And then moving more towards kind of a regulated infrastructure partner. We serve rias
and the RIA platforms that are bringing folks like Franklin, Templeton, Eagle Brook
other institutional counterparties that want to provide direct access to for their clients to hold
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please visit vchain dot org. Link will be in a description. Welcome to
the Thinking Crypto Podcast. Her home for Cryptocurrency News and Interviews. With me
today is Nathan McCauley, who's the co founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital.
Nathan, great to have you on. Thanks so much for having me.
Happy to be here, Nathan. I'm excited to speak with you because I
followed Anchorage for many years and you guys are certainly one of the top tier
custodians out there, and got a lot of questions about your news services and
much more. But before we get there, tell us about yourself, where
you're from, and what's your professional background. Sure, thanks for asking.
So excited to be here. It's been following your podcast for a while,
so it's a pleasure to be on. I guess my name is Nathan.
I grew up in somewhat small town rural Indiana. Everybody around me their parents
were farmers or factory workers. That's kind of the game in rural Indiana.
The town actually grew up in for a little while there was actually called Economy,
Indiana, which I always think of that as kind of a funny fact
now that I'm working in crypto, working in finance, having grown up in
a little town called Economy Indiana. But yeah, got my start there,
and the Internet really unlocked the ability to connect with people. My town only
had something like one hundred and fifty people, so it was nice to get
to connect with a broader community online, whether that was through online message boards
or MMOs like various MMO video games that I played growing up, really got
to me to connect with more of the world. And then as I went
off to college, wanted to start my career. I really wanted to get
into tech, and so figured out that where they were building the tech was
San Francisco, and so got myself hired at a number of companies out in
San Francisco, and from there really focused in on software security, compliance,
fintech, all of which came together very nicely when it came time to start
Anchorage later on my career with my co founder, where we looked to build
an institutional custodian for holding digital assets for institutional investors. Now, along your
journey towards crypto, what was your first encounter with bitcoin and what was your
AHA moment? Sure, so it's it's funny. I have to admit that
I was a little bit late to the game on bitcoin, not for lack
of hearing about it early on I was one of the one of the places
I worked at when I was in the tech scene in San Francisco was at
the time a very small startups called called Square. We made a little device
that plugs into mobile phones allowed people to accept credit card payments. At the
time, it was mostly for people buying and selling, say furniture on Craigslist,
maybe small coffee shops, things like that. Really saw Square grow monumentally
while I was there. Wish I could take all the credit for that.
I can't. I was just a member on the team there, but had
a really fun time, and it was during that time that bitcoin really rose
to rose to prominence. So lots of people there. Of course, we
were in payments, we were in fintech. Lots of my colleagues looked at
bitcoin and thought it was interesting. I thought it was interesting from the cryptography
perspective, but because of what I would say was my US centric view on
it, I didn't really perceive the notion that we needed an alternative currency,
and so I have to admit that I missed the point of it early on.
What I did talk to a lot of folks about at the time was
men wouldn't be cool if software applications could run in the blockchains instead of just
having decentralized money, could we have decentralized code, decentralized infrastructure. And so
some amount of brainstoring about that early on, and so I was very pleased
when I turned away from crypto for many years, turned my gaze back on
it and found that Ethereum had come out and exactly that idea had come to
fruition, This idea that you could do decentralized applications. That ended up being
where I really started to get more interested in, see, oh, hey,
this is not just a currency thing, this is an everything thing.
All software can go in this direction, all services can go in this direction.
It can actually solve a lot of the problems for us. And so
that's really what piqued my interest even more later on with crypto was the rise
of ethereum, the rise of decentralized applications. Yeah, absolutely, So what
was the genesis of the idea to start anchorage? Did you see a need
in the market because custody absolutely so important, right, It's a pillar for
many acid classes to have proper custody. What was the genesis of the idea
behind it? Yeah? So the general purpose idea is Diogo and I Diyoga
is my co founder here at Anchorage. We were working on Docker. Docker
at the time was it wasn't is a cloud computing technology, and we were
working on security for that to really bring great security to everybody deploying into into
cloud environments. Was AWS, Azure, GCP, kind of across the board.
And one of the things we saw was particularly in twenty seventeen, was
the rise of bitcoin's bull run in a sense really one of the first bull
runs that really kind of catapulted crypto bitcoin into the public consciousness at large.
And the market reality that you saw at that point was that was entirely a
retail driven phenomenon. And so if you take a look at any other asset
class in the institutional space, what you find is upwards of certainly more than
fifty percent sometimes sixty, seventy, even eighty percent of a particular asset is
held by institutions that hold it, and it tends to be a relatively smaller
overall market share that is held by individual investors. Crypto had the reverse of
that. They had huge amount of retail interest, very little institutional interest,
and so that performed the thesis for why over time bringing institutions in would be
super important. On top of that, you start to look at like,
okay, what does it take for institutions to come in? And the starting
point for them is how to hold the asset. They can't even get started
in the asset class if there's no way for them to hold the asset.
They need software, security, institutional counterparty, and regulatory certainty all combined into
a single package that formed the basis of the thesis early on for Anchorage.
Add on to that the fact that Diogo and I had a lot of interest
from potential people in the ecosystem, the real early adopters that were starting to
invest in digital assets reaching out to Doogo saying hey, can we custody these
digital assets? How can we do this? How do we do this better?
And got a real sense there that not only was there a kind of
theoretical possibility like I laid out of institutions will adopt the need custody, but
also a market reality at the time that people needed it and needed it immediately.
And so that is really kind of the genesis of the idea, is
that understanding of the market structure and frankly just a market demand that people wanted
the service back then, Sure, can you tell us a bit about anchorages,
different services and what makes it unique from other custodians in the market.
Sure so. Certainly at the inception of the company, the prevailing market sentiment
was this idea of cold storage. The basic notion of cold storage is take
assets, put them on a computer, turn the computer off. That's the
only way to be secure. Basically viewed that as roughly speaking, what you
learn in security one oh one in college. On the first day, you
learned that's the only way to build a secure system, and then the entire
rest of your education is how to actually build usable secure systems. And so
the state of the art was put it on a computer, turn it off.
So this was like, Okay, we have a real opportunity to improve
on the tech that underlies this, and we different to ourselves to this day
about how institutions can get very fast access to funds. This manifests in a
lot of different ways. So they can trade and settle immediately, they can
access staking services, they can access DeFi, they can work with NFT marketplaces,
all without having to have this notion of taking the assets out of cold
storage, making them usable, and then actually doing the action. All of
your assets should be accessible to you whenever you want them, and in doing
that, you can actually build systems that are even more secure than cold storage
by tying in biometric authentication, tying in a whole host of authentication metrics that
you can bring into the ecosystem. And so from that custody base, which
we've grown exponentially over the last seven years, we've been able to add services
on top of that, and so trading services were very popular trading part counterparty
for some of the biggest institutions in the world. Settlement services allow them to
move assets around. A huge amount of the assets that are held in our
platform are staked, and so we have the staking capabilities across a whole variety
of different assets. And the story doesn't stop there. We're continuing to add
and scale up and add more services as clients demand them. That's amazing.
And if I'm not mistaken, you guys had gotten a license on the OCC
a couple of years back, right or a few years back, which allowed
I think I can't remember if we made you a digital bank. Is that
correct? Yeah, that's right. That's right. So early on I was
talking about what it takes for institutions to come into the digital asset space.
The way we thought about it when we started the company was if we combined
the solution to two impossible problems, we would have a very valuable offering in
the market. That first one was a fundamental advancement on the state of the
art, which was previously cold storage. What if we do things better so
that people could access the assets at any time? Hard security problem needed to
be solved. We solved it. The second impossible problem we wanted to solve
was how do we get the whole thing regulated? How do we act as
a what's called qualified custodian for digital asset investors. When you're investing other people's
money at significant enough scale, you have to follow a rule called the custody
rule that is enforced by the SEC. The SEC says, if you're over
this amount of assets that you're managing for other people, you must hold your
assets in a qualified custodian. Qualified custodian has to safely hold the assets and
do that in a regulated way. There's a number of ways to do that,
but the most unambiguous and clear way to do that is to get a
federal bank charter, and so many years into our process, we were actually
granted the first and as of today, only federal bank charter allowing holding of
digital assets. And so that was issued by the what's called the OCC,
Office of the Controller of the Currency. It's a sub sub agency I suppose
of the US Treasury. And so we remain the only federally licensed, federally
overseen national bank that holds digital assets for our clients. Wow. I know
there has been and we're going to talk a bit about it later, just
a lot of uncertainty in the market, a lot of pushback on maybe a
certain legislation and things that have been put forth. If I'm not mistaken,
I saw that some folks are trying to push back on the OCC handing out
some of these approvals or licenses. Have you encountered any issues with that over
the years. So we've found the OCC to be a very fair regulator and
a very informed regulator. I would say they do not take their responsibility lightly
when they oversee a bank. They hold that bank to the same standards as
they hold every other bank to. And so what we have been working on
for the past several years since we've gotten the charter, is continuing to advance
that relationship, continuing to mature our processes while the federal agency has mature they're
understanding of the digital asset ecosystem, and so we have found a very fair
and thoughtful broker in the OCC and in how they oversee us. I think
it makes a lot of sense as you start to scale up the amount of
assets in a platform, as you start to scale the kinds of use cases
that institutions want to get into. Having the transparency and the finality that comes
with blockchains on top of federal oversight from a regular like the OCC really gives
you the best in breed level of trust that a custodium can provide. And
so you take that transparency that inherently comes with the blockchain plus the same level
of oversight as the other large banks in the country, and there's really no
place that you can get as much trust in the custodian as you can get
from Anchorage Digital Bank. And so this as a trend. We being the
first, we expect that we will be the first of many to get this
charter and to work in this place. For now, we're for now we're
the only ones, but we think it's a very positive trend and expected to
continue over time for sure. Yeah, I mean we're seeing Congress and the
folks. They are all working towards passing legislation. Obviously, there's still a
lot of uncertainty and confusions when many government agencies. We're going to talk about
the SEC later and so forth. But it is what it is. And
but to your point, the occ seems to be they understand the landscape and
are working with the industry. Tell us about the type of clients that are
working with you. I don't know if you can name drop, but maybe
you can give us the categories and are you custodying any of the bigcoin ETFs?
Hi, everyone part in the interruption. I'm Tony Edward, the founder
and host of the Thinking Crypto podcast. I have a YOUG favor to ask
you. If you haven't subscribed as yet on YouTube or the podcast platforms,
hit that subscribe button, hit the thumbs up button, hit the notification bell
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It allows me to bring great quality content to you. Thank you for your
support, and I'll let you get back to the content. Good question.
Good question. So we serve some of the largest institutions globally, the largest
holders of digital assets. By way of categories, I'll start with early adopters,
venture capital funds, hedge funds. Anyone who was early to the space
wanted to invest in digital assets, whether that's taking positions in bitcoin and ethereum
or a us the landscape, investing in the new protocols that are coming out
like ap dose, Suie, stark net, other other kinds of protocols where
investors want to participate in those. So we really like serving the investors in
the in the ecosystem, but we also like solver serving the innovators themselves.
So the blockchain protocols, when they launch a new protocol, often the their
entity and their their foundation ends up holding a decent portion of the overall circulating
supply, and so we we serve as a custodian for them as well,
and that's a big, big area for us. On the more traditional side,
we serve entities like sovereign wealth funds, So some of the global sovereign
wealth funds that want to take positions in digital assets, we serve their their
use cases as well, and then moving more towards kind of regulated infrastructure partner
UH we serve rias and the ra A platforms that are bringing folks like Franklin,
Templeton, eagle Brook other institutional counterparties that want to provide direct access to
for their clients to hold digital assets. In terms of the crypto ETFs,
it's a very exciting area where we don't have anything to announce today, but
suffice it to say that we are a very natural partner for any crypto based
ETF looking to roll out products in that area, looking to do things like
custody of say bitcoin or over time. One of the things that's very interesting
is that our Federal Bank charter allows us to participate in staking, and so
the fact that it allows usicipate in staking, we think will be a very
meaningful unlock for future growth for the the ETFs that might want to have assets
in the ETF that incorporate a staking component there as well, and so we
expect the the ETF landscape to be a big part of our growth over time.
Let's talk about staking for a second. I'm very fascinated by that because
on multiple levels, I persons stay crypto. There's a lot of retail investors
whose steak as well. Are you seeing a growing demand in institutional staking and
are they viewing it as a passive income or some sort of yield that they're
earning over time, and are they adding to that pool. Let's say it's
e theorem right that they see that, hey, we can hold this asset,
it's going to appreciate in price over time, but what we can also
earn yield off of it via staking. It's a really good question. I
think I can't necessarily speak to everybody's particular interest in staking and why they're pret
in stake. And there's certainly folks that want to participate in staking for exactly
what you're talking about, because there's a yield component that comes along with the
staking. There's others that view it as, hey, there's this blockchain has
an emission schedule, and if I want to keep up with my ownership percentage
of the total supply, I need to participate in staking in order to make
sure that I am not diluted of my total share. And so the individual
views on which way to think about that vary, and I think everybody has
their own different investment thesis and reason for participating. What I can say unequivocally
is that staking is a growing business for us. We've seen over quarter growth
in terms of number of units and overall dollar equivalent value that is participating in
staking in our platform. Right now, I think something like one sixth of
our asset base participates in staking, and so we have a very sizeable amount
of assets in the platform that are being staked. A lot of this is
ethereum, a lot of this is other assets like Solana, but then a
bunch of the new assets that have launched over the last several years, they
tend to launch and want to participate in staking from day one, and so
there's a there's a really healthy mix of different assets in the platform that are
participant in staking. M HM, tough question for you, and I'm not
sure if you can speak fully to this, because I know it's there's many
complications today. If an asset a crypto asset, and this is a big
debate happening with the SEC, c FDC and much more. We're waiting,
we're waiting for clarity from Congress. But if an asset that says classified security?
Does that affect your ability to custy it? So there's a lot of
market participants that need to devote a lot of careful consideration to whether an asset
is a security. The good news for us, at least is that national
bank do not. National banks are unequivocally allowed to custody securities, and so
when we are custodying assets, we do not have to decide, hey,
is this a commodity? Is this security? Is this a token? National
banks are given the ability to custody across the board, and so we utilize
that fact to custody a wide range of assets without necessarily on the custody side
needing to be concerned whether it's a security, commodity, or any other such
type of asset. Got it all right, Let's talk about the big news.
Porto, the institutional self custody wallet. Tell us about this and what
are the capabilities? Sure so, Porto is a great addition to our product
suite. What we've seen over the lifetime of Anchorage is that our clients want
to do more and more with us with our tech, with our platform.
As I mentioned earlier, we built our tech in a way that allows it
to be very flexible in order to move assets quickly to participate with those assets
UH. And increasingly what clients want to do is they want to take their
assets and utilize them on chain for various activities that they would like to do.
So those on chain activities might be participating with various DeFi interactions they might
want to participate in with a staking protocol. For example, one of the
one of the use cases that some of our clients have wanted to do is
to participate in restaking type opportunities like our developing. Sometimes clients want to participate
into NFT marketplaces UH and put bids out there for some of those kinds of
things. And so what you find is a whole host of use cases that
are really frontier use cases that clients would like to participate in. And the
best way to do that tends to be to take the assets yourself, put
them into your self custody system, and then within that self custody system,
utilize the platform capabilities that allow you to participate there. And so really what
it is doing is allowing the clients to with a familiar set of tech interfaces
that are very much distinct from our custody system for example, and for the
kind of the regulated entity systems but still feel familiar in a way, allow
them to access the full range of things that they would like to do with
their assets. And so that's really the raison deetra for Porto was serve the
client's use cases, allow them to have the flexibility to use their assets in
the way that they would like to, and really free them up to access
the whole ecosystem of activities and opportunities that are available within the crypto ecosystem.
Now, as a retail investor, I use hardware wallets and I have some
software wallets that I use as well, so and I have to back up
my private keys and make sure those private keys are safe and secure. Tell
us about the process of the private keys for those institutions. Are you helping
to cussy the private keys or is it split? What's the metrics or the
mechanisms behind that? Good question, good question. So what institutions want,
and whether it's in a custody system like anchor digital bank or a self custody
system that puts more of that control in their hands. Ultimately, what they
want is reliability. They want to know that they have the assets, want
to know that the assets aren't going to somehow disappear, they are going to
make some sort of a mistake and lose access to their assets. And so
the core premise of Porto at its inception is provide the same level of security
and the same level of trust as is possible when using Anchorage Digital Bank for
these clients. And so what we provide is a very similar security architecture,
security mechanisms, things like access to the keys using biometric authentication with hardware devices
that you have on the client side and then backed by keys that are backed
up by Anchorage and allow people to make sure that they have access to those
things. Now, notably, we do not have any access to their assets.
We are not able to move their assets. That is only possible through
their infrastructure, and they must be involved in order to be able to do
that. But the set of trade offs and constraints that we allow them there
allow them to have say key recovery, where they can migrate the keys if
they want, they can recover the keys. They recover the keys without needing
to interact with us, And so that you have a whole set of frameworks
and options that are available there while maintaining the same level of trust and reliability
that the clients have come to expect. Mm hmm. I want to talk
about like the industry and custody because obviously we saw what happened with FTX and
com mingling and all kinds of nonsense, right, and then we're seeing certain
bills being brought up by different sites, like I saw California put out something
for proof of reserves and so forth. Do you see a rise in custodies
custodial services around crypto being used by uh more government and so forth, who
are going to eventually put bitcoin in their treasury and so forth, pension funds
and endowments and so forth. I would love to get your take on how
the custody landscape essentially has changed since, like because of the big FTX collapse.
Sure, yeah, so I think one of the ways, one of
the ways to think about this is that crypto in many ways has gone through
cycles, and one kind of interesting way to think about it is that it
has gone through cycles on a accelerated path relative to say the broader markets.
And so you could look at some of the exuberance that happened in twenty seventeen
as roughly equivalent to the stock market boom and bust cycle of the early two
thousands. And I like to liken everything that happened with FTX to the set
of issues that happened in the traditional financial markets around two thousand and eight,
some amount of fraud, some amount of over leverage, and that causing some
failure to some institutions and a really hard lesson for many people to to to
live with. And so what you've seen with FTX is a I think healthy
response to think more about counterparty risk, to think more about segregation of duties,
to think more about regulatory oversight, combining with cryptotransparency, all of those
things coming together leading to a renewed interest in conservative, thoughtful players like Anchorage.
And so in many ways, the industry suffered a big, big blow
overall when it came to the FTX issues that happened there. But in the
in the rebuild there that has been beneficial, I would say, in many
ways to the players that are trying to do it right, like Anchorage,
the players that are trying to say, hey, we want to never commingle
client's assets, always keep them on separate ledgers in separate blockchains, so that
when you're holding assets and anchorage, not only do you get a statement from
US that says, hey, you have twenty bitcoin, but you have a
wallet address where you can look at your wallet address and say, hey,
that's my wallet address. I know that my particular bitcoin is held there by
particular theory of my particular xy z token. And so that additional level of
transparency that we'll provide where you have segregated wallets on chain, all also being
overseen by a federal regulator. There's no way to get more transparency and clarity
than this. And what we're going to see over time is more of the
world's institutions will move to this model where the counterparty risk is so greatly reduced
because of that federal oversight, because of that on chain transparency. And I
do think that, yes, over time, we already serve sovereign wealth funds
who have decided that they want to allocate into crypto, and whether that's whether
that's their their treasuries or as you mentioned, pension funds coming in over time,
I think there will be a whole host of this, and some of
that will come from direct relationships with us, like many do today. Some
of it may come in through the ETFs or which we will be a custodian
of H and it will be a good variety of ways to access the crypto
rails. I'm assuming the answer is no, it is, but can can
you tell us someone the names of those sovereign wealth funds? I cannot kudos
for asking, but we have to. We have to be thoughtful about our
clients and their positions. I gotta yeah, you know, and it's it's
out of general curiosity because everybody wants to know, you know, who's who's
investing and so forth, especially from the soalegn wealth fund standpoint, because you
don't get too many headlines and things along those lines. You know about those
folks. So anyway that I ask fair enough, what's on your twenty twenty
four roadmap? So this year we want to really build on top of the
strong custody base that we've gotten, and the general trend is to do more
things that our clients want us to do. So clients are asking for more
advanced trading capabilities. We're going to help them with that. Clients have asked
for easier access to FIAT rails and all things around. Stable coins, so
we're going to do more of that. Clients have asked to be able to
hold assets at anchorage and not have to move those assets to exchanges in order
to trade, and so being able to do off exchange settlement where you hold
your assets and anchorage, but then still get the ability and buying power,
whether it's ATTC desks, market makers, or crypto exchanges. Clients want,
clients want access to that. We want to continue to help out the ra
A ecosystem. It seems like there's been a acceleration in that area, driven
in many playouts by the crypto ETFs. Right now you just have bitcoin ets,
but many of the r providers want to provide access to more tokens for
the clients, and so we're going to be integrating with them and even more
some some things that I can't necessarily announce yet, but that's it's going to
be a really big year for us. And so we're looking forward to that
follow up question on the item where clients want to not be have to move
their funds out of custody, you know, whether it be OTC or trading
and so forth. Are you playing to build like your own trading desk or
a partner with an exclusive exchange or I don't know if you can share any
details or it's under NDA for now. No. So we do have a
trade capability that is built into anchorage at this point, and clients that are
holding assets with us are able to trade. We go find the best price
for them out in the ecosystem and then allow them to execute that trade and
then settle directly into and out of custody. That doesn't meant all of the
client's needs, and so sometimes there are particular features of other OTC desks or
exchanges that they'd like access to without having to take counterparty risk to actually put
their assets on, say that custodial exchange or that that dealer, and so
what's what's needed there is really a kind of a triparty solution to allow people
to keep assets at anchorage and have the counterparty know that there are assets there
that are available to them in order for them to trade. That's what we'll
be We'll be looking to expand in that area over time. That's awesome.
Let's talk about the crypto market at large. I would love to get your
thoughts on the bitcoin ETF launches and the inflows we've been seeing pretty incredible and
it just seems like there was pent up demand for bitcoin. What are your
thoughts on the performance. I think it's it's really just the beginning there.
This is a asset that has continually attracted more and more people over time.
The general trend is as you learn more about bitcoin, you get more interested
in it and want to participate in it, not just because of the price
appreciation, but because of the deflationary nature of it, the fact that there
is a fixed supply, and so I think what has happened there is a
packaging in the in the bitcoin ETFs that has allowed more people to more easily
express that opinion, whether that's through their existing brokerage accounts, existing institutional offerings,
and so that that is a area that will continue to grow and will
basically only continue to grow over the next really decades. I think the cascade
there is that the bitcoin ETF is just the first of many, and that
we should expect that to be an infinite game, not dissimilar to the way
that traditional asset ETFs are. There's an infinite number of combinations that come together
in those markets, and so we should we should expect this to be a
very healthy ecosystem that develops over time, and we're just in, you know,
really the first inning of what that looks like. For sure. I
know everybody's asking about the etherar METF when we might see that this year and
next year? And obviously we got still some uncertainty from the SEC and the
CFTC and so forth. Do you think we see that this year or maybe
next year? So it's a good question. If I had a if I
had a crystal ball that knew the answers to these things, I would be
running a hedge fund instead of a custodian. And so the core premise of
running a custodian is, uh, you don't know. You can't predict the
price, you can't predict anything except that the general trend is positive for digital
assets and everyone's going to need a custodian there. And so I'll avoid making
any kind of prediction. But but to say that I'm I'm a supporter of
the idea. I think the faster that we can get more of the investing
public access to these assets, the more fair of a of a situation we're
going to have in the in the digital assets ecosystem. The digital assets shouldn't
only be available to early adopters or those who can figure out all the complexities
of private key hes and crypto specific exchange accounts. So the the crypto ETFs
as a rapper that gives the financial outcome to more and more of the investing
population is a undeniable public good and I'm very very excited to see more people
get access to the opportunity here for sure. Let's talk about n f t
s and tokenization and is anchorage custding n f t s for any major brands
or institutions and I'm assuming you're set up to handle tokenization of real world assets
as well. Yeah, good questions. So we are an NFT custodian for
a number of the larger brands in the space that are working in the in
the the n FT ecosystem, So we don't have any disclosable relationships there,
but we do we do hold n f ts for clients and and help them
with that, whether it's people that are using us as an infrastructure provider for
say they're buy and sell all the way to say n f T funds that
want to hold assets with us and participate in the the price appreciation of those
of those n FT collections. On the real world asset side, this is
a this is a very interesting area. I have a little bit of a
i guess contrarian view on this, or maybe non standard view that there is
actually a very very popular real world asset that most of the crypto industry participates
in, which is USDC USDC stable coins generally, I think are the first
proof point of real world asset tokenization, and so where we do a lot
with stable coins, and we're can continue to do a lot with stable coins,
but it's an area that I think can grow over time. You have
a lot of positivity around the space, particularly around asset tokenization. Some of
the recent announcements, say from black Rock looking at tokenizing effectively treasuries in a
sense, and we are a we are a partner to them on that,
and we are we are customing some of the Biddle token h for some of
our clients who have looked to take a position higher. And so we're going
to continue to grow in that area and excited to be a an enabling infrastructure
player for the real world assets tokenization movement. Yeah, and I'm very curious
about the future of that and more so because maybe my background, but real
estate, like if a building in Manhattan is getting tokenized, and I can
buy a chunk of those respective tokens and then have them at a custodian like
anchorage and then trade them or borrow against them or whatever it may be.
I'm curious about that, you know. And and it may be artwork as
well, having certain rare art pieces of art token ied. So I know
black Rock is looking to do funds and all that not really I like for
me personally, or you know, a different flavor for everybody, But I'm
very curious about the real estate tokenization and what that would look like. Yeah,
I think it's a it's a really interesting thing to somewhat reflect on the
things that we can own as investors right now. So none of us,
none of us blinks an eye when we're able to own a small fraction of
a publicly traded company. You know, you and I are very easily able
to own a portion of Tesla and participate in the rise or fall of Tesla,
And for reasons that aren't entirely clear, that's less possible with real estate
assets. And so the the idea that real estate assets could be fractionalized and
have more widespread participation in that area. You know, real estate is one
of the one of the biggest assets in the in the country. There was
even early in the early in the country's history, there was even an idea
that the dollar should be backed by real estate. And it was the first
real world asset, real estate to real world asset. And so I think
it's I think it's a great trend. I hope crypto is enabling mechanism for
more widespread ownership of real estate, and so yeah, I would love to
join you in that in that endeavor once it's once it's more readily possible.
I know you probably can't answer too much about this, but I'll ask you
anyway. Is there anything in addition to the black Rock what they're trying to
do, investing funds and so forth, any other information you can share there
and they're looking to tokenize other things, and you know, whatever you can
get details you can give there. Sure, great questions. So I don't
have any particular insight there versus what you can. You can see Black Rocks
saying publicly, even even Layer of Fink saying publicly that they have a big
strategy on their side to participate in this area, and so it's it looks
like it should be an interesting area pay attention to over time. But I
don't have any particular insight that I can share there. I hope you I
got to ask because the users and the people listen and watching, like ask
him about this black rod. Everybody wants to know what's happening the seeds.
All right, I got some wrap up questions here for you. Firstus,
if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be? Yeah,
so this is a This is an interesting question. I I like meta
verses mainly in the sense that they can spark the imagination about what we can
do in the real world. So most interested in how they can participate in
the real world. And so my my view of this would be combine a
metropolitan city like a San Francisco or New York with the architecture and taste of
Barcelona in the commitment to beauty that Barcelona brings, with a healthy dose of
rural areas. And so if I can be out in a on a row
boat on a pond and then head into a beautifully designed city, that would
be my ideal metaverse. Mainly, so that it could spark the imagination so
that we can see those things come into reality someday. That's awesome, and
it got some wrap up questions here, excuse me, rapid fire questions Versus
favorite food. Favorite food, I would have to say I love grilling,
and so a steak grilled to perfection along with a potato some corn on the
cob. That really that's my sweet spot. Favorite music or ben uh.
Lately been listening to a lot of Boston. I think they did a They've
always done a really good job. You know, it released one album a
decade, you know, really took their time on and did it right.
So I'm a big fan of Boston. And favorite movie. Uh, favorite
movie. I loved Mad Max Fury Road for just its its commitment to a
theme, the beauty that was in there. It wasn't it wasn't trying to
have a big plot. It was just trying to do exactly what it did.
It did it so well and so big fan of Mad Max. Yeah,
me too. I love the Originals as well with Mellen Gims. Those
were great as well. Favorite book. Favorite book lately, I've been focused
on this particular book called Timeless Way of Building and it's a it's a it's
a book all about how to basically the ideas that like architecture should be designed
to encourage particular activities and so that a place gets defined by what happens there
more than the building itself, and so designing buildings so that they really focus
on what happens there and the implications of that even beyond architecture are really interesting
to me these days. And when you're not working at Anchorage, what are
you doing for fun? So gardening, playing with my children. I've got
I've got three kids, reading books, playing chess, a few hobbies there,
but a lot of the time goes to spending time raising my kids.
Awesome, Nathan, great chatting with you. I'm looking forward to the future
updates around Anchorage and would love to have you back on as things progress.
Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much, Tony, appreciate
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