E164: GSR CEO: The New Era of Crypto Is About to Begin

29:24So I ended up getting a normal taxi and then walking half the way. So clearly something is broken about this market structure as well here. But when it works well... That's what keeps you young. Getting my steps on. The homes in stairs. Walking up the hill. Yeah. So when it works well, what should happen? Everyone's been in Uber. My son's been in a grab in Singapore. People hear hail DDs, right? And people understand how that works as a two-sided marketplace. It's just supply and demand for a particular asset. In this particular instance, it's rides, right? That's no different to trading and what a market maker does.

30:06So when Uber goes into a new market, what does it do? It pays drivers to sit there with the app open, doing nothing and waiting for the demand side to come right so supply of rides and demand of rides why do they do that because they have to ensure good user experience for the people that want to take the rides they have to make sure you when you call something it's going to be there within five minutes right or the most people will cancel so optimize the user experience when the market is nascent and you've got to bootstrap it from zero to one. That's what they do. We're exactly the same. In this case, Uber is the exchange, right?

30:50The exchange may compensate a market maker. In this case, we are the drivers, if you like, right? We put resting orders in the market to make sure that when someone comes with demand to take the liquidity, they get a good experience, they get a good price. They can execute a big order without too much slippage from the market. They can do it 24 seven, anytime. I can wake up in the middle of the night and call a taxi and I can still get one because someone's being incentivized to be there waiting for me. That's how I best like to describe what market makers do to people that don't understand even sort of financial markets necessarily, but just another kind of two-sided marketplace.

31:33Does that make any sense to you whatsoever? Actually, it's pretty good. Okay. Who is the passenger? Who's the passenger? The passenger is the taker, right? So it could be retail. It could be another institution coming, right? You know, we think of the market maker as a transportation firm, right? So Uber has individual drivers and anyone can put limit orders in the market, right? You can go in and do it on your own personal account. but Uber also has professional firms working on the platform, right? With fleets or taxis. Think of trading firms like that. Professional with KPIs, right? You've got to be here.

32:16You get compensated to meet these KPIs. Spreads, debts, uptime. That's all we do, right? And you create a good experience for the other side. Whoever wants to come and take the liquidity from the market regardless of how big it is, right? Retail might be a small four-person car. You've got a big institution coming and say, I want a van that carries 13 people. I've got a big order, right? I still want a good experience. You need different types of orders in the market to satisfy the demand side. Quick shout out to our sponsor, Athena. It's one of the fastest growing projects in DeFi with over$7 billion in stablecoin supply and an average 11 % APY on SUSDE.

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33:48Check the link in the description down below to learn more. there's a market maker reputation problem today you always need a scapegoat usually it's binance or market makers you're less of a scapegoat than some other market makers out there we're on this podcast yeah why do market makers in crypto have a bad reputation it comes back to some of the things we talked about before right it's uh it's an under-regulated market there's not enough people out there that want to do things the right way they want to optimize for short-term gains they're transactional right they make money and the consequences are and they leave the market and there isn't enough enforcement.

34:49So although we welcome the right level of enforcement and regulation, right? That there has been in the past sometimes over, you know, over enforcement as well. And we have to find the right balance. Like under the previous administration, the SEC, right? It was against everybody. I think not me personally, but our founder testified in the Ripple case. We were bound to have had no unsavory role in any of the distribution of supposedly unregistered securities. But it's real, right? So everyone gets tarred with the same brush because just because it's possible to do something bad doesn't mean that everyone in the industry is a bad actor.

35:35Crypto in general has that problem. So, you know, for years, everyone would say, ah, crypto is just for crooks and money launderers and, you know. Is it not?

35:49And the black market, right, and drugs and whatever. Yeah, of course that existed. All of that existed, right? But it doesn't mean everyone that played in the market was a bad actor. There are nice people that can do well. There are good people that are trying to build the industry. Yeah. So I think that's changing over time, right? The bad actors self-select out of the market, we've seen people put away rightly so. In prison for it, we've seen people be blocked from exchanges, right? You mentioned Binance. They've done some good things in terms of creating a level playing field as well over time, right?

36:29With cases like, you know, WET report last year being kicked out of the platform. We welcome that. It's starting to happen for real now. There's more surveillance happening. There's positive moves in the right direction, but we're not there yet. How do we fix the crypto market maker's reputation? Change the structure, right? We talked about it. Why does Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan not have a reputational problem? Well, A, they've been doing it for years like us, and generally they've been doing the right thing, right? Because actually you can do well and do good. At the same time, these are not mutually exclusive things, right?

37:13I think I was taught that growing up as well, right? Going back to who am I as a person, you know, what my parents tried to do and what, you know, you can have biodegradable green materials that are replacement for foam packaging that creates white pollution in the seas. Hey, you're doing good. Hey, you can make money doing that. there's not a problem with that. So we have generally a good reputation, as you've seen, you go on crypto Twitter and not that many people bitch about us and what we do. Pretty clean. We've tried to do the right thing over many, many years, but that has to come together with a structure and regulation that removes potential conflicts of interest.

37:56And I think that's what happens with underwriters for IPOs. I think that's the direction the market might move in. where we want to take the position as the premier, top-tier, lead-left underwriters. That's a term commonly used for whoever leads the underwriting syndicate in an IPO because we earn the reputation, because people know that we can meet our obligations, because the regulations prevent conflicts of interest, and we've built up over many years and decades a network of clients that trust us to do that and would just be the first name in people's minds when they want to list a token, they'll think of us, that's the positioning we want to talk about.

38:44That's quite different from other so-called market makers, right? Because most market makers come from a propriety trading background. They come from a different DNA. If you look at most people at GSR, they've come from a client service background. from some shape or form, right? Either investment bank, sort of sales and trading side of things, serving corporates, you know, for Fortune 500 companies that want to do hedging or treasury management or people from the asset management side, like my background, you're a fiduciary to your clients, big sovereigns, pension funds, university endowments, right?

39:21We know these other people we serve, we're trying to do right by them. It's a different background to a pure prop. trading mentality where it is about leaderboards and money and P &L and competing against not just external people but internally other pods and desks for who can make the most money at any given time right and the compensation structure is geared towards that we're a little different we're not a neat what you kill kind of place we're a different type of culture there's more collaborative more collegiate we pay that way we try and encourage people to work together So I think that's how we solve part of the problem of reputation over time.

40:08You mentioned Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan. GSR aims to become the Goldman Sachs of crypto, the investment bank for Web3. What does that mean exactly? When you think about what we just talked about in terms of where the market structure for bringing new issuance is broken, I think we can be part of the solution to that. So how do you do that? You create a business that holds the hand of any token issuer, regardless of the underlying asset. And we can talk about that later. Tokenization is a big theme. We're looking at that space, but not just utility tokens for protocols, whether that's infra or application level, but other types of assets later on.

40:59You hold the hand from inception to maturity, from the primary markets through to secondary market liquidity through to maturity, and you offer everything they need in that life cycle. That's how you gain the trust, gain the alignment, get better reputation. So that means for us three main business lines. It's an advisory business before companies become listed and liquidly traded. A market business, once they get listed, and we trade that on centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges over the counter, stream that liquidity to whoever wants to consume it. And that's changing over time. Who is the counterparty that we face?

41:42And then finally, as they become, you know, multi-billion dollar balance sheet foundations in their own right, help them manage that, create yield and help them fund their future expenses right so three businesses in a tradfire world you say that's a universal investment bank i was about to ask give me an example of what the goldman sachs would be doing when they work with a company like coca-cola so people understand ah this is done that way coca-cola working with goldman sachs what's happening there that you're trying to replicate in the web 3 world yeah yeah so coca-cola or maybe it's something a bit more relatable like a web to tech company right that's more more recent that people can remember like i grew up in in the sort of web 2.0 world and you know social media and on before even like mobile internet but on desktops and things like that and facebook right facebook would come to market, Goldman would invest in their pre-IPO round, right?

42:50Substantial capital off their own balance sheet on the VC side of things, bring them to market, underwrite their IPO. As they become mature, Facebook itself and their CFO office and their treasury needs asset management, right? Their employees and their executives need private wealth management. Goldman would probably do all of that. I don't know if that's true in this specific case, but you get the idea, right? That's what investment banks do. And that's what we are already starting to do for our clients. It's just Web3. It's even more complex. They have to think about capital markets much earlier than Web2 companies because they have to think about tokenomics and they have to think about where they set up their legal entity and they have to think about exchange listing strategy.

43:40In what sequence? That's a lot of stuff to worry about. We can hold their hand and be their advisor. We can also independently put a ticket in as maybe the first institution on their cap table. Separate part of the business, right? Information barriers and no conflict of interest, no pay to play. But then they become a trusted partner of ours and vice versa. and we take them through the rest of whatever they need to do in that capital market. So that's what we're doing. We have some gaps in our capabilities. We're trying to fill them either by buying companies that we think are already great at what they do or building that capability ourself.

44:23But that's the goal. Under one roof, one-stop shop, come at the first instance that you're thinking of building a WebBerry company and trust us to provide you the network, the resources, the connectivity, to do all of that through a multi-year cycle. It's not transactional, one and done, short-term deals. Or is it so necessary for GSR to think bigger instead of just making more market-making deals? Think bigger and become the Goldman Sachs of Web3. Why now? A few reasons. I think we talked about the market being broken, right? So if we don't contribute to the solution, I think we'll just see a gradual decline in the demand for our services, quite frankly, right?

45:21Because there's a structural underlying problem there. Number two, there is real margin compression here, right? So we used to do this. We were one of the OGs that started doing this many, many years ago, but people have come in to compete with us directly or to be upstream of us and perform some of the services that we used to do as part of the package for earning our fee on a deal, right? So if we got 1 % to 2 % of total supply, for example, people would come in and say, hey, I'll do tokenomics for you. I'll do exchange listing strategy for you. I'll take 10 bps, 20 bps, right? They'll come and start to compress the amount we can charge.

46:09They're good companies, mostly. Some of them are bad as well. We talked about it, right? Not everyone is bad, but there are scammers out there. Some of them are good. And they start to disintermediate us and start to remove the relationship that we have with the end client. So we'd rather do it all and earn our right to be the primary market maker, to be the lead underwriter and say, we'll do it all. We can charge explicitly for it, or we'll just build a relationship with you earlier and then trust that you will naturally choose us downstream, right? For market making, for OTC, for asset management.

46:50And it becomes more like, almost like a SaaS business, right? It's like a tech company where you have cost of customer acquisition and you have customer lifetime value over time. And we think the lifetime value is huge because we build a lot of trust and relationship with that company. We don't need to explicitly ask them to use us for X, Y, Z service, but because we are valuable to them from day one, they're just going to work with us anyway. And that becomes much more diversified, much more predictable, much more stable. So that's the third reason, right? It's good business. If we can do that and be less sensitive to the cycles, then that makes us a more attractive company for ourselves, maybe to be a publicly listed company one day or to attract institutional investment.

47:42We've never taken a penny of outside money to this day, right? Bootstrapped with 20k of the founder's money, you know, 12 years ago. I think over that time, the growth in the book value of the company is outpaced Bitcoin and we've done great, but what's next, right? Like we've got to also start to compete. So that's the reason, because now is a time when crypto and TradFi is converging so quickly that we've got to have some more firepower, some more capital to go and invest in acquiring businesses that help us get there or get licenses and have regulatory capital because now crypto is finally ready for prime time.

48:27It's taken a long time to get there, but that's a big reason for doing it now. You mentioned acquisitions. You've made two major acquisitions. Why? Well, they actually come together. So I guess they count as one. Another deal we're looking at is an investment, minority investment not an acquisition not a majority you know stake in that company so really the acquisition is one deal but it's two companies and it's in the advisory space so i talked about you know advisory and our markets business and asset management right it's a buy or build decision for us can we do it ourselves yeah is it going to take a long time maybe is it better to go and acquire something in this case yes it was why because these two companies who are called autonomous and architect they they're the best in the business right we think we're the best in our business you know we're you know um we want to work with people who are culturally aligned with us and already leaders plus we've had a multi-year commercial relationship with these guys anyway.

49:46They refer business our way. Why not be part of the same family? So what do they do? Autonomous helps at the very start of the journey for a token issuer. So you set up a legal entity to have your labs business that does all the dev work. And then you set up a token issuing entity, typically a foundation, right? It could be in Cayman, could be Switzerland, could be Singapore. US is trying to attract more of these foundations back onshore. That might happen. These guys are agnostic, but they help with these things. Basically, setting up the foundation, appointing directors, getting you set up in the right structure to start developing.

50:27Architect does something different. They do advise your work primarily on tokenomics and exchange listings, sometimes market maker selection, and asset management. how you do the stuff later down the funnel. Tokenomics sometimes happens even before people set up the entity. So it's not always clear which is the first touch point. But either way, architect and autonomous, common team, common shareholders, they're excellent. They have the relationships with some of the biggest foundations in our space. And they, like us, So also from a service background, right? They're people that have been in financial services, in big four accountancy firms.

51:16They have the right values. They want to build this for the long term. They think the combination of these companies is much more powerful than us standalone doing our own thing. I think there's a lot of consolidation happening in the market, whether that's exchanges, buying each other, or custodians going up the value chain or down the value chain. It's the same thing for us, right? We think these are a great team and we're very happy that they're part of the GSR family now. Quick one. I want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible. Thank you, Trezor. My favorite cold wallet to store my crypto and make sure I sleep well at night.

51:57If you want to order a Trezor wallet and sleep well at night too, you can use my promo code WSHT 10 to get a 10 % discount. Big thank you to Bitwise Asset Management for backing today's conversation. Bitwise is a crypto specialist asset manager with more than$15 billion in client assets across 30 plus crypto solutions, including ETFs, index funds, alpha strategies, staking, and more. However you like to invest in crypto, Bitwise has something for you. Thank you to our friends at SWE for supporting this show. SWE is a scalable layer one blockchain that's fast, secure and affordable, built by previous Facebook developers and that delivers the benefits of Web3 with the ease of Web2.

52:37To support this show, please check the sponsor links in the description down below. You mentioned a minority investment and you talked about tokenization before. Can you tell us more about this and why now is the right moment to focus on tokenization? Super excited about this, personally. I think there's a lot of misconceptions about tokenization. Firstly, right, there's people talk about it, it's flavor of the month, it's everywhere, but the market hasn't really developed yet. There's a lot of people that are supplying assets, right, whether that's you know, tokenized private credit funds or tokenized, you know, equities.

53:31But the demand side hasn't really come yet, right? So again, back to the Uber analogy, where's the other side of the market? Let's not build stuff that is just, you know, a solution looking for a problem. Let's build something that's actually genuinely useful for people. That hasn't happened yet, But we think it's going to happen in the next few years. We just got to find the demand side and help with the distribution and say who is going to invest in these kinds of assets. So we'll come back to that. But before talking about that, it should be a big opportunity. We started earlier about what did I learn from my fuck-ups on starting my own businesses and being a startup guy.

54:17one of the first things was learning that the market's got to be big enough. This is a fucking huge market. How huge is it? Nobody knows right now, but the best estimate is if you think about crypto currently market cap being three trillion, give or take. Okay, it's taken a beating recently. Maybe it's like 2.5 now, but that level, right? Think about the securities market as a whole. So equities, debt, you know, trade financing, whatever other things altogether, that's a$300 trillion market. So if the estimates are even 5 to 10 % of that comes on chain in the next few years, right? I think that's what the consultancies are saying.

55:02Then that's$15 to$30 trillion, right? That's 10x what the market cap of crypto is today. So that's big enough, right? When I was doing options, I was a smaller market. You had to be dominant market share. You'd have to be very leading to make a sustainable business out of that. But this is a big enough pie that we think we've got to bet on it. And the other reason is because we need programmable assets. I think we talked about this earlier as well. So if AI is really going to take off, we're going to have AI agents that need to earn their own living, that need economics for themselves to make themselves sustainable, then they need to have stable coins for payments that are programmable, that can have a if this, then that logic applied to them.

55:57They don't understand fiat currencies. Then they also need assets to be able to invest in. They need to generate yields. So you've got stable coins, you've got tokenized money market funds, then you start moving up the risk spectrum to other things that's going to generate some yield for them. So that's kind of the bet that we're making in the long run, if that makes sense. And then happy to talk more about how we're going to try and find the other side as well, because that's not easy. What needs to happen for this 10 % of 300 trillion securities market to be on chain by 2030, which is just four years away?

56:33Yeah, it's not a long time. like any two-sided market. You've got to find the other side, right? There's a lot of supply. Why? There's people that want to tokenize whatever they have, real estate, that is illiquid and they can't actually find buyers. So you don't want to just sell a shitty asset to someone, right? And leave someone else holding the bag. We've learned from, you know, the last 10 years in crypto that that's not sustainable. There has to be real demand. for whatever you're trying to sell, what is that going to be? So in our view, the obvious starting point for us, at least, is helping the foundations to diversify their holdings because we have the relationship with the foundations.

57:20As I said, we're a full-service capital markets partner. They trust us. They've got multi-year relationships with us. Often they just hold their own token, XYZ token. What can they do with that? They can sell some calls on it. and by the way that's another way of putting pressure on the market because everyone just sells vault no one's buying options and volatility you gotta make that market appear as well separate topic but that's what they can do they can sell options to generate some yield they should diversify right they often call us and back in the day when it was first time founders managing their own treasury without professional CFOs they would just not really understand risk management.

58:03They'd say, the token's going to the moon, it's fine. Everything is fine. We don't need to diversify. Now, the sophistication is there. There are people that understand how to manage their own treasuries and they know they need to diversify. If they have a return target of, we need to make 6 % to 7 % a year to fund our future growth because we have all these development projects in our pipeline, we've got to give grants out to get developers building on our ecosystem, then we have to hit this target. Well, just sitting on money market funds is not enough to do that. They're going to have to diversify a bit further, right?

58:42Do they start to buy listed debt? Do they start to buy private credit? Do they start to buy other types of assets that gets them to that target? We think that's probably the most obvious starting point. we've started it with money market funds because that solves a problem for ourselves and it's the most basic sort of underlying asset that people want to trade quite regularly but we're trying to find other things that look a bit like this and create a secondary market for it

59:19You mentioned before advisory

59:24You actually have a case study on that that you built with polygon oh yeah katana yes explain to me katana simply yeah um i don't think i'm going to be able to explain this like i explained it to my mom this one's harder i don't have an uber analogy for this one because what they're doing is pretty cool and um my mom doesn't understand and stuff. Yeah. My mom is not cool. Yeah. So Katana. Yeah, it's a great example of where we've tried to be that full service partner to somebody, right? So this was incubation, co-creation with Polygon. What is it? It's a DeFi first layer two, EVM compatible. What problem is it trying to solve?

1:00:13Again, I'll go back to, we're trying to create some value here, right? not just build something that people aren't going to use. Two problems. One, liquidity fragmentation. So you go onto any chain, and usually there are tons of primitives doing the same thing. So you'd have five or ten spot AMM DEXs. You'd have a couple of PERP DEXs. You'd have another bunch of borrow lending protocols, asset management protocols etc etc and it fragments liquidity people just go chasing whatever yield is best you know in a given place and that's the second problem like when you have fragmented liquidity and when it's a speculative market what do people do or they just optimize for who's given me the most dollars in my pocket that's dangerous because how sustainable is that we've seen many many times whether that's you know Terra Luna or that it doesn't always work right you can't just go chasing unsustainable yield that's been given by the issuer to get some attention short term you've got to have sustainable yield so that's the second thing that it solves how does it solve it it takes the the chain revenue it takes the application revenue and it takes like sequencing fees and the borrow lending market so you know Morpho is one of the core apps and the borrow lending yield on that it aggregates it all together and it gives people then a more sustainable balanced diversified yield right and that's not just gonna you know move up and down based on you know temporary incentives that people are offering that's going to be long-term sustainable so it's solving those two things and And we helped with the whole cycle, right?

1:02:09From tokenomics to technical integration to finding the other market makers, right? We're the primary market maker, but there's plenty of other people out there that have idle assets that can be bridged on Katana and it's using those idle assets to generate yield for them that we don't sit on natively. So we brought in other market makers to do that. Help with TVL, you know, bootstrapping to get it going. the whole service it was it's great learning experience what we learned from that is this is awesome we like this model have a smaller amount of bigger partnerships and bigger clients people building real use cases right we don't need hundreds and hundreds of clients we just need a few impactful ones but it's a shit ton of work right and we don't have the internal resources to do all this.

1:03:01That's why we went to make the acquisition as well because there's a bunch of people out there doing it longer, better, more structured than we can. So why not learn from them, right? We don't know everything. What does doing things the right way mean to you?

1:03:23Doing things the right way. It means that's tough. I think about it maybe in a couple of ways. One is like, if it's printed on the front cover of Wall Street Journal or Financial Times or South China Morning Post, we're in Hong Kong, right? How would you feel about it? If you don't like that feeling, don't do it. Because that's real, right? That's how you should live. You should treat others how you want to be treated and you should live, you know, a life that you would be proud of. you could look back and tell your kids about and your grandkids and your story and not feel ashamed about that. I talked about being a family man.

1:04:07I believe that. So I guess that's the second piece. The second piece is like treating other people like you would want to be treated yourself. And I felt that didn't always happen to me growing up because I'm kind of like a third culture kid, I told you the story of moving from China to the UK age five. I didn't speak a word of English at that point. I was a kid, you pick it up quickly. So that's nice. But at that time it was hard and bullying, fitting in. I always felt like an outsider. And so that's helpful actually, right? Because as an outsider, you always think, well, how would I want to be treated by other people?

1:04:52I can then be more empathetic to others, I try to see the best in other people and we take that approach with our clients as well I think right, because it's not just here's the deal take it or leave it it's I want to help you that's the first mindset we listen to our clients problems, what are their pain points we've got two ears and one mouth for a reason so we start by listening and then we talk about what we can help them with and that's different to a lot of market makers who are just there here's the deal here's the structure take it or leave it and we're trying to be a bit more consultative in our approach to things and so that's I think where it comes from like doing the right thing our founders have instilled this as well I talked about their background professionally, but personally, there's a sort of family-like culture at the company as well, which is hard to maintain as you grow.

1:06:02But I think we've done it reasonably well. We come together every year for an offsite. We bring people together. People are much nicer face-to-face than over Slack or Telegram where people throw stones at each other and shit on each other, get rid of that. and I think that that then drives like what we do externally as well When is job done for Xene? Never man I'm a workaholic I told you work ethic and grinding is something that was brought up with but I mean jokes aside

1:06:45it's not about money I guess right it's not it's not about how much money that I've earned because for me money is kind of it's just a means for exchange and buying something else and for me that something else that's valuable is freedom you know freedom can take many forms right I think freedom can be financial freedom I think for that it means security and the ability to protect your family and your loved ones if war breaks out and you've got to put them in a bunker somewhere and protect them how do you do that? Do you have the freedom to do that? Do you have that optionality? Then money can get that for you

1:07:46I think that

1:07:51it's not about competing with other people for me it's not about leaderboards and how we're doing against other people it never has it's been about competing with myself that's when I'm done what is the personal best that I want to achieve if I achieve that if we achieve that collectively as a company then we can be satisfied then then we can be done so i've always liked um individual sports and we talked about personal training right it's kind of like that it's personal training you know you set yourself a goal you want to get your weight down you want to increase your your muscle mass you want to lift 50 more or you hit that target boom you know you can feel satisfied that you're doing something good for yourself and and you've reached that goal for me it's not about competing with others especially in a market that is still quite new and like we talked about right like we don't need to fight for market share we just need to grow the pie together exchanges market makers issuers let's get aligned and let's do the right thing and everything will be better collectively um so that is how i measure myself i think that's how the company measures itself so if we go back to last year and all the craziness that happened the external environment, we can't control.

1:09:08It was tough. The second half of the year was tough. Not going to lie, but did we achieve our internally set goals? Yeah, because one year ago we said, we think the market is going to change. We think we need to diversify from being a pure market maker to something way more than that, upstream and downstream. We drew a little diagram amongst the team. Different people contributed to that. It's not just me. In fact, the idea didn't come from me at all. it came from someone else in the team. Good ideas can come from anywhere. But we iterated on that and we said, hey, we think we need to be a business that has an advisory, markets business, and asset management business.

1:09:47One year ago, we didn't have an advisory business. We didn't have an asset management business. Today, we've acquired an advisory business and we've built out an asset management business through our activities early on in the digital asset treasury space. So sometimes it's build, sometimes it's buy. but we got there. That's fucking cool, right? That's like setting ourselves a personal training target, getting your personal best. That's good enough for me. And so I think I've heard people talk about games on some of your previous podcasts as well. I like to play games too. And talking about protecting your family in case of a nuclear disaster or war.

1:10:35I don't know if you've watched Fallout. I'm a bit of a Fallout geek. It's a game that they turned into an Amazon show. Have you seen it? No. Basically, it's about if war breaks out, everyone lives in underground vaults. But the point of telling this is to say, I like to play games, but the games I like to play are single-player games as well. It's not like a competitive game. it's a single player game it's a role role-playing game you're kind of constantly trying to improve yourself upskill have better traits you you trade you barter with money to get more resources and then you complete quests and you become the hero and you become the the main character in your own story for me that's good enough right just live life as the main character in your story and like we said at the beginning, my parents gave me the platform stability to do that, to try and take some risks, not rest on my laurels and just clip a coupon and try to work in a big company, have a stable job.

1:11:45I tried that. I think that's a great experience at BlackRock, learned what good looks like, learned what big companies do well, but then you apply that and you try and create your own story and journey and that's been hard but it's been super rewarding as well. So long after but that for me is what I want to do and when I will be done is when I achieve some of the goals that we've set for the company but for me personally as well in terms of looking out for my family. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for showing that there is some nice guys in Spotify and some nice guys in crypto and some nice guys in the market making industry space.

1:12:32Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate it. It's been really enjoyable and I like learning from the best. So yeah, hopefully you'll have me on again another time. With great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. As you probably know by now, I host some of the biggest names in Bitcoin and crypto on my podcast, but a lot of the best stuff never makes it on air. The Shift newsletter is where I share that raw behind the scene alpha. The insights, stories, and lessons straight from my guests that you won't hear anywhere else. If you want the real insight take on Bitcoin and crypto, join my newsletter, The Shift, in the description down below.