Building a Global Crypto Powerhouse

Lane Kasselman, Co-CEO and President of Blockchain.com, joins The Deal Table to explain how one of the oldest companies in digital assets built a business spanning 90 million wallets and 190 countries, and why he moved its U.S. headquarters to Dallas.

Lane came to crypto slowly and skeptically. A lawyer by training, he started his career in politics, spent four years at AT&T, then joined Uber as one of its first 100 employees and left after it passed 6,000. When a friend introduced him to Blockchain.com founder Peter Smith, his answer was blunt: "I don't believe in your fake internet money thing, but you seem like nice guys." He advised and invested for years before finally coming in-house about five years ago. What converted him was not a price chart but Argentina, where friends who were software engineers and startup founders were having US dollars physically couriered to them to escape hyperinflation, and switched to crypto the moment it became an option.

The conversation breaks down what Blockchain.com actually is: a brokerage rather than an exchange, and the largest non-custodial one in the world, which means compromising the platform would require compromising 90 million individual accounts. Lane walks through all three business lines, the retail brokerage with roughly 42 million verified users, an institutional prime brokerage offering more than 800 crypto assets to hedge funds and family offices, and a proprietary trading and asset management arm run by a room of quants in London, all sitting on shared infrastructure and staffed by about 500 people across London, Dallas, Paris, Singapore, Vilnius and Buenos Aires.

He also details the M&A playbook behind seven acquisitions, sorted into three buckets: buying regional market share and customer bases outright, buying technology to extend the platform underneath all three businesses, and acquihiring five to twenty person teams who can be taught crypto afterward. He lays out the three rules he carried out of Uber, hire utility players, "we all do windows, we all do floors," and never let a resume decide what someone is capable of, a rule he applies to himself: "I shouldn't be running a crypto company based on my resume."

The episode also covers why AI agents may be crypto's biggest near-term catalyst rather than its competition, the difference between store-of-value assets, utility tokens and meme coins, why FTX and Terra Luna were fraud and bad software rather than hacks, why the company actively wants a permanent regulatory framework rather than fewer rules, its deliberately bipartisan board, the Dallas Cowboys partnership, the weighted analysis across 14 cities that landed his family in Texas, and the IPO the company is building toward.