved into like an institutional sub 100 microsecond exchange. You look at the other products out there, their order books are very liquid and toxic, and or their matching engines just don't work. What does it mean for a matching engine to be toxic? So, in market's toxic when the liquidity is like very thin at the top of the book. and the spread between is wide. But toxicity is like a mathematical concept inside an order book

and it's super interesting to research. But the bigger problem is like the matching engines just don't work when there's a ton of velocity. This is partly because it's tech companies building matching engines rather than people who have built matching engines building matching engines. Well, what about Binance? Binance's matching engine is totally distributed inside of Amazon Web Services. So it's not like a Kolo, it's like a 2, 300 microsecond at best matching engine, you know, which in any normal market would be like 1990 speed.

Oh, I see. It's, you know, it's not geared towards, you know, being a spot price discovery leader. It's geared towards sort of being like a Amazon of crypto apps at or Walmart. Like, we have everything, you know. It's about breath, not speed. And they don't have banking. So you can't trade. When I say spot market, it's probably.

important for me to clarify that I mean like a place I can trade dollars and euros and pounds for digital assets right which I can't do at finance right although they've I think they're starting to turn on some of the fiat exchanges those so far have always been outside of the core finance order book there's sort of like little franchises and very liquid oh that's right that's right you can destroy the whole Malta order book with one bitcoin so it's not really the solution yeah so it looks like there's this opportunity for you that's like just ripe. Yeah. Yeah.

And then we'd be running an exchange. Look, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't roll it out in the future. But I think, I think that historically we've been a neutral participant in the sort of exchange ecosystem. But, you know, one of the things that I think is challenging is that it does hold the whole space back. like, you know, this week, which I know I've been told not to say this week. But recently, there was a crash at BITTAM. Let's just tell the listeners all about how we do things here at Unchained. But anyway, no, keep going.

There was a crash at BitStamp, right? Someone put a really big order, which should have been stopped by a caller. Oh, I saw W. On Twitter on Twitter about this. And so a caller is like a risk limit, which is basically designed to like not rip your holder book up, right? BitStamp doesn't have collars because the matching engine they used as the one they built six years ago. And so there's no collar and then it's slow.

So it took minutes to grind through this order, which meant that the entire reference rate on all the derivative exchanges was impacted. Right, like Bitmex. Like Bitmex, Deribet, etc. And the whole like the global crypto order book ripped off of one order for several thousand Bitcoins. which like at a properly functioning venue with a fast matching engine, that order should have been ground through in seconds. And when that order was ground through in seconds, it never hits the reference rate.

Right. And so when you have these kind of problems, like, you know, it just increases volatility, it destroys trust. And it seems like a problem that just is going nowhere, which is frankly shocking to me after half a decade.

Yeah. Yeah, I saw her tweeting about that and how essentially they profited from that with some kind of trade on BitMex because they knew that was what was going to happen. Dovey, by the way, is like, I don't know her at all, but she is one of the most fascinating people to follow on Twitter and super insightful analysis. I know she's, I saw her hilariously tweet. I forget what it was, some news about the Finnex or something.

And then like, like, Mike Dutas of the block was like, damn it, like, we were going to do the story, but then like, you know, whatever. You've adopted Segwit, the upgrade for Bitcoin, which enables more transactions with each block. on some of your products, but not on others, including your main product to the blockchain wallet. Why not? Yeah, so I think one important thing is a step back and understand that broader context of Segwit. Segwit is a change to the way signatures are handled in Bitcoin that improves efficiency. And generally speaking, when the Bitcoin community decided to focus on technology that would increase the efficiency of transaction,

rather than the throughput of transactions. It moved a lot of work from the protocol to clients, to people using, you know, sort of to the end users of the protocol and software providers. One of the things is important to understand about the way that our software works is that all of our software is generating transactions on the client side, which means that we have to handle that signing module across, you know, every model of iPhone, every model of Android, you know, tons of web browsers, window devices. So it's not even just when we change something in an encryption library changing it on three apps,

it's changing it to support hundreds of devices past that. And it's the riskiest kind of change we can make. Because if something goes wrong, you know, our client's funds will be at risk when their transactions aren't signed properly. Past that, we also have to move clients' funds to a new output type, which means that we have it, we have to do this across all our platforms simultaneously. And some of our platforms, like iOS, are behind other projects like Web. So if we only needed to roll it out on one platform, we would have already rolled it out on some of our products, some of our wallets. So we'd have

already rolled it out on Web, for example. But it has to be a simultaneous release. And to get it really, really right, we probably have to dedicate a whole cycle. You know, by the time, um, say it was rolled out, fees had already spiked and then come back down. And so, um, you know, saving an extra 30% on fees hasn't really been at the top of our product roadmap. Customers, you know, when they, when we survey them about what they want, what kind of features they need, it's usually about broader access to assets, ways to store their crypto and liquidity to trade between their crypto. It's very rarely, you know, help me save 30% on Bitcoin transaction fees. And so while there's a huge amount of interest on Twitter from about 15 or 20 Twitter

accounts for us to adopt Segwit, there's not a lot of demand for it across our customer base relative to other product priorities. Now that said, you know, we felt like it was important to support Segwit on our Block Explorer. Otherwise, you know, the number one place people look up transactions wouldn't show Segwit transactions. That would be terrible. And so we had that to go ready from day one. On our custody systems, it's there. on our clearing and settlement systems is there. So we actually do thousands of Segwit transactions every day. This will not make any of the folks that want us to do Segwit happy hearing this.

Because, you know, quite fairly, we generate 20 to 30% of all Bitcoin transactions. And so folks really want to see us adopt because for the last year, adoption of Segwit has basically stalled. And what I'd say to those folks is, you know, we are going to get. get there. I won't promise you exactly when. It'll depend a lot on what happens tomorrow and what gets prioritized in the dev roadmap. And, you know, is there another unplanned fork that we have to deal with? This stuff's kind of constant. But we will get there and we'll get there when we can do it in a safe way across all of our platforms for all of our clients. You know, I got started in this to help make Bitcoin useful and easy for people. And I'm still super passionate about Bitcoin.

It's kind of like your first love and want to see it be as successful as possible. But today, Bitcoin has really, as a community, committed to that digital gold thesis and narrative. And if you believe Bitcoin is digital gold, you don't need cheap fees. So every time someone on Twitter says, like, Bitcoin doesn't need cheap fees, I say absolutely. And that's a lot of the reason why Segwit hasn't been prioritized. All right. Yeah, but previously you were in the camp that didn't want it to be digital gold. and that's why you signed the Sequeau 2x thing, right?

I thought and still believe that Bitcoin could be more than one thing. I thought it could be digital gold and it could be cash for the internet. The community didn't agree with me. And there was a lot of us that felt like Bitcoin could be more than one thing. And, you know, turns out we were in the minority. Maybe Bitcoin will be more than one thing in the future. Today is digital gold. And supporting that use game,

case means liquidity, it means fiat on ramps, it means storage types, like adding hardware wallets, but it doesn't mean optimizing for cheap fees. So I wanted to ask you also, you know, we've been talking about like all the different jurisdictions and stuff. What has it been like trying to manage all these regulatory issues across, you know, multiple jurisdictions? And like, and just out of curiosity also, how would you compare the different jurisdictions? I don't think it would be wise for me as the CEO of the firm to comment on which jurisdictions are my favorite. Oh, please.

They're all my favorite. Oh, really? Of course. Absolutely. And jokes aside, though, it's been tough. It's been really tough. You know, one of the first meetings I did external meetings on behalf of the company was I went in and met with the head of fintzen at the time, like seven years ago. It was like, here's what we're doing.

What are the rules? She was like, this is a strange meeting. Because I had no lawyers with me. You know, no legal advice. She just came in and was like, tell me what the rules are. And so I think, you know, most of the time regulators are pretty reasonable. They're like usually reasonable people that want to achieve a certain outcome. I think understanding that's important.

I think also understanding like what are your bright lines? Like, what are the things that you're not willing to do? Like in our case, we're not willing to give up on the dream. of everyone having their own private key. So that model doesn't work with existing regulation. The idea of everyone being their own bank isn't something that regulation thought about 15 years ago was written or 30 years ago, whatever. And so we've had to engage in a global campaign to advocate on behalf of the non-custodial model.

And as the largest company running non-custodial front and center, you know, the burden of doing that work has largely fallen on us. And so we've engaged in public advocacy work on behalf of that idea, you know, in countries all over the world, often very expensive campaigns. And we've been fortunate to, you know, to be able to reach a place with the regulator in most jurisdictions where they agree with us. And that's been tough. And it's been a huge drain of time and resources. But like, because that's something that we believe in so deeply, it's worth it.

Vitolik actually recently wrote this blog post where he was saying that some of these regulations coming out around data privacy and then like the recent Finson guidance on crypto that all those things are positive for peer to peer transactions. And you may not know the Finsen thing either, but that was very, I'm very familiar with the Finsen thing. Yeah. Because it basically was like a boon, I would think, for your kind of company. We spent many years working with Fenton and Treasury. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, in general. I think it's, you know, and if you believe, believe that the future, like as Vitalik does, the future of crypto is in people having their own keys and isn't software powering this whole financial system, that guidance from FinCent

was incredibly positive. Yeah, for you, in particular, for blockchain in particular. Or, I mean, but then more broadly for peer-to-peer transacting. Yeah, I think, you know, you're right. It was most likely incredibly positive for blockchain. I think when we think about the mission of blockchain, which is like is what is important to at least me and the reason that I'm still here every day for God knows how long. It was broadly so broadly positive for the whole class of products that I was really happy to see it. At the same time, though, you know, this is like a thing that requires constant vigilance and constant effort because it's not a concept like crypto people understand it. You know, whenever we talk about, you know, so I sit down with like,

Vitalik and I'm like talking well Vitalik actually gets this stuff but I sit down with the average crypto engineer I'm like oh you have to like explain this to regulators all over the world they're like why it's so obvious I'm like well not obvious to the regulator and so we require you know constant advocacy

and explanation and you know we haven't been alone in that I think CoinCenter has been a powerful ally and advocate on this run as well but I think generally when you look at like what is positive in the crypto world the fact that like you know, there was sort of like the first phase of the advocacy work around this was like the regular being like, huh, what? And the next being like, hmm, maybe. And now it's kind of

being accepted formally. And I think that's super positive for the entire crypto ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah, with the exception of that one Congress person wants to ban Bitcoin. But anyway, I think, you know, threatening to ban Bitcoin is a great way to get the TVs and social media to pay attention to you for a day. So I don't think it's all that serious. Yeah. It was kind of like, hmm, all right, are you going to turn up the internet? or what? Because, all right. Something else I want to ask about is to do the stellar air drop,

you've been requiring that people verify their identities. And that sort of, in some sense, seems like a departure from blockchain's ethos. You know, not exactly, you know, they're still maintaining control of their private keys, but like directionally. So were you facing pressure from regulators to get more info on your users?

We, so it's interesting. The core belief here, has never been in anonymity. You know, we've always, like, used your IP address to make sure that people don't log into your wallet that aren't you. We've taken your phone number. We've taken your email. Like, we, you know, since day one, we've collected enough information about customers that it was not a very anonymous service.

The core value here is user control of their funds, right? So why do we require you to verify your ID? to receive the air drop. The answer is very simple. We're sending you money. And any time that we're sending someone money, we need to know their identity, thanks to a variety of regulators around the world, you know, the alphabet soup of three, three-letter regulators. You can still log on to our website today and open up a wallet, which is your email. We're not going to be able to send you free money. We're not going to be able to power your trading. But you can still use our service. And we're deeply committed to that.

You know, one of the side of other reasons that we verify people's identity with the irdrop is to combat synthetic fraud. Because anytime you do an air drop, people try to get more than their air drop. They try to get a thousand of their aerrops, or 100,000. And there's a whole cottage industry dedicated to referral fraud, payments fraud, and increasingly air drop fraud. And so, you know, we triangulate a wide variety of Dhabo. to prevent fraud in airdrops, because we do air drops, not just a stellar air drop.

And the challenge is collecting enough statistically significant data points to build your fraud model. And so a lot of the identity, the verification stuff feeds into our fraud models. Right, right. That makes sense. And that also explains why it's been taking someone to do the stellar. It's really hard. It's an incredibly difficult computer science problem to give away free money at scale. Um, you know, and look, air drops usually have fraud rate, you know, loss rate of around 40 to 60

percent. So, so. Oh, meaning that you're sending money to these accounts that are like, well, that for air drops normally, yeah. So if you look at air drops historically, 40 to 60 percent of the air drop is lost to fraudsters. We, you know, internally had a target of under 10 percent. When we told people that, they were like, you're insane. Um, and when the air drop first started, we were definitely not under 10 percent.

today we're in the single digit percentage. Oh, wow. But it's been a huge like multi-million dollar investment into the fraud and data science side to make that possible. Okay. Yeah. Because I did see some users complaining about why it was taking so long and stuff. But I figured it was a huge wait list right now. We have on the airdrop, there's probably 50, 60,000 people in the backlog.

But generally to onboard at blockchain right now, there's probably a wait list that's, I think, 450,000. thousand people deep. Wait, for the wallet? Yeah. And why is that? Because we will let you sign up. It's very low friction. You can do it in 30 seconds. But if you want to go through more onboarding to be able to trade, to have access to fiat, maybe access to airdrops, there's a further verification process you need to go through. And depending on your jurisdiction, it can be identity verification. It can be, you know, all kinds of stuff. It really depends on your jurisdiction. But we can only process so many applications a day. And today we process, you know, 30,000, a day. But even with that level, which is a lot, we still have a backlog of about 450,000 people

waiting to be processed. So it takes, what, a couple weeks or something to get onboarded? Really varies by country. Oh, okay. So I actually want to circle back. to something that you mentioned at the beginning, which is world governments participating in digital currency in some fashion, whether it might be releasing their own central bank digital currency. In August 2017, you said at the time that we were two years out from a top 30 government in the world releasing a central bank digital currency. That's just in a couple months.

So where do you stand on that prediction now? And maybe he wanted, I don't know what you were going to say earlier when you brought that up if you wanted to add on that. Yeah. So I think we're closer on a Western government, like a G7 government, than people think. By August? Maybe. And Venezuela already released theirs, which is hilarious.

Not a top 30 and not a real. Venezuela? Oh, you know, that's a good question. I don't know. Well, if you look at a 10-year snapshot, Venezuela is a top 30 country? If you look at a one-year scrap shot, thanks to their economy falling off the list, it's not. So is this close to being right, Laura? This close.

I can't give you that one, but anyway. But anyways, look, it is a pretty bold prediction. It was. I, you know, I almost got there. Didn't quite. And I think that, you know, the other countries that are close to it that have made a lot of progress in the background area, Russia, which their project is very advanced. The Canadians got quite close and then didn't do it.

And I was counting on the Canadians or the Danish people. And, you know, the Canadians didn't quite get there. But, like, we'll see. I'm very happy to be right about the two years if something happens in the next year or two. I always, well, we'll see. The Canadians definitely have been front and center with... Okay, I think the other thing that government's going to do is start holding crypto as part of their foreign reserves. Oh, really? Want to put a deadline on

that prediction? We can always reference it later, my podcast. Sure, but governments already hold crypto. Which ones and which cryptos? Slovakia. Holds a lot of Bitcoin. For what purpose? Oh. But they made the rare choice not to sell it. Huh. Right? And there's, that's public. There's other governments. that haven't publicly disclosed that are holding Bitcoin that they confiscated. I'm not yet aware of a government that's bought a large position of Bitcoin or Ethereum or anything else. But there are certainly governments that are holding large positions. And there are sovereign wealth funds that are holding positions.

Oh, right. So if you count the sovereign wealth fund as the government, then it's already happened. So I'm happy to make that projection. Okay. Yeah, I think that was already public. You've also said that blockchain plans go public in the next few years. why? And do you see any challenge in doing that? Because as we know, the crypto markets are very volatile and sometimes there are these long winters, but, you know, when you're public, shareholders are looking at quarterly earnings. Yeah. So the first thing is like, when we go public, we'll be able to

look at a broad array of ways to go public, which would be super interesting. So like, you know, will it be an ex... Will non-crypto companies be going public by issuing tokens at that point, like major ones. That would be interesting. Will we go public on NIC? Who knows? I think you've identified the problem for every major venture backed crypto company though,

which is volatility. And we've been very, very principled about how we have thought about revenue and trying to only generate revenue and we thought we could do it in a sustainable, predictable way. And so our financials are much less volatile looking than probably any other major crypto company.

We're probably the most capital efficient by an order of magnitude. So we've spent by far the least money of any major crypto company. We've also probably have the most stable set of financials. And this is largely because, one, we are very long term. And being long term, a lot is about being

predictable and managing a risk. Two, we knew that we wanted to go public someday. And to do that, like, we need to be predictable and stable. And just to be clear for people, because I did skip a whole bunch of questions, because you were talking a bit long, but basically the way you guys generate revenue is charging transaction fees on transactions. I imagine it's the same weather, or not the same fee, but you do that both at the high and low end of your customer base? So we don't charge for transactions. We charge for trades. Oh, trades. Okay. Because you have to remember that we do 100,000-ish transactions on crypto a day. Not all of those are trades. And those transactions, like when you pull out your wallet and you send

me Bitcoin, there is a transaction fee, but we just charge you our pass-through cost of that transaction. We don't charge you anything on top of that. When you trade, we do take a margin on every trade. Okay. And is that your main source of revenue? That and advertising and then asset management, which are lending businesses inside of. Okay. So something that I was curious about is also there's been a number of Wall Street executives

hired at crypto companies here at blockchain, but also at competitors. For instance, you hire Jamie Selway, who came from a broker-dealer in trading technology from Investment Technology Group, but many of these people, whether here at blockchain or at other companies, but including Jamie, did leave within a short time period. Why do you think that is? Yeah, so last year we went through the, you know, a tough transition of building a real executive team. So we tired eight execs last year, promoted others internally. It's a hard thing to pull off. Probably one of the harder things that I've ever worked on here at blockchain. Yeah. Not all of them made it. You know, we have.

hired people from, not just Jamie, but we hired people from Twitter, TD Ameritrade, Goldman. We hired a public company CFO all the way down the line, right? And most of those people worked out and are essentially running the firm today. So, you know, I talked about the Goldman partner, the former Goldman partner, Charlie, that runs markets now, phenomenal leader inside the business. our CFO who came from Fortress in one main and took a company public and has the super resume right,

McCrena, incredible and effective leader. Both of these people are from finance. We have another executive in our product team from TD Ameritrade. It's from equities, right? Our general manager of our wallet is a longtime executive here named Zen who came from UBS,

ran a trading team at UBS. BS. So the point that I'm making is that it's not so much about people coming from finance. A lot of those people have worked out. It's that not everyone's going to make it inside the context of our crypto firm, right? And I think what separates people out here is that you have to, like, the work we do is really hard, like really hard, and probably even harder than the average crypto company because of the non-custodial thing. And you have to really believe in that vision. and we're not able to, you know, baptize everyone into the cult. And so, you know, when you're building out these exact teams, you expect a certain, you know,

a certain loss rate or rejection rate. It's almost like the body, you know, rejecting an implant. Now, at the same time, it's been true that the wave of people of big name execs into crypto companies and the wave out, you know, we had our Jamie Sellway, Coinbase head there, Jonathan Kellner has been, you know, pretty consistent. And, you know, I think that's probably the same story, right? Which is just, it's hard to mainstream these people over. I think equity people in general have been really hard.

Even when we look at, you know, lower levels across the org. Partially this is because equities people are used to a very defined market structure of custodians, clearers, and all this stuff. And you kind of get equities people in the crypto market and they're like, okay, is all how does this all work? And you're like, well,

we have to build the custody, the clearing, the custodian, the lending, the routing. They're like, holy shit.

Right. You know, like, this is going to be impossible. And you're like, yep, yeah, it's basically impossible,

but like we might as well get on with it. You know, versus like, you know, folks that you hire out of like commodities has, you know, been very different.

Commodities, private equity. Those are folks who are used to these kinds of exotic, strange, rapidly evolving. global markets. And the other thing, you know, when I talk about global is like equities folks are very, like if you hire someone in equities in the U.S., they have really only done America ever, because equity markets are national. Whereas if you hire people from commodities,

commodities people deal with the whole world. And so it's very tough to make the jump from equities to crypto. And we've seen that play out here and almost every other crypto firm. It's an interesting thesis, but it makes sense. So where can people learn more about you and blockchain. No one needs to learn more about me. Okay. I'm on Twitter at one more Peter. And then the company is at blockchain.com. And you can go to blockchain.com slash you about it if you want to learn more about the firm. Yeah. By the way, can I just say it is no fun. It's like a total exercise and frustration Googling Peter Smith blockchain. This is like, even like blockchain.com, it really does not

help very much. You know, some founders want a profile, they want credit, whatever. I don't. This company was built by hundreds of people that aren't named me. No, no, but it's like the Smith part and then the blockchain part. Do you guys regret using that name? Absolutely not. It's an amazing name.

Yeah, it is, except like, I mean, it's just very hard to find things about blockchain the company. And it's the sea of like, but anyway. I think, you know, when you're, when you're a company, you mostly think, about acquisition, you know, acquiring new customers. And we probably have the premier property for that. Yes. And the premier SEO property.

And so I don't think we've regretted it much. I know. I should get like, I don't know, blockchainpodcast.com or something. I mean, we could put you at blockchain.com slash podcast. Then you'd really do well. I don't think anybody's going to type that. blockchain.com slash podcast. Do people type, type, you know, dot com slash something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. people type in blockchain.com slash wallet all the time. They directly type in blockchain.com slash markets. Okay, you tell me if there's a search, if like there are searches on your, because can't your engineers figure out if people are typing that in? Yeah, of course. Okay, so then maybe we'll talk. All right.

Thanks so much for coming on the show, Peter. It's been great, having you. You're welcome. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Peter and blockchain, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you are not yet signed up for my email newsletter, go to Unchainedpodcast.com right now to get my thoughts on the top crypto stories of the week. Be sure to check out our new channel on YouTube. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from factual recording, Anthony Yun, Daniel Nuss, and Rich Struffolino. Thanks for listening. Thank you.