As the head of Bicco, and you know we've got billions in custody.
I periodically say this, I want people to hear it in the press.
If you're a bad guy out there, like literally, you can come and
kidnap me and you get nothing. So please don't like I do not actually
have the ability to move the money at all, whether it's my personal funds
or company funds. This content is brought to you by Uphold, which is
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No commingling, no lending out your funds. If you'd like to learn more
about Pold, please visit the link in the description. Welcome to the Thinking
Crypto Podcast. Your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews with me Today is Mike
Belshi, who's the co founder and CEO of Bitgo. Mike, it's great
to have you back on. Nice to see you again, Tony, Mike.
You know, I'm a big fan and we've talked over the years.
Certainly appreciate your Web one point zero and two point zero background, and now
you're doing great things in Web three and there's a lot to talk about.
You guys at bitgo have been so busy. All good news. Let's start
with the news that broke this morning, and that is your acquisition of Brassica.
If I'm saying that right. Tell us about that and how you'll be
working together. Yeah, sure, Yeah, we're very very happy. Look,
we met a fantastic team in Brassica. They've been working on a slightly
different path actually right, different from digital ass as. They're working more towards
private equities. You know, there's a ton of work going on, not
just with our industry, but also traditional firms are all talking about like how
do we how do these this new technology affect like traditional finance, and Brassica's
been tackling the private equity space, but they do it a little bit different
way. So like bitco, they are an infrastructure provider. They're creating APIs
that you can use and you can launch, you know, a completely digital
for digital forward applications whatever it is you're building, white labeled embedded inside of
your own stuff, but it's completely compliance on the back end. And now
you can do that with private equity. So this is Reggae offerings, Reggae
plus offerings completely you know, within the context of how we manage securities here
in the United States. So they spend a bunch of time on that.
They've got some big clients that are looking to be able to scale. So
let me just give you a quick example. Like let's say, let's say
you wanted to create a security for every baseball player in in the in the
Major League Baseball, right, I mean, that's that's like a hard thing
to do. There's a lot of securities issue. But guess what with the
platform that Braska is built, you can actually make that happen pretty trivially.
And they've got a transferation behind the scenes. It keeps track of, you
know, the shares of the private equity that's being launched, and then they've
got a custodian side by side with that, and then that can interface like
the broker dealers, et cetera. So, look, the team at at
Braska has been fantastic. They got a ton of experience with how do you
build these things the right way, which is very similar to what Bicco's been
doing. So they compliment the bico team very well. And we're now actually
the first company to really be building a single house that can handle all kinds
of alternative investments. So there's been a question is it going to come from
the digital asset innovation side, is it going to be coming from the traditional
finance side. Look, I know a lot of traditional finances looking at how
to do this. They're looking at real world assets. They call it now
previously called tokenization. How do you marry this stuff together? Bicco's doing that
and we placed a big, a big flag in the ground on our claim
for that today. Yeah, to your point, TRADFI Larry Fink a black
Rock has been talking about tokenization, saying it's a future of finance. So
you know, with this service, you're able to expand your product footprint.
Obviously, you primarily have been a crypto custodian while at now you'll be able
to handle tokenization and the issuing of assets on the blockchain. Does this summarize
kind of you know, the the vision. Yeah, that's right. I
mean, look in terms of real world assets, I think Bicco probably is
the largest you know, tokenized issue with our wrap bitcoin product that actually is
exactly that type of product. But I think when you look at the competing
solutions away from Braska, they've looked a little bit too much at the technology
and less like what's the problem we're trying to solve. So tokenization is an
important thing for the future, but actually you got to remember that like private
securities and and and whatnot have been lacking technology at all, you know,
the pretty much devoid of technology. Go find me a tech forward you know,
transferragement. Go find me a tech forward broker dealer that can launch these
types of things at scale. They don't exist, but Brasica has built that,
so we bring that together with Bicco. Look, the first thing we
want to do is we always want to make sure we're working on customer problems,
like what is the pain point you have? Oh, it's I want
to be able to offer more of these at scale embedded into my own business
in a technical way that runs twenty four to seven that's what we do.
That's what braska does. They fit very well together. Now tell us about
and this may be in the early stages and you're still going to you know,
ramp up and expand this. But which blockchains do you plan to utilize
or are you agnostic? You know, it just depends on the client's needs
or or the type of asset. That's a great question. I think look,
wrap bitcoin might be a good example here. I think you can look
at some of the other big stable clients as to how they're operating. So
we run you know, bitcoin on a number of chains today, pretty much
every blockchain wants to have a wrapped form of wrap bitcoin to utilize, you
know, as part of their TVL mechanism in the various defile applications. So
we're taking the approach where we just issue that directly. There's some newer technologies,
you know, there's like layer zero wormhole that moves some of this into
smart contracts. We have not decided to move forward with that yet because at
the end of the day, we're fiduciary for this money, right and you
know, there's a lot of footprint risk on some of the smart contract work
that's out there. I'm not trying to discredit those protocols. I'm just trying
to say, like, look, it's a different level when you've got billions
of dollars of asset at stake and you really have to manage the risk for
that. So we will get there, and then those will help make it
even more seamless. But at least for now, we're doing more of it,
we deploy it on each chain, and the same thing is I expect
will be true for private securities. Again, though, I think you've got
to focus on the use case. So for the issuers of these private securities,
what are they trying to accomplish? Do they want to have it on
multiple chains? That answer will vary depending on the use case that they're building.
Do they want to put on one block chain? Do they just want
to have digital access and they're going to keep it all kind of in a
private network. All of these are possible. I'd like to think that one
of the strengths of bicco, why we've been around for ten plus years now,
where I've raised so little money, is because we're very commercial in our
approach, and that means understand your clients problems, help them figure out how
to solve those and then you know that always ends up having good success in
the end. Yeah, absolutely, Now, Mike, there was also some
other big news where you got an investment from cash handling firm Brink, And
this piqued my interest because I've seen the bring trucks, you know, drive
around throughout the United States. You know, if you're near a bank or
whatever it may be, tell us about this investment, how you'll be working
together, and you know, is Brink looking to or maybe what's your crypto
strategy if they have one. Yeah, look, so breaks does physical security
and anyone that is holding large amounts of crypto assets. Even though we use
cryptography, even though we take the keys and we split them thousands of miles
apart, there's still a physical aspect to it. You know, you can't
have someone break into a vault somewhere and then steal some hardware devices and then
have all the time in the world to go and hack those devices. So
physical security is a key part. I've said for years. You know,
we blend a combination of physical security controls along with virtual ones, meaning software
as part of how we provide our cold storage. By the way, there
was some question about you know, some of the ETFs we're using like single
signature addresses, right, and it's in cold storage with certain vendors, not
b Go. But you know, where are those keys held and how are
they physically security? And if it really is just a single key somewhere,
whether it's printed on paper or whatnot, you know, is that vulnerable to
physical security threats potentially? Look, I'm not trying to say what I don't
know. I don't know how those things are stored. It's not a BICHO,
but at Bicco we take we take this very seriously. So yeah,
look Brinks and Bicco, they're going to be handling some of our physical security
components with us. Some of this is boring stuff, you know, armed
guards and and things like that, but it's still critical nonetheless. Yeah,
and I know the amount was not disclosed as far as investment, Is that
correct? What are you able to tell us about that? Yeah, we
didn't disclose it. It's a relatively small investment. But we're really really honored
to have kind of their support as an investor at Bicco. Of course.
Awesome, And there was also news a Bitgo being granted an in principle approval
from the Monetary Authority of Singapore for a major payment institutional life and tell us
about your expansion there and as well as other plans to expand this year.
Yeah, so look, I mean, if you want to step back a
little bit before I answer that question. You know, there's a lot of
focus on regulatory clarity here in the United States. How do we offer products,
whether it's custodianship, whether it's trading in the digital asset space, in
a way that fits within the model that our regulators are comfortable with. From
Bicco's view, we think that actually we have a very clear path that is
not at odds with our regulators, not at odds with our clients, not
at odds with our investors, And we're trying to help make it simpler to
think about the future of finance, like what should the future structure look like?
So so let me answer this by first breaking down what regulatory is,
because it's a it's a small word, but it encompasses a lot. And
when it comes to regulatory I break it down into three groups. Three groups.
Number one is like law enforcement related regulation, So this is aml KYC
transaction monitoring, This sanctions controls, and those types of things. From this
perspective, frankly, the players like Bicco and coinbase in the space are doing
the best job of this of any financial institution, whether it's digital, asset
or otherwise. This is because we're using technology first. This is because we
know we've got a target on our back from certain parties. The law enforcement
part in spite of what some lawmakers may say, is actually really under control.
And in Bicco in particular, we're an institutional company, so we work
with institutions more in the retail and from that purposes, this is covered.
The second area, which you hear a lot about is investor protection. This
is largely the task of the SEC, and you know, this is where
you hear all this regulatory polarity. So like, if I'm selling you investment
product, did I disclose it properly? Am I pumping it to you while
dumping it in the back? Is the market manipulatable by others or by me?
You know, these are questions the SEC deals with to make sure that
investors know what they're getting. I do agree it's a very important thing,
and you know the SEC was successful. I think that's been over a year
now. But shutting down Library token. I don't know anybody that held Library,
but I'm sure there were some investors that you know, the SEC saved.
But the reason I'm a little bit sarcastic about that is because of the
third area of regulation, which most people don't fully understand, but it's the
most important, and that is regulating market structure. So the way our markets
work in the stock market, the way our derivatives markets work with CFTC.
Obviously, these have been established over decades, and it's the regulators are tasked
with making sure they understand what each participant is doing and what risks that participant
is taking, so that no matter what risks are in play, the market
will not go down. That is, one player can't knock out the entire
market. This makes sense, right, And of course, where regulators failed
us frankly in the last year is FTX. FTX had no market structure.
They were doing everything. They were the exchange, they were the buyer's broker,
the seller's broker, the clearinghouse, the custodian, the bank, and
then all it took was one fraudster, right, and he was able to
steal billions of dollars right, So The reason I hit this so hard is
because that is the most important regulatory risk for regulators and legislators to get their
heads around, and yet they're not really doing it. They're so focused on
this thing with investor protection at the SEC, which is important. I'm not
trying to deny that. But in the marketst's your case. The whole market
goes down and people loves billions. And in the case of you know,
a single you know investment, yes it's bad. I don't want anyone ripped
off. It should be disclosed and that should be all proper. But it's
a much smaller thing. It's only it's only a one off, right,
So all right, Now back to your question about Singapore, where Bicco's got
building blocks, which regulators have no issue with. We do custody, we
keep the assets safe, and we work with good players. That's all we
do. Right, Apple's giving me a thumbs up there, all right,
So, uh, it's very basic and we're not we're not at odds with
anyone. The second thing that we do as a custodian is escrow. And
you know, you think of escrow as a real estate transaction. You think
of it as like a thirty day thing. I think of it as like
a three millisecond thing. You and I enter into a trade somewhere outside of
Bicco, has nothing to do with Bicco. We enter into escrow with Bicco.
You've fund at millisecond one, I fund at millisecond two, and we
close the whole thing out at millisecond three. That's escrow. That's settlement.
That settlement with the technology that we get when we put technology first instead of
thinking about how the market structure from tradition markets evolved over the last hundred years,
they didn't have the ability to do real time escrow when they came up
with our current markets. All right, When we talk with regulators about custodians
offering escrow as a mechanism post trade settlement as the future of market structure,
the regulation delighted. There's actually no ambiguity. They're like, yeah, this
is great, this is what we want our custodians to do. And we
talk with regulators here in the US. We talked with the regulators in Germany
under a baffin license. Singapore, we talked with Dubai et cetera. So
Bicco is the only company that has I think maybe even more than one.
Maybe coinbase has more than one custodian globally, but we have eight I guess
custody licenses around the globe today. And this is all part of a long
term initiative for how do we allow regulators in each of the regions, whether
it's Europe or the US or Asia, to be able to regulate their clients,
keep the money in their region, have them trade globally with known good
participants, enter into settlements through escro mechanisms which again are easy to regulate and
understand, and pieces altogether. So that's this is the big of Go network
that we're building. It starts out with some simple stuff. It's operating today.
Volumes are increasing, you know, on a week over week basis.
We're really pleased with it. But this multi custodial initiative is how we make
a global market. And just one last point, you know, regulators up
until digital assets have largely concerned themselves locally or regionally, like it or not.
The Internet, and now the blockchain connects people around the world, right
Suddenly, the ability to regulate simply buy borders is much much harder, and
of course this is a problem that's been coming. You know, just like
the Internet opened up information and now you've got the Great Firewall in China,
you've got other information restrictions in Iran and other countries. It's being talked about
right now for you know, what the US wants to censor. Once you
have the Internet, people have the ability to globally communicate. Of course,
the regulation around that becomes tricky. The exact same thing that is happening for
money, the Internet of money. We've heard before, it's here. We're
trying to piece that together in a way that's super easy. So anyway,
Singapore is a critical strategy here. Singapore has for a long time been a
forward thinking regulator in terms of how monetary systems can be built put together,
and anyway, we're looking forward to working with them and that that's what that
license is about. You know, speaking of global markets as you're putting,
you know, clearly explaining it and the analogous to communications via the Internet,
what is your outlook for that global market? Is it with the you know
the context of tokenization, stocks, bonds, real estate and all these things
being tokenized on the blockchain, do you see a truly global market where there's
fractionalization twenty four to seven trading, and that could be in any part of
the world and participate. I could buy a share a token of a real
estate property in Manhattan, and it could be in some other part of the
world. Is that something that you think is realistic? I mean, of
course it is, and the technology can certainly do it. We know how
to do it. It's actually a less risk endeavor when you make it all
real time than when you don't. You know, we talked, you know,
as the ETFs were launched just last month, how did the flows of
money work? You remember that, Like, you've got the investors that are
buying through their brokers and it's a T plus two settlement to actually make the
transaction. But wait a minute. If the ETF is supposed to track the
price of bitcoin for real time for when the investor bought, but the cash
hasn't flowed to the actual ETF yet, how does that work right? And
the answer is a complex set of buffers, risk management, et cetera to
piece it all together. So ironically, you know, it's great that we
have the ETFs in play, right. It creates a it enables a massive
distribution channel into bitcoin which previously didn't exist. But it's really taking you know,
a Ferrari and converting it back into a fiat. Sorry, I shouldn't
use the word fiat has overlapped, but it's like turning into a Volkswagon.
Right. We have this real time mark market that trades bitpoint all around the
globe twenty four to seven. It's got lower risk because everything is pre funded.
And you now take it into this ETF market which only runs Monday through
Friday nine to five and closes at four pm, you know, New York
time, like what, so you know we've gone backwards. The reason that
every bank, every broker, uh, you know in America has some amount
of exploration going into digital assets, tokenization, real world assets, whatever you
want to call it today is because they know, of course, we can
do better. And you know, we've witnessed this as we've seen some of
the traditional financial partners start to dabble with crypto over the last ten years.
We usually run into legacy systems that were built, you know, twenty thirty
years ago, and they're like, ooh, how do we record a transaction
that happened on a Saturday? And they've got to go replumb for that.
So all right, anyway, yes, I see, there's there's no doubt
that our markets get more seamless, more connected, and more real time.
To your point about the bigcoin's body TF, yeah, I've been thinking about
it as well. Right, they're making bitcoin part of equities, and it's
like it's now in that category versus digital assets and so forth. And do
you think you know, there's going to be maybe a boomerang effect where okay,
it goes out to tratify, but eventually it'll come back on chain where
you have ETFs on chain. But I don't know about that. Look,
I think there's pros and cons of both models. So you know, I
criticize the ETF, but let's criticize the whole it yourself path for a moment,
you know. I mean in terms of just individuals holding key material,
it's still really tough. Uh, most people don't know how to do it.
I think the next generation is going to get better at it. I
think we as technology service providers are getting better at it. But human nature,
when it's you know, kind of your own thing, we take short
cuts. You know. This is where like institutions running sock processes and all
of these boring things that slow us down. It actually does matter. It's
really important to make sure that you got your backup stored properly. So here's
here's for the folks that are really big believers in self custy. And what
I love about, you know, the crypto mark is that you can have
both. You can actually have self custy and you can have institutional custoding.
They both work, and you're on a level playing field between these two parties.
But when you are holding it yourself, it's easy to think about like,
oh, hey, you know, I've got you know, three percent
of my net worth in bitcoin, and I've got a ledger and I printed
out of the backup and it's in the safety deposit box and I know how
to do it. It's a different story when it's ninety percent of your net
worth and you're thinking, you know, something tragic could happen to me,
and I wanted to go to my family tomorrow or whatever. Suddenly self custody
at ninety percent is different. And you know this to be true just by
the fact that you use a bank. Right if you really thought that holding
cash was more fun than than having someone else secured for you, you would
do that, but we don't want to put bars on our windows, right.
We don't want to have to have safes in our house. We don't
want to have to have the constant physical threat that goes with it. So
look, I'm not saying these are insurmountable problems. I'm just pointing out that,
like you could do a nice compare and contrast, and you can see
some places where ETFs really win, and you can see some places where self
custody really wins on the ETF. Though it is kind of funny, like
you know, if the market starts to really move on a Saturday or Sunday.
And by the way, I go back to June twelfth, twenty twenty
two, when Celsius was collapsing, there's a lot of market move and if
you're locked in an ETF, you're not going to be able to do anything
until Monday, so you're only going to get in after the damage and carnage
has been had. Ye. It's a great point, Mike, and a
lot of what you're saying I've experience. And it's like having to show my
wife how to use a ledger because my self custoding majority of my crypto and
without giving numbers, it is a good amount. And you know, having
all these things and like you're saying, backing up in a safe and all
that. Sometimes I think it would be really easy if I have a institution
that I can just leave it there and then if anything ever happens to me,
my family they can easily access those funds. My wife wouldn't have to
go crazy trying to figure out all this stuff which is brand new to her.
Well. Look, I mean, as the head of BICCO and you
know, we've got billions in custody. I periodically say this. I want
people to hear it in the press. If you're a bad guy out there,
like literally you can come and kidnap me and you get nothing, So
please don't like I do not actually have the ability to move the money at
all, whether it's my personal funds or company funds. And I think as
we start to get to large amounts, especially if we end up in a
strange place, sorry to be pessimistic, but economically in the US in the
next few years, I mean, we could start to see some real physical
threats coming in. I'm not trying to pimp a book here, I just
I hope everybody stays cautious out there, gets the right makes the security help.
If you do have large amounts of asset, you know, you definitely
should should think about a lot of different aspects, including physical maybe call it
brinks. Sure, yeah, no, no, that's great advice. You
know you mentioned before the market structure, right, and that is so important.
There are a couple of bills in the House, couple in the Senate.
In the House, there is a market structure bill, which I think
addresses some of what you were talking about. You know, what's your outlook,
Mike. You know we've got the election coming up, you got the
SEC they see how these everybody's still trying to figure these things out. Do
you think we see regulations past this year or next year and what that might
look like after the election. Look, the good news is that we have
legislators thinking about what needs to change, and it's going to take a few
iterations, a few drafts before they get it right. So I don't think
it's this year. I think it's probably more like twenty twenty five, maybe
twenty twenty six before we see anything. Look. On the good news side,
though, we also know how to handle these assets today. I think
it's really that number two, the uh, you know, investor protection regulatory
clarity that's needed. The SEC needs to be more specific about, you know,
which types of assets really fall under their reign and which don't. Obviously
they've made some claims, there's been some disputes, the courts have said no,
you're not right, and so it's clear there's ambiguity. I mean,
anybody can sit here and say like it's all perfectly clear. But given the
amount of credible voices that are coming out and saying, hey, we would
like this more more easily spelled out. What I believe is that we should
have regular leaders that are here to help America American business as much as American
investors. And I'm not trying to say business at the expense of investors.
I think the two go hand in hand. Right. If we have a
good place for people to do investment, then business grows and it'll expand on
top of itself. This is why the US is the number one stock market
globally, right. I mean China had some struggles just this last week.
Obviously, US regulation here is actually really really helpful. I would like to
see the SEC and the regulators get to a point where they're like, Okay,
we don't like the way a particular company handled this particular asset that maybe
should have been a security Instead of smack them down with like a hey,
don't do that, you can't do any business, et cetera, they should
be providing a path, you know, and if there needs to be a
small amount of fine, okay maybe, but they should be providing a path
where you bring it into compliance. And this denial that there's any any ambiguity
I think is not helpful. There's been so much discussed, you know,
from drugon Milliner to others. It's clear there's ambiguity. So let's help solve
it. Let's get regulators that want to help solve the problem instead of just
you know, smack down people that are politically opposed to them. I think
would be a much better place to be. But we got some more time
and in the meantime, you know, we'll keep building for sure. Yeah,
Look, it seems like we're moving in the right direction where more members
of Congress are aware. I mean, you got political candidates who are talking
about crypto now what they would do. And then what was interesting yesterday Janet
Yellen called on the folks at the House Financial Services Committee to get cryptoregulations passed,
So it seems like, you know, moving in the right direction.
Well, look, mostly I would take one exception to it. You know,
one thing I'd like to see happen is for this depolarization of crypto along
party lines. To be honest, I'm completely baffled by it. The Democratic
Party has, i think, for decades been known as kind of the party
for the people that wants to take power away from like the big bankers and
hand it down to you know, the individuals, and I think they do
this in a lot of regards. And yet somehow the Democratic Party has taken
the position that bitcoin and digital assets are dangerous, and in fact they say
that like it's it's remember that regulation number one, the law enforcement component.
They make claims that somehow crypto is is outsized the problem here. It's completely
false. We know this on multiple fronts. First off, all of the
companies like Bicco and coinbase that are we are here to work with regulators.
We are following the law to the t and we're certainly doing a much better
job than the US banks that are getting fined on these same fronts. With
multi billion dollar fines that far exceed anything that's ever happened in crypto. But
another thing that's just evidence of it is, you know, look at recoveries
of stolen money. The largest two recoveries of law enforcement in the US recovering
monies in the history of law enforcement, they're both in crypto. One of
them is the soak Road Funds, which is currently going on, the other
one is the Bitfinex funds. How was this done when allegedly these crypto companies
don't have appropriate law enforcement controls. Well, the reason is is because we're
built on a better architecture. We're built on top of this thing called the
blockchain, and the blockchain gives a level of transparency that we've never seen before.
The Democrats also, you know, they like to talk about January sixth,
but remember like within two weeks of January sixth, by January twentieth,
people are already identifying funds on the blockchain that have been used to fund various
groups. And this is because with a public blockchain, not only do you
have law enforcement having the ability to go and see where money is moving,
but also so the entire populace can so we can now police ourselves as as
a nation, which is really really powerful. So look, the bad guys
out there are going to quickly learn that it's a lot easier to do bad
things with Fiat than it is to do with bitcoin. This is not going
to be an issue. And I would love to see a world where regulations
don't take a one point eighty just because we have a new president. And
if you recall at the end of the twenty twenty era, and I'm not
trying to promote one president over the others, it's not what it's about,
you know. But the OCC which controls all of the federally regulated banks in
America, came out with a plan for OCC banks to be able to support
crypto and bank in New York. Mellon and other credible parties came forward and
wanted to move on that. And then we got a new president. The
laws didn't change, the regulations didn't change, but the interpretation throughout the administration
went completely the opposite as the previous administration. That's not what a presidential transition
is supposed to be about in this country. You know. It's supposed to
be that me or you or anyone as a business is able to understand the
laws and rules, abide by the laws and rules, and regardless of who's
in the White House, we can still do business without those rules changing.
But we're not seeing that so anyway, that's the one thing I would like
to see. I think it's going to continue to cause some delays on getting
you know, regulation fully sorted out here in the US. Yeah, and
look, I've seen some pro crypto democrats like Richie Torres and Darren Soda.
I've spoken to a couple of them, but Elizabeth Warren, unfortunately, her
voice and marketing, if you want to put it that way, outweighs you
know, what they've been saying, and that's been a challenge. But hopefully
we have some pivots towards crypto and we get some things through now. In
the bitcoins body taps, I noticed that bitgo is the custodian for Valkyrie,
and I believe hashtags are there others. Those are the two so far,
and we hope to have some news about others and not too distant future.
But yeah, look, I mean it makes sense if you're a custodian of
anything. I'm sorry, if you're an etf issuer of anything, you know,
it makes sense to use multiple custodians, and of course they want to
do that. So the first wave, a lot of people ask me,
like, why did Coinbase get so much of it? Remember, like we've
been trying to get an ETF through for almost ten years now. So the
immediate focus of all of the ETF issuers was how to get first in line
and how to make sure that you remove all objections. So, you look,
they register with the SEC, the SEC has comments and questions, they
go through this. What's easier, you know, figuring out one custodian or
two custodians. Of course, you put as few possible objections in it as
possible, and you pick the one that's already a publicly listed company, regardless
of whether the technology is stronger or not as strong. And you know,
look, the bigdo technology up against any other custodian always stands head and shoulders
above. Obviously I'm pimping my own game here, but even against Coinbase,
I stand behind this fact. Look, we do this two out of three
technology across everything that we do, and those zero compromises. We're never using
the single sig wallets, which apparently you know, some of the other big
custodians do, and there's a reason for that. It's really really important in
terms of getting insurance, having the right controls, no single point of failure,
physical problems of like not being vulnerable to a single site being attacked or
overrun by a small militia. Now there's talks of bigcoin ets being approved in
Asia, such as Hong Kong and so forth. What are your thoughts on
that. Do you think we see that this year? And given that you
have licenses in different parts of Asia, are you looking to to facilitate custody
there as well? Hi everyone, part of the interruption. I'm Tony Edward,
the founder and host of the Thinking Crypto podcast. I have a you
favor to ask you. If you haven't subscribed as yet on YouTube or the
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you for your support, and I'll let you get back to the content.
I think Hong Kong's moving pretty fast. I think they're sincere, and I
think they see an opportunity to start to win market share globally that they have
to act now. So I think that's going to come very quickly. And
then, yes, of course, part of why we're doing this globally is
because you know, look, there's a lot of assets outside the US.
There's more outside assets outside the US than inside the US. I think this
is one of the things that people you know think about. You know,
while the US sorts out how to participate in digital assets, foreigners outside of
the US are like, I don't want to put it in America. You
guys need to sort that stuff out. I'm going to keep it in Europe.
I'm going to keep it in Asia until you do. Look, if
the US had a friendly climate towards crypto, even if it had some wrinkles
in the first few implementations, we would breathe bringing all of these assets into
the US right now. We would win. There's no reason we wouldn't win.
We have absolutely the most stable political system, absolutely the most stable financial
system in spite of all of its flaws. The stock markets, of course,
are already here. So we're missing out on opportunity by not being clear
to just say, hey, we welcome it, bring it in, we'll
figure it out. So other nations, Hong Kong and others are doing just
that. They're like, all right, US doesn't want to do it,
we'll do it. And of course we know that there's an ongoing political rivalry
between the US and China, so this is going to play out economically too.
M M. My question for you just came to mind. Do you
think part of the pushback on crypto and slow to get regulations out and so
forth. In addition to it's all new, but also it removes the control
and the visibility around fiat currencies, which the government, you know, they
control the money, they can control how things go with the economy, and
we see they pull different levers with rate hikes and printing money when they need
to write. But now that for example, is they're able to track it
maybe a bit better with these ETFs because it falls under the equities bucket.
That's that's kind of what's happening that they're like, hey, we can't control
this thing. We can't see where money's flowing. Money's going into stable coins,
money is going to bitcoin. People are self cussing, we can't that
or control it to a certain degree. But if it's an ETF wrapper or
some financial product that falls under the equities bucket, we can. And I
don't know if I'm off base here, and I hope I'm articulating that well,
but a bit of the pushback into delays because of that money is power,
right, This is a phrase that's been around long before bitcoin. And
yeah, people are concerned about maintaining the power of money. So I'll give
you you two thoughts. Number one is on the ETF. Remember they they
rejected in kind deposits of matrolls, right, this is a first. All
other ETFs have the ability to do in kind, you know, create some
redemptions I guess they call it. But and that's a really important part of
actually having a tight spread between the ETF price and the underlying actual price.
And yet so from a pure investor protection point of view, of course you
should have in kind creates interdemptions. But they didn't go with that, and
I think part of that is because they feel they don't have a good handle
on how to do sanctions controls on bitcoin generally. But I'll give you a
second example, which is really I guess more abstract, but about what happens
when fiats lose control of their monetary system. And we haven't seen this tremendously
in the United States, but every FIAT operator, of course, has to
think about this. So we could just go back a couple of years.
Of course, we had the COVID years. Every country printed a lot of
money, right, so the supply of all the currencies went way up.
That created a set of problems, and then we started to see inflation.
And so then you see the federal reserves also try to shrink that back down
by increasing interest rates. As soon as interest rates here in the United States
went up, the dollar got way stronger against a whole bunch of international currencies.
Is because not only is it a dollar, which is already the reserve
currency, but now it's returning five percent. So all this money from other
currencies floods into dollars those guys who were already having weak financial systems. So
I'm talking about Argentina, I'm talking about Venezuela, I'm talking about Turkey.
They start seeing massive inflation, and if you wouldn't call it hyperinflation, I
think it's pretty close to it. All right, So what happens in those
countries, Well, the leaders of those countries are now in trouble and they
see their citizenry starting to try to get out of their fiat and move to
dollars. And as they do that, their currency gets even weaker. So
you see a pattern. It's always the same. So first they'll make it
illegal to hold dollars, and so now the people can't hold dollars. Does
that stop them? No? Like, unfortunately, the people are just you
know, there's victims, right, They're trying to preserve their value so that
they can pay their rent, buy their food, and send their kids to
school. It's basic stuff. And the government can come in and say you
can't have dollars. But if the only choice is to hold this cash,
which you can see is going down in value on a daily basis, you're
gonna do something. So this pattern has played out in all those countries.
We've seen tether, you know, and you know, people have a lot
of questions about tether. I mean, obviously it's sustained over a long period
of time, it's been impressive and its growth. But if you think bitcoin
in crypto is complicated, imagine overlaying a layer of stable coins from you know,
kind of an unregulated player. The people in these countries are so desperate.
Not only are they ready to move to digital assets, they're ready to
move to this single tether, which they're not even sure exactly where it's back.
And I'm not trying to say that I'm making bad decisions. They're making
a good decision. What they're looking at is they're like, well, that
thing's holding the value of a dollar, and my local currency is like going
to zero, So what am I going to do? All right? So
back in the mind I think for FIAT leaders is like, I like to
have my money. I can print it when I want it. I can
do politically what I want to do. I know it has side effects.
How do I not lose my ability to print money? And if I allow
something that's got an actual static supply like bitcoin or gold to be used too
much in my nation, do I lose control of my power? So,
like this is the libertarian argument. I mean, I think it's a lot
about why we are here in the bitcoin space. I'd like to be a
little bit more balanced, I guess on the political part of like, you
know, is it purely one way or another? The folks in power are
not going to easily give up, and they will not let the currency simply
move. So there's battles to be fought. Some of those are being fought
in the early skirmishes. I think where we're at right now. In the
end, I think there's no doubt that digital assets bitcoin are going to win.
They have to win because it's the people. Remember back to that example
I just gave. If you're just a citizen in a country that has overprinted
its money supply, you don't have a choice. You can't use the fiat.
It doesn't work, it's broken. You have to move to something else.
You're looking at two options right now. I think it's either gold or
bitcoin. Bitcoin's better than gold in almost every way. When it comes to
a currency, you can hold it yourself, it can't be stolen, it's
a lot lighter weight, it could be funged, it's fungible into without every
other bitcoin, it can be divisible into tons of little, tiny, tiny
parts, so it's just not counterfeitable. Also very important gold tons of counterfeit
out there. And then lastly, the supply is even better at bitcoin.
As you know, as the price of gold goes up, the mining operations
beef up and they mine more gold, so the inflation of gold goes up.
All right, Anyway, those big advertisement I guess for bitcoin. But
yeah, I think this is this is an undercurrent of what's going on politically
for sure. So Mike, when the Big One's body tess were approved,
did you start seeing increased demand for your services? Where you getting more phone
calls? I'm curious if you know institutions were like, oh this is this
is interesting that you know Big One going mainstream and so forth. I think
I think there's two competing factors here. Yes, Actually, over the last
six months, things have been really accelerating. We're definitely coming into a ball
market, certainly relative to where we were the last couple of years. Our
revenues have increased, our customer client bases growing very quickly right now, and
I'm hearing that from other CEOs. I think the ETF backdrop has helped with
some of the narrative and the messaging, But the ETF itself, I think
we haven't seen it actually fully pick up steam yet. So remember the biggest
funds in America, the pension funds. They're likely to part this paid in
digital assets by way of an ETF. It fits within their model, they
can use their existing structure, they can get their heads around the risk.
A whole bunch of reasons. I don't believe those parties really materially changed their
thought process around Bitcoin until the ETF was actually launched. That is, they're
not. It's been ten years, right, so and there it's been up
and down on whether there's an ETF. They were waiting until it's really done
and it's really operating. We're now at that stage, which means they can
now go into the next evaluation, which is putting together the whole case for
should it be part of their portfolio, figuring out how they will do that,
mitigating all of the risks that go along with it, running through the
committee after committee. These guys run very strict, very organized investment processes.
They don't just know say ah, great, I can do an ETF now
by me one hundred million. No, it's a very very methodical process.
So those processes are started, and I think we start to see that happen,
you know, really take effect mid to late this year. Yeah,
it's it's interesting and on a personal level, I've been getting more phone calls
from family members and friends, many of who've seen the news around the ETF
approvals, like how do I invest in bitcoy and tell me more? It
seems like a psychological barrier has been broken down and they're seeing these big names
launching the ETF. So it's it's I'm excited for this upcoming bull market.
Certainly true. I mean, obviously a tremendous amount of credibility comes to the
space when you know Blackrock and Fidelity. And by the way, there's a
lot to talk about Blackrock these days, but I think Fidelity and I'm not
trying to diss on on Blackrock. BlackRock's doing a great job. I really
appreciate all that they're doing too. Fidelity has been tuning this this horn for
ten years now, no, no, a little less eight, right,
but they've been in it for a long time. They saw the promise of
this early, they built Fidelity assets. They've just been you know, taking
along slowly, consistently making their products better. So book hats off to both
of those guys. Yes, they definitely lend a lot of strength. Franklin
Templeton also, of course, wisdom true, all of these guys are great.
Yeah, some of the biggest names. So, Mike, I got
to ask you, Uh, you guys are doing great. I believe your
last valuation was like one point seventy five billion. Are you you have plans
for this upcoming cycle to go public? What can you tell us there?
We're happy to continue operating for quite some time. Look, I mean,
IPO is probably a destiny at some point for the future of ITICCO. I
think we wouldn't want to try to to go public under under this administration right
now. I think I think there's probably still a lot of headwinds for crypto
companies, but also there's a lot of benefits of being a private company.
And I think until all the regulations are kind of sorted out here in the
US, we're happy where we're at. We're growing, we want to provide
great value to our clients, and not having the distraction of public markets I
think is actually a real benefit for us. Final question here, anything else
you have on your roadmap? Obviously you guys are doing a lot. There's
a lot of great things, but anything you can give us a hint on
that maybe down the road, well, I think we talked about some of
it with the Go network. You know that really is kind of one of
our big endeavors. It's not a it's not an all wrapped and done in
twenty twenty four things. This isn't, you know, a five year endeavor.
You know Bickos started out, I mean just to kind of reiterate it,
like you know, all about this technology security. It was initially it
was multi sig, which is today the gold standard of how you secure this
stuff. But today it's not just multi sig, it's multi sig, MPC,
threshold signature schemes, smart contracts. There's a lot that we do in
that space. We are the largest wall as of service provider bar and on,
and this is where we hold one key or clients will two keys,
so it's self custody to you, but you get all the best benefits of
that security. And we're the only provider that does that two of three everywhere
you know fireblocks and others that are doing these three of three systems, which
means you have to go figure out how to protect against loss. So we
protect against theft and loss with the two of three system. Anyone that's using
three out of three is only protecting against theft, doesn't protect against loss.
You have to go figure out, you know, resolve the puzzle of how
do you not have a single point of failure when there's a backup key somewhere.
So we got the wall as a service component, the custodian with the
largest independent custodian in the world. We're going to continue to grow that now
with our international capabilities. And then the next phase is the GO network,
which is really trying to figure out how do we build market structure in a
sensible way that's better than what we have in traditional markets, faster, it's
real time. And then of course we've got a partnership with Copper already in
play. We hope to get that launched and operating this year, but there'll
be other custodians that will be coming into We strongly believe that we should continue
down this decentralized endeavor, even though we're known for the centralized custy. I
guess one last point on this, why have all three keys stored in the
US, right? We can now start to split those across jurisdiction, so
you can put one in Germany, put one in the US, put one
in Singapore, and have the benefit of qualified cust in the US, and
then kind of in aggregate, but have the protection against any jurisdictional things that
may happen which may not be what you want to have happen for your keys.
So we're trying to continue to push that decentralized front, recognizing, of
course there's times when people want to hold your you, to hold your keys,
you to hold their keys for you, But how do we make it
so that's still no single point of failures, even down to the regulatory or
legal level. Yeah, absolutely, Mike. Always a pleasure, always great
information, and I'm looking forward for the future updates around BICKO. Thank you
for joining me. Congrats on all your success too, Tony. Really love
to seeing your podcasts. Keep both the great work.