{ "episodeId": "SLP221", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "joe_kelly": { "name": "Joe Kelly", "role": "guest", "tag": "JOE" }, "dhruv_bansal": { "name": "Dhruv Bansal", "role": "guest", "tag": "DHRUV" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.43, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Have you got a business and you are considering holding Bitcoin as part of your business? Should you self-custody and should you use multi-signature for security and control? Well, Joe Kelly and Dhruv Bansal from Unchained Capital, my podcast sponsors, joined me on the show to talk Talk about what business owners have to consider, how to custody Bitcoin Unchained's solution, cold card support and more. This show brought to you by swanbitcoin dot com, the best place to auto stack your Bitcoin in the US with incredibly easy setup and low fees. I really appreciate that Swan is Bitcoin only, they're dedicated to Bitcoin education, they want you to hold your own keys and withdraw your coins. If you've got pre-coiner or new coiner friends in the US, this is a great place to send them. One of the big positives of regularly recurring buys is smoothing out price volatility. Utility and the Swan team have recently launched daily buys, so with Swan, they pull USD from your bank account, buy the Bitcoin, and withdraw to your cold storage. Go to swanbitcoin dot com slash livera to get ten dollars of free Bitcoin when you start stacking with Swan. This show also brought to you by Unchained Capital, Bitcoin native financial services. Unchained are doing great work to make multi-signature accessible, and if you're thinking about your Bitcoin security, consider going from zero to multi-seq with Unchained. You can build it yourself, or if you want assistance, there Package, you can have hardware wallet devices mailed to you and have guided setup calls to build your vault together. Use the link in the description and use the code Livera for a discount. Go and check out their website at Unchained Dash Capital dot com. This show also brought to you by Knox, a Bitcoin custodian dedicated to ensuring their insurance protection covers the full value of their customers' assets. For example, suppose a fiduciary wants to hold two hundred fifty million dollars of Bitcoin with Knox, Knox will seek to obtain two hundred fifty million dollars of insurance dedicated exclusively to that. Account and adjustable to volatility, no fractional coverage or narrow scope. Insurance for what it's worth, a tool to transfer risk. If you are a Bitcoin company, investment fund, trust or family office, check out Knox for your insured custody. That's knoxcustody dot com. Here's the interview. Joe and Dhruv, welcome to the show. Thanks." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "02:18", "start": 138.24, "text": "Excited to be here. Thanks for having us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:20", "start": 140.2, "text": "So, Dhruv, you've been on the show a couple times, but Joe, let's hear a little bit from you. How did you get into Bitcoin and starting Unch" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "02:29", "start": 148.9, "text": "Cool, so yeah, I guess it makes sense to rewind a little bit. when I first got to Austin for school, I guess over a decade ago, and knew, knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I dropped out, but thanks to hanging around UT's campus, I happened to meet Dhruv, who was, in the grad school there, getting his Ph-- working on his physics Ph.D. at the time, and, I was really interested in data and, and the technology around data, and, and he had started a side project with another" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "02:59", "start": 178.66, "text": "We befriended him and we decided to start our first company to-together called Infochimps. We ran that for four years, and it was a success, and by 2013, we, we sold the business. And I basically Drew kind of dragged me into Bitcoin. He, he learned about it, during our time at Infochimps. I'd been too busy, you know, running the company and, and he decided to kind of pay enough attention to it to, to be smart on it. And then once we sold on Infochimps for the first time in our lives, we had a little money we could afford to lose, we bought some Bitcoin. And the more I'd learned about it, I was already interested in investing and finance and money, how the world works, and Bitcoin is a great prism" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "03:41", "start": 220.84, "text": "My early guide to, hey, how does this thing work? And, you know, really helping correct a lot of the easy misunderstandings one can have with Bitcoin. and so it was just something that's resonated with me. I, I've, I've been a, a traveler all my life, somebody who really values independence and, you know, living, in a way that isn't, you know, controlled or dominated by government or other people. and Bitcoin is just a, a tool for freedom, and like, like nothing else. So, you Anyone else with Dhruv, there wasn't any other space we'd rather work in than Bitcoin, so we really, in two thousand and sixteen, decided to, to focus in on Unchained and build a, a company, build a suite of products that we would use as Bitcoin holders, as we felt there was just not enough financial services for people like us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:28", "start": 267.79, "text": "Fantastic. And, yeah, you guys know I'm a fan of your work, I like the approach you guys have, and it's really, I think it's, it's gonna start to really" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:41", "start": 280.94, "text": "And they're looking for ways to do it in the true Bitcoiner ethos way of holding their own keys and all that. So, look, we've got this recent news and we're seeing companies starting to hold Bitcoin, so thought I'd start off with some of that around, just to get your thoughts, what's, what are some of your reflections around companies holding Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "05:00", "start": 300.33, "text": "It's really great, obviously, for Bitcoin. I think it's really smart moves, by these companies. Michael Saylor said it best, they were looking at a melting ice cube. I mean No reason if you're trying to hold wealth or for an extended period of time and want it to still be there and, and worth something, there's no reason dollars have to be that default choice. And so I think for these companies to come out and announce it publicly in that, that list that's maintained now at bitcointreasuries dot org, maintained by, the," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:31", "start": 330.81, "text": "the, the" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "05:32", "start": 331.65, "text": "portfolio, yes, basically is, I, I think a really great testament to What's, what's gonna take shape in the next few years, and, and that, that they're just gonna be, that list is gonna get only longer." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "05:45", "start": 345.03, "text": "I mean, pe-people kinda laugh about Bitcoin being, adopted inside out, maybe, from other monetary assets or other financial instruments that, that historically. And in this case, I think there's a lot of companies where individuals, executives, employees hold Bitcoin or are interested in Bitcoin, but the company itself doesn't have a stance. Maybe there's a regulatory concern, maybe there's some other worry. over time, there's just, you know, the, the, the longer Bitcoin lasts, the safer it continues to, prove itself to be, the more clear regulations become, and I do think maybe some of the recent clarity, in the US, for business, for, for banks around being able to custody Bitcoin, those, those all sort of feed back on each other and, and make it so that now businesses can enter this kind of wave of, buying and holding Bitcoin, n-n-not just transacting with it, not just accepting it and then selling it immediately, but like choosing to hold it, for, a longer term period. And I think, we love that Unchained, because then it brings them into, you know, our domain Around how to keep that stuff safe, over the time that they plan to hold it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:53", "start": 413.01, "text": "It's also interesting that many Bitcoin businesses have just natively been doing this for a while, and I know even for you guys at Unchained, you've been working with other Bitcoin companies on how to help them secure their Bitcoin. So tell us a little bit about that progression and how it-- this kind of started with Bitcoin businesses doing this, and now it's progressing to non-Bitcoin companies doing this." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "07:16", "start": 436.02, "text": "It's true, yeah, and Bitcoin and, and sometimes the- Choice to hold Bitcoin, it can involve, a complex set of ideas that, you know, not everyone is, is just really ready to appreciate on the surface. You know, Bitcoin hold, o-operating companies in Bitcoin are definitely gonna be the first that are most comfortable with those set of ideas and kind of bucking the, the status quo around people tend-tending to hold wealth in dollars, or other fiat currencies. so yeah, I, I guess I, I think I just view that as a, it's a, it's an idea dissemination problem and, getting people to rethink, how to store wealth. And so, yeah, that's in, inside the Bitcoin industry are already- best position to act on those ideas, I suppose. Also," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:04", "start": 484.11, "text": "it'd be interesting to chat about some of the considerations for business leaders and CEOs. I mean, there's custody, there's taxation, there's reporting, there's how do you secure it. How would you try and explain that to someone? So let's say someone is a business holder, they're not a Bitcoiner, or maybe they're just starting to get interested in Bitcoin and they're, they're, but they're thinking about this idea. How would you walk them through that process of? Starting to think about these different concepts and how to work it into part of their business." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "08:36", "start": 515.61, "text": "I, I, I think there's a little bit, it, it parallels maybe the way that individuals approach their own Bitcoin journeys. I think sometimes we call ourselves Bitcoiners, and certainly, you know, Stephan, you're, you're a great Bitcoiner, and, and, and so many of the folks who come on the show are Bitcoiners, but before we became Bitcoiners, we were just people who bought Bitcoin, maybe the first time, and we were curious about it. And before we We were technologists, we were investors, we were entrepreneurs, we were, suspicious people maybe, there's all sorts of motivations to, to get started, and the more time you spend, the more Bitcoin can become for some people, if they, if they're lucky like Joe and I, it can become part of what you do every day, it can start to increasingly become part of your identity, some, and, and you get become comfortable with that, with that phrase, \"Bitcoiner,\" and I think there's like that process for companies too." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "09:29", "start": 569.02, "text": "it Isn't a Bitcoin company per se. And as far as I know, other than this move, they haven't like started foray into like a huge Bitcoin product integration or anything else like that. They've just become a company that's decided to hold Bitcoin, so they're not a Bitcoin company. They just hold Bitcoin, and I think that's a really important distinction, that it's important that, that category of companies be kind of identified and labeled, and so people can put themselves in that box and say, \"Oh yeah, I don't have to be a Bitcoin company in order to be able to own Bitcoin, \"because that's a bit too much. just like for individuals, it's a bit too much to say, \"I'm a Bitcoiner, that's why I bought this, \"you know, first ten dollars of Bitcoin. \"No, it, it starts as an experiment" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "10:13", "start": 613.14, "text": "Once you open that threshold and you say, okay, we, you know, we don't have to be a Bitcoin company to do this, we just are a company that wants to hold Bitcoin, then what are the next questions that you should be asking, right?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "10:24", "start": 623.74, "text": "I, I think a lot of these questions too get are, well, there are, are still challenges, bit, with Bitcoin's novelty and interesting accounting questions. there's a lot of precedent to, to rely upon with just foreign currencies and any business that has any, multinational operation or has to hold pesos and dollars, the ways you think about taxation, reporting and, and accounting across those different currencies, that there, there's gonna be a lot of, al-- already established principles that one can rely upon. it, it is ultimately important also to consider custody, of course. That's, that's something we're in the business of. we do believe that it, it best serves an, a company if, if they hold their own keys and, and something like multisig is the best way to see that the company can affect that. Not every company will be in a position to do that. it's better that they're, they're in Bitcoin, whether they hold their own keys or not. but it, it is, it is the best way to fully kind of own Financial services, like Unchained and the kinds of products we offer, it's the best way for the company to be fully guaranteed as to, you know, their ultimate rights and claim on, the Bitcoin that they say they have, and they represent to investors and, and management that they, they do truly have. So, it's really where I form a property in that way, of course, and I think the more businesses that get involved at that le-that layer, the more advantage they're gonna be in terms of taking advantage of future innovations in Lightning network or other means and ways someone could, get a return, if they'd like to, you know, get a Bitcoin on Bitcoin, return, which does require putting at risk, but it's one way that corporations like to manage their treasury is, you know, finding safe invest-investable assets for them too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:10", "start": 729.97, "text": "Do you guys think we will see the, this story faster in pla-in the developing world where perhaps the currencies are weaker and there is more of an appreciation for the melting ice cube factor?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "12:24", "start": 743.64, "text": "I think it's a mix. I think on the, I think als- you also have to just look at the size of, the, the amount of cash on actual US balance sheets. that, that I think that's just where there is the, the biggest hoard of cash that has the potential to convert into Bitcoin. while in, in other countries, I think it's definitely possible. I think there's probably still yet more education, to have happen. We do have the advantage in the US of, and I guess countries everywhere, this past year, the amount" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "12:53", "start": 773.42, "text": "People that are now paying more and more attention to that idea, the idea of Bitcoin, the number of fund managers and sharp Wall Street people that take it more seriously now, it's, It's almost, at least tracked the, the size of, of the M2 money supply." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "13:10", "start": 790.06, "text": "I think it's an important point about, it's, it's those who have the money that they're been sitting on that really we should expect to, to move first, perhaps. i-it's kind of, again, parallels the individual adoption curve, where, we didn't see Bitcoin first adopted by lots of people in the third world. We saw Bitcoin first adopted by first world technologists and people who were, close to it. because they, you know, have, computers and could understand it when it first came out and had, you know, spare dollars to put into it, as Joe said. you know, even it, it wasn't until we had, you know, sold a company and had a little bit of money that we felt we could maybe be making risky speculative investments, when, that's when we first acquired Bitcoin. So similarly, it's like, I, I, I, I see it more likely that, that US companies with fat stacks of cash that they've been waiting to make investments in, or looking for good opportunities, or they've been nervous about, maybe perhaps the perception of an overvalued, you know, equities market in the United States or whatever, whatever their concerns are, if they're sitting on a lot of cash, this is a reasonable thing to do with it, right? And that's exactly what a lot of individuals did, and, and you sort of see that," }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "14:21", "start": 860.61, "text": "themselves when they buy Bitcoin is like, why, why are they buying it and over what timeframe and what are their expectations for what will happen to this asset class? I think when I bought it, personally, I expected it to be extremely volatile, maybe go up, though I thought that was unlikely, and I expected with high probability that probably it would go to zero and that that was a risk I was taking by betting early. and I think it's, it's later in the adoption curve, the risk of it going to zero is, is, is increasingly less" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "14:51", "start": 891.31, "text": "And so I think companies need to be, comfortable like, like if they're gonna put whatever percentage of their, cash on hand or reserves or, or, or investment portfolio into Bitcoin to expect that kind of volatility, and that's hard to do if you don't have a lot of, other cash or other resources that are perhaps less volatile or, or, or don't produce income as well. So I, I'm not surprised that we're seeing US companies do it. I'm also, i, i, i am personally was kind of surprised by MicroStrategy in particular. I didn't like know too much about them as a company, and I didn't know too much about their CEO, who now of course is everywhere in, in the Bitcoin space, and it's fun to, to, to watch him, learn and, and, and be so popular and so good at, becoming a Bitcoiner. but Square, doesn't surprise me at all" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "15:42", "start": 942.23, "text": "Would make a move like that. I think hopefully other businesses, in the United States and globally that are close to Bitcoin already and have been trading with it or enabling, you know, trade with it, start to make moves like this, that'd be really exciting to see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:57", "start": 956.62, "text": "Yeah, and from a balance sheet perspective, it might also be interesting to discuss Perhaps it makes sense for a company with big cash balance, obviously as you mentioned, in fiat cash, and, perhaps if they have, A high, if they have a large amount of fiat debt, then that perhaps helps them a little bit because even though their cash balance is going down in real terms, they're, they've got a loan as well, and so that loan is also going down. But perhaps the scenario where it makes even more sense is where they have a cash balance and they have low debt. What do you guys think from a business perspective?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "16:34", "start": 994.29, "text": "Tough to say, yeah. I, not, not sitting in the CFO seat at the company and knowing exactly how they need to allo-allocate their cash. you know, having a, a u- a US dollar denominated, debt or, or fiat denominated debt is, is one way of being short that currency, and so if you, you know, I, I could see it kind of going the other way too, wanting to hold, you know, still in Bitcoin, expecting that currency to, over time, you know, underperform, Bitcoin. So I, I can see you've got that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:04", "start": 1024.13, "text": "That's a fair point. So let's say the business leader now is thinking, okay, I wanna hold some Bitcoin, and I've got these different options. So, let's talk about some of those different options. So I guess just listing a few of those out. So they could use a custodial solution. They could just naively just kind of just do one single signature, right, trusting one person to hold the keys. they could try to do multi-signature, d- Why, right? Everything all on their own with multi-signature, or they can go with a provider like yourselves who are providing, multi-signature business accounts. Can you just talk through a little bit how you're thinking, on some of those different options and why, you know, why would some of those options make sense versus other ones?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "17:51", "start": 1071.44, "text": "I guess it speaks definitely a little bit towards that. I mean, we were faced with something of the same decision, years ago when we started Unchained. We were, you know, contemplating at that time, you know, lending to people against the value of their Bitcoin that would be held as collateral. Originally, we weren't, we weren't sure how that would look from a custody perspective. but there were all sorts of questions that we had when we started to explore. The simplest thing to do would have been to get a Coinbase or Gemini account, and just, you know Where we would hold our collateral. but it made us uncomfortable, I think, as individuals, we'd already moved our own Bitcoin holdings to hardware wallets and, and cold storage, and it felt odd, I suppose, asking customers to accept what we felt was a less safe ultimately method, that's the reason we had moved to hardware wallets, as individuals. It felt weird to ask customers to accept that as a, As, as, as, as where things would be custodied. And remember, this is around 2016 that we're thinking about this stuff, so it's, it's, it's, it's a while back, it's early. And we're really worried about legitimacy, right? We really want to make sure that this new product that we're kind of bringing to market, the idea to lend against Bitcoin held as collateral, is, not gonna blow up with regulations or some, you know, hack or something like that, right? this is before there was" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "19:14", "start": 1154.18, "text": "About using, third party custodians like Coinbase or Gemini, not just because of like what happens if someone gets to our, not just because of like the marketing perception of like we don't do that ourselves, so how can we do that in our product, but also like, what if someone got to our, you know, password? Where would we store the password in, in a shared password manager? What about the two FA codes? It's really hard to share a two FA code across a team. There wasn't like necessarily LDAP or Active Directory or other That we could find at the time, with these services. but moreover, we also had a lot of questions around, well, what if Coinbase, if we, if say we do this, and even let's say it's secure, and we even figure out how to make access really secure, what if they just decide that they don't like our business, that we're somehow a risk, and they, wanna shut our account down? Now suddenly we're on the hook, like all this lost stuff that we thought was collateral is not accessible to us anymore, and meanwhile we've given" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "20:15", "start": 1215.0, "text": "a tower of cards that we, we couldn't rely upon it. and now we're maybe pretty conservative guys when it comes to risk here, but like, that's, I think, the right way to build long-term robust financial services. So a lot of those pushed us in the direction of self and then finally multisig custody. But we were also in position at the time to be able to contemplate building all that stuff. I think without the option, I'm not sure what we would have done. We probably would have just, you know, used, a single hardware wallet or As that, as that is. one of the things that I'm really happy about with the recent launch of Unchained's business account product is that it's exactly the kind of thing that we would have been use-- we would have loved to use at the time when we built Unchained. If we could have maintained one or two or different, private keys and then had a, you know, professional custodial partner helping us craft vaults and, and stuff for each of the loans that we were giving or each of the clients that we were managing, that would have been a great way started our financial services we had planned to do. I think for businesses that are thinking about some of the same stuff, big question is like, what, like, what are, what are your expectations and what are your, perhaps your representations around the Bitcoin? For us, it wasn't our Bitcoin, so we felt we had to really, you know, up level the level of security. Some businesses may be comfortable since it's their own Bitcoin and that the business owns, taking a, certain risks. They may be comfortable, you know, using a third party custodian that And just trusting and relying on their reputation and their technology to keep the Bitcoin safe. I don't think there's a one size fits all choice yet, but my hope at Unchained and is to m-build out services that make it easier for businesses to make the choice that we're making, which is to hold keys, to have transparency, to be able to audit stuff, right? To be able to do things on the chain, to, to proof of reserves. These are the unique and awesome aspects of Bitcoin, and businesses that don't engage at this level, I think sometimes- We'll kind of miss the point of, of what this asset class is all about. And I think as Joe was saying, it, it that puts them in a position to miss out on a lot of innovation downstream." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "22:22", "start": 1342.49, "text": "Yeah, at least where, I mean, Bitcoin is kind of a, it's an asset that's meant to sort of live outside of the realm of the state and state controlled monetary policies. And so for folks that kind of get into it and then, use like a, a fully regulated custodian that might, you control in, in and outbound type transactions to the, it does really kind of miss, seem to miss the point of why you'd wanna hold this in the first place. And so the more, native you are, as one way we put it, the, the closer you are to the protocol, the more you can take advantage of that supernatural or sup-supra-national, set of features that, Bitcoin can give you, and being able to transact globally without, any intermediaries. and I do think it, it'll kind of over time, as more businesses own and operate Bitcoin, it can Of trust that businesses can accomplish cross border contracts and agreements, in ways that, you know, maybe you wouldn't trust, you know, engaging with a, a business in Venezuela right now because depending on how you're to lock up, you know, maybe some collateral to an agreement, it might require adjudication down there, it might require using a Venezuelan bank you're not, you're not willing to trust, but, you know, set up a multi-sig with them and now, and you establish the right key holders, and now maybe you're, you're entering into new That you wouldn't have otherwise, because you can use Bitcoin as, as really the backbone. so I, I do really think it's important for, for businesses to consider over the long run, that it's, it's in their best interest to be as close to the protocol as possible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:57", "start": 1436.92, "text": "Great. And so let's ta- let's chat a little bit about the Unchained offering here. So you've recently launched the business account, so can you just give us an overview, what's the offering there?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "24:08", "start": 1447.69, "text": "Sure. So business accounts are really a set of features that bring, really marry this, this idea of multisig with corporate governance, and we have a, really a basic business offering that's meant to look just like our, most, for the most part, just like our standard accounts look like for individuals. that means it's Free to sign up, free to create an account, and we do charge, free to set up a co-a vault, we do charge for any, signs where Unchained is requested to sign. in general, you know, our client, they, they hold two keys and the, and the business would hold two keys as well, and two keys are necessary to, to sign to move the funds, and so the business can always transact, so long as they possess those two keys and have access to them, in a way that's free of charge," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "24:57", "start": 1496.64, "text": "We do charge a hundred and twenty-five dollar signing fee for that, that basic business account, and then we have a more advanced business account, which is where, a, a business beyond usually a, a sole proprietor or somebody that's more appropriate for the basic business account, as soon as you start to have to add extra users, there, there now starts to be more of a monthly pricing model, that kicks in as there starts to be other, a, a team inside the CFO's office or inside of, you know, across officers at the company that wanna Or have access to different views and, permissions inside of the, the corporate, account with Unchained. That's more-- That falls under our advanced business account. it also has a signing fee, but otherwise, the monthly fee is, is most of what's included. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:44", "start": 1543.75, "text": "the business owner, let's say even in the basic business case, they're a single user, but they've got two different hardware wallets, and what they can do is keep those in two separate locations, and then, when they want to sign, they can basically take their laptop around to the different locations and use, you know, the Trezor or the Ledger or now recently the Coldcard, as the signature. So maybe you wanna tell us just a little bit around the education process of that, I mean, without doxing individual customers. And things, but just what's the journey been like for some of your customers who have been trying to learn, to use multi-sig in that way?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "26:23", "start": 1582.82, "text": "It's been great, you know, we have, our director of product marketing, Phil Geiger, and now we have, we're actually growing kind of a sales team as well that, that faces clients as they come in. we offer a, a concierge onboarding package that, many clients have taken advantage of, that is where we, we really help hold their hands through the process of WALLETs, and then at the end we'd help, you know, deposit some Bitcoin into their vault for them. the, it's been really impressive that the really, the broad range of clients that have come through that. you know, we're talking, you know, some clients, they didn't even need Phil, it was just about getting the Bitcoin at the end. plenty of other clients, it's, or on the other side of the spectrum, you know, we might spend two and three hours, with the, with the client and so we have really a multi-generational, set of clients and folks who have come in for either individual vaults and now these business accounts as well, people running businesses between, a liquor store, roofing company, you know, of course, the Bitcoin operating businesses that we've talked about, but yeah, definitely, definitely mixed, and while there is, you know, some education, usually p- at the point people are talking to us and serious enough about these accounts, that they have the motivation Motivation and they're, they're already believers and, and know they need to hold some Bitcoin and they wanna hold it this way, so it's, it's pretty easy to overcome all the, all the conceptual challenges along the way. And it's, it, yeah, for all of us Bitcoiners, it's always fun to, you know, help open others' eyes and, illuminate this path for them." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "27:58", "start": 1678.46, "text": "I mean, there definitely are some challenges though, I think, with, with what we're trying to do here, just almost conceptually, there's like these two competing masters" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "28:11", "start": 1691.37, "text": "of Users can have within your account, within your business, and so they can see or have different levels of access to be able to control or, or, or do different things in the platform with the, Bitcoin that The, that the business owns. But at the same time, Bitcoin is very, dismissive of, of who's doing what, right? Like if you have the private keys, if you know the redeem scripts, if you have the xPubs, you can do stuff on your own with open source software, some of which we've released, right? And, and that's an interesting contrast because we still wanna preserve that. We're not trying to build like a walled garden where, you know, you're buying into some like private security solution or like a side chain or, And then you're getting all this awesome like business account management stuff for your business because of that, that, that exchange of, of trust. This is like, you're preserving the, the, the, the on-chain multi-sig collaborative custody na- product that we already have. You're just within our platform getting to have a little bit more fine-grained control about who can see what. and that's pretty cool actually, because there's some interesting now options that businesses can set up for themselves, and, in, you know, things like being able to sign for a key but not being able to see all the information for other vaults or other products that that key may protect, right? So being able to split up access is, is pretty important. and that's the kind of thing that we're helping you businesses to do here." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:39", "start": 1778.51, "text": "Yeah. And let's talk a little bit about the multi-user aspect. So how does it work with the different users? Like, let's talk in a, in the advanced business accounts context, what's the deal with the multi-users there?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "29:52", "start": 1791.7, "text": "it's, it's a kind of a membership model that's similar to a lot of other account or products or SaaS companies that, you know, sell accounts that are designed to be used by groups, organizations, or businesses. So, anybody who signs up for a normal account, Adam Chain can create a new, business account, and it's just another entity within our platform that can hold keys, can have profile data, can build vaults and loans, and, you know, as a, as a first, a class, kind of, client object for us. and having created this, the user created it, they're the owner, and they can invite other people to join this account just via email. You get an invitation, you opt in, and then so you can build up, you know, your staff or whatever, you can To join the same, account, and then you can set different access permissions. We currently have two levels of access, basically admins who can do everything and viewers who can only, see the information that's available, they can't take any action, so they can't author transactions or, or build vault or, or do anything like that. Over time, we're gonna, create more and more fine-grained ways, to split up access control, but that's what we shipped with, last month. and, the idea now is that this makes it a lot easier for businesses to coordinate the kind of different stakeholders that might be present, in a realistic and scalable approach to custodial bitcoins. There may be folks who, you know, hold keys, there may be controllers who author transactions and who are approving and verifying external addresses, there may be, billing or administrative folks who, you know, pay for the service Or want to have control over that. And, you know, those are pretty standard features for, accounts for businesses, for other financial products and services, and that's kind of what we're kind of adding as our platform increasingly targets that class of customers. But what's unique is that we're not letting go again of the underlying, this is just happening on the blockchain, it's public keys and redeem scripts, it's private keys, and you can always, you know, opt out of our entire platform and, and I think that's one of the, scary aspects of, of stuff like This is the, the administrators and the folks who have the highest level of access, of course, they can see and do everything, but they can also get the data that lets them to do this stuff off the platform. that shouldn't be viewed as a security hole, that should be viewed as an important, you know, wallet recovery tool. but educating businesses about how to think about the, like this kind of freedom and orient themselves so that they have the, you know, right amount of freedom that they feel like they can control, that's, that's kind of one of the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:35", "start": 1954.71, "text": "I guess the customer can export some of the key information out of the Unchained platform and take that over to Caravan, right? The open source side, and still spend using that, right? So that's probably an example there." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "32:47", "start": 1966.52, "text": "And to be clear, I think, I think you meant this, but just in case any listeners might be confused, like we're, we're talking about public key information there, and they'd of course still have to additionally have the private keys that are associated with those public keys. But yes, that's our goal. Of course. Yeah, we, we want customers Court action against us and we couldn't do anything, or if somehow we decided that we can't support their business and we wanted to close their account down or, or, or whatever horrific outcome you as a customer of ours might imagine, we want you to feel that no matter what, as long as you have your keys and you've got your, you know, xPub config files, you can use open source tools, ours, other people's, to continue to operate with your funds. That, that gives us, i-i-it's, it's in the spirit of, it's both in the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:39", "start": 2018.63, "text": "Back to the show in a moment, I wanna tell you about a new sponsor, Bitcoin Black Friday dot com. Bitcoin Black Friday is from the team behind Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin twenty twenty one conference. Bitcoin Black Friday is a celebration of the growing Bitcoin economy. On the site, you can find active deals for up to fifty percent off on your favorite Bitcoin gear and other merchants accepting Bitcoin, but it doesn't stop with spending Bitcoins. Bitcoin Black Friday also lists over sixty five charities that you can support with Bitcoin. Bitcoin and a stacking stats page with ways to earn Bitcoin. If you are a Bitcoin accepting merchant, go to bitcoinblackfriday dot com to list a Black Friday deal, and if you wanna take advantage of the discounts and sat stacking opportunities, go and sign up for email updates, bitcoinblackfriday dot com. And finally, CipherSafe. We're talking about Bitcoin and multi-signature this episode, don't get caught out without a backup. CipherSafe are producing the CipherWheel product. It's a wheel-shaped metal seed backup, and you can essentially backup the typically PIP39 And twelve or twenty four words into a metal product and make sure it's fireproof, waterproof, rustproof, petproof, and tamper evident. So if there were to be an accident, make sure that you or your loved ones have access to your bitcoins. Orders are going out, go and get yours at cyphersafe dot io and use the code livera for a discount. Now back to the interview. The other important part is not everyone has the time to go become a professional multi-sig operator themselves, and so part of that is that's what they're offloading to you guys, right You're helping manage that, you're kind of, doing that process of making sure that the hardware wallets are still compatible and all working with the platform. And I know recently you did some work, in terms of, Trezor as well, right? Was it with the Trezor bridge to make sure it all still works with the Unchained platform? Dhruv, do you wanna just chat about that a little bit?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "35:25", "start": 2124.81, "text": "Yeah, it was just like, I mean, small issues, like there was, it was just, you know, integration is, is tricky, And so, nor have the same set of functionalities, and a lot of them are supporting many different currencies, and they have many layers. And, in the particular case, our latest collaboration with Trezor a few months back was indeed just getting this really amazing feature of being able to confirm your membership or ownership of a multi-sig address, you know, through a web browser onto your Trezor. There was just some small stuff that was miswired along the way, right? And getting that fixed, and it's, it's kind of an exercise in coordination between different companies to, to even notice was patched and, and fixed. But it's cool because, you know, it shows that this, this, in that particular case, at least, it shows that the Satoshi Labs team, was really, values kind of multi-sig usage with their product and they design things to work and they expect them to work, and when they don't, they put out fixes. I think not every wallet maker is like that. Coldcard is, is great because, you know, they really push, standards like PSBT and other things onto, those who want to use them," }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "36:34", "start": 2194.43, "text": "Those and that are out there, the better, our security gets, but it takes work, right? And I think that's one of the things that we, as a business, spend a lot of our time on ultimately right now, is making sure that all these devices can work together seamlessly so that users and businesses who rely on them don't really have to do that, because for better or worse, they're not super motivated to do that with each other today. Like, no, the, the device manufacturers don't spend a lot of time ensuring that they are able to knit into each other's qu" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "37:05", "start": 2224.73, "text": "And Stephan, when we, we intend to push on further and, and with other multisig providers and, folks that have the same kind of concerns we do, because, yeah, that there should, there should be, there needs to be more standards. There's, there's a big hole, in our space and our industry of, of standards around, hardware wallet interfaces and, and multisig." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "37:23", "start": 2243.44, "text": "Yeah, yeah, I mean, multisig is how we're gonna scale Bitcoin, in a lot of ways, and so it's important that we get good at" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:32", "start": 2252.03, "text": "person's perspective, like the customer, they might be thinking, \"Well, what about when staff rotate in and out of positions or someone retires? Like, how do you sort of manage that process when I'm doing an Unchained business account?\"" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "37:45", "start": 2265.08, "text": "I think it depends again on like the scale and the way that you've, designed your, your ho- your, your keys and vaults. Let's, let's take the most simple example of you have, two keys in your business and you use a two out of three, vault at Unchained And Unchained holds the third key. you have two co-founders in your business, and each of you holds a key. Maybe that's a really, great way to start out and build your first vaults together, but as you point out, you're rapidly gonna run into this rotate, this, Key rotation problem, right? Staff go in and out of the company, what do you do with their keys? So there's a lot of, imperfect solutions to this problem. I don't think there are any really super perfect solutions generally to this problem across Bitcoin. I think it requires a little bit more lifting and, and some things like Taproot and others, I think really, help with this. But in short, today at Unchained, like the strategies that we would recommend are, use more keys, right? You're free to upload as many keys as you like into the platform The Bitcoin you own across different groups of keyholders, so you can kind of have pods that, you know, make it easier to rotate out. the platform already has a, a robust like key rotation facility built in. You can say, \"Hey, this key right here, we're not gonna be using that anymore, and we wanna replace that everywhere in the system with this other key.\" so let's onboard new keyholders and then, you know, fairly quickly sign the necessary transactions required, but that's actually moving Bitcoin around. more sophisticated, customers Customers, since this is Bitcoin and it's a protocol, we don't, you know, know for sure that you're necessarily even using hardware wallets when you're interacting with our site. as long as you're able to provide xPubs and signatures, you know, we're all speaking Bitcoin, right? And so some folks, are able to shard their keys internally and split them up, and now there's even another layer, you know, below the single key participating in the multisig, that key itself, you know, maybe it's Shamir Started, maybe there's something else going on. there's a lot of, in-- there's a lot of strategies here, but they're all gonna, they all suffer, from, from some awkwardness in, in some way or another. Like this general problem of someone has a lot of privilege a-and knowledge into Bitcoin and where it is and how it moves, how to rotate them out, it's a hard problem" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:06", "start": 2406.5, "text": "Sure. Yeah. And, I know Unchained also has some open source stuff like Homeit, which we spoke about last time you were on the show, Dhruv. Do you have any thoughts on whether that could be worked into part of the Unchained business account solution as well?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "40:22", "start": 2421.65, "text": "Yep, yeah, Hermit is compatible with like our platform. I mean, it's a piece of software that we support, and it's designed to give businesses like a degree of freedom within a key, so they can split it up exactly as I was talking about. it was, it, it's funny today, I was reading the tweets about, Taproot being merged into, I guess, Bitcoin Core, though not activated yet, and people were, you know, going on about all the amazing stuff that, that we'll be able to do in the future. and I think that's the kind of stuff that Hermit is trying to do right now, but not on the chain, not through more complicated and capable contracts or signature schemes, but just through, using, Shamir sharing. and so for customers who are interested in pursuing that option, that's a thing that we can help them onboard into and they can use something like that with our platform so they can internally have multiple keys and each key can be itself split up, in, in a variety of ways. And for Herman in particular, what's kind of cool about it, it was another collaboration with some of the folks at Satoshi Labs and many other places as well, is that it's not just regular Shamir sharing, it's kind of like that multi-level split thirty-two. nine sharing, which I think is ex- ex- is extremely flexible for, like scalable business deployments." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:41", "start": 2501.09, "text": "And, also wondering if you've got anything you could share with us in terms of future ideas around what, what direction you might take the business accounts platform with things like key-level permissions or transaction-level permissions and what, what, what could be built in there?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "41:57", "start": 2517.46, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I don't mind revealing that on the backend we've already have a very fine-grained permission system that like almost every action And set of related actions is, is, separated out into its own atomic permission, which is then assigned to various roles and targeted against various groups. It's kind of a pretty, s- if you'd like, standard, access control list, inspired kind of security model. and we like that because it kind of makes it really easy for us to then, do fun things like share access to different vaults th- across different providers, share access to keys, and allow our app to become a little bit more social. Over time, which is a direction that we're h- which is part of the direction, that we're headed in. what we've launched so far is a coarse grain version of that, partly just to get this out the door and get it in front of customers who've been asking for it for a long time, but also we really wanna move carefully through the design space for how to be able to assign and administer these more fine grain permissions. as I said before, s-having access to, to, you know, the most holy information, in these vault Comprise them, gives you a lot of information about the assets, and so it's important that, you know, customers are walked through very carefully, in our user interface, like how to do that stuff. And so we're pretty simple today, but as we move towards exposing the fine grain permissions that we've already created, that'll create a lot of flexibility for, for businesses." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:24", "start": 2604.1, "text": "Also recently, very recently, Coldcard has come to the platform. So do you wanna tell us a little bit about your journey there? I know you had to do some work on the backend to Sbt working, can you tell us about that?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "43:36", "start": 2616.27, "text": "Yeah, it's exciting. I mean, it's sort of like sometimes something that breaks the symmetry kind of forces your action. I think we, we weren't confident maybe up until last year about, what standard we would like for transaction or for standardizing transactions as they move through our system. sometimes you use things like JSON where it's convenient when you're talking to a library that accepts that, and other places you might use something else. different tools just have different, you know, ways that they like to represent transaction data in but PSBT as a sort of, you know, rough standard for what we're going to use to represent transactions to each other as we pass them around, is something that we were almost forced into by deciding that we wanted to really adopt Coldcard, and it's part of what took a little while to get here. it wasn't just plugging in the Coldcard and a hack to kind of talk to it, we really wanted to invest in moving more towards PSBT, everywhere in our stack and, and driving other wallets or attempting to To drive them as much as they can understand, PSBT. and, you know, I think PSBT is a pretty imperfect, standard in a lot of ways, but on some level, it breaks the symmetry, right? Coldcard's using it, other wallets are using it, it feels like it's kind of got some momentum and traction behind it, so, okay, good enough, like we're gonna standardize on it and move towards that for ourselves. and I think part of what makes then PSBT challenging to support is it's not just packaging your, you format, that, that's pretty easy. It's not like moving from JSON to XML or something. It's more that the demands that PSBT does make of what has to be in there require you to think about organizing your addresses, using xPub's, like using sequences. And in multisig, there's some kind of open questions about what was the right way to do that and the right structures to use for that. a lot of the, a lot of the reason that PSBT is useful in multisig is because you're really passing transactions Back and forth a lot, right? You have to-- There's something that generates an unsigned transaction, there's some multiple number of signers that, you know, get past that and then they come together and that's a bit of a different process maybe than a person who's just signing, you know, with their one treasure right there on their laptop. and so in general, like the multisig community, I feel is being, and, and partly the, the hardware wallet community, since they're innovating around passing transactions and air-gapped ways and all sorts of other stuff back and forth from computers into, into wallets, that's where the innovation in transaction handling is happening. and so, you know, that we sort of had to go through both those things, like both conceptualizing inside of our platform to be a little bit more, multisig standards based and, you know, releasing Caravan was a big part of Of our journey there, and then adopting PSBT finally as a standard for how we wanna talk about transactions internally, and that was the combination is really what helped us get to Coldcard. And then of course, we gotta open source stuff, right? That's how we think about this. Like, we want other people, you know, checking our code, we want other people using Coldcard in their multi-sig applications. That just makes, you know, it more, more likely that more Bitcoin lands in multi-sig, which is what we want." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:46", "start": 2805.6, "text": "and also it seems like the- Awareness around what are the main attacks and ways to mitigate them in the multisig world are slowly improving as well. So I think, you, I think you touched on this earlier around registering the other participants in your quorum and having the device actually recognize that. So I think now Coldcard allows that, and that's something that, o- like from an overall perspective, the security in the space is improving, right?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "47:15", "start": 2835.18, "text": "It, it's also just, I think a maturity thing, you know, like a little bit what's happening there is cold cards deciding that I'm not gonna be as, if you'd like, dumb, and I don't mean that in a derogatory way, I'm, I'm gonna decide to be smarter, I'm gonna hold data, I'm gonna have state that lives on me that helps me contextualize things that talk to me more. and that, that is smart, but it's also, you know, more tightly coupled, right? so Aren't thinking about multisig in the same way, are saying, \"Well, give me a transaction, I can sign it, I'm gonna sign it.\" And they don't really know, they're not storing for themselves separately that transaction context of quote-unquote a known multisig wallet. So it's an interesting kind of trade of space on the device and, and tight, tighter coupling for potentially greater security for a class of users. I think you also see things like that develop over time when you imagine, you know, wallets having cookies for particular applications. So It's not just that, you know, some application is talking to the co-card or the trezor, but in particular, the application that I use to initialize the wallet is the one talking to it, and having those kinds of bits of state stored on the wallet as well. Like, I'm not necessarily advocating for that as the right strategy, I'm just pointing out that I love seeing the industry sample this space and try different strategies and letting, you know, people decide which one they think is more secure. so for us, people were clamoring for cold card, and so we were eager to support it. and it helped us get better at Bitcoin, so I'm excited, that's exciting too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:50", "start": 2929.87, "text": "Yeah, that's really cool, and, I d- I think definitely the cold card support really adds to the offering there as, seeing as it's such a popular option amongst, particularly amongst the hardcore Bitcoiners. And so Great, development to see. Great, yeah, really enthusiastic. so I guess we are now starting to see like a financialization of Bitcoin. So, what are some of the implications of this, this idea that we're financializing a computer network? perhaps Joe, you wanna start here." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "49:21", "start": 2961.39, "text": "Well, sure. You, this, I think this gets at, you have things like the Lightning Network, you have, you know, our product, which started as a Bitcoin secured US dollar loan, but I think, you know, based on some of the things Working on and the ways multisig helps you construct networks of Bitcoin holders or people might have some claim to Bitcoin that's in the multisig. I think you're gonna start to see more, financial products that start to build on top of Bitcoin and, you know, the Bitcoin con- or the, multisig, excuse me, the multisig construct is something you see in a generalizable pattern, across, you, the idea of just, hey, let's lock up Bitcoin and then we're gonna trust that Bitcoin Bitcoin is only gonna escape that locked up mechanism through certain conditions in a contract, and so that starts to look like other insurance funds or, sometimes Bitcoin that's on loan in a particular fashion, and so it's, it's, it's an interesting area we're exploring and actually Dhruv has a, a lot of thoughts on this as well." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "50:21", "start": 3020.87, "text": "I think one way Joe and I think about it is like it's sometimes said that any company as it becomes larger kind of just becomes like a money managing company, you know? Like Like, I don't remember the company that everyone says it, but like they, you, you make these things, but really your company makes money off the pension fund for all the employees that make the thing, and that's somehow the real business. And I'm not sure if this is a good example of what a business should be, or, or a sort of inevitable example of as businesses get larger, this financial aspect of, of inte-integration and then money management becomes even more important for them. I'm not, I'm not sure, but I see a parallel kind of idea happening," }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "50:59", "start": 3058.74, "text": "happening upwards through the networks that are connecting the participants. So like the networks, as Joe was saying, like through multisig in particular, we're connecting to each other in network. Lightning is a network of multisig channels, and we're selling each other liquidity and we're selling each other the ability to push payments through. and so that incentivizes us to get connected into this network, and you kind of imagine a world in which there are millions and, and hundreds of millions of people using such a network, these devices are in everyone's pockets. Suddenly this like financial network for Bitcoin payments is now capable of doing other things, and data maybe starts to move through it, and with data is moving through it, then how much, ha-- like content and applications, and, and you sort of begin to see that, and, and all of that is still ultimately being moved as, you know, i-i-in a way that's priced, you know, satoshis per byte, and it's, it's an interesting kind of parallel, like, companies grow larger and become more financialized, these networks grow larger because they sort of are financial networks Like the networks that are, that, that might otherwise be used to transport data or energy or other things across our society. And I think these big moves of, of players in their industry buying Bitcoin, taking a position, imagine if that position does grow by a factor of ten or a hundred over the next decade, suddenly they have a lot of Bitcoin or relative to the world, they have a lot of Bitcoin, and they're asking, \"How do we make more?\" Suddenly, that Bitcoin becomes one of the more interesting aspects perhaps of what their business is or does. And now- They're invested in these networks and now they're going to make further investments to continue to have them grow and to continue to have that Bitcoin continue to earn. So it's kind of just this interesting, you know, markets for Bitcoin financial services kind of eat the world as they grow larger and consume, you know, adjacent, marketplaces that they're next to." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:48", "start": 3168.35, "text": "Yeah, and I think it really starts with, the whole treasury reserve aspect or idea of just, just holding it, and then, companies will look at ways to either, you know, try and earn Bitcoin, whether that's, you know, Lightning Network. I mean, Lightning Network is, network is still very early, but certainly there'll be, It starts with that, that-- it starts with this process of holding some Bitcoin, and then that entrepreneur might be thinking, \"Well, how can I earn some?\" And maybe it makes sense to try and earn some, once enough other people also hold it too, so that's probably an important part about growing the network, right?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "53:25", "start": 3204.97, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I sometimes think, and again, MicroStrategy isn't a business that I know a huge amount about, but I think about their total Bitcoin holdings, their total, you know, yearly revenues, if-- again, if Bitcoin does go up by factors The next decade or two as big as, as MicroStrategy, and if MicroStrategy succeeds in continuing to hold it, like, how much is their business thinking about that Bitcoin reserve as their, you know, as their new macro strategy, if you like? I'm not sure." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:53", "start": 3232.79, "text": "Yeah, certainly a funny, funny one there. So being a Bitcoin company, there's probably some unique challenges that Bitcoin founders face. What are some of the challenges that you guys face?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "54:07", "start": 3246.9, "text": "One of the definitely, you're right. Really proud to build what we consider a, a Bitcoin native company, and so I think there's kind of interesting ways that a lot of our challenges either culturally and, and education and, and risk and uncertainty tends to kind of mirror Bitcoin, in a really interesting way. And so where, where Bitcoin is this thing that, you know, was able to," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "54:33", "start": 3273.33, "text": "It'd be adopted by a certain subset of individuals and, and radically so, who are radically passionate about it, but it's taken a lot of time for the, the idea to spread. It takes a lot of time for people to really believe that, like, oh, yeah, it's, it's, I guess it's here to stay, I'll, I'll invest a little in it. and so, yeah, it's in some ways building on the back of something that has that social problem, it's somewhat sometimes the, the social problem for Unchained, and we A really dedicated set of clients and customers, dedicated set of investors, and a community around us and great supporters like, like you, Stephan, and really enjoy working with you and, and your community. but yeah, there, there are just, there's a lot of investors out there aren't willing to believe if they wanna make, if they wanna invest in cryptocurrency, they want it to look like a multi coin something. they don't, they don't maybe wanna trust, investing in something that's just going to custody Bitcoin, for the foreseeable future and Only work with Bitcoin. I think so it's like" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "55:36", "start": 3335.81, "text": "timescale problem." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "55:37", "start": 3337.15, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "55:38", "start": 3337.75, "text": "So it feels like a lot of, you know, tech-- like we think of ourselves as a bank, as a financial services company, as a tech company, but in a lot of ways, the investors that we interface with often, maybe, our, our, our, our- Confused or thinking about a different kind of timescale or different playbook, it feels like the traditional tech company is on some kind of like, there's this like wave of adoption because of some new thing, and they're like either too early or they're like just on the wave or they're like too late, and then the wave, you know, crescendos, and then it's a huge big market and it stays like that for a while, then decades later it gets superseded by the next wave. And that doesn't, it's not, that's not the experience of being in Bitcoin, right? Like, there's been this like four yearly like just cycle of adoption and, and, and retrenchment and mania, and, it, it's, it buffets companies, right? It, it hugely changes revenues from the high year to the next low year. it makes people really overzealous with how much risk they're willing to take on, and as founders, like, we kind of negotiated that first cycle now. Like we've been through the cycle, but as Bitcoiners, we were-- it's not the first one that we've seen, and we kind of always, like, had a certain sense of like wanting to be long-term, like, \"This is our business, like, we own a lot of this business, like, we're really invested personally and, and, and reputationally in what we're doing here. Our goal isn't to, like, have a quick win and run away. like, we want-- we, to build a really long-term bank for a long-term asset class. You're a cycle, right? And they're not, and they're just like, \"Oh, you should do the ICO, right? \" \"No, you should rehypothecate the coins. \" \"You should be lending against, you know, this altcoin over here, like it's the next big thing. \" Or, and I think a lot of that's just been such bad and distracting advice, and we like haven't done it, and we sometimes look really stubborn or like contrary, but, I hope that over time it'll be proven out that we made the Let's wait and see." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "57:47", "start": 3467.1, "text": "It is crazy, I mean, we're, within the last month or so, we've gotten to celebrate our four years as a corporation. you know, we, we only launched really publicly more in midsummer, 2017, so haven't always been as public, but it's crazy to think that we're one of the longest going Bitcoin companies about at that point. It's just, it's, it's very weird." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:09", "start": 3488.61, "text": "You survived. And look, I, I think it's, a really interesting thing that so many things in this space are just indexed to price, right? So as the number goes up, you see more users sign up on exchanges and wallets and everything, and a lot more transactions on chain, and, and then it becomes this kind of process where you have to kind of deal with a massive, massive influx of people. So, certainly I think that's a-- a-and to your point as well, it's that people are coming from different levels of under- Standing, right? So probably many of my listeners are in the more hardcore Bitcoiner camp, so many of them are Bitcoin only and they're like diehards, but not everybody has got to that point and it takes a bit of time." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "58:50", "start": 3530.34, "text": "Yeah, and it's careful 'cause you can't, and you know, people only get to these ideas themselves, so on, on their own in some way, you can't, you can lead the horse to water classically, right? Can't make a drink." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:01", "start": 3541.43, "text": "And, what about, the employee side? So finding, you know, high, highly talented employees, what's that been like for you guys?" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "59:12", "start": 3551.62, "text": "I think it's been, it's, i-i-in some ways we've gotten really lucky. I think we've hired some really incredible people, but there's also been a lot of washout. Like, I think we're sometimes not afraid to hire or contract with folks and try them out and see what they do, and we have often found that folks don't get Bitcoin, like, Like, they're not like believers in it or something. I mean, sometimes they may not even understand like basic aspects of how it works and that there's so much fakery and nonsense in this space, yet a lot of people wanna work in it, especially during the, the peaks of each cycle. I think that's a challenge. There's also this like idea that there's so many people who, especially I think this is true in the coding side, core engineering team, there are so many people who are incredible engineers and we would love to have them, but they feel" }, { "speaker": "joe_kelly", "time": "01:00:00", "start": 3600.23, "text": "And it definitely helps that, you know, if when people are coming in the door, you know, in an interview, and they know a lot about Bitcoin, they own Bitcoin, they're passionate about it. but a lot of our challenges as a, you know, company aren't necessarily challenges with Bitcoin there are challenges with building software and scaling our systems, which are challenges that, that, a lot of engineers, you know, have experienced in. So sometimes like this idea of like we're a Bitcoin company can be off-putting to people that just want a really challenging technology problem, But, it, it, I don't know. What, what would you add, Joe?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:00:34", "start": 3634.25, "text": "Yeah, on the other hand, it also just, I, it's really fortunate to be able to work in a space that people, there is a, a broad swath of really, innately passionate people about Bitcoin who are willing to leave very high-paying jobs, very prestigious jobs and roles for, this, this Bitcoin startup. we do have that going for us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:56", "start": 3656.33, "text": "Yeah, it cuts both ways, and I think for many of us, we-- it, it feels like we're really taking a chance, but it's, it's a new frontier, and if you go out to the west and you go out on the frontier, that, you know, it's high risk but high reward because as many of us who are bullish on this space see it like, if you build a good product or build a good service in this space, you have incredible opportunities coming over the next, say, five to ten years." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:01:22", "start": 3682.91, "text": "Oh, We, we feel like we're, we're a better position than ever, and it's, it's really feels validating that, it feels like the world has kind of moved towards us. I think a lot of bitcoiners get to feel this way too, not just, us at, at Unchained. So, it's a great feeling, it's a great feeling." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:39", "start": 3699.48, "text": "Alright, well, I think those are probably the key points. if you guys had any closing thoughts for the listeners, and of course, tell them where they can find you online." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:01:47", "start": 3707.86, "text": "Yeah," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:01:53", "start": 3713.41, "text": "Business accounts that we talked about today, both Dhruv and I are on Twitter. I'm at, at Joseph Kelly, Dhruv's at Dhruv Bansal, or our corporate account at Unchained Cap. it's really a pleasure talking to you, Stefan, and always good to be on the show." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:09", "start": 3729.2, "text": "Thanks, guys. Listeners get the show notes for this episode at stephanlivera.com/slash-two-two-one. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }