Building a Global Crypto Powerhouse

If you want to have economic growth in your country, give people a safe place to store their value.

Lane Castleman is the president and chief business officer at Blockchain.com, a company at the forefront of blockchain innovation, building the infrastructure for the next generation of finance.

Where we are today is one of the largest crypto brokerages in the world. We have 90 million wallets worldwide, 42 million verified users, and that's across 190 countries.

His leadership has guided Blockchain.com through 7 major acquisitions, expanded its footprint across continents, and brokered a historic partnership with the Dallas Cowboys.

Crypto is the fastest, most efficient way to execute. We offer over 800 crypto assets in our institutional business. That is unique in crypto.

How did crypto transition past Warren Buffett calling it rat poison and Jamie Dimon called it a fraud? Is it fair to say it's an accepted investment class? Lane Castleman, great to have you here. Lane, right? This is the first time in my life as a Lane that I've interviewed or maybe even had a real conversation with another Lane. I'm waiting to meet Lane Kiffin, right? So we can talk a little football, but that hadn't happened yet. So welcome, Lane.

Thank you. And what I'm so excited about is you're not going to call me Lance. You're not going to call me Lee. Wayne. Or Wayne. Yeah, because I know you've experienced that through your life.

My now deceased father-in-law called me Wayne for the first 6 months I dated his daughter and So I was accustomed to that humiliation.

I feel completely left out of this conversation.

Yeah, I will answer, respond to Lance just because I, at this point, I'm just over it.

Well, it's also a sort of female and male name. So I get a lot of mail to Mrs., to Miss Lane or, you know.

So anyway, Blockchain.com.

Yeah, right.

You know, have you always been in technology?

So have I always been in technology? Yeah, personally.

Yeah.

So my career actually started in politics. Which being in crypto today makes me very suited for it because it's quite a political environment for us these days. So no career. I'm a lawyer by training. I went straight into politics and did that for quite a while and then switched to tech. Actually, we were just talking about before the show started with AT&T. Wasn't really a tech company back then. You can say it is today, but that was my, my first step into the tech world, or at least the telecom world. And then everything changed.

Yeah, it continues to change and evolve fairly rapidly. And you're right at the cutting edge of that with crypto. Crypto, it's an industry that to me is still very, very young. I know there's a lot of meaningful evolutionary steps taking place. When did you get involved in crypto specifically?

So after that experience at AT&T, I was there for about 4 years and there was an upstart that was challenging the incumbent taxi industry called Uber. And it wasn't the Uber that you know today. Anxious to do something else, and I got an opportunity to go work there very early. So I was one of the first 100 employees, and I was able to leave a couple of years later after it exploded in growth and 6,000 employees. And I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had a little bit of time off, and a friend of mine that I knew from politics was working in finance at this company called Blockchain.info. And he said, why don't you come on out to New York and meet the founder? We're working on some pretty interesting stuff. I'd like you to explore it. Maybe you can come work with us. So I did. I met the founder, Peter Smith, and the co-founder, Nick Carey. And at the time they were trying to figure out how to do remittances in a much more efficient way, right? Getting capital from the US to families offshore somewhere, which is generally pretty expensive. And they were having political issues with trying to get permission to open what we were calling Bitcoin ATMs back then in places like Argentina or Mexico. They wanted me to come in to help them with policy and communications. And I remember saying, and he reminds me of this all the time, to the founder, I don't believe in your fake internet money thing, but you seem like nice guys. I'd love to help you. Why don't I advise for a little bit? And over the years I advised, I consulted. When they first raised money, I had an opportunity to invest and I really did like the team, although I wasn't really sold on crypto. It took several years for me to come around on it. I ended up starting some other companies and we got pretty involved in the ICO space, even though that kind of blew up and then imploded, and some other aspects of crypto. And during that time, I actually came around to what the true value proposition was to myself. So I didn't go in-house to Blockchain.com until about 5 years ago, even though the company is 13 years old. So it took me a little while to come around on it. Now I'm certainly a true believer, but I'm not crypto native. Like a lot of folks in the space.

Yeah, I was doing a little homework beforehand of people that were not believers and now are. It's kind of remarkable. I was looking at Warren Buffett called it rat poison squared, Jamie Dimon called it a fraud, and now JPMorgan Chase is deeply involved in blockchain payments. Larry Fink, BlackRock, who was one of the biggest skeptics, was on 60 Minutes this week talking about a digital currency. He now calls it Bitcoin digital gold. I went to high school with a guy named Paul Tudor Jones, who's a billionaire hedge fund manager who had a similar posture on it, probably when you were first getting engaged with it. And he now allocates to it as part of his core holding. What happened? How did crypto transition past Warren Buffett calling it rat poison to it being now Is it fair to say it's an accepted investment class or where are we in this?

Yeah. So I think that's a fair statement. I think today, especially with where regulations are, it is certainly an accepted asset class. I think one of the things that happened, the sea change moment, was that it went from a speculative investing tool that was having many ups and downs, sort of like any other new industry, to a very deep financial product that means very different things to different people in different parts of the world. So when you look at crypto through a US lens, it still is very much an investment asset. That's how most people see it. And in fact, BlackRock has seen quite a lot of success through their Bitcoin ETF, right? It's the fastest growing first 21 months of any ETF they've had in history.

Really?

So they're, they're seeing it firsthand. But that's because of consumer interest in investing, which is fascinating. That is great. I do think what some of the other luminaries you mentioned have noticed is that in other parts of the world, that have long suffered from hyperinflation or no safe store of value, an unsafe banking environment, crypto is the solution. And if you want to have economic growth in your country, what's the fastest way to get there? Give people a safe place to store their value. And so we're seeing this play out all across Latin America, all across Africa. And so it's a little hard to feel it in the US because our financial system here is amazing and there's no reason to question it or have any kind of alternative. But that's not true in most of the world. And I think that is what's happened is that crypto jumped over the problems in tradfi and a lot of other parts of the world. And I think the value is, you know, quite undeniable.

I think also, though, is like when I first heard of like Bitcoin was like circa 2018, but I was hearing it from people that I would not trust with a ten-foot pole or whatever thing. The guru people, they're very slimy. So it feels like from a branding standpoint, I know that's still there, but like, it didn't seem like there was adults in the room 7 years ago. But like, you know, like with the Texas Blockchain Council and other various organizations that have been able to introduce the policymakers and actually have real businesses, it feels like there's adults in the room versus 7 years ago where the only people that were actively talking about on the internet were people that were just trying to make a buck. They're like the rug pullers per se. So I feel like there's a lot more visibility for the adults in the room.

I think a lot of industries start out with the cowboys, the people who are mavericks. Some have genuine real interest, others are in it to make a buck. But if it's going to last, eventually it evolves. And so The people running crypto companies today, they don't necessarily come from crypto. I'm a great example of that, right? I came from other industries and everyone that runs our company, and I can say this about many of our contemporaries, the execs running those companies have, you know, built other companies in other industries. They have reputations that extend deep into Wall Street or into Silicon Valley, and they've moved into crypto both to help legitimize it, but to also make it more valuable to the people and firms and industries that need it.

You said that you weren't a true believer early on, and it took you a period of years to, I think in your words, get the value proposition. What is that? What do you see as the value proposition? Is it that safe haven proposition?

That's what initially turned me, and it really was no more clear than in Argentina. Argentina goes through all sorts of changes in its monetary policy. Almost as rapidly as the seasons change and has long suffered from hyperinflation, where it is actually difficult to save enough money to do anything, right? Because you don't know what the value of the Argentinean peso is going to be. You add on top of that a banking environment that is notoriously untrustworthy. You don't put your money in the banks. I have friends in Argentina who would get paid in Argentinean pesos and then they had their money guy come over, right? Somebody would come over with US dollars strapped to their chest. And I'm talking about friends that are drug dealers, right? These are people that are software engineers, right? These are people who are running their own startups in Argentina, and they had to go through this sort of blue law or blue money process to get some sort of value that they could hold on to that wouldn't change. And that was the US dollar. That is not sustainable at all. As soon as crypto started being adopted in Argentina, all of a sudden all of these same friends were asking that their companies or vendors or clients were paying them in crypto because it was easier for them to store. They're fine paying taxes on it. They're fine reporting it. They just wanted something that was less volatile than the Argentinian peso. That's what did it for me. I had actual friends who were benefiting from a real store of value.

Hard for— as an American with the safety and security that we perceive in our currency and our economic and financial systems to understand that mindset. When I was running a wealth management firm, back in the '90s, the Cayman Islands was seeing an explosion of deposits. There's more money on deposits. This is an island with, what, 2 miles wide, 12 miles long?

Yeah.

Had more money on deposits in the banking system than the state of California.

Yeah. Okay.

And part of that was Brits. Most people don't think of Great Britain as being volatile, but they had a period of very high interest rates and they were actually trying to control the flow of their currency outside the country. So Brits called it a funk hole, and they would go put their money in an offshore bank as a place of safety. Americans started doing that as a way to hedge against the risk of litigation, that they would be sued for something frivolous, but they would lose a lawsuit, and they had assets overseas. So we have the unique experience of not having to have had to worry so much about our financial system. But that does make, that does make sense to me. Do you think it's displaced? I mean, I turn on the news last night and gold and silver hitting new highs, and I sort of think of that as being contrary to Bitcoin, you know, or crypto hitting new highs because I think, well, everything, you know, shouldn't go up at the same time. And I kind of see them as being disconnected as the store of value, right?

Yeah.

With, with crypto taking their place. Maybe that's part of the argument for we have too much money in circulation that's creating lots of different bubbles in real estate and in stocks and in other areas. But do you think crypto ultimately takes the place of precious metals as a store of value?

So I think that's what's so interesting about crypto today is that the word is sort of like saying finance. It means so many different things. And so store of value is one aspect of it. And we certainly should get into the others. Do I think crypto supplants gold and silver and other precious metals? No, but precious metals have long been inversely correlated to the macro. So that's where people go as a safe harbor in times of uncertainty. I think you can debate whether or not that's still true today. I think there's moments of correlation and not. Crypto is largely sort of falling into the same consumer mentality, where when there are moments of concern or conflict, usually it's some sort of global conflict. We saw this happen last week when there was new tariffs announced on China. China, consumers flee for safety, although that did cause a momentary flash crash in crypto, it did cause a spike in precious metals. I think those dynamics will continue. I don't know that digital gold replaces real gold. I think people will continue to invest in both. Yeah, I certainly do.

Yeah.

What about the attention because for the past several years, Bitcoin, blockchain, was the new kid on the block. And I know it's not that new, it's been around for over 10 years, but from getting the political attention, getting real investment dollars, and in the last 2 to 3 years you have AI. Now AI is soaking up all the attention and now it's competing on data centers, is definitely competing on investment dollars. So how does blockchain, maybe not blockchain.com, but just the whole industry How does it react to that from that competition aspect of it?

So I personally think AI is probably one of the best things to happen to the crypto industry in the last couple of years. Certainly, you know, you can't deny that regulatory clarity in Europe and now in the US has helped. But what I think most journalists haven't noticed about AI or realized yet, and certainly consumers, is a very simple equation, and that is During COVID I had lots of extra time like a good Gen Xer, and I got into collecting sneakers. I became a sneakerhead and I was getting up at all hours of the night trying to find, you know, the latest drop on a pair of sneakers that I was super excited about. Now I have an attic full of sneakers that my wife is very, very annoyed with. But I was like, there's got to be a better way, right, than me waiting up to find this pair in my size. That's an exclusive drop. Well, today you can certainly have one of the agents do that for you, right? You can say, I want this special pair of sneakers in my size in this colorway, and it will go find it for you. And it may, you know, say I've got to do the search again in a couple of days. But like, you have a digital tool to do that for you. But the question is, how does it execute the transaction when it finds the pair of sneakers that you want? Now, you could give it your Citibank card, but is that really the most efficient way for a computer to execute a transaction? I think what's likely to happen, and this isn't a 5-year thing, this is a 2 or 3 months from now thing, is you'll give AI agents the ability to execute a transaction for you in whatever the most efficient way is possible. So the agent's going to go figure out, am I going to buy these sneakers with crypto? Am I going to use your credit card? Am I going to use fiat? I'm going to use the most efficient payment method possible. And if I need crypto, I'm going to go buy the crypto. And what we know, just because we see it in our data, is that for international transactions, crypto is the fastest, most efficient way to execute those transactions. So now think about this on a global scale. It's not just Lane and Sneakers, right? It's companies executing major transactions with their AI agents. The agent's going to be charged with finding the cheapest, fastest way to execute the transaction. It's going to be with crypto. So there is a convergence of these two things and it's happening right now. And we're already seeing it in our data. Like we know the major LLM providers already are partnering with crypto companies like ours to do this.

So tell me about your crypto company. Where do you fit into all this activity?

Yeah, so Blockchain.com, one of the oldest companies in the crypto space. So our birthday is actually today, 13 years old. We had cupcakes in the office and our company was founded— Yeah, sorry. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Our company was founded together with Coinbase at the same time. Back then it was a couple of engineers sitting in an apartment in England. Coming up with ideas. They had read the Satoshi whitepaper. Everything's evolved a lot since then. Where we are today is one of the largest crypto brokerages in the world. So we have 3 business lines. The first one is what we're most well-known for, and that's our retail brokerage. So we're not an exchange. We are a brokerage. It's a very different experience for our customers. They can buy, sell, hold, invest the most stable cryptocurrencies depending on where they are in the world. Between 30 to 50 are available to them. We have 90 million wallets worldwide. But if you want to compare it to Coinbase, the verified user count is about 42 million. And the reason for the difference in numbers is that you can have multiple wallets, right? So like I have a couple of accounts, right? So about 42 million verified users and that's across 190 countries. So the retail business is quite, quite large. The second business line is our institutional business, and this is really a prime brokerage. So we've got thousands of hedge funds, VCs, high net worth individuals who are using us for spot OTC, derivatives, custody, lending, margin, options, everything you would see at a prime brokerage on Wall Street. We do the same thing tied to crypto, all tied to crypto.

Okay.

Here, here's, here's the big difference. We offer over 800 different asset classes or sorry, different assets crypto assets in our institutional business. That is unique in crypto. There is no other institutional platform that has that type of access. And then the last business is our asset management business, which is still at this point just proprietary capital. But we run our own trading algorithms, we have our own ventures business, and we do a bit in the digital asset treasury space. So those three verticals are run by about 500 people. Headquarters is in London. The other headquarters is here in Dallas. And then we have offices in about a dozen countries.

So, so being that, that the brokerage side of it, where does the Texas Stock Exchange— does that come into play at all? And I mean, being that we're in Texas and you're in Texas, is there any kind of bleed over or is it just a completely separate thing altogether?

It's separate for now. I think that, you know, for us, our interest in the Texas Stock Exchange is the same as our interest in NYSE or NASDAQ, which is where we're going to go public. And that's top of mind for us. As it relates to the trading of securities, we do offer, actually on Monday, we will start offering our customers in about 100 countries the ability to trade tokenized securities in about 100 different securities. So there is a convergence of crypto and the traditional type of exchanges. But I think we're a little way away from that. The reason is when you get under the hood of how a Texas Stock Exchange, actually I'm not quite sure how the infrastructure's gonna work for them, but like with a NYSE or NASDAQ, the fundamental differences in the way that we execute transactions and settle them couldn't be more different, right? So crypto is fundamentally atomic settlement. If I send you a Bitcoin, it is settled in the moment that I send it to you. Whereas if I want to sell you a share of Marvel, it takes like 7 days for it to actually settle. Correct. The fundamental mechanics behind those two things couldn't be more different. So I do think it'll be a while before the two industries are really merged.

But in the ultimate, at least the way it was explained to me way back when, is specifically with like Bitcoin, it's all about the ledger. So I'm pretty sure that's pretty much all of blockchain technologies. It's ledger and making sure that, you know, if the color is red, it's always red no matter where you look at the ledger because it can't be hacked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's one of the strengths for sure. So we refer to it as being immutable, right? So, you know, for your viewers who are less familiar with the blockchain, just think about a big Excel spreadsheet, right? And so each one of those cells is full of data and there's countless computers that are ensuring that the data is the same in each one of those cells. It's immutable, means if it's changed on one computer, it's not changed on all the others. So it can never be hacked. But that is the difference in the way that we record data versus filing documents with a registrar. Right. Very different.

Right. And then just again, it seems like, like any time right now, like if I gave Lane or either Lane an invoice, like if you paid it immediately, why can't I have that money immediately? Why do I have to wait for the credit card processing? Why do I have to wait for the bank processing? And it's just— it is frustrating that we live in 2025 and the traditional way of getting paid is still takes a minute.

Every couple of months I'll have an employee ping me a note about how they're, you know, trying to buy their first home. There's a lot of younger employees at our company, right? So they're trying to buy their first home. And they're like, I had to go into a branch to send that. And it just like blows their mind, right? Because all day, every day, like we're the opposite of that, right? And so when all of a sudden you get stuck in the traditional financial system requirements, which I get why they exist, it's just— it's a reminder of, oh, there's a long way to go before, you know, things meet each other.

And I think to that point, there's always biases. If you're in the room where everybody is fast and strong, you start thinking everybody's fast and strong, and then you go in the real world where everybody's fat and slow. It's like, oh, okay, well, you know, maybe I should look in, you know, maybe make sure I look in other rooms, not just my own.

So it does create an interesting challenge for, you know, the broker dealers of the world and the people running exchanges today. And that is there's a whole new generation of consumers who are expecting instant settlement, right? Transactions to be completed as soon as you press a button. And that's not how our markets work at all. So I think there'll be a reckoning at some point. That is fortunately not our responsibility to fix, but I do think there'll be a real demand from consumers. Think about how many people under the age of 30 are using Robinhood, where they will sell you a synthetic share and it's instantly settled. Well, they'll take care of the rest of it on the back end. So I do think there's big change coming.

So what is TradFi?

Oh, TradFi. Sorry, sorry. Traditional finance.

That makes a lot more sense.

Yeah, sorry.

Well, I was just looking at the notes. TradFi.

TradFi.

You didn't know what TradFi was?

It's our incumbent industry that we're working against. Yes. Yeah.

Well, once you say it, it's like, Ryan, you could probably figure that out if you just spent 30 seconds.

It's all good. The nickname for our company is BCDC., which took me about 3 years to get, which is just blockchain.com, BCDC. And it just never even occurred to me that that's what it was. So it's all good. Safe space here.

There we go.

I love it.

So I have a daughter who, you know, when there's a plane crash, she thinks it's not safe to.

Fly.

Oh, right. And shark attacks.

Yeah.

She seems obsessed with shark attacks and plane crashes. And I'll explain to her the statistics, right? It's a lot. You're at a lot more risk driving to the airport than you are flying on the plane to your destination.

Yeah.

When I think about crypto and I think about Bitcoin and other, I think about the hacks, I think about the thefts. There was a feature on television this past week on one of the major networks about recent hacks. And, you know, I think about FTX and Terra Luna. And so how do you differentiate what you're doing? I wouldn't ask you to explain that that plane crash over there didn't have anything to do with you, but, but how How do I, as someone who doesn't really understand the world you operate in, how do I, how do I contrast FTX and Terra Luna with blockchain?

Yeah. So when you're thinking about crypto and holding assets, right? So the simplest interaction that a consumer can have with the industry is to own the assets outright, right? Direct exposure. So say you want to own a Bitcoin or own a fraction of a Bitcoin, you hold it in a wallet or an account. There are two types of accounts: custodial, non-custodial. Custodial account is like a savings account at a bank, right, where your funds are deposited into a master account and noted on a ledger, right? When you go to deposit your funds at Wells Fargo, it's not like they're just holding them separately for you, right? It goes into one big pot. And if for some reason they were hacked, that pot would be exposed. On the other hand, you have non-custodial brokerages and exchanges that are more like safe deposit boxes, right? Where it takes your key and the bank's key to open the safe deposit box. Both of those exist in crypto and there's reasons for both. Blockchain's the largest non-custodial brokerage in the world. So most of our accounts start as non-custodial. So if you wanted to hack our platform, and I'm, you know, fine to say this on a podcast, I've said it publicly before, you'd have to hack 90 million accounts, right? Which makes the platform inherently safer. Now, it does come with drawbacks, which means transactions are a little slower, right? A custodial environment is always going to be a faster transaction settlement time. Instead of it taking a couple of seconds, it could take up to a minute, which maybe doesn't seem like very long, but in the crypto world, that could actually be a long time. Right. And so there are, there are some drawbacks to it. I think today most of the large crypto companies, most of our contemporaries, whether they're custodial or non-custodial, They have licenses from all the major regulators around the world. They have SOC 2 compliance. This means they've gone through the rigor of ensuring that their platforms are inherently safe. What happened with FTX wasn't like a data issue, right? That was a human issue, right? That was fraud. That was fraud. Terra Luna, you know, that was also bad software, but it wasn't necessarily— and you certainly could argue fraud,, but like that wasn't a hack, right? We're talking about like Mt. Gox, which is sort of the famous one from 10 years ago. And there've been other hacks since then. Those are primarily on very small platforms. That's not to say there aren't exploits, right? I think every year we hear about some sort of data exploit at every tech company, right? You see it at financial institutions. Bad actors are always going to find a way, But the question is, can they get very far? These days, they can't. So I would say generally, if the company you're working with, if the crypto company you're working with has its licenses issued by states in the US or the EU or the UK or the federal government, once we have a licensing regime in place, you can be pretty confident that your assets are safe.

Do you want a licensing regime? Do you want more regulation? Is that better for you, for the industry? I'm kind of a libertarian. So I'm I'm hesitant to invite regulation. At the same time, there are industries where it seems like, particularly in their nascent stage, that, you know, that could be a protection.

So we absolutely want a permanent regulatory framework, you know, and it's consumer protection isn't like a bad word, right? We firmly believe in it. We don't want our customers to lose their assets either because they invested in an asset that was fraudulent or because our platform isn't safe. We also realize that we can't control everything happening in the industry, and regulation ensures that we're all meeting a minimum threshold, but it also gives us a level playing field, which is what we want. The previous administration was pretty tough on crypto. At the same time, they are also the ones who approved the BlackRock ETF in Bitcoin. So the current administration and the current Congress, bipartisan in its support, I think there are 34 or 35 states that have MTLs that are applicable for crypto. So the US has leaned into this and we support it. The market structure bill, this is like basically, is crypto falling under the CFTC or the SEC question? That's being debated at Congress. I don't know if we'll see an answer this year. We'll certainly have an answer before the end of this administration. And that clarity would help. But in the meantime, the CFTC and the SEC are, you know, being reasonable in their rulemaking about crypto.

Yeah. So with your role right now, do you spend more of your time in like the biz dev, building the products, acquiring products, hiring staff, building the team, or more on the policy side? I mean, given that that's your background.

So I love the policy stuff because it is my background. Unfortunately, I can't spend all day every day on it. I wish, I wish that was something I could do. We have a really capable team that focuses on it. So today the company is run with me and our founder, Peter. We divide and conquer. Peter and I, as I mentioned, I met the company very early on and we've been friends ever since. And so we're kind of— I like to say I do mornings, he does nights. And so he is an engineer by training. He's also the person who really has an extremely firm grasp and understanding the financial dynamics in the crypto space. So he's the person who's developing our new products on especially the institutional and trading side. When it comes to the day-to-day operations of the company, that sits with me. And so we just, we figure out how to divide it up and it.

Just sort of works. So I want to back up a little bit all the way to Uber because you say you were like first 100 employees.

Is that what I heard?

Yeah. Yeah. So obviously Uber did fairly well. And where do you see the similarities with like Blockchain.com as far as a business? Similarities, comparisons, contractions. What's, what's the same? What's different in that journey from Uber to your current journey now at Blockchain?

Well, I'd much rather have the banks against me than the taxi industry. So, man, the taxi industry was, was a rough, a rough opponent to deal with, like legitimately like mafia-based and corrupt in many parts of the country. And so that was That was rough in those early years. You know, we were— my greatest success at Uber was when we were able to get the permission to operate in Nevada, where the taxi industry is made up of— or the taxi commission is made up of the 12 families who own the 12 taxi companies in the state. And we were able to get it through. You know, that was a pretty fierce opponent who was basically fighting for their life. And we've seen what's happened since, right? The taxi industry has been pretty much decimated as a result. And many taxi drivers have since, you know, they've moved on to work for ridesharing in one way or another. So we were successful and we really did kind of take down the incumbent industry. That is very different than where we exist today with the banking industry. I think, you know, crypto and banking or just finance, the financial sector in general now are just like two sides of the same coin. There's people are moving back and forth all the time between the two sides. The banks we use are all the bulge banks, whereas 5 years ago, they didn't even have a diligence process to onboard us. Now they all bank us. So I think it's generally, it was détente at first, and now it's which of the bulge banks is going to be the first to buy a crypto company? That's sort of the next thing I think that happens. So I think that's kind of where the competition component with the incumbent industry ends. I think where there's similarities is there was no regulatory environment for the ridesharing space and we had to go create it. Same thing happened with crypto. The difference is Uber kind of ruined the ask for forgiveness thing, which we got away with back then where we just sort of started operating and got our hands slapped and then got rules passed. Crypto couldn't do that, right? There is clear monetary policy all over the world. And when you get in trouble, it's like going to jail kind of trouble, right? So you have to ask for permission. Blockchain has always been at the forefront of applying for licenses, meeting with regulators, being slow to expand into markets when we weren't sure what the regulatory environment looked like. But the challenge is still the same, which is you need to get policy laws, regulators to catch up with your industry. And so that fight has been similar for sure. It feels like we've crested that hill though. So we're on the other side of it now.

What about, was there any like not necessarily industry specifics, but just the, the, from building the business itself? Because obviously Uber, again, incredibly huge, massive company, and, and Blockchain.com is on the way as well to do the same. Yeah. Like, what was there anything that you were able to pull from that experience that you were applying today, or is it just you're just awesome and, and that's just natural to you and you didn't, no.

Matter what? Um, so I think, you know, I learned 3 rules when I was at Uber, right? So The first one is hire utility players, right? And when I got to Blockchain.com, we were hiring subject matter experts, not utility players. Yet our needs change every day, right? And you need people who can flex between different parts of the business and are able to pick it up quick and learn it quickly, right? So whether it's somebody comes in who's an expert in compliance, but you realize, you know what, they're also a pretty effective attorney, right? So you can put them into practice with contracts. Or maybe somebody who was an engineer, but you know what, turns out they're great on the product side. So, you know, people who can flex. So now we hire utility players. That was an Uber learning. Second thing is one of my rules. We all do windows, we all do floors, right? Which is whether you're an intern, sometimes you might have to act like the CEO. And if you're the CEO, sometimes you may have to act like the intern. And there is no work that is above you or below you. And that is not typical in corporate America and was one of the rules I learned at Uber. My desk was next to Travis's, right? So he would sit next to me and correct my email, right? Other times I would get on the phone with an investor I'd never met and pretend to be him. I was me, but like pretend to give the pitch that he would give. And then the third one is, you know, what you've done before does not define what you're going to do today. So reading somebody's resume isn't sufficient to determine whether or not they'll be good at a job. And in fact, I tend to hire people who have non-traditional backgrounds for for roles that they don't necessarily fit for based on our traditional analysis. I shouldn't be running a crypto company based on my resume. It doesn't scream that at all. I'm a lawyer with career in politics, career in communications and policy. What am I doing running a giant financial services company? Peter saw what I also understood, which is like, I went back to Stanford to learn how to be a VC. I started a VC fund, I started an M&A practice. Like I actually learned how to do it.. And so I came into blockchain to scale it and take it public, but the resume doesn't really say that, right? So on paper or on my LinkedIn, it doesn't really say this guy should be running a crypto company. And so those lessons were very ingrained in me at Uber and I brought them to blockchain. So if you look at our employee base now, it reflects that mentality.

You talked about 3 business divisions. One is you're a broker and you distinguish being a broker versus being an exchange. So based on my knowledge, a broker is an intermediary. You're going to go acquire the asset for the client. You don't own the asset and you're not an exchange where you're matching the buyer and seller for a transaction fee. So is it as simple as I open an account with blockchain, I instruct you to purchase X amount of something and you acquire that, I have an account, I get a statement from you? In my old dinosaur way of thinking, is that accurate?

You're basically there. It depends on which part of the business we're talking about. On the retail side, from a brokerage standpoint, we have the assets, we have the inventory. We're the counterparty to the customers. You are the counterparty. Okay. All right. That's not the case, though, on the institutional side. Obviously, we don't have inventory of 800 assets, but we'll source the liquidity on their behalf, but we're not the exchange.

We're not just matching the parties. Then you have a prop trading desk. Is it your own capital or is it your you're managing capital for others as well?

Yeah, not yet, but that's on the horizon.

So no, it's our capital. Okay. And you said you're using algorithms, you're looking at trading patterns and looking to identify ways to exploit inefficiencies or trends in the marketplace.

So in London, we have a whole room of quants that have developed these high-frequency, low-latency trading algorithms. Some work, some don't. Fortunately, more work than don't.. And we've been running that business now for about 2 years. And it's quite successful and gives us the confidence to launch a classic asset.

Management business, which is on the horizon.

Right.

So you've got a 3-legged stool there, it sounds like. Yeah, that's nice. So you had a— we don't usually talk politics. I'm not inviting you to express political opinions. But with that said, you came from a background in politics. You're not an industry that has a lot of strong opinions among politicians. There has been a change in the administration. Mr. Trump would have been much like Larry Fink, who had negative things to say about crypto until he didn't. Now he's embracing it. He even has a company that's actively engaged in crypto. Do you, do you find you want to wade into those waters or do you find that your background in politics makes you want to stay away from.

Being part of that scrum? Yeah, well, you know, I have, I have two jobs. Job number one, dad. Job number two, president of Blockchain.com. And so that means my personal politics, you know, stay aside. I put those to bed when I came to work here. There's, you know, my background is clear and anybody who does any research on me will know. Where I come from and what I've done. However, when it comes to blockchain, I advance our interests regardless of party and we are party-neutral at the company. That said, we spent some time with the president in January. We had lunch with him to have a conversation about our company and our trajectory, some of the challenges we've had at the federal level, not just about the SEC, more about banking regulation and sort of how it's applied unevenly across the states. And he was extremely receptive to it and gave us some recommendations on how to proceed. And we've had a dialogue with the White House ever since then. The crypto industry, very active politically in getting candidates elected on both sides of the aisle as long as they're pro-crypto. Our partners in that, Coinbase, are sort of the loudest and they have the largest pocketbook for it. We fold in behind them. But it's not that we're not active. We're just not quite as loud about it. But we are meeting on the Hill. We're meeting at the White House on a regular basis on all these issues. But because we are focused on becoming a public company next year, we are keeping our head down to not be too political. Yet we are advocating for the interest of our company and our industry. If you look at our board, we have both extremes, right? On one hand, we've got Jim Messina, who's the former deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House. And then the other, we have Joseph Otting, who was the comptroller of the currency in the last Trump administration. And we've got everything in between, right? So we very much try to maintain a bipartisan approach, but You know, it is hard not to be close to.

The administration these days when they're so supportive. Yeah. So you from California, spent time in New York, now you're in Texas, very different cultures, also very different temperatures. I'm, you know, I love San Francisco. It's one of my favorite cities. It's a great foodie city as well. And but I'm reminded of Mark Twain's comment that, you know, the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. That's right. How are you adapting to the, adapting.

To the Texas heat? So we've been here a year. Yeah, we love it. You know, everyone's first comment is, well, you moved here for taxes, right? Yeah. Which we didn't. Now, I'm not going to say that I don't appreciate the tax benefit of being in Texas, but we had the opportunity to leave. And, you know, couples often have that conversation about if we could live anywhere, where would we live? But there's always a blocker, right? Work, school, whatever. We were fortunate. We had a moment in time where we didn't have the blocker. So we looked at 14 different places to move. Dallas is on that list. We ran a very engineering-minded weighted analysis, and I spent a lot of time in Dallas because we have a sponsorship with the Cowboys. And so I was here a lot and I've become a fan of the city. And for everything we think, I think is important in life, from our kids to our social life to food, Dallas just ranked really highly. And I can say a year in, the analysis was right. We're so happy to be here. The summer is rough. We left for the summer. That was a little, a little rough. But, you know, like Texas isn't the West and it's not the South. It's sort of the best of both. Yeah. And I love it. And I also can say my kids are just like better humans being here. Wow. Than they were in Northern California. So I really appreciated that too.

Wow. Well, welcome to Texas. Thank you. Yeah, we're glad to have you here. Thank you. Cowboys. I'm not sure, you know, about that investment, but I'm from Tennessee, so I, you know, I can say that without being reviled necessarily. It's an interesting dynamic here in Texas from somebody that came from, from another state in that everybody loves the Cowboys, but they don't like the ownership.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you always blame the owners if you're not winning.

Exactly right.

So that's, that's interesting. Let's go, let's go into the acquisition side of things because, you know, Blockchain.com, you know, is I don't know if you're the 800-pound gorilla, but you're one of them, one of the bigger players in the space. So when you acquire a company, what are you looking for? And what are those things that make you want to bring them in? Is it something that's doing something that you're not? Is it just the obvious things? And then what are some of the past transactions you've done and what started.

That and how did those go through? So since I've been here, we've acquired 7 companies. We were quite acquisitive when I first got here, and then we slowed down a little bit when the market crashed and have since picked it back up. They generally fall into 3 categories. So the first one is market share. There's a lot of regional crypto companies where you can just buy a bunch of customers, to put it frankly. We've done this most notably in Latin America, across multiple different countries. We bought a company called Sosocio several years ago to basically just buy a customer base and a team all at once. So you basically just jumpstart your business in that region where you may have sort of a small presence. So that's sort of the first part is a regional expansion part that generally starts to pick up as the market starts to collapse a little bit. So I would expect you'll see companies like ours do more of that the next time we're sort of looking at a crypto winter. You'll do more kind of market expansion through acquisition. The second is for tech, right? So as you know, you've noted we have these three different business units. The reason we're able to do that is because we have a common infrastructure that underpins all of them, right? Whether it's the soft stuff, regulatory and licensing, to the hard stuff like the engineering platform that sits underneath, it supports all three businesses. But that means if we want to expand businesses, we need to expand the tech stack. And so one of the fastest ways to do that is to buy it. So we are always looking for interesting technology to buy to complement our existing platform. We've done that 3 times since I've been here. And then the last one is acquihire, right? Or acquihire. So that is 5 to 20 person teams at a company that's doing okay, right? But maybe they can't raise their next round of funding, yet they have these great pods of engineers or product managers or squads, and they may be focused on something completely different. Like we bought one that was focused on like a TV advertising platform, but it was a really great product engineering team. And so we bought them and taught them crypto, right? And so we're doing that kind of constantly, right? We're always looking to acquihire, and it's a great way to add another 5 to 15 people all at once that.

Know how to work together pretty well. What's interesting about that is because, you know, the past year or so, everybody's been talking about AI soaking up all the people's jobs and is an MBA even worth it in the AI world? And, and are you familiar with like Windsurf? Like, I think it's Windsurf, but they had the— Microsoft was going to buy them for like billions of billions of dollars. But then Google came in and just hired all their team for like $2 billion. So they basically made the company worthless. And I'm paraphrasing heavily. So, you know, do your own research on that. But the reason I bring that up is if they're willing to spend that much money on the people in an AI environment, clearly the people element is still a high priority. So hearing that you or Blockchain.com will acquire companies for the people themselves, is pretty cool.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think there are a lot of amazing founders all over the world, right? I was in Silicon Valley. I got a chance to work with them. I was a VC for a little while, so I was investing into companies. But sometimes your business just doesn't work, right? Like you maybe are famously— when I went to VC school at Stanford, they taught us about watching out for the walking dead, right? Those companies that don't have exit trajectories. And you know what I'm talking about, right? And they're they're able to just kind of like plod along a little bit because they're making enough to keep the lights on, but they don't have any potential for an exit. And those are really interesting opportunities for us because those founders usually are pretty humble. They're willing to come in, they want to keep building, they have a vision, but they're okay adapting to a new environment. So we're always on the hunt for those. We're certainly looking for them in Texas because we want to keep expanding our office here, but we look for them.

All over the the world. And it's so great to have you here in Texas with your company.

I look forward to learning more. So, well, talking about innovation, because I've always been fascinated with innovation in the Bitcoin blockchain world, because from what my understanding— and I'll be very honest, it's minimal, but it's more like just being in the room when people are talking about it, kind of learning— it's the blockchain, it's the ledger. And then the only things you're really innovating is maybe making a faster computer to be able to process. Like, what other innovation is there? Like, is it the, you know, sitting in a room and trying to find the loopholes and financial mechanisms to make a new thing? Or like, you know, where's the innovation in the space, rather? Yeah, you see what I'm trying to ask? I know I'm doing a very poor job of asking the question. But because at its core it's just the ledger and in the processing to do it, right?

Yeah. So I guess I would think about it in terms of like, you know, like a car, right? So every car, you know, non-electric car is a combustion engine in it, right? Yet one could argue that like the different manufacturers and different vehicles serve very different purposes, right? Like a cement truck versus like a Honda Accord. Fundamentally, they're the same thing, but they serve very different purposes. So there's innovation in both. I think crypto has very similar properties to that example. So I think on one hand, you've got the assets themselves. So the assets also, everything's coming up in threes today, fall into 3 buckets. So you have assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are store value. That's the digital gold we were talking about. They're not great assets to transact with because they are pretty valuable and they're changing their value actually quickly. So you don't necessarily want to use them to pay for something. Then you have utility tokens, which are assets that were created to facilitate some sort of transaction. The best example I can give you is you've heard of the company Ripple, probably, and their token's called XRP. But what does Ripple do? Why do they exist? Well, The main reason they exist is to facilitate financial transfers between companies across borders. So XRP was developed to help facilitate that, right? Like you can think about it in terms of Uber, right? Uber has to pay, let's call it, a million drivers around the world on the 15th and the 1st, right? On the 1st and the 15th. So they dump in the US dollars into Ripple, who then turns it into XRP. The XRP shoots out around the world and that gets converted into the local currency on the outside. Seems like it's pretty efficient, right? That is a utility function for that asset. Now you can own it as an individual, but like it was developed for a very specific purpose. And then you have the meme coins, right? Which are not really based on anything other than popularity. And it's very hard to predict which ones are going to be popular and not. We generally don't recommend putting a lot of investment into meme coins, yet some meme coins, Dogecoin, become a store of value, right? So sometimes they do become mainstream. Enough people buy them, their market caps increase. The innovation across all three of those is fascinating, right? Bitcoin is very expensive to use. So think about like a wire transfer fee, right? So you pay a fee to use your Bitcoin. Different assets are cheaper to use because it's easier to send them across whatever network they've been developed on. And so that's where the innovation comes into play. Again, may not matter to Americans, but if you're in Nigeria, you really care about what it costs to use your asset to pay the babysitter or buy a pizza because you're using it in place of the naira. You're using it as your form of currency. So you don't want to pay a huge fee. You want to pay a very low fee, right? So innovation in that space is very important to you. So that's one category. I'd say like the other category is the tokenization category, right? Which is taking real-world assets or assets like securities and tokenizing them so more people get access to them or they're easier to transfer. And that does require, you know, the development of a blockchain or a ledger. But that's just the vehicle for executing the transaction, the tokenization process itself. Tons of innovation there. So I think there are— there is quite a lot of innovation to happen. The engine structure doesn't necessarily change, but.

What happens around it will change. Well, I love the example of the cars, because if you think about a Model T and an F1 car, I mean, obviously they're different planets, but it's the theory is the same. Correct.

Yeah.

So how big is the team at Blockchain.com now?

So we're about 500 people, which is a little light for how big the company is. You know, when the market collapsed, we got real small to make sure that we could survive. Number one rule in crypto is just survive, right? So we got small. We've been growing since then, but growing thoughtfully. You know, there is an economy of scale, just how we're, how we're built. So we don't need a 10,000-person team. But we are rapidly hiring.

I'd say we're probably about 100 people short right now.

And then 100 people short.

100 people short. Yeah. And then on that, like, because you're in London and you're in Dallas and you said you have employees all over the world or all over the country, all over the world.

Yeah. What are the challenges in leading that type of team? So at first, you know, just after COVID, we were fully remote. So while we had some offices, people could work from home, which I think there will be papers and books written forever about work from home versus back in the office. And we did start to run into some challenges where the team was just moving more slowly. It was harder to solve what seemed like quite easy problems. And so we did require everyone to come back into the office. And so over the last year, we've really been focused on— in the US, Texas is, or Dallas is now our hub. We've got London, we've got Paris, we've got Singapore, we've got Vilnius, Lithuania, we've got Buenos Aires, I'm probably missing a couple others. But now when we're hiring, we're hiring people to come back into the office. And what we're finding is that the team is much more efficient now that we're bringing all those people together. That also means each office develops its own culture. And in addition to having a culture, that work ethic that comes with it is getting much stronger. And so I do think it was pretty hard to manage a team globally that was basically all sitting in their living rooms because you couldn't really get teams to work as efficiently together. Now that they're in offices, there is sort of that group mentality that keeps the team being efficient. It does require that we have to travel around to the offices a lot, and also offices tend to wither and die unless there's a strong leader in each of them. So we're very thoughtful about making sure there's a management level or senior exec.

In each one who anchors it. Yeah, I think that's going to be like the great debate for the next 10, 20 years is to office at home, work remote, or work in the office. Because like, you know, I'm a fan of that. I'm a fan of the Jamie Dimon mindset. But then again, you've had like Brett Ryan who's like, well, we've always been remote. People come to the office, they go work from home. I don't care as long as they do the work. Yeah. So it's a fascinating debate, I suppose.

Yeah, we're not like 9 to 5 at your desk. And if you need to go work from home for whatever reason, I had some stuff with my family yesterday. I was working from my home office all day. Like, you do what you need to do, right? But generally we're in the office depending on where you are, 3, 4 days a week. Some offices are 5. It just depends on that, that city's unique environment.

So this is going to be a fun question. Like, you've got that California vibe. We've been sitting here talking. I've met you before. And you've got kind of like a cool guy aspect to affect, whatever. But at its core, blockchain is fairly nerdy. The tech guys, the guys that have never seen the sun ever. What's it like being a leader of a company? And again, I know not everybody at Blockchain.com is like that. There is kind of like that fun, cool, cool guy, sex appeal type thing going out there. But at its core, it's a technology company. So how do you keep technology like fun and hip and all those things? Or is that just my personal bias.

Bleeding through because I came from that? Were you insulted or were you complimented?

I'm not sure where we landed on all that. I don't know what he's asking. I want— I can't wait to like highlight this section to show my 13-year-old because they'd be like, well, no, that doesn't sound right to me. Well, thank you for saying that. I appreciate it. I did. When we first took the office across the street from where we are today, got in the elevator and next floor, woman gets in the elevator and she kind of looks me up and down. She's like, you must be from California and a very thick Texas accent. I was like, wow, okay. I didn't realize my attire kind of spoke that. So yeah, I think, you know, at this point, you know, crypto companies are not just full of the crypto nerds, right? Which is sort of how they were initially built. And it's okay. I think they see that as a term of endearment. It was for a long time a requirement that you only hired people who were crypto native. They had to be into the space, right? They had to live and breathe it. They had to have experience in it. Otherwise they couldn't be effective. It was just too complicated. And what's happened over time is that we realized, sure, That may have been true then and certainly is important for people who are leading different parts of like the engineering or the product org. But really you can hire experts in any field and then teach them the crypto thing and that's generally a lot easier. And so that's what we're doing today. So I do think the personality types that you'll find at our company kind of run across the board from like deep crypto expertise. They live and breathe it. 100% of their assets are in it. They're talking about stuff that like I don't even understand, right? To folks who have just come to the space from working at a company that was maybe in telecom or in dating or something else and have become crypto execs. That's okay. They can learn the crypto thing. I mean, we are building a 100-year company here, right? And so that requires us to be thoughtful about the fact that some people may not be believers in crypto or they may not have seen the value for themselves. I'm constantly dealing with investors. I'm at every investor conference and often when I'm dealing with private sector investors or equity investors, private equity investors, they have heard about crypto, they've looked at it, they've done some analysis on it, maybe they've invested in it. But more often than not, when I'm talking to public equity investors, they are very like anti-crypto. And this is moving now that there's more public companies and it's like I'll be sitting in a room like this and it's like I have to debate the merits of it. And the reality is, like, we can agree to disagree. We don't have to be disagreeable. You'll get there eventually. Like, I'm not trying to sell you on it, right? Like, you will get there. And if you don't, that's fine, right? My job isn't to convince you to be interested in crypto. My job is to give you a place to engage with crypto that's safe, offers a lot of features and benefits, and that can actually help you accomplish whatever your financial goals are., but I'm not trying to evangelize for it. I think that like, and count yourself lucky if you've not sort of like seen this or heard about it, but like crypto bros and Lamborghinis was a thing, like crypto bros and yachts and all of that, lots of planes, all of this stuff. Our company is like, we've never engaged in that. The founder, Peter, myself, like we are the opposite. We are like boring folks that live in the suburbs and drive Volvos. Like it is, we are not that world. And I think the company has been.

Successful because that has never been part of our DNA. You know, with BlackRock and Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon becoming believers, it will become more institutionalized. And I think the culture around it will change. I became a stockbroker in 1980, you know, 45 years ago. And I, growing up in Memphis, which was an agricultural community, it was sort of, we were this, very Southern, religious, conservative community. But we had people that were the largest cattle trader, the largest pork belly trader that were speculative. And so it was this dichotomy. And I started investing in commodities and in hedge funds back when they weren't even called hedge funds. And people responded in the same way they respond about crypto now. If it wasn't a stock or a bond or real estate, then there must be something terribly wrong and risky about it. You know, I made the argument and wrote papers at the time, published academic papers that managed futures, if used properly, actually reduce the risk of a stock and bond portfolio because they were non or negatively correlated. But boy, you want to talk about getting goofy looks. And so I can understand sort of how it must feel to be a mover in a space where there's a lot of resistance and a lot of skepticism. But it certainly seems to me that a whole lot of people that are very high up the food chain are.

Now coming around and embracing what you're doing. I think that's right. And my experience has been, at least lately, more with crypto curious than resistance. Here at Old Parkland, I'm fortunate to you know, have lots of meet and greets here with various family offices and hedge funds are based here. And I want to say almost all of them are not yet in crypto.

But are very curious about it. Yeah, I would define myself that way as very curious about it, particularly when people like Paul Tudor Jones, whom I know as a very sophisticated investor who said, no, you shouldn't invest in that now, make it a part of their core strategy. It's kind of like, wow, what am I— what am I missing here? It looks like it's turned the corner. The ETFs, how much capital is now.

In the exchange-traded funds? I don't know. I don't watch that number. I think you said it's the fastest growing ETF. BlackRock's iShares ETF is their fastest. Well, it's only been around for 21 months. It's been the fastest growing 21 months of any ETF they have launched. And since then we have seen multiple other ETFs take off in a similar, similar fashion. I also know the board of that is made up of some former crypto execs, which is amazing that BlackRock, you know, storied institution, took that step. You know, I think we'll probably see more exposure for regular consumers, which is generally how this all starts, to crypto assets through whatever platform is they use right through Schwab or, you know, E-Trade or maybe that's the same now, I'm not even sure. But there are more options available for them to have exposure to it. Right. And that's kind of where it starts, right? So while people may represent companies and funds and institutions, they're, you know, individual consumers first. Right. And so they get their education there. And we're seeing it on the investor side where, you know, for a long time it really was like VC firms or people who are more crypto native But now for the first time, we're starting to see public pension funds and other types of frankly, like more risk-averse asset groups becoming interested in crypto. So I, yeah, I do think we've really kind of come around that corner. CalPERS? Not yet. Yeah, that would be— that's the holy grail. It is the holy grail. It is. Yeah. No, not yet. We've not had any— well, maybe some folks have had conversations with CalPERS.

We have not. Yeah, like California Public Employee Retirement Plan. It's the largest private— it's the largest.

Pension plan in the world.

It is the largest pension plan in the world.

Yeah.

When they move into something, they move in a big way. And it also, aside from their dollars, the credibility that's assigned when a CalPERS adopts you, they made a big move in alternatives back in the day and.

Gave a lot of credibility to it. So as we wrap, One thing I just want to point out is, is going back to the employees in your hiring strategy. And what I mean by that is your openness to like, hey, you don't know anything about crypto, that's fine, come on in. And I think that's so important just because not just the typical climate of pretty much any industry or politics or whatever, it's just with social media and algorithms, it forces people into these echo chambers. So the fact that y'all are not forcefully, but just naturally open the door to get outside opinions and are welcoming to that, I think is so powerful.

And look forward to seeing the progress of blockchain.com. I'll leave you with this crazy story, which I think you hopefully find as amazing as I did. So we have a couple of brand spokesmen for the— or spokespeople for the company. Some are former NFL players, some are current players. One of them is a former NFL player, and I was recently with him at an event and I met his partner, significant other, and we're talking and she has a job working in insurance somehow, doing something in insurance. And she said, but, you know, in my spare time, I trade crypto options. And I mean, I was like, my jaw was on the floor. I'm like, there's 100 people in the world who know how to trade crypto options. And then like, here is a random person that I just met who's connected to us through sports and, you know, brand representation who their side hobby is trading crypto options. Right. So like that was a watershed moment for me, right, that I could meet someone randomly who knew about something that we have a small team doing and there are very few experts in the world. So, you know, I am, I am very excited about what the future holds, not just for our company, but also for our industry.

That's a great story.

I didn't know there were crypto options. Like I said, there are like maybe 100 people, maybe 200 people in the world that trade them. We're fortunate to have a few of.

Them, but Yeah, like it is nascent. Fascinating. Well, thank you so much, Lane. Great to have you here. Great to have you and your team here in Dallas. Great to hear that you did a rational approach to evaluating where you wanted to put your company and you chose here. That speaks highly of Dallas and we're glad you're here.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.