This post was last updated on May 15th, 2020 at 01:56 pm

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Quotes
āAs someone who identifies with being a journalist, you always want to take the side of advocating for the misunderstood. I think #bitcoin and #cryptocurrency are still widely misunderstood.ā ~@pete_rizzo_, Editor-At-Large @krakenfxĀ Click To Tweet āConsumer protection and limiting harm are really attractive first principles ā especially in an ecosystem like #crypto, where those were really in short supply back in the day.ā ~@pete_rizzo_, Editor-At-Large @krakenfx Click To Tweet āThe long-term case for #bitcoinās price growth is positive. It's based on actual data. Even if you draw conservative assumptions, it's still an attractive investment opportunity.ā ~@pete_rizzo_, Editor-At-Large @krakenfx Ā Click To TweetDescription
Welcome to this conversation with Pete Rizzo, Editor At Large at Kraken and former Editor In Chief at CoinDesk. It’s a wide-ranging interview that begins with a quick history of crypto journalism and a review of Pete’s career before shifting to the fascinating report from Kraken Intelligence entitled Inheriting USDs & Acquiring BTCs: How The Great Wealth Transfer Will Fuel The Great Bitcoin Adoption.
The conversation is split into 4 chapters:
- Chapter 1: Peteās time at CoinDesk
- Chapter 2: His current role as Editor At Large at Kraken
- Chapter 3: The Kraken report
- Chapter 4: The cryptocurrency canon or collection of writings that anyone interested in crypto should read
Topics Discussed In This Episode
- Peteās first experiences covering cryptocurrency
- The early days of crypto content
- How everyday language can fail technological innovations like Bitcoin
- On joining CoinDesk back in mid-2013
- Pete’s years as CoinDeskās Editor In Chief
- How the internet & social media disrupted the old media monopolies
- Why we still need professional investigative journalists
- Krakenās record of putting ethics over expediency
- Krakenās new report on the āGreat Wealth Transferā
- How the “Great Wealth Transfer” could bring $1 trillion into Bitcoin
- Krakenās recent acquisitions and plans for the future
- The cryptocurrency canon
- Why crypto needs a definitive, in-depth explanation of Bitcoin mining
Links Relevant To This Episode
- Nomics.com
- Nexo
- CryptoTrader.Tax
- Nomics’ Fully Customizable Daily Crypto Newsletter
- Flippening.com
- Clay Collins
- Pete Rizzo
- Kraken
- CoinDesk
- Bitcoin (BTC)
- Mike Dudas
- The Block
- Ripple (XRP)
- Coinbase
- Balaji Srinivasan
- Tuur Demeester
- Dan Held
- Jameson Lopp
- Nobody Understands Bitcoin (And Thatās OK)
- Adam Back
- Economics of Proof-of-Work Mining
- Binance
- Tim Copeland
- Ben Munster
- Lightning Network
- Ethereum (ETH)
- Tezos (XTZ)
- TRON (TRX)
- FTX
Transcript
Clay: Welcome to Flippening, the first and original podcast for full time, professional, and institutional crypto investors. Iām your host, Clay Collins. Each week, we discuss the cryptocurrency economy, new investment strategies for maximizing returns, and stories from the frontlines of financial disruption. Go to flippening.com to join our newsletter for cryptocurrency investors, and find out just why this podcast is called Flippening.
Clay Collins is the CEO of Nomics. All opinions expressed by Clay and podcast guests are solely their own opinion, [00:00:30] and do not reflect the opinion of Nomics or any other company. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon as the basis for investment decisions.
Welcome to this conversation with Pete Rizzo, Editor-At-Large at Kraken, which is a top 10 crypto exchange and one of the first legitimate crypto businesses in the space. Before Kraken, Pete Rizzo was Editor and Chief at CoinDesk, where he worked for 6 years and helped grow the publication from a concept to the industryās most important crypto news website.
[00:01:00] This interview is ostensibly about Kraken Intelligenceās fascinating report entitled Inheriting USDs & Acquiring BTCs: How āThe Great Wealth Transferā Will Fuel āThe Great Bitcoin Adoption.ā But we also spend a great deal of time discussing the history of crypto journalism, the origins of CoinDesk, the editor-in-chief role, crypto journalism today, and Peteās new role at Kraken.
As a side note, if you want to hear more about the state of crypto journalism, check out episode 70 of this podcast, where we speak with Mike Dudas, CEO of The Block, [00:01:30] about their growth from zero to four million readers in 18 months.
Our conversation is split into four chapters. Chapter one is Peteās time at CoinDesk. In chapter two, we discuss Peteās current role as Editor-At-Large at Kraken. In chapter three, we do a deep dive on the Kraken report. Finally, in chapter four, we consider the cryptocurrency canon or collection of writings that anyone interested in crypto [00:02:00] assets and blockchain should read.
The transcript and show notes for this episode are available at flippening.com/rizzo.
Weāll get to the episode in just a second, but before we get started Iād like to pause for a moment to tell you that this episode is brought to you by the good folks at nexo.io. Hereās a word from them.
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Okay, back to our regularly scheduled program. Hereās my conversation with Pete Rizzo, Editor-At-Large at Kraken. Enjoy. [00:05:30]
Clay: Before we get started I was thinking about this interview and how it should come together, and it occurred to me that it would be a huge missed opportunityābefore talking about this really interesting reportāif we didn’t talk a little bit about your background and some of the wisdom [00:06:00] that you’ve accumulated in the crypto journalism trenches. You’re really one of the pioneers in this space. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were up to before crypto and how you discovered this whole space?
Pete: Sure. Before I was a professional journalist, I was an aspiring journalist. As an aspiring journalist, I was looking for ways to get my name out there, cover something that was interesting. Obviously, when you’re young and trying to get started in any field, it’s difficult to really differentiate [00:06:30] yourself. I ended up working for a friend of mine who was doing mobile payments journalism around the emerging fintech space, and I got involved there. I started taking on some articles and eventually figured I needed to differentiate myself.
This was at the top of 2013, and as many listeners might know, this was the early days of Mt. Gox was losing its banking relationships. The first venture capital was really funding bitcoin and cryptocurrency companies or really just bitcoin companies then. [00:07:00] I really sank my teeth into those stories. I attended some local bitcoin meetups in Boston, got to know the people, and I was just super fascinated by all the stories there.
My first article had something likeāI interviewed a comedian who had invested in bitcoin, a business owner who was accepting bitcoin. Just a wide variety of like very interesting people and characters. That’s what really drew me to cryptocurrency is it was something that was really new, and no one could really quite explain it, and it was just a great story. [00:07:30] I found myself always fascinated by it. As someone who is a writer, who’s someone who is interested in exploring concepts, you always want to be working on something where there’s no past precedent.
You can’t really go back to like the 1900s and find an old article on cryptocurrency about somebody having already written that. They don’t have this body of work that exists. Whereas if you’re writing about politics or something, there’s this established canon that you need to live up to. What I really liked about cryptocurrency was that it was just so new. [00:08:00] You’d ask 10 people about it and you would get 11 answers. I think it’s still, in many ways, like that today.
Clay: Thatās a really great point. When it comes to content, it seemed like in crypto, there were a number of land grabs going on, but one of them was brandingāboth personal branding and branding when it comes to creating media businesses, content businesses, YouTube channels. There was this was heyday that existed simply by existing and putting out [00:08:30] content on a fairly regular basis. It doesn’t mean you necessarily make a lot of money, but you could establish yourself as one of the authorities in the space fairly early without much of a track record. It sounds like you’re speaking to some of that. Does that ring true to you?
Pete: There was a great quote from Paul Vigna. This is from the Age of Cryptocurrency where it’s, “No one writes songs about PayPal.” I always really liked that quote because I thought it summed up what I always found really interesting about cryptocurrency. It just had a passionate and [00:09:00] enthusiast base. It was easy. There was a time when the barrier to entry to things was lower. I don’t think that means necessarily that the first generation of pioneers did a bad job. You can look and see that a lot of the institutions that were built up early on have endured some of them more successfully than others.
I do think overall, if you look at the ecosystem today for journalism and exchanges compared to even four years ago. A good benchmark that people are using right now is, āWhere were we at [00:09:30] at the last halfing?ā That was in 2016 and the price was below $600. We were coming off a low of $200, $300. The interesting thing to remember back then is that we didn’t really have the body of evidence that we had about bitcoin’s price and its historical behavior, That’s one of the things that was so cool about this Kraken reportāthat we’ll get to talk aboutāis that it dives into that. We didn’t really have that stuff, so nobody knew that bitcoin wasn’t failing back then.
[00:10:00] That’s where you get into the great lore of the community with the infighting and the technology wars that occurred. I do think it’s a fascinating time. You compare that to now and there’s still a lot of investment into cryptocurrencyāeven though it’s a down market as you alluded to. A lot of media brands out there, a lot of bloggers, people doing successful cryptocurrency content. That’s great. The support and the investment in the ecosystem is just so much higher than it was four years ago. If you weren’t there, [00:10:30] it’s hard to keep that in mind.
We have exchanges like Kraken where we have 800 employees, we have 70 open job positions. We’re doing $83 million in daily volume across our exchanges. This is a down period for cryptocurrency. If you look at the last down market that wasn’t true. The overall health of the ecosystem, and again, that’s something I think the report looks at really well. The bitcoin ecosystem and the larger [00:11:00] cryptocurrency ecosystem are pretty healthy compared to where they were four years ago.
Clay: That’s a little bit about what got you into the space. A key word there is differentiation. It was a time when someone could differentiate by focusing on cryptos. It sounds like it was a good combination of following your passion, but also, it sounds like it was a great calculation in terms of career positioning as well.
Pete: I always thought that something like CoinDesk needed to exist even before I was a member of the CoinDesk team. Itās easy to see [00:11:30] why people would need quality information about a subject like cryptocurrency. Even 10 years on, we’re still struggling to make the technology. We’re struggling to explain technology to the technology to people. I mentioned this recently to someone. One of the amazing things about real innovations in technology is that linguistics fails bitcoin in a lot of respects. It is a technology that is so multifaceted, that is so [00:12:00] dense in what it achieves that we lack the ability to express what it does.
That’s really powerful. That has held back bitcoin to some extent, but it’s also representative of something larger, which is that as humanity, we’re confronting this new idea. We need to understand it in real time together. There’s no way for us to accelerate our understanding of it. That’s what’s so cool about it. It does, [00:12:30] in a lot of respects, still feel like a misunderstood thing. As someone who identifies with being a journalist, you always want to take the side of advocating for the misunderstood, and bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are still widely misunderstood.
Clay: With that letās transition to chapter one, which is about Peteās time at CoinDesk.
How did you come in contact with that team, and what was your first role there, and how did that develop over time?
Pete: I joined CoinDesk when it was a loose group of people on Skype is [00:13:00] probably the best way to refer to itāwho just had a really good idea for a product. We’re really nailing creating something really special for that market. I joined around mid-2013. I was the first US hire to a team that was largely based in Europe. I quickly became the person they built around as they moved operations into the US because that’s where a lot of the investment and the activity was happening.
Obviously, [00:13:30] that business changed over the years. Eventually, we got acquired, we launched a conference business. A lot of learning lessons there. I wear a lot of hats. I was someone who initially was writing stories. People there remember meāand a lot of people remember me in the spaceāas the person who’d take their phone call at any time if they had an announcement or something.
I remember doing a midnight call with somebody from Ripple about their funding announcement. What we were trying to do with CoinDesk is always outcompete [00:14:00] the major news sources, and really build something where we were serving a 24-hour global market. Again, providing quality information because the thing that the ecosystem really lacked back in the dayāand it still persists to todayāit’s that a lot of the data services are bad. They rely on poor assumptions, they deliver information that’s somewhat questionable. The same thing with the startups, the companies, and announcements, somebody needs to hold these people accountable or at least make transparent what is happening.
[00:14:30] I was always attracted to the mission of trying to grow that part of the ecosystem because I felt that, again, consumer protection and limiting harm are just really attractive first principles. Especially in the ecosystem like crypto where those were really in short supply back in the day.
Clay: Then as your role expanded and you became Editor-in-Chief I don’t know, could you share a little bit about what an editor-in-chief does? Is it primarily focused on content, [00:15:00] or do you have revenue responsibilities? Are there quantitative numbers, goals that one needs to hit and is incentivized around? What does that look like? What are the incentives and forces at play being in a role like that?
Pete: I would say that more than at any other company, journalists at CoinDesk were people who did mostly everything. I worked on helping launch the consensus conference, I worked on the business side. You’re talking for [00:15:30] the first two or three years, we expanded to about 12 people, but we contracted to two or three people. It was an environment where you had to wear a lot of hats
Media businesses are hard to monetize anyway. It doesn’t matter really if you’re in a new emerging technology field. That doesn’t give you any special edge. It’s still difficult to monetize. Yeah, I would say in contrast to today where I think a lot of young journalists are able to come into cryptocurrency, and they’re able to go to CoinDesk, or The Block, or Decrypt. They’re able to [00:16:00] focus on their stories, they’re able to focus on their narratives. Really, what the ecosystem lacked back in the day was anything that would support them.
CoinDesk was really the first successful company because it became a company. It became something that could support the kind of work that it wanted to further in the world. There are a lot of early first generation bitcoin media startups like InsideBitcoins, we just see the things that came and went. I always looked at it as the success of CoinDesk was supporting the work
It’s the [00:16:30] idea that something like this should exist and then committing to that continuance. Ultimately, we were able to get there. I don’t know how to quantify Editor-in-Chief. I had designed the interior of the office. I picked out the couch. I was up at 12:00 in the morning talking to our editor in China because we were establishing a 24-hour news outlet. All of a sudden we went to 24 hours and people were online all day. I was [00:17:00] determining how they had conversations in Slack, and who reported to who, and what the role definitions were.
I really transitioned, again, from a few people on Skype to something where it was a 40 plus person operation around the world. You’ll hear similar stories even at Kraken now. It’s an 800-person company around the world. They take security, 24-hour security, very seriously, and you’ll hear more stories from people there who were with the exchange when it was very small. [00:17:30] Obviously, a number of departments and a number of verticals.
Everybody has that same story especially in 2017 and dealing with the influx of consumers, the new demands on the products. [That’s been 00:17:42] what’s so cool being at Kraken is really just seeing how they’ve done that, but also staying true to the values of crypto.
That’s something that really shines through in the Kraken brand, and that a very few companies have done successfully, which is staying true to the ethos and trying to build and grow the technology and the products [00:18:00] but also keeping in mind those first principles. If there is a commonality where my work from CoinDesk extends into what I’m doing with Kraken, it’s definitely that same commitment, I would say.
Clay: I’ve been really impressed with some of the acquisitions that Kraken has made. I think it was in the same month? I could be wrong, but they announced both the acquisition of Circle’s OTC Trading Desk and then that they had hired you. I was like, āWow. They’re going to tear?ā
Pete: You sat with Marco Santori yesterday, right? Who’s now our chief legal officer. [00:18:30] The message is people want to work at Kraken. Again, it speaks to the brand, and the commitments to the community, and the ethos. Those are very strong attributes in this environment, and that companies that show that commitment, again, are reaping a lot of benefits.
Clay: Did you own revenue at CoinDesk at various points, or that there was a business office or a sales org that did that?
Pete: I never owned revenue specifically. That was one of the things we were trying to do is separate [00:19:00] the business side from the editorial to make sure that there was never any undue influence there. I would definitely say I consulted on matters of business and did feedback into things like that. Over time, we were able to separate those two things. You always want some collaboration there. I did wear many hats for sure.
Clay: Letās move on to chapter two, which is a discussion of Peteās current role at Kraken. Your official title is Editor-At-Large, and what [00:19:30] comes with that?
Pete: At Kraken, I’m really working on a diverse amount of things across products, across some different creative fields. Obviously, for exchanges, the big thing right now is to educate and acquire customers. They’re doing things like research reports, which we’ll talk about, webinars, they’re doing evergreen content, educational content. There’s a tremendous demand for companies in this space to help educate the market.
[00:20:00] I’m playing a role wherever Kraken needs to interface with that audience and communicate intelligently. The thing that is really attractive about Kraken is they want to speak to new people, but they want to help guide new people in such a way where they’re getting the wisdom of the people who’ve come before.
That to me was very attractive in terms of I don’t think there has been a great service or an educational offering from the community. I don’t think there’s a lot of companies that are really [00:20:30] committing to that. That’s something that we’re really trying to do with Kraken’s brand right now. We have this tremendous inner industry reputation where people in the industry love Kraken.
Weāre trying to update the product and translate it in such a way where even new people who might, today, take the easy choice of going to Coinbase, or Cash App, or Robinhood where you may not actually even own Bitcoin. Because on something like Robinhood, you may notice you can’t withdraw your bitcoin. [00:21:00] You’re not actually purchasing the assets. Translating that experience to something where you’re also getting the benefits and the expertise of the Kraken brand, and the team is really where our mission is heading.
Clay: Last question about the journalism space, do you think there’s anything important or different about how media businesses or journalism companies monetizing crypto versus other places? It’s [00:21:30] interesting that the longestāand probably largest in terms of page viewsāplayer in the space, which is CoinDesk, monetizes with a conference. Do you think that is just a fluke, or do you think that crypto content businesses need to monetize differently?
Pete: The question is interesting. I’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this over the years. I don’t think there’s anything unique about crypto businesses. That’s one of the things that people get wrong maybe when looking at crypto media is that the media is [00:22:00] under tremendous change. If you’ve been following Balaji Srinivasan tweets. He’s tweeting a lot about citizen journalism and how the tools to access media outletsāit’s interesting.
Media outlets are third parties. Even the word media is that you are a medium, which means that you are interfacing between parties. Media outlets were historically intermediaries who controlled access to the means to disseminate information, which was historically quite expensive. If you look at the 1800s [00:22:30] where it was owning a printing press or even the 1900s. The New York Times owns the means to print 200,000 copies of the New York Times every day and disseminate that to 70,000 New Yorkers within a few hours.
That was the means of publication. I find that to be something that was a really useful analogy with cryptocurrency because if you think about it today, banks and financial institutions, they have that same monopoly. Printing money and [00:23:00] putting money into financial products is a similar resource-intensive process. You have to print the assets. You have to make the contract. You have to have a broker sign this thing. It has a lot of attributes that itās easy to equate with earlier media.
How I like to view cryptocurrency within a historical lens is that what we’re seeing happen with media companies that we should eventually see with financial services. That the [00:23:30] long tail of crypto instructions should evolve similarly. Then you bring that back to crypto journalism. I don’t think there’s anything special about cryptocurrency media particularly. Media is at the long tail of being disrupted by our ability to move information at lightning speed around the world. Someday, a similar thing will happen in the dissemination of money. I think that maybe there’s a role. [00:24:00] Who knows how that will change the media further? It’ll likely have a pretty big effect.
Clay: I find it interesting how few of the publications that I’ve come to respect have stayed independent like CoinDesk was acquired. The Washington Post obviously owned by Jeff Bezos. You’re now at Kraken. Anyone can publish things now, but having the education, the background, and [00:24:30] being able to fund long investigative pieces, that isn’t cheap stuff to do. It’s part of the reasons why I pay for subscriptions to the New York Times, why I pay for a subscription to the Economist.
Pete: Absolutely, yeah. I will always defend journalism. One of the issues with journalism is that I don’t think journalism really knows what it is anymore. Working in the media today is probably 1000 times harder than it was 100 years ago because it’s just the tools and the competition is so [00:25:00] fierce. That’s something that you want to keep in mind when evaluating it. Technology disruption creates competition, and competition increases value. At a certain point, that is not always true. We still need the New York Times, we still need Reuters, and we still need people who are going to pay the enormous cost of resourcing information that is in the public interest that is not public.
I’ll give you an example that I really like. The [00:25:30] Louis C.K. sexual abuse or assault allegations. That was a story that was famous and published by the New York Times. That’s an investigation that took many months of effort, whose publication had massive ramifications for the entertainment industry. That work still needs to be done by journalism, journalists, and that is journalism. Journalism has been diluted by things like technology services like Twitter, and Google, and the internet. It’s [00:26:00] easy to prioritize clicks and publishing opinions. These things are very easy to do. The core ofā
Clay: Price predictions.
Pete: Yeah, price predictions. The core of producing valuable non-public information that is a societal good. Itās easy to understand why something like that should exist, and it’s easy to understand the benefits of it. It’s harder to understand how you create business models to un-log it. I would say, I’m still really passionate about that idea. I do think though that [00:26:30] tech journalism particularly and other subsets of journalism have maybe lost sight of that.
Clay: Let’s transition to the role of content for businesses like Kraken but also wallet providers. There’s a whole of reports coming out in this space. There’s a whole lot of analysis. What do you think represents the value when it comes to these reports analysis? Because everyone’s taking polls, everyone’s compiling this stuff. Every once in a while, some of these pop.
Much [00:27:00] like movies, a lot of these reports analysis, it seems to be a bit of a hits driven business and itās hard to predict. Even in industries that are hits driven, there are companies like Disney that manage to knock it out of the park consistently and have multiple billion-dollar-plus movies in one year. What do you think goes into a good report? What represents value to the space?
Pete: As Editor-At-Large at Kraken, I’m speaking on behalf of a lot of the people who do create behind the scenes work to [inaudible 00:27:27] and develop these reports. The lens that we’ve [00:27:30] taken on it is to avoid short-term, small window analysis. We do some recurring monthly reports and things like that, but for our larger proprietary stuff, I’d say with this report, we were able to take a vague impression and then supply hard data to back that assumption up.
The report that we’re talking about is the great wealth transfer. How basically generational transition of money can give Bitcoin a price boost. That takes a vague impression that people [00:28:00] have that generational attitudes toward Bitcoin are improving, that younger generations are more inclined to buy Bitcoin, that obviously, wealth will transfer between those generations over time, and then it really takes a hard analytics approach to quantifying that.
We’re examining authoritative sources and making reasons for the estimates about how this transition might occur. Something like that can be really useful because it takes something where we’re talking about a subject that’s obviously a core to Kraken, [00:28:30] which is the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies. We’re taking a much more historical or longer-term lens on it and helping invite new people into seeing the world through our eyes.
At Kraken, really, where exchanges, and wallets, and these types of content providers provide value is when they provide useful frameworks. They avoid the easy predictions. They avoid the things that are cheap wins. They provide something where [00:29:00] the thing I liked about this report is you could send it to someone who really hadn’t interfaced with cryptocurrency a lot before. It takes the approach of giving it as part of technological transition at large.
There’s just a ton of super interesting facts in the report. Just painting this picture. The number of wallets that contain between 0.1 Bitcoin and 1 Bitcoin has grown. It was something like 200,000 in 2014 to 2 million. It’s easy to see [00:29:30] something like that. Even though in crypto, being in the industry day-to-day we see the ups and downs, that’s a clear multi-year trend there.
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First, when the price of your collateral grows, [00:31:00] so does your credit line. Letās say that you borrow against your Bitcoin when each Bitcoin is worth $5000, but over the course of your loan, the price grows to $10,000 per Bitcoin. This means that the size of your credit line in Nexo just doubled as well. I personally havenāt seen anyone else doing this.
A second thing that I really about Nexo is that you only pay interest on the amount that you borrow. Iāve seen Nexo competitors require you to take out loans and force you to borrow the entire amount. With Nexo, you get a credit line, can borrow only the funds you need, and pay them [00:31:30] back whenever you want, with interest assessed daily. Again, this isnāt something Iāve seen other providers do.
The final aspect of Nexo Iād like to highlight is that they give you the ability to borrow against a basket of cryptoassets. For example, if you post BTC, ETH, and BNB as collateral to your Nexo account, the Nexo Oracle calculates the real-time market value of those assets and adjusts your credit line accordingly. To my knowledge, other providers in this space only allow you to borrow against one asset per loan.
Finally, this episode is also [00:32:00] brought to you by the startup that produces it, nomics.com. Nomics is a crypto market cap website and aggregator going head to head with CoinMarketCap. We stand as a transparent alternative to many of the sketchy market cap websites out there. We wonāt name names, but I think you know who weāre referring to.
Anyway, if you haven’t been to nomics.com in a while, I encourage you to visit our website. We offer transparent volume statistics for nearly every cryptocurrency and crypto exchange in the space, and I believe we have the only credible crypto exchange index in the space at the time [00:32:30] of this recording. If youāre sick of scammy ads, bad design, and manipulated data provided by companies whose founders hide from public view, then check us out at nomics.com.
Okay, back to Pete.
Pete: That’s really how we have approached it, we’ll be seeing a few more publications coming from the Kraken Intelligence research arm coming up in Q2 and beyond.
Clay: Let’s make sure we do a deep dive on the report here inside before we do, can you just tell us what is the scope of everything that you cover? [00:33:00] Is it all content? You mentioned webinars, reports, copyrighting. If you guys were going to run a conversion rate optimization split test of your home page, would you be in charge of that, or who would do that?
Pete: One of the cool things about working at Kraken is it’s definitely a roll up your sleeves environment. If you want to get involved in different things there’s a lot of latitudes there. I would say coming from CoinDesk and that entrepreneurial environment, I’ve found a similar environment here where you have a lot of [00:33:30] different teams, a lot of different synergies. I’d like to say that I work on trying to harmonize all those things within Kraken. Maybe finding a way for people who already work together to work together a little bit more efficiently, to work together in a way where they’re able to align their work more with something that interests them.
What I’m hoping to bring to Kraken is just the operational efficiency that you get with a 24-hour news outlet. How regimented and diligent you have to be and [00:34:00] applying that to different creative functions in ways that make sense and that helps them and us get our messaging out.
Clay: One of the things that I appreciate about Kraken is there are so many brands in the space that start with Coin, or Bit, or everything is very jargony in terms of branding. I like that Kraken, much like Nomics, has a different name. It’s a single word. Then on branding, it’s pink and purple. It feels like you guys are taking branding risks. Is [00:34:30] that true across the board, or do you feel like you are allowed to do risky things when it comes to brand and brand voice, or is that not owned by you?
Pete: Yeah, I definitely work with brand voice a lot. I don’t know if that’s how I look at it as trying to do a risky thing, or that our job as content creators is to do risky things.
Clay: To differentiate it at least.
Pete: Whenever you’re doing content, you want to accentuate, you ought to break out the brand. With Kraken, the key for Kraken is [00:35:00] being really across the line community line. That’s what separates Kraken from other exchange news is that Kraken is definitely historically taking a very ethical approach to the business. You can look at our CEO Jesse Powell and his statements that he’s made in terms of negotiating with the regulators, bringing up difficult topics.
Kraken has done a great job historically being like a sherpa or a shepherd for the industry. When other people took easy, easy routes on [00:35:30] things, Kraken sometimes took the harder route because it was the right thing to do. Translating that into the brand has been really hard because it takes a lot of people to commit to a set of values. What’s good about Kraken is weāre bringing in those people right.
You saw Pierre Rochard, Dan Held, myself, and Marco Santori whoās now coming in. Itās that commitment to value that really is the first principle that drives everything else that we’re doing.
Clay: Letās shift to chapter three, which is Krakenās report entitled Inheriting [00:36:00] USDs & Acquiring BTCs: How āThe Great Wealth Transferā Will Fuel āThe Great Bitcoin Adoption.ā
I looked at the report and read it. It’s fascinating. It reminds me a little bit of the report that got me to actually buy a Bitcoin back in the day. I had friends who were mining it. Back in 2015 or so, I read a report from Tuur Demeester called How to Position for the Rally in Bitcoin. It [00:36:30] was this super optimistic report. I don’t think he had a fund back then or was taking LPs, but it was the kind of thing that needed a refresh. It was a good just introduction to the topic, and it’s hard to get that anymore because there is so much context. It’s hard to know where to start, and who you’re speaking to, and all of that.
In this report, Inheriting USDs and Acquiring BTCs: How āThe Great Wealth Transferā Will Fuel āThe Great Bitcoin Adoption.ā Who is this written if you think about [00:37:00] reader personas? Was this written towards someone who was just getting started or someone else?
Pete: The thing with working with the Kraken Intelligence teamāthis is something we talked about isāwho’s the audience? The answer to that is someone who wants to take an analytical view of what’s happening within the broader spectrum of technology change. Itās really easy to look at short-term windows of things, āOh, is somebody buying this stable player? What’s going on in this part here?ā [00:37:30] It’s harder to take a comprehensive look at, āOkay. Well, empirically over a large amount of time, what are we seeing?ā
Even in my own personal beliefs about cryptocurrency, I’ve become a lot more of a Bitcoin advocate over time because if you’re really looking at the data, it’s empirically clear that Bitcoin is separating itself from the other cryptocurrencies. More and more, the statement that Bitcoin is succeeding on a value proposition, that it is a well-understood technology that is seeing adoption is just [00:38:00] empirically true. It’s not someone’s opinion. It’s just looking at a great body of information. You have to say that this is a statement of fact almost at this point.
One of the things I liked about this report is it takes a lot of data and it synthesizes it. You can see that data suggests that a disproportionate amount of Millennials and Gen X investors continue to be a driving force in the buying and selling of cryptocurrency. If we see that continuing, well then you can draw other assumptions about it. [00:38:30] Bitcoin is growing, it’s becoming less volatile. You can say things like it’s spreading, it’s growing exponentially, and the network is becoming more mature. Those are statements that you can make looking at data.
The cool thing with this report is it takes those data points about the spread of Bitcoin as a technology, and it then makes another set of assumptions about wealth transfer within the United States. Obviously, it does come to the conclusion of making somewhat of a price prediction, but what it states is that about $68 [00:39:00] trillion worth of wealth is going to change hands simply over time as the Baby Boom generation begins to transfer wealth to younger generations.
It states that at some point, we can assume that the number of people who are Baby Boomers who have wealth is going to be zero, and it assumes that there is a rate of transfer of those assets. Then what it does is it extrapolatesāwell, based on the risk appetites of the people who will inherit that wealthāif they make allocations of this wealth into [00:39:30] Bitcoin. If they make the consumer decision to say, āI have inherited wealth, and instead of putting that wealth into equities, or treasuries, or the stock market, or under my mattress, I’m going to choose to put some of that into Bitcoin.ā It extrapolates what the benefits to the network might be from a monetary perspective
One of the things that’s interesting here is if you look at a 5% allocation, you end up with the Bitcoin price that is pretty high. Why is that interesting? It’s because we’re just looking at [00:40:00] the United States, we’re just looking at if people in this one specific use case. It ends up drawing a really nice concrete data point where you get all these people throwing out these big bullish cases for Bitcoin and you’re like, “Oh where are these numbers coming from?”
A layperson can come into this report, and they can leave understanding that the long term case for Bitcoins price growth is positive. It’s based on a lot of actual data, and that if you draw very conservative [00:40:30] assumptions based on that data, it’s still an attractive investment opportunity. That, to me, is the real message in the report that I don’t really think has been expressed quite as succinctly in any other literature out there.
Clay: Were there any surprises in this report for you? You’ve been in the space for a long time so it’s probably hard to surprise you. Is there anything that raises your eyebrows a little or struck you as being counter-intuitive?
Pete: I’m always surprised to see the projection of Bitcoin in the future. As someone who was in the [00:41:00] space early onāI joined in 2013. I could have purchased my first Bitcoin at $50 but did not. I’m someone who has lived my life being conscious that Bitcoin is a network that is growing in value. Even then, I found it hard to accept that Bitcoin is getting more valuable, that is doing so at the rate that it is, and that this is generally just a very difficult thing to wrap your mind around.
[00:41:30] Dan Held of Kraken obviously does a good job of talking about this on Twitter. He’s done a great effort out there into distilling what the ethos of being a Bitcoin Hodler is. Someone who is committed to Bitcoin long term and how someone lives their life as a Bitcoin investor. Honestly, Dan may get some criticism for tweets that may seem a bit like they’re maybe too promotional of Bitcoin, but ultimately, speaking to that is valuable. [00:42:00]
For new people, it’s difficult. For people who have been in this space for a long time, it’s difficult for me too. Understanding that Bitcoin is this new type of monetary system and learning how to make decisions and choicesābut personal choices because wealth is ultimately personal choiceāwith this system as an option.
That’s another interesting thing about the report is someone could read it, understand the findings, and then maybe go forward with their life, and [00:42:30] considering Bitcoin as something that isn’t just a strange new technology. It’s something that will be with them through the rest of their investment life and financial life.
Clay: It sounds like, I would rather say, the core thesis is that there’s this intergenerational wealth transfer and how that is going to be a catalyst for Bitcoin adoption. Can you just dig into the main thesis behind this report and unpack it a little bit more? On [00:43:00] some level, we’re asserting that the number go up, but there are some mechanisms behind it. What are those mechanisms?
Pete: As I said, the report is interesting because it’s based on some foundational assumptions. It assumes that over the course of time, a certain amount of known money. There are these government agencies that track this money that changes hands between generations because this money is taxed. When you transition wealth from yourself to a grandchild or [00:43:30] something like that, when the wealth moves, it’s ultimately taxed by the government. Ultimately, we have this really great body of data for how that wealth moves. We also know that there’s a certain percentage tax allocation.
What the report does is it takes that data, and then it takes projections for the transfer, and then it takes a series of estimates for if we were to assume a certain amount of this wealth is transferred to these younger, more Bitcoin-friendly generations. People with [00:44:00] attitudes that are maybe a little bit more bullish on the long term. Bitcoin as a savings technology, as a technological tool to preserve wealth, if they allocate some amount of that wealth into Bitcoin, well then, we will see this benefit.
One of the headlines of the report is assuming that 5% of the money that transfers is allocated into the 2% inheritance tax rate, we can expect that just shy of $1 trillion dollars would transfer into Bitcoin. Again, that’s interesting because [00:44:30] I do think it is a more conservative investment. People who are into cryptocurrencies tend to be quite bullish. What’s interesting about it is it takes this neat, reasonable assertion. If I was going to inherit money tomorrow would I put 5% of it into Bitcoin?
As that becomes a choice that more consumers have, if some of them take it, now we’re starting to get projections of what Bitcoin looks like if it really starts succeeding at its value proposition of being a stored value over a long period of time.
Clay: There’s an interesting table, [00:45:00] figure 1 talks about the implied price of Bitcoin. At the low end, it has it at 67,000 per Bitcoin, at the high end, 700,000 per Bitcoin. This is speculation into 2044. There’s a lot of people that actually think these numbers might be low for 2044.
Pete: The other thing is that it invites you to consider what you think will happen by giving you a framework to make the decision, [00:45:30] the report avoids an easy conclusion. It says, “Do you think these assumptions are correct? If you think these assumptions are reasonable, here is the scale for what things might look like.”
It’s a much more friendly framework that Kraken Intelligence has provided for newer people. Itās that you can really step into this framework, and it invites you to take a little bit of a stakeholdership in making a choice or assumption. āDo I think this is accurate? Am I a person who thinks that 1% of the money that is [00:46:00] transitioned between these generations will be stored in Bitcoin because those generations think it’s a great stored value, or do I think that number is higher? Do I think that those people are going to be much bigger fans of Bitcoin? Are they going to be using Bitcoin a lot more widely?ā
You can then begin to draw assumptions based on how you feel about Bitcoin. That’s what’s ultimately cool about the report is that, and again, it avoids the easy conclusion, it puts a little bit of the onus on the reader to assess the framework, to walk around the framework, and to ultimately get a feeling for [00:46:30] what they think makes sense. That’s something that is helpful for new people especially as they’re wrapping their heads around unfamiliar concepts.
Clay: I feel like we discovered or we talked about the main thesis and the big ideas in the report. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about with regards to the report?
Pete: Yeah. I would say one of my favorite things about the report is just I would actually say youāve mentioned figure 17. I would mention figure 1 which is just Bitcoin within the history of technological innovations, bubbles. [00:47:00] The generations who are a MillenialāI’m a Millennial, not sure if you’re a Gen X or which generation you’re a part of, but I think that younger generationsā
Clay: I’m at the cusp there.
Pete: Younger generations, it’s hard to contextualize for us. We came of age at a time when the internet was really peaking, and it was so disruptive that it was possible for me to do things like become a Jack Dorsey who has multiple billion-dollar companies. At some point, the internet hit [00:47:30] an escape velocity where it was so disruptive, and it was disrupting industries at such a rate that you could be a serial entrepreneur. You could found many companies or do all these things. With crypto, we almost have to walk back those expectations a little bit.
One of my favorite charts in this puts Bitcoin within the internet mania, and then the roaring 20’s like auto housing, radio, the railway mania in the UK. [00:48:00] Technology innovations are something that it’s not new. We have this idea that technology is anything that’s new in our lifetime, but that’s not necessarily true. Radio was a technology, cars were a technology. These are things now that we live with, and we interact with, and we consider them boring, that we consider them mature technologies.
It’s interesting considering cryptocurrencies in that way because if they’re successful, then ultimately they will display those characteristics. They will be like things that [00:48:30] become so ingrained within life that they’re commonplace. I really think that having that framework tooāand I’ve done a lot of personal thinking about thisāis just where do I think Bitcoin is, and how do I think Bitcoin relates to other technologies? Which comparisons do I like? Oftentimes, I find myself going back to the older comparisons because Bitcoin is often compared to the internet, but the internet is itself based on other innovations.
It’s built on the fact that we have the ability to communicate messages [00:49:00] electronically anyway, which stems from the telegraph which is a much older innovation. We have all these things that are built on top of each other. Viewing Bitcoin in that great lineage is always helpful. Helpful to put it into perspective, and it can help get rid of the easy prediction, and the easy comparisons that often come with conversations about Bitcoin.
Clay: It sounds like this is part of Kraken’s effort to be the first exchange where someone [00:49:30] buys Bitcoin. It’s being that initial fiat OnRamp, which it looks more and more like that is something that Kraken is interested in owning or making a dent in.
Pete: Yeah, very much so.
Clay: I bought my first Bitcoin on Coinbase because I didn’t have to deal with order types, or two-sided marketplaces, or things that seemed unfamiliar to me. There was just a price and that was it. There are pros and cons of different approaches, but what has Kraken done in the last [00:50:00] few years from a UX and just experience point of view to position itself to be friendlier to that consumer side, first purchaser of Bitcoin with fiat?
Pete: You’re going to see a lot coming up. I can’t give too much away, but that has been a tremendous focus of the company for the last several quarters or years. Some of that work is finally going to start to come to fruition in [00:50:30] Q2/Q3, so hopefully, we’ll be able to ship a lot of things and people will really get to see how Kraken envisions the platform. Today, Kraken is definitely optimized for your very serious crypto traders.
You mentioned the acquisition of Circleās OTC Desk, we actually acquired Bit Trade, which is am Australian OTC Desk, so growing those services around the world. We acquired crypto facilities in the UK that add futures to our platform. Definitely, through [00:51:00] the acquisitions, you’ve seen an expansion of the services for traders who really want that high-end, white-glove, sophisticated service. That today is the customer that Kraken serves.
As I mentioned, just my own attraction to the company, what’s really cool is that Kraken has that commitment to the community, commitment to the ethos. To see that be really successful in one market and really to get the opportunity to try to translate that to something else, I think it’s been super great to work on that. [00:51:30] We’re very much thinking about things like that.
Obviously, on the site, people come to kraken.com today they’re going to see a product that’s very much tailored to that core Kraken constituency. Over time, it will be interesting to see if we can make that jump to being that more of a first stop. Especially that is an increasingly competitive environment you’re seeing, not even just claim-based, but people like Square have come into the Bitcoin buying game. You’re seeing all sorts of new services. A lot of people do dollar cost average in [00:52:00] its cryptocurrencies. There’s certainly no shortage of competition in that sector.
Clay: Okay. Letās transition to chapter four, which is a discussion of the cryptocurrency canon or at least, what Pete should be in it.
Kind of thinking about reports, are there any that stand out to you as seminal reports in this space that have come out?
Pete: I would say the cryptocurrency canon is a very difficult thing to find. I’ve actually been [00:52:30] thinking about this a lot lately. I don’t know if it exists in a single repository. One of my favorite ones that I always cite is Jameson Lopp’s Nobody Understands Bitcoin (And That’s Okay). That’s one of the ones that I had a role in editing and publishing that originally when it appeared on CoinDesk, and is just a really great distillation of just how to prepare your thinking.
That’s what a lot of the content in the space gets wrong. I think that with innovation, really, [00:53:00] you have to almost prepare yourself to consider it. A lot of people show up to cryptocurrency expecting to run a marathon without stretching. That good content in the space will help you stretch because you need to. I always compare understanding Bitcoin to a process of unlearning. As I said earlier about the technical innovations where we’re used to technical innovations being easy, we’re used to UX serving the user.
So many of the [00:53:30] social media or mobile phone revolution was all about bringing the internet closer to the end-user. Here, with cryptocurrency, we have the opportunity to scale technology, but we want to do that without losing the Ethos. What are the things that we’re trying to preserve? Adam Back does a really fantastic job of in his articulations and defenses of Bitcoin over the years of we need to scale up Ethos, because if we want to scale at any cost, it’s like we already have PayPal. [00:54:00] We have PayPal and these services for visual money movement.
The really great work in this space has been people who have almost cleared the brush in terms of helping people understand how to think about Bitcoin. Definitely, Nobody Understands Bitcoin (And That’s Okay) by Jameson Lopp is a favorite of mine. Definitely, the writings of Adam Back are pretty seminal also. Itās a tough space to wrap your head around. Even after being here for so long, I feel like I learn something new every day.
Clay: Three is a [00:54:30] very satisfying number. Is there a third one? The writings of Adam Back, Nobody Understands Bitcoin (And Thatās Okay), is there a third you can give me here, or would you need to be a little bit more prepared for that?
Pete: I can tell you one that I wish somebody would write, maybe that’s an interesting thought.
Clay: Sure. Let’s do that.
Pete: One of the fascinating debates right now is around mining, which I think Bitcoin’s using the proof-of-work algorithm to disseminate rewards is a really fascinating element of the Bitcoin protocol [00:55:00] that even 10 years on is not very well understood. What’s pretty interesting is that we’ve seen over the last three or four years is honestly with the ICO boom. We’ve seen an aggressive capitalization in alternatives to that. What we’re going to end up coming around to is a re-appreciation or a higher-level understanding of what Bitcoin mining is.
One of the fascinating debates that I would love to see a definitive article on is the [00:55:30] understanding of the Bitcoin mining market and security model. Because every time we get to one of these hackings, there’s this you who wants to ring the alarm that Bitcoin, all of these miners will go offline, Bitcoin could fail. There’s this mining death spiral argument that always, always comes up. We’re not seeing that. Someone who could do a definitive article on understanding and explaining Bitcoin’s mining market in a really sophisticated way.
[00:56:00] Hey, this is Clay cutting in from the editorās booth to note that anyone interested in learning about Bitcoin mining, the incentives behind it, or mining-related security should check out Flippening Episode 71 with Hasu entitled Economics of Proof-of-Work Mining. We cover everything from Nakamoto Consensus to the problem of declining block rewards. Find it at flippening.com/hasu.
Okay, back to Pete.
Pete: I can give you my recent spitball, which is [00:56:30] the reason we in Bitcoin do not really care about mining profitability is because miners are not continuing the Bitcoin service. The right way to think about Bitcoin mining is that Bitcoin is paying for computation and that the market is serving Bitcoin’s demand for computation. It is immaterial how that demand is satisfied.
What is material is that Bitcoin creates the condition under which that demand must be satisfied. Because every 10 blocks, [00:57:00] Bitcoin needs to accumulate enough computation to have added a block to its blockchain. It is Bitcoin’s continued demand for the service of blocks and economic value that the network actually provides extracting that from the world. That seems to be the secret sauce of proof-of-work. There’s been a lot of focus over the years on the Bitcoin mining industry as something that’s important to Bitcoin. Maybe we really haven’t quite articulated what that relationship is. [00:57:30] I don’t even know if I’ve done a good job of it right now.
Clay: It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ve provided some valuable insight there. Who do you think are some under amplified voices that you think have unique perspectives and are folks that are maybe challenging long-held opinions or at least shaking up the space in a way that’s helpful when it comes to writing and essays? Where does your mind go?
Pete: Writers often times bias towards skepticism, which is [00:58:00] something that I’ve alsoāover the last few yearsāstruggled with a little bit personally, is that writers always seem to over bias being critical. That’s something that writers hold up in esteem, so if they give a really critical comment, it’s almost like you feel like as a writer that you’re doing some great amazing thing.
It’s funny, one of my articles that I got the most hate for was a very positive article I did about finance that a lot of people attacked because it was so positive. [00:58:30] People in space, there is an over-indexing of being critical. I always question that because I think that research reports, and research writers, and journalists, being critical doesn’t necessarily mean you’re providing a ton of value. It’s one of two modes, which is you also just point out that something is going really well.
Some recent work that I’ve been really interested in, Tim Copeland at Decrypt did a fantastic [00:59:00] report on the privacy issues with .eth domains that I thought was really fascinating. A really good example of where cryptocurrency journalism can be impactful. Taking this interesting novelty technology, which is the ability to tokenize easy wild addresses, and then showcasing that you can extract all these pieces of information about people who are using them. I thought that was super fascinating.
Obviously, you have to tip your hat to anybody who’s doing great investigative work like The Block with their breaking [00:59:30] story last week about CoinMarketCap being acquired by Binance. Pretty foundational work for the space there. I mentioned in our conversation somebody who’s in the crypto world but is venturing outside a bit is Ben Munster, who was with Decrypt for a while, has been doing some great coverage of the coronavirus from Italy. He’s got some funny last [inaudible 00:59:49] articles from there. Those are some of the names that are top of mind for me recently.
Clay: As far as crypto content OGs, you’re as [01:00:00] OG as they come. You’ve had an arc of a career here, and itās far from being over. You mentioned you’re a millennial. When you think about legacy and the impact you’d like to have 10, 20 years out, what do you see there? What do you want to look back and see yourself as having accomplished far into the future?
Pete: This speaks to my transition from journalism towards what I’m doing with Kraken now. I would like to be seen as someone who contributed [01:00:30] positively to the movement. I was able to do that at CoinDesk because as I said, at that stage in the development of the technology, I think it was really critical that something like CoinDesk exists, and that it be managed by someone who could provide the critical lens that was needed.
If you think of all the things that we saw in such a short amount of time, there was the skepticism for the private blockchain trend. There was the sudden emergence of ICOs [01:01:00] and the bitcoin scaling debate. The CoinDesk record on that stuff was ultimately pretty good. That the way that we covered that stuffāI did thinkāhelped further the technology. Not to quote somebody but Joseph Poon, the co-creator of Lighting Network, once told me thatābecause CoinDesk was around back thenāmany people who would have scammed ICOs just ceased to exist because we were providing coverage.
I don’t know if I ever believed in that comment from him, but [01:01:30] I do think that it is probably the most flattering piece of commentary I’ve gotten. I would like to be seen as someone who is still contributing. I work in many ways to contribute to that. I do think that people who have been around in the industry, we do need to do our work to grow it. That is something that I’m increasingly interested in, and doing so responsibly, and in ways, that still serve people is hopefully going to be a commonality in my work.
Clay: Thatās very cool. Do [01:02:00] you have time for one more?
Pete: I can do one more, sure.
Clay: Thinking about Kraken a little bit and a lot of the challenges that crypto exchanges face when it comes to products, and user experience, and what to prioritize, and what not to when it comes to product roadmap. It strikes me that there’s very much this vertical versus horizontal tug of war that can happen in this space. For example, someone could go all-in on Bitcoin, offer Bitcoin loans, lightning network transactions, [01:02:30] be the very first to implement SegWits, and just decide that, “Hey, we’re going to be a Bitcoin exchange,” and really embrace all the things you can do on top of that.
Then, of course, there are exchanges that are very Ethereum-oriented and have embraced DeFi, which has really comeāI don’t want to sayāout of anywhere, but it’s just really impressive what’s happening there in the developer community that’s really developed around that. There is just such a critical mass of smart people working on products there.
Then you’ve got all the other things. [01:03:00] You’ve got Tezos staking, and stuff you can do with TRON, and then there’s a whole bunch of people that’ll just sign up for whatever exchange lists the latest ICO, or new token, or asset that they’re interested in acquiring. You’ve got folks like FTX making all kinds of tokenized financial products with various mechanisms built-in.
There are just so many different ways to go. Does Kraken or do you have an opinion on whether or not it’s best [01:03:30] to be mostly horizontal or mostly vertical, an idea, a philosophy about the trade-offs between both of those approaches?
Pete: Yeah, I would answer that. I would just say that our CEO, Jesse Powell, has done a really great job setting the tone for that. One of the benefits you get from being a company with scale is that you’re not under as much pressure to innovate, but I think Kraken has done a good job of expanding its services. We did Tezos [01:04:00] staking recently. We were one of the more competitive people in terms of our stated return rate.
It’s all about, as a company, putting your foot into different things and finding clever ways to expand it, but again, as being a large company, one of the benefits is you get to see how other people fare with these things. You get to benefit from the great experimentation that goes on. You can borrow good ideas, and you can let the ones that are a bit more overzealous [01:04:30] play their course. We’re definitely watching and analyzing and there are great vibrant discussions internally about a lot of these things.
That said, are you going to see huge markets for decentralized lending capabilities on Kraken tomorrow? The answer to that is probably no. We’re going to move at the measured pace. This has been a major takeaway since I got here is just security is the overriding [01:05:00] first principle of Kraken. If there is anything that even any way that would make our security even a tiny fraction more compromised or even vulnerableāI should say, that’s probably a better termāit will not happen.
Honestly, as someone who was from outside the exchange sphere and came into it, people should take a lot of comfort in that. Kraken is a company that takes great pride in its choices, thinks about [01:05:30] things pretty deeply. Ultimately, when it does something in the market, that sends a signal that it is something that the company has thought strategically about.
I wouldn’t say that we’re quite making endorsements, but people should view our decisions as coming from that measured and carefully weighed lens. It’s been really great to see up close, and I’m hoping to see a lot more of that. [01:06:00]
Clay: That concludes my conversation with Pete Rizzo, Editor-At-Large at Kraken. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go I want to invite you to subscribe to our fully customizable daily crypto newsletter. Itās the first of its kind in the industry: you choose the delivery time for when you want to get the newsletter, and the cryptocurrencies you want price updates and news updates on.
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Okay. Thatās it for this week. Stay tuned for next weekās episode. Until then, take care. Bye.
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