And Jeremy. They're using point based custody as the sort of favor provider today
for these ETFs, But again that kind of feels like the only game in
town in many ways. I'm sure if you know b and Y and Melon,
who black Rock is used for all their products over decades, if b
and Y Melon suddenly said they want to get into this game, and you
know it's no secret that these banks are looking at this sort of stuff,
then you can be sure they're not going to follow a subcustody model where they're
basically filling the role custodian, but point base is somehow underneath them. As
a sub custodian, they're going to have someone like b and Y Melon wants
to run everything in the house, have their own tech, have their own
offering, which again they need control them and provide as a service. This
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in a description. Welcome to the Thinking Crypto podcast. You're home for cryptocurrency
news and interviews. With me today is Sebastian Higgs, who is the co
founder and chief operating officer at Cordial Systems. Sebastian, great to have you
on. Thanks so having me Tony. Good to be here, Sebastian.
I'm excited to speak with you. You have a plethora of experience as it
relates to custody in the crypto space, and you guys are Cordial doing some
very interesting things. So definitely have a lot of questions around what you're doing.
But let's start with your background. Tell us about where you're from and
your professional background as well. Sure, thing. So I'm from a town
a few miles out of London in the UK, spent a lot of my
years there growing up and a lot of my professional time as well. But
I'm also our French on my mother's side, so a lot of influence from
that side of the world, and spent some time growing up and living as
well in Belgium and Germany. So pretty much an all around European, I
guess you could say at this point, but yeah, London remains home for
now. And you know, on my professional background, so I guess to
his American terms, I majored in physics when I was at university and quickly
decided during my master's degree that I wasn't going to sign up for a PhD
program. Working with nanotech in a dark lab while hours of the day was
not my idea of fun after all, so decided to quickly jump off that
bus. Whilst my friends were owning a pay check in the city of London.
I sort of followed suit and sold out of the science game and joined
Goldman Sachs in their London office. So trad fire, I guess is my
background mainly in risk management functions relating to GOTC trading business as well as securities
lending and repay desks. And then yeah, after a few years of working
in trad fire and moved on and left that pretty conventional career path to pursued
the crypto thing. This was probably twenty seventeen now, which being a crypto
podcast, I'm sure will spend a few minutes talking about that at some point,
for sure. Yeah. So I'm fascinating about your time at Goldman Sachs
because I know at some point they were all against crypto, you know,
they were all naysayers, but now many of them are on board, like
black Rock and many of the Wall Street banks. So what are your When
you were there, were they exploring crypto, looking at bitcoin and things like
that. So when I was, if they were, I wasn't a part
of those conversations. However, I think my first brush with bitcoin and blockchain
was still when I was at Goldman. So I did sort of put it
to my MD and I said, hey, this this sort of blockchain tech
thing. You know, well, what are we thinking? What's Goldman thinking?
I did get some some version of an answer, so I guess you
could say it was on the radar. I couldn't tell you how much it
was on the radar at that point. I think, Yeah, it was
probably just kind of this this sort of thing in the room which everyone's trying
to make sense of. It was probably after I left, I was still
in contact with a lot of people at the bank who could actually started to
focus more of their time on digital assets. So I don't know if this
was part of a newly created divisional what there certainly seemed to be people around
twenty seventeen twenty eighteen who were definitely kind of more focused on this stuff,
as well as some more traditional securities markets as well, So they were definitely
behind closed doors kind of doing their homework. Show we say, that's kind
of the impression I got, And I'm sure across the street all the banks
were kind of doing similar things for sure. And what was your first encounter
with bitcoin? And when did it click for you? What was your aha
moment? Yeah, my first encounter, So I said, that's probably towards
the end of my time at the bank, probably how a lot of us
got inducted into this world. Yeah, and kind of said, hey,
do you know about this bitcoin thing? And you work in a bank,
and you know markets and such, do you have a view. So I
kind of did a quick Google search. I think at some point I just
you know, had a few minutes there. To be honest, I was
initially a bit dismissive of the whole thing, you know, like I guess
like a lot of people might go up feeling well, I was expeculative asset
a lot of risk. You know, you win a lot of money,
probably lose a lot of money as well, which is basically a warning label
you could probably stick on any investment products. In hindsight, there's not an
unreasonable position to hold on the topic. But again didn't really constitute a well
informed or well research argument on my part. It's more just a lot of
snap judgment. So going through the Arha moment, that was more probably during
twenty seventeen, so after Gold, when I took a year out pursuing another
degree at Cambridge, and whilst I was there, was reading a lot of
stuff on blockchain technology, spending some time trading crypto using crypto service providers,
And yeah, that's probably sort of where it clicked with me. Somewhere between
the Bitcoin white paper and hearing address andentinopolists taught so eloquently on the subject and
just trying things out on chain, which I think even until today people still
generally would saying, you know, getting hands on, trying things out is
just a great way to be a student of this nascent space. So I
think that was kind of when I had my AHAD moment, and it was
already clear back then as real innovation, as real use cases already in play.
And yeah, I would generally kind of describe twenty ten to twenty twenty
as that period where experimental digital currencies kind of announced themselves on the world stage.
And now twenty twenty, twenty thirty, we're seeing the results of that
kind of play out now with all these differ of things going on in the
world, whereas black rock or CBDCs and all the rest. So yeah,
it's probably about twenty seventeen was the AHA moment, and since then a lot
of people seem to be having an AHA moment in the man's stream as well.
For sure, that's an understatement, right, they're all here now.
It seems like, you know, you mentioned Andreas Antonopolis, and he was
a big part of how I learned about bigcoin as well, And when having
my AHA moment reading the white paper, but then listening to Andrea's talk about
it, so very similar. You know, a path towards learning about this
that you had now you spent some time at, if I read this correctly,
Genesis Global Training from that mistaken you also started a digital acid custody business
which was acquired by them. Can you can you clarify that please? Yeah,
so this was probably my second job in the crypto world, so joined
a existing could storage custodian in London that was called Bolts at the time.
So I wasn't one of the founders on this particular project, but definitely founding
team and a part of the leadership and all the rest. But yeah,
as you pointed out out, this custodian was acquired back in twenty twenty by
DCG and Genesis Global Trading back when they were the biggest prime broker in the
digital attic space. So we were very much acquired to be a part of
that prime broker strategy. They obviously had the trading desk, the lending desk,
derivatives and everything else, and they just needed to compliment with the custody
side of things. So yeah, we were brought in in twenty twenty two
to help facilitate that. So, yeah, I just meant some time over
there. In many ways it was kind of reminiscent of being back in a
bank. In other ways not so much as well. But yeah, I
was there for probably about a year or say, at the acquire before again
kind of hopping off and getting back to start because builders want to build,
for sure. So that's a good segue into Cordial systems. You know what
led to the creation of Cordial systems and tell us about you know, the
services and the mission and so forth. Yeah, so I would say on
called systems itself. So we are a technology company first and foremost. Again
we focus on digital assets in the cryptocurrency space. Taking the long view,
our mission is to protect enterprise resources in today's distributed environments. So resources there
is a bit of a casual term, covering employees, machines as the users,
as well a variety of digital assets which could be cryptocurrencies, it could
be something else in a more general sense, as there are many digital assets
that's sly protecting as they carry some operational value or intrinsic sensitivity. You know,
it's not just blockchain addresses and the balances that they hold. There's also
a bunch of other things in the enterprise which have an operational sensitivity component to
it. So right now we focus on self custody for crypto and digital assets,
but again this is generally applicable to a wider distributed workflow involving multiple internal
or external parties collaborating on a task to achieve some goal in the world of
trading. So what we have right now is our first product, which is
called Your Treasury, and it helps institutions to run software in house for the
purposes of holding crypto and assets across thirty five public blockchains. So all the
bitcoin and the Bitcoin foks, the EVM chains which are out there at to
our Slana, you name it, we've probably got it covered. So this
product, whilst being self custody, yeah, it's kind of a label,
I guess that's been around for a while, but we sort of approach it
in a very different way, and we are kind of the first solution out
there that's a sort of custody product that doesn't have all the risk associated with
being SaaS hosted or vendor side hosted, which has been problematic in many ways
for institutions engaging in our world with the blockchain, particularly those who are more
of a traditional background, who like to maintain a lot of control and keep
things in the house. They don't like to outsource as much or delegate things
that they perceive to be critical to the functioning of their business to just some
you know, some startup or newcomer. They generally like to retain all that
in house. So yeah, we help to facilitate that in a way that's
a little bit different to us on the market. So let's do like a
Marx scenario here. So let's say black Rock, right, they have a
big one etfter they issue, they're tokenizing on ethereum. They are in the
running for any etherorem's body TF as well. In the United States. They're
currently using coin based custody for you know, their bitcoin et apps and so
forth. But let's say they use Cordial, they would be able to essentially
build that in house self custody and potentially be able to hold those funds.
Right, that's essentially what you're enabling these institutions to do. Yeah, I
mean that is that is one aspect of it. So exactly right, a
traditional player could come in and use Cordial and kind of have their own means
to internally manage their their cryptoia or their digital assets. Specifically for the ETF
side and black Rock, I think with the launch of the Bitcoin ETF,
you know, we've seen that they're following a very traditional framework in that exchange
traded products as kind of a value chain with multiple actors, and they all
have that kind of separation of roles or response abilities. So you know,
black Rock might be the issuer, there'll be someone else as the authright participant,
someone else's a market maker or transfer agent and all the rest. So
it's probably less likely that we see someone like a black Rock go down that
go downstream and custody assets themselves. But you know, you could equally just
look at, well, who do they use today for the custody side,
and Jeremy, they're using coin based custody as the sort of favorite provider today
for these ETFs. But again, that kind of feels like the only game
in town in many ways. I'm sure if you know bing ye Melon,
who black Rock is used for all their products over decades, if b and
y Melon suddenly said they want to get into this game, and you know
it's no secret that these banks are looking at this sort of stuff, then
you can be sure they're not going to follow a sub custody model where they're
basically filling the role because agent, but point bas is, somehow underneath them
as a self custodian, they're going to have someone like being my melon,
want to run everything in the house, have their own tech, have their
own offering, which again they control and provide as a service. So that's
a good example of someone that might come in and maybe use our use our
products and say, hey, we're basically partnering with someone in industry, but
we've got this as a as a standblone business line which they themselves can can
operate. Oh yeah, that makes sense right, building that digital asset,
crypto arm or segment of the business and they can use your technology to help
the self host have the self hosted custody, right am I saying that right?
Framing it right? Yeah, self hosted self custodial. I mean there's
a lot of Yeah, crypto has always lads of labels and then buzzwords,
but yeah, yeah, with our product, you can self host it and
you would be self custody and that you own the underlying assets. Control over
the underlying assets. Now, obviously you're doing this on an institutional level as
a retail investor. In many of the retail folks who are listening, we're
dey're familiar with the self hosted retail wallets, right, whether it be Meta
mask or point base wallet or whatever it is. Is it kind of the
same setup where there's private keys or is it much more complex? Yeah,
I mean there's a lot of over that in terms of you're kind of solving
similar problems. Like you've pointed out the private key, that's first and foremost.
If you spend any time in the crypt said, well, do you
know that's something you need to absolutely keep safe. And that's true whether you're
on the institutional side or retail user. Again, there's going to be a
range of products out there, like you pointed out metal mask, these browser
wallets, or even you know, maybe using something like a leisure or a
treasure if you have something a bit more offline in your sort of personal capacity
and managing your crypto. But again, it's a very different set of requirements
or needs that a individual will have versus an institution. So you know,
on the institutional side, we're looking at not only is the key secure,
and there's a bunch of questions attached to that and sort of scenario planning in
determining is it secure or is it potentially open to you to some risk,
But there's also everything above that around or who has access to the key,
or how do you manage any sort of authentication and authorization of a user that
might be interacting with that key, because again, these institutions are going to
have teams or people across multiple teams with different interests in interacting. You know,
it could be a compliance person, it could be an operations person or
a trader. So you need to balance in a much bigger, a much
bigger context from institutional side in providing this sort of product versus retail, where
you know, you're kind of saying like, well, I want my funds
to be safe, but I also want them to be usable in terms of
I need to send them from A to B, but equally, I want
to sign stuff on DeFi if I'm you know, maybe interacting with like UNISWAP
or putting things into liquidity pools and earning some yields, you know, that's
kind of where you may want to find that there's a lot of utility as
well, versus you know, you could have on institutional side. Again,
depending on institution and how well verse they are of crypto or how comfortable they
are of crypto, they might just say I just want to secure my assys
at rest. And also when I move them from A to B, I'm
not yet looking at staking or interacting with UNISWAP and these other things. So
it is quite a different landscape and versus the retail world. But again that
they will kind of benefit from each other. So we have this thing like
multi party computation on the institutional side, you have a countrabstraction. On the
retail side. There's a lot of projects happening in that space now, so
they do kind of inform each other somewhat. But again I think on the
retail sides, you know, there's just less less boxes to tick and less
less needed as far as bringing a power tools to the market, which an
institution is going to want. Yeah. Absolutely. Now is your product on
chain? Is it like on a specific blockchain? And you mentioned there's interoperability
and you support many different coins, but is the product itself on any specific
blockchain? So interestingly, with our product, there is a blotchain component to
it, which is as far as I know, not something that exists on
the institutional side today. So we use for if we have any cosmonauts out
there who might be watching, we actually use the COSMOSSDK and the tendement consensus
algorithm for certain parts of our system, and that enables us to kind of
have like a custody app chain. I guess to use crypto terminology, but
it lot a lot of benefits, so namely a lot of other solutions on
the market today is as I said, it's sort of standard SaaS model.
You're a customer. You're doing API calls to this vendor to use the thing
that they host and that they offer, and you're very much kind of on
the outside. Whereas with our products, this is a software you can run
on the customer side on their own servers, and so those servers can act
effectively like nodes for your own custody Cosmos blotchain. So that gives you a
bunch of benefits around well, not having any privileged act to have access to
any of the keys. So we'll have a key share on each of these
nodes, so you can have four those deploy you can have ten. It's
entirely up to the customer. And each of these nodes runs the software,
so they don't have to trust each other. They all kind of have the
same thing under the hood. They're all running the processes and they kind of
say, well, right, I understand the answer to be A, and
then they can look at each other and go, I have A. That's
where the consensus model comes in. So if anyone is malicious or a node
is corrupt or failing, you know, it kind of gets excluded from that
consensus round. And you basically get to a point where these nodes not only
have a key share themselves, but they also have the policy engine, which
is in because traditionally in the institutional custody side, that policy engine sits with
the vendor, which is a single location. You trust them to keep it
secure, to sort of manage access around it. But again, if that
gets tampered with or interfered in any way, you'll quickly discover that not my
policies means not my keys, and therefore not my key is not my crypto
kind of things. So there are a lot of institutional learnings around. It's
not just about solving for the private key it's also about solving for distributing the
policies which determine how these keys ultimately get used. And we found a great
solution to do that, which is kind of using this cosmossitk blockchain component is
certainly part of it. So that's another kind of bit of security innovation that
we brought to to the custody world. That's awesome. Are you able to
share maybe any institutions you're working with. I know sometimes these things are under
wrapped in NDAs, but need that you can if that names maybe the types.
Yeah, sure things. So, I mean at the moment, we've
announced kind of back in March that this called little Treasury product is live.
So we kind of took it to market with our early cohort of customers.
And the two that we named of that cohort were Jump Trading Group, which
is a propriety trading firm kind of mentioned alongside typically like DRW or Citadel or
Jane Street. You know they're they're off that ILK. So Jump Crypto they
use our products for all of their dish lasted trading flow. Now, another
name we mentioned is Backpack Exchange, which if you're on crypto Twitter, which
a lot of the audience are going to be very maim on crypto Twitter.
You know, you probably witnessed their own incredible growth story. You know,
they're one of the largest centralized exchanges now, particularly on the Salana side of
things, that Slana community. So yeah, there's just two examples of customers
we work with, but generally speaking, total treasury is therefore prop traders,
market makers, exchanges and in techs as well that's want to offer a crypto
product to their customer base. Now, I know we kind of touched on
it earlier that you know, maybe depending on the jurisdiction, and like you
know, we talked about black Rock as example and with the ETFs. But
do you see the future of crypto being from the institutional standpoint more self custody
kind of using your systems given that the technology is much more advanced, is
better security layers and so forth, there's more advances like what you guys are
essentially doing, making it easier providing all the bells and whistles with this service.
Do you see it that more of these folks are going to self custody
using technology like yours. Yeah, so I guess the answer is yes.
And though so maybe just to kind of give them more context around that.
How the institutional side has progressed so far today is you know, I mentioned
starting off at this cold storage custodian. So the cold storage model or offline
storage was very much the first first way that institutions were keeping their private key
safe, and that necessitated a fully outsourced relationship. You would basically have a
custodian or someone trying to be a custodian would basically look after your keys and
provide all this security guarantee and you have to maximally trust them with that.
So it requires a lot of due diligence and all the rest to properly evaluate
those providers. However, there was also another sort of friction or difficulty,
which is when the assets are offline, then it comes sign that you want
to withdraw them. That process can take a little while, so if you're
an active market participant, and again slows a relative term, but if you're
very active in the market, it is slow to the point where it's just
not really usable because you're maybe moving out of positions on a regular basis,
or you need to fund your activity on an exchange. So these NPC wallets
or multi party computation wallets came along and said you could have similar security guarantees
to cold storage, but with the instant access of a hot wallet, so
you don't have to suffer this lag time when it comes to withdrawing your ASSSS.
They're a lot more usable. It isn't some like security brick where yes
it's secure, but the trade off is you don't have the speed of access.
So NPC wallets helped strengthen the signing operations and give a bit of power
back to the end customer. And again they were kind of the first self
custody type of product because they gave a key share to the customer and then
the other key share typically resided on the side of the vendor in their service.
So this was kind of the first movement towards self custody. And again
that's obviously accelerated as well with the likes of FTX collapsing. People are a
lot more aware of kind of counterparting risk or leaving assets on exchange, so
there's just a lot more motivation towards self custodying, and that's kind of where
we decided to step in as well as cordial systems with this treasury product,
because again, the NPC wallets give some signing power back to the customer,
but you still rely on the vendor to run the other ninety five percent of
the custody processes. And we decided to really flip that on its head and
said, well, can we make it safe that the customer can run ninety
five and we run five percent and effectively that's that is what we've done.
So as a partner to these customers on an ongoing basis, Cordial Systems is
just doing code maintenance, code updates. It's a true software supplier relationship.
You know, we don't need us to be online to sign stuff or have
our databases working or whatever it is. You know, that can all run
locally on the customer side, which is again extending the definition of or what
is self custody. And if I want to have maximal control myself, I
don't trust anyone, I don't want to rely on anyone or have dependencies.
You know, That's that's really where we come in and that's the strength that
we offer. So yeah, big institutions which are highly regulated or just very
security conscious with all these things going on in the market, they're very much
looking to take control of their assets. So that's very much where we can
step in. Yeah. Absolutely, And what's on your twenty twenty four roadmap
or the remainder of twenty twenty four. Yes, I mean lots of things
going on. I mean, we're obviously always adding more and more blockchains as
the market just moves so fast. There's main net launches every year, and
there's some pretty big network's going live later in the year, so we've got
an eye on that and sort of being one of the first to support them
as an institutional wallet. That's another strength of us, just being able to
add any new blockchain in the space of about a week, which again is
very important for our market makers and prop traders out there. But it kind
of besides that. We're also we've spoken so far about Oil Treasury as a
as a product for the self custody. So all of our customers today are
running this software in house on multiple service There is a world we're also working
towards where you know, if you're maybe a mid size or a smaller shop,
you might say that's that's great, but I can only run on two
servers and I want to have Bodial or someone else run the other part of
the software on some other servers externally, which is a very reasonable deployment model
to have more of a kind of co hosting type of relationship. So we're
also working to have commercial partners that can kind of host our software for institutions
as well. And then there's even a third model, which is where things
get a bit more interesting again. That is, do we explore having the
software run on servers at different entities which are kind of connected in some way
by some sort of trading agreement, shall we say so? At the moment
today I mentioned you know FTX collapsing, that's led to a lot of what's
known as off exchange trading now, so exchange is now more of a pure
execution venue. Your assets there, and a lot of institutional traders are actually
leaving assets in a cell custody or custodial account and then trading directly with those
assets being held there, trading directly with an exchange. So there's becoming more
and more of a divide in the responsibilities of who does what. But at
the same time, these bits of marketing infrastructure are becoming more and more interconnected,
which is mirroring the traditional finance world in many ways, and we sort
of wander with our sort of unique approach of having this kind of blockchain style
product. You can almost have nodes running, say one at the exchange,
one other custodian, or one at the customer side, or whatever the case
might be, and they have some sort of legal relationship that governs how they
do for trading between them. But rather than trusting someone to you hosts things,
they can kind of have this shared bit of software, but they all
have transparency and they can see exactly how things are done, and it really
opens up, It really opens up that trading relationship in a way that's not
been possible so far. So yeah, constantly trying to improve the self custody
thing, but equally being mindful of that a lot of our customers are active
traders and participants in the market, so we also need to extend our product
into other areas. Now, a question I thought I came to mind when
you were talking about some of the upcoming things. I'm assuming that anything on
chain, whether it's an NFT or tokenized stock or real estate, you can
support because it's on chain, right, Yeah, exactly. From a sort
of technical standpoint, we could support anything, you know, any sort of
VRC twenty token, or could be a token on SOLAA or issued on some
other chain as well. So yeah, very much from a technical standpoint,
super easy. I guess the question always comes down to maybe the classification of
the asset itself, to say, hey, is this a representation of a
security or is this thing itself the security? In which case do you maybe
need some you know, appropriate licensing regulation to permissively hold this thing? But
yeah, you're right. So I think a good segue because one of my
lists of stuff was to ask you about cryptoregulations. Now I'm in the US,
you're in the UK. The US is despite some headwinds, you know,
we've got some ets, you get some things going, but there still
isn't clarity. I know the UK has some clarity, the EU has some
clarity. How are you feeling about the regulations that have been put out by
the UK and the EU? Yeah, I guess in general, all the
regulators and different jurisdictions are kind of going at their own paces, and it's
long time been a bit of a patchwork of different frameworks to contend with.
So back when I was doing the Prestogian thing a few years ago. In
many ways that was a bit of a nightmare because you're trying to be compliant
to going to different markets, but you know, you almost have to do
like specialized word for every market you're trying to go into, where it's US,
UK, Europe, Hong Kong and all these things. So it still
very much feels like that's the case, and at least in the UK there
is a rather slow approach still to regulation. The FAA didn't roll out the
registration component, which was more of a anti money laundering style of you know,
just checking that you're doing your st basic compliance requirements under the money of
ordering regulations. So that was a very obvious and a good first step in
terms of not binding off more than they could chew and kind of making very
difficult asks of the different providers out there, which are maybe in the context
of CRITTO, can be just not possible and it can show a lack of
understanding on the part of the regulator. So there's been you know, some
good discussion and four fall progression i'd say from the UK and EU, and
I'm maybe not as close to the US side, but like everyone else has
been watching their legal battles, and yeah, seems to be you know,
endless memes going around about how SEC offers investor protection and where it has not.
So I think I think we're all in touch with that and we're all
kind of watching whether it's in the US or from AFAR, because again,
the US kind of leads the way in a lot of this stuff, at
least from a long term perspective. So when we saw the coin base against
the SEC and effectively now having case law cementing that self custody wall its does
not mean you operate as a broker and that the wallet really is just a
piece of technology. I think that was a huge, huge win, which
it got some it got some air time a few weeks ago, but I
think just in the kind of league and compliance as well, that's kind of
given a very solid foothold to a lot of a lot of providers out there,
and it's a really big win. So coin based are doing great things
on that front, kind of fighting the good fight and trying to advance with
discussion in a way that it can kind of get things to be sustainable and
work work for everyone on the kind of a business friendly regime rather than this
little hostility that might be a bit more prevalent in the last few years and
all the rigmarole we had to go through to get ETF approved and the greatest
scale doing their part on that as well. So yeah, I'm sure a
little bit more. Yeah, and I'm hoping our Congress here acts and you
know, get something past hopefully maybe not this year, but by next year
at least after the election. I would love to get your thoughts on the
bitcoin et aps. You know, in the United States. Obviously we've got
to approve a lot of the big institutions. We saw incredible inflows this week.
Hong Kong launched their big one in spot at APSU. There's talks about
London where you're located, near where you're located, looking to launch in May,
and then there was news of Australia looking to list big one in ether
ETFs on their stock exchange. So lots happening globally with et aps. What
are your thoughts on how things are progressing so far and the performance. Yeah,
it's really been the narrative that's dominated twenty twenty four and I think with
good reason, and there's been the tail went to a lot of the price
increases we've seen over course of the years so far. So yeah, I
think bitcoin supot ETF in the US has been a long time coming. In
Europe, they've already been a number of exchange traded products, So if you
want to get exposure to bitcoin throughholding securities, that's been possible for a while
now. And then again, like we were just saying, you know,
in many ways, US can sort of lead the way, so it's not
surprising we're seeing other jurisdictions that have not been as quick to move. I'm
now sort of following suit, So yeah, I mean I'm not on the
financial market side as much anymore and certainly not giving any investment of advice,
but I can't imagine anyone buying the ETF at the start of the year is
unhappy about that decision, particularly if they were kept out of the market before
due to various constraints. So I think by all means, it's it's been
a success so far. And I'm sure you and others watching have been tracking
the inflows and outflows over the last several weeks and just kind of how that's
prepared to being the most impressive ETF performance in history. So by all means
it's been a great success, right, And I think the second order effect
here is that there's still plenty of institutional capitals sitting on the sidelines, which
maybe said, oh, we will wait and see what the product track record
is after six months, then maybe we'll be comfortable going in and buying some
ourselves. Equally, if you're a portfolio manager, you know some of your
peers are buying and getting exposure to bitcoin more so than they have in the
past, then you don't really want to be left behind from an investment performance
perspective if those holding bitcoin are up and you had no exposure. So you
know, maybe that's just a long way of saying you don't want to be
the first one through the door, but also you don't want to be the
last. So the launch has been good and Blackgrock just has this massive scale
distribution which is unparallel, well, then we could well start seeing a second
wave of buyers that have kind of been tracking this thing and seeing how it's
performed. And yeah, other markets following suit with exchange traded products in other
more vocal jurisdictions. So I don't expect that narrative is done and We're going
to see more of it and taking on crypto Twitter. Everyone's kind of like
you know when e FtF now, so there's more to come for sure,
for sure. Yeah, I'm excited. I know right now we're in a
little bit of a cool down, a bit of a pullback, but I
still think we got another leg up, So I'm excited to see what the
top looks like. Awesome, Really quick before we hit the wrap up questions,
I'd love to get your thoughts on you know, world governments are building,
like Central bank digital currency cbdc's certainly a lot of pros, but also
people are worried about the cons. I'd love to get your thoughts on that,
and maybe you know also the rise in stable coin usage as well.
Yeah, so I think you know, on the stable coins in general,
I mean they've been one of the massive success stories of crypto. You're just
having twenty four seven dollars on chain and being able to access that, and
that obviously because the central banks to kind of kind of jump to it and
also decide, well, we've got to figure this one out. They kind
of have something I sort of compete with that they don't want to have.
Donaldis just siphoning off into USDC or whatever it might be, and you know,
just quickly maybe circling back to Andreas Antonopolis, we spoke about the beginning
of the court. I think he had a very good way of looking at
this when it started happening and saying, well, you're going to have money
of the state, You're going to have corporate money, and then money of
the people. So obviously cbdc's being state money, and then corporate circle with
the USDC would be an example, and then bitcoin as kind of many of
the people in Andreas as well. So I think that's a useful taxonomy,
and we'll continue to see his stable coins are getting more and more adoption and
that's just going to carry on as well. And the CBDC thing, well,
that's still kind of in a pilot mode for now, and there are
concerns around I guess, you know, not to go to your tinfoil hat,
but government overreach and these kind of things like, well, if they
control the Ledger with kind of a even more control than they've had in the
past, you know, least cash was this kind of better asset you could
exchange and they one can tell you what to do with your cash. But
if the government has full programmatic control over your bank account or what you're spending
your money on, you you can quickly go down a bit of a dystopian
path. So who knows if those end up being realized, and there's maybe
not so much a question of do they or do they not. I think
just CBDCs are great for the general broader conversation and we'll probably, yeah,
may inadvertently be a great marketing campaign for white people should have a bitcoin or
some other commission less stable coins. So yeah, I think they all kind
of have their place, and it's all just going to kind of help with
seeing how things pan out over the next several years. Yeah, for sure,
I like what you said about you know, it could actually be beneficial
to crypto because on one hand, you know, when these governments put out
these things like CBDCs, they're going to educate the public more about blockchain,
so right away it breaks down a barrier of people not understanding or trusting blockchains
or what it may be or the technology. And then to your point,
if they see that, wait, there's even more control, I'll just use
a permissionless stable coin or bitcoin. So yeah, that definitely makes sense.
All right, you got some wrap up questions here for you. First,
if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be. That's
a great question. That's a tough question as well, my own metaverse.
I mean, I'd be quite happy for metaverse that was something like a giant
day festival. You know, you kind of turn up blue skies, it's
warm, great music playing on different stages in the backgrounds or whatever, and
in between you're just walking around a bunch of different tents or stools and kind
of having these like little mini experiences or whatever. The users or the citizens
of this metaverse want a set up and kind of bring their own thing to
it. So yeah, it gives me something like performance arts creating something really
wacky as a fun of expression as well, just a good bit of escapism
overall, just to have good vibes taking in some music. You know.
I kind of find that's my happy place anyway, when I'm just kind of
going to the gates in the summer and just kind of enjoying a beer in
the sun and just taking it easy with friends, you know. So a
metaverse in that, in that way of thinking, would probably be pretty cool
for me. Yeah, for sure, I agree with you. I'm big
on going to like live music events and I enjoy that for sure. Rapid
fire questions. First, is food? Favorite food, something a bit of
spice, Korean street food. I would say nice. Favorite musician or band,
so back to the day fest stuff, you know, bluesy rock.
I'm going to go with guns and Roses. Nice, favorite movie Gladiator,
favorite book picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. H And when you're not
working at Cordial, what are you doing for fun? Yes, if it
isn't going to the gigs, I just spent a lot of time outside doing
a lot of running and endurance events. Done a few ultramarathons, a bit
of mountain climbing and such, so you know, generally you'll see me,
yeah, going full escape as them into into the forests or going on a
hike something to that, to that effect. And we've got a pretty large
dog at home as well. He loves to kind of get outside. So
time with the family and being active awesome, especially in pleasure chatting with you.
I got to have you back on in the future. As you know,
things progressed with Cordial, But I love what you guys. Are doing,
and thank you so much for joining me. Thanks Tony, enjoyed it.
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