Kraken’s 10 Year Plan | Arjun Sethi

Hey, that's crazy. You're either working for free or that I'm crazy enough to believe that we can hit those milestones over the next 10 years. So I have a 10-year period to hit that. And so as I explain that to folks, they're like, 'Okay, you basically don't get anything if we don't hit these milestones.' So you're basically here to try to hit those milestones. And so if you're here over 10 years to try to hit these extreme goals, then you get rewarded for it. And that means I'm trying to put people in place to hit those goals and thinking bigger and bigger as we start executing it.

Thanks for having me.

Um, I guess where do you want me to start?

Sure. So, the tribe story is pretty synonymous with Kraken as a whole. At tribe, when we started the firm, venture capital is a very who-you-know versus what-you-know ecosystem. And I'm sure you've been through it where there's just a lot of folks that think venture capital and capital raising information is in a very specific way. When you work at a company and you work on any product, you're making it better, you're thinking about testing and iteration. You have a hypothesis and you can just keep incrementally making it better and better. So I think there's never been a time to build better companies, but all the innovation that continues to happen, we know all the great companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Square, etc. But when you think about financial services, there hasn't really been much movement at all. The greatest innovation is like Excel, which pretty much sucks. And so when you take a look at early stage, seed stage, mid-stage, late stage, it's kind of the same. Everyone goes through the same process. They might be looking at other heuristics, but it's a very manual process. And I think that whole process is frankly quite broken. So when we started tribe, it was literally can we get access to raw data for us to be able to interpret that and then through an interpretation of ingesting it, cleansing it, we can come up with our own heuristics not just for one company but many companies. Then could we be better partners, could we deploy more capital in a more efficient way, and can we get capital to folks that actually need the capital versus someone who was in a FOMO category. The world's still really data-driven.

Jonathan's one of our co-founders.

Yeah. So, I think those are terms that people use to make it less. It's a nice marketing. Yeah. It's just like saying like yeah we use AI and machine learning. Okay. Well, like you can use ChatGPT but it doesn't mean you use AI at your firm. It was more that when we got data from a company, we could ingest it and then if you had N plus a thousand companies, could you benchmark it the same way you think about public markets? And so what is the data that you wanted? So you start off with everything. Then you figure out how to ingest it, label it, and then think about ways in which you can interpret it and then you can come up with a criteria for decision-making. One of those criteria are helping a company, investing in a company or just helping to alleviate some of those insights.

So if you take that nugget which is how do you get to a place where you can empower the customer more than anyone else then when you think about crypto or at least what was really important for me. It was the same thing which was I grew up in the United States thinking about, you know, or when my dad got here he kept thinking about I get to come to the United States I get to build whatever I want I'm free to be able to build whatever I want and then I can use the tools and services that are out there to be successful and no one can get in my way. And so there's this whole concept of like a merit-based system, right? So, now when you're growing up, at least for my generation, I guess I'm on the older side of the sort of the millennial range, at least for me it was the same thing, which is that there's like a path that if you work hard enough or if you work harder than the other folks around you, work smarter, not just necessarily harder, like all of those things combined that you should be able to have a path to be able to also build whatever you want. And so that kind of led me to build multiple companies, test and iterate some stuff, experiment. But I think like what led me into crypto more and more as I continued to dive deeper or get more obsessed with it, was just the pure nature of putting control back into the hands of the individual.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So um when did you join Kraken as co-CEO? A year ago officially. Yeah. Last year. This time last year.

When I got introduced to the company, it was first through the folks at DCG when they introduced me to Jesse and it was more of an acquaintance and over time kind of built a relationship and then tribe officially invested into the company through a secondary transaction that the company facilitated in 2020 and 2021.

Um well, the only person that made the decision was Jesse and Ton. Those are two folks. They own most of the company today. They're on the board and they're the co-founders. And so my relationship has been with them and obviously I was sitting on the board as an investor and a shareholder um sorry as an independent board member and investor and shareholder. And so I'm flattered that other folks were a part of the process but I think look I think I'm not sure I can say that I'm a product visionary in any capacity or that I'm good at product. It's just that I've been building products my whole life. Yeah. And so I have a very specific way in which I look at the world and that has been always determined by I don't really know anything. So just assume nothing and who are the customers, who are the clients, they come first and so what are the products and services that you can build for them. And so if you look at the mission of Kraken, I mean we have our literally our culture dock or our mission dock there which is around how do we get crypto into the hands of more people? How do we empower them to own their own data in some cases, but they own their own capital? Um, and so that's what does it mean to actually build products in that direction? Yeah, that's all I'm continuing to build against, which is what that ethos is and was and making sure that's like front and center. Yeah. So, in terms of, you know, do we have a faster product velocity? Yes. because we're just put, you know, we're going back to basics, which is what is a product, what are we trying to get done, what do we want to be able to provide value versus extract value, which is what typically companies do. Um and then more importantly, the premise of what crypto was in the first place. So kind of give you an example when you look at a traditional financial services company that comes in like a bank or a neo bank they're trying to find out all the ways in which they can acquire as many customers as possible but there's only a few areas where they can actually make money right the margin profile and that's usually rehypothecating customers funds in some cases which is fine you know it's regulated you're allowed to do that you have a partner bank etc etc and So when a customer deposits funds and a bank again first principles is rehypothecating it. In the past you used to get a certain amount of yield back right your checking or your savings account had more yield than it has today. And so as rates have gone up and down they haven't really gone up and down for the customer. It's not like you get a yield. And so if you look at crypto assets and what it allows you to do and why I think Kraken has been in my opinion more at the center of like what does it mean for the client and the customer is how do you get rewards or yield or the power back in terms of decision-making back to the customer. How do you educate them that this is happening? And I think it's more and more important to think in that way for all of the new traditional assets that are also converging into the crypto ecosystem. It's not something that's talked about. Most people just talk about, hey, we're going to bring these real world assets or these tokenized equities or assets into the crypto ecosystem. But they're still trying to figure out ways in which to make that spread or that money the same way they made it before. And I think what the beauty of crypto is like when you think about earn, staking, yield, etc., it's like again in the hands of like what you guys want. You should be able to do the same thing with, you know, tokenized equities. Tokenized equities. most of the financial companies, broker dealers, etc. that make money off of it, they make money off of securities lending, right? Um there's no if if that's going to happen, then you should be able to pass that back to the customer, not the other way around.

Yeah. So you know the there's this term going back to basics but then the question is like what does that actually mean right and I've actually written about this and so like my whole road map how I think what I execute against what are the things that I measure is actually just it's available open source if you really think about what do you google how do you find so if you just type in like my name or tribe capital like all of the essays and the way in which we think how I've operated how we've built out organizations I I do I remember reading a post you guys had called which I'd recommend called I think it was how to find product market fit quantitatively or something something that's right yeah and then we have something called scale and variance but before that I talked about how to build a people platform and it actually just comes down to I know it sounds funny like how do you just clearly articulate and transparently talk about like what is it that matters to you and then how do you incentivize people to actually hit those goals um So let's talk about the basics. So the first thing that most people think about is hey this organization is bloated. Let's just fire 50% of the folks. And now I think for some types of organizations that that is important. I don't think that's important for for example at Kraken. So the first thing was who are the folks that have already been executing certain initiatives for a while and so you go spend time with them. What you want to be able to do is continue to build trust more than anything else, which is the first question I got was Arjun, are you only here to take us public and then you're out, right? That was I think that was the general idea of the public like, oh, they're putting this PL guy in in place to get them public. Um and the first thing I wanted to be able to to show and that doesn't happen overnight was that here's my comp, here's how it's structured, here's what I actually get paid for, which you laid this out to the whole company. That's right. Yeah. What is it? Is that public? Will you What is your incentive? I think we'll I mean obviously we'll disclose it over a period of time. Um but like or will you share how you're incentivized? Yeah. So the way I'm incentivized is I have a pretty market rate CEO salary which is lower than most of my execs that are there. And then my compensation outside of me already owning a bunch of shares with Kraken is at certain milestones for enterprise value. then I get a certain amount of unlock. Probably not too dissimilar to how like Elon hit it. And so some of these enterprise value unlocks are like way out there. So you can say, 'Hey, that's crazy. You're either working for free or that I'm crazy enough to believe that we can hit those milestones over the next 10 years.' Um so I have a 10-year period to hit that. And so as I explain that to folks and they're like, 'Okay, you basically don't get anything if we don't hit these milestones.' So we're basically here to try to hit those milestones. And so if you're here over 10 years to try to hit these extreme goals, then you get rewarded for it. And that means I'm trying to put people in place to hit those goals and thinking bigger and bigger as we start executing it.

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No, I think what was interesting about Kraken was that I was already in love with the product road map. I just wanted us to get there faster. Nice. That's it. It's not accelerate the product. I wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel. It's more that you know we have spot, margin, we have our futures and our perps etc today but it's more about how do you bring this in cohesively on behalf of who our customers are. So most of our customers I actually think one of the biggest misnomers about Kraken because we didn't raise which is a good thing too is that we stayed under the radar we didn't talk about who our customers were who do we cater to. So at the highest level is that we're an exchange. We've got a transparent way in which we have built out the exchange so that our professional traders that come day in and day out. So this isn't a prosumer, this isn't a retail customer. This isn't an institutional, you know, large customer. It's like what I call like the meaty middle is like folks that are day trading and professional trading. Like that's their livelihood. And this phenomenon started basically 25 years ago with the folks that sort of think about TradingView type products and so people have always thought about these set of folks as fragmented but they're not like think Interactive Brokers plus more and so that's the set of products that we build. So we're a customer of our own exchange which is we have our Kraken Pro now we've got Ninja Trader and a set of new products that we're creating but it's all on behalf of our professional traders. Those professional traders continue to bring us liquidity all over the world. So mostly North America, Australia, Western style countries, Europe, that's where we've been predominantly strong and we're continuing to grow in other areas as well where a professional trader wherever they're located in the world think, act, look, and feel the same. They want to be able to trade. So a commodities trader or a equities trader, options trader, whatever it is, they want to be able to have a certain amount of, you know, multiple assets to be able to trade off of. What's great about how we've built our platform and our exchange is that the road map is to be able to continue to cater towards what they want unilaterally uniform way in which to think about where it sits and then you can think about how you want to trade and so then the tools that you provide them I use this insight internally is that look before we're we've been regulated we're secure and we help our traders trade any asset and the more assets that we have the more they're going to continue to trade with us, but at the same time, the more products and offerings that we can have on behalf of that, and the tools that we have, then they're going to continue to stay with us. And so, some of them are going to stay within what I'd call like the cruise liner, which is like it's safe, you know, it's not going to tip over. But some folks might want to do a deep sea exploration, right, into DeFi, etc. So, how do we bridge the gap or hybridize in some cases all the things that we need to do on behalf of that professional trader? I think it's one of the toughest roles is running an exchange in a bull market because there's so many ways you can make money and so many things you can do. And that's actually when you need to be the most disciplined. The most disciplined. Exactly. And like one of the I think Coinbase has done many great things, but one clear venture off into a land that didn't make sense and they spent a lot of resources on was for example like their NFT platform that turned I think they had 500 people working on that and that was like a pico top type of thing. Hire a bunch of people from Instagram etc. But I'm not trying to pick on Coinbase every exchange has done many things like that.

Well, so I mean part of the problem of the opportunity set here is that it's a fast growing ecosystem, right? If you think about all the chains, all the ways in which you can provide yield, lending capacity, you know, staking, rewards, etc. is there's just not a lot of products and services that are out there that cater to the needs of your customer. So, think of it this way. One, you need to be trusted. So, they think about security, the custody of their assets, the borrowing against it, and trading against it. That's one. But if you want to do like savings and yield, that's a different type of customer as well. So like let's use stable coins for instance as an example. Okay, why is stable coin on top of crypto rails really important? Again, it might seem obvious, but if you're in Nigeria, if you're in any of the Latin American countries, if you're in any of the Southeast Asia corridors, you care about assets that are safe and you care about assets that are hedged against your own currency inflation risk in some cases, right? So Latin America is a great example. And so why do people price their own groceries or things within their store in USDT? Well, they do it because they don't trust their local currency. So this isn't me saying that one country or its economic system is good or bad. It's just that this is the demand bottoms up. So you have to be able to build products for that too. So the privilege that we have is that we have our professional traders trading on our exchange. we've got like pretty large amount of depth and liquidity. And that gives us the ability to be able to build other products on top of it, right? So there's another counterparty that's willing to take the risk of money movement regardless if that's B2B for the average consumer, whatever it might be. Mhm. So the way I think about it is again we're in a privileged position to what I had said earlier where how do we bring customer and user value back to them and reduce the amount of cost that they have for things that they want to do on their everyday life. So if I want to send you a payment across borders, how do you reduce the amount of spread that there's down to zero if we can? If I want to send it to a friend, if I want to send to any asset, if it is a fartcoin, if it is dogecoin, if it is dog, if it is BNB, doesn't matter. The list goes on. If I want to send that, I should be able to do that in a way that's fragmented and easy and I don't have to, you know, charge a spread. You can do that when you are vertically integrated as an exchange and you have custody and you have the ability to lend and you have the ability to let people move money back and forth. And so instead of relying on traditional brick-and-mortar middleman in between that take a spread along the way, if we already have a centralized exchange of liquidity, we can just move that capital back and forth for whatever the reason may be. It's one of the reasons probably why we already have like what is it I think 65 to 70% of all onboarding and offboarding from fiat to stable coins worldwide.

Um, I think the way I think about it is that over a 5 to 10 or 20 year horizon, it probably be almost all almost all trading. I mean it's not something to get scared about. It's just something that will happen. So the question you have to sort of ask is okay, how do you think about building out your exchange to be able to move onchain and offchain depending on the products and services that are out there. There's always going to be a certain amount of stuff that stays centralized, but it's how do you bridge the gap and how do you hybridize for what people really want to be able to do. And so there's always a different cohort of customers that go there first, right? Which is like we call them degens. But you can think of them as like, you know, the first to be able to jump off the ledge to try something and then it works. Then there's a next set that say, okay, you know what? I'm willing to do deep sea exploration. And then there's a next set that say like, look, I want it to be safe and you do it on my behalf. And so there's a set of tools that you build and then there's a set of what I'd call hybridized products and services that you're going to build. But I don't see a world where it's only centralized liquidity. I think it's going to be a combination of, you know, off-chain and onchain.

Yeah. I mean the beauty of maybe the way in which I've been trained and the folks that I work with that I've also brought into Kraken is actually not too dissimilar in we can say a lot of things about Facebook but the way in which the cohort of people that grew up on Facebook or built on top of their platform and leveraged using data science to see we used to use this term how do you see the world as clear as possible. And the more you can see that, then you can see what I call gross demand trends are of human behavior. And so the more you see that pick up, then that's what we consider inevitabilities, right? Then you'll be like, okay, what's an example of that? Well, obviously stable coin has been an inevitability. It's obvious that people are going to use more and more blockchain. I do think it's obvious that people will want to have control over their own data and over their own assets. Now the way in which it manifests that's going to be different and so you have to separate the behavior and the demand of what people want versus the products and services that are going to cater towards them. And so you already see this in the web one and web two world or data 1.0 or 2.0 world. But if you think about what's been happening in fintech that's exactly what customers have been demanding not just in the United States but worldwide and so that's a trend that's happening. The question you have to ask is okay while that's happening are they going to care more and more about control their own assets control their own destiny. My sense is yes because of what's happening across the world and what I call the volatility of global order. And I don't see that trend changing anytime soon yet. However, it's always possible that it could change. But I think the early versions of what you'd see again gross demand of people's behavior and demand for the products that they want, I think crypto is like a very large subset of that. So, let's use other examples. People from Russia that left Russia that went into Dubai, India, Southeast Asia corridor, they don't have access to bank accounts. So what do they do? They use wallets and those wallets allow them to be able to proliferate regular everyday payments. And that's why card services are important. So it's kind of like this interesting mix of things that we're used to here in the United States we just don't really think about are like things that just do not exist for folks that are worldwide. And so when you think about what does that demand look like? Well, that's a billion, two billion, three billion people, maybe four to five over a period of time. And their demand will create more products and hopefully those types of products then proliferate back here in the United States.

Absolutely. And the more we can do that on behalf of clients or customers depending on the products that you're building I think the more you can just continue to drive down cost. I think everyone kind of forgets about that which is every friction point that we have for these products especially in financial services is a cost to the customer.

We um so we had a lot of debates about should we do it? Should we own it? should be vertically integrated. We've got distribution, etc., etc. I think we went back to what do our clients want. So far, if the majority of our clients come to us and say we don't trust anyone but Kraken have a stable coin, sure, we'll go in that direction. I think we're very far away from that because there's USDC, there's USDT, we've already gone through waves of different stable coins. There's a lot of other folks in the ecosystem that are trying to get into it as well. And it may not be a network effect proliferation. It might be just for, you know, B2B interpretation of, you know, moving assets back and forth. What we want to be able to do is continue to stay agnostic and then continue to be able to build a system so that you can move whatever stable coin there may be for whatever use case through our ecosystem, regardless if that's centralized or onchain moving forward. So we'll continue to build the tools around that. So we're agnostic to the way in which the clients want to be able to have access to it. there are some regulatory concerns for some areas and constituents. So we'll adhere to that. But I think what's more important is that does it give access to our customers? Do they get liquidity? Are they able to move their collateral the way they want to regardless of the stable coin, Bitcoin, tokenized equities, RWAS in the future? Is that if it's a well-oiled machine then we'll provide it.

I think the way we look at any organization is where do you drive your profits and how do you spend it, right? And so research and development is like always important which is what are the types of goals that you have and what are the multiple shots on goal that you want. I think in order for us to make hybridization of what onchain liquidity is going to look like with our centralized exchange, we have to take multiple shots on goal in that area. And so the answer is yes because we've learned a lot. We've made it better. We're going to continue to make it better. And then we've got, you know, over the next 45 to 90 days, a set of new three to four products that we're going to have out there that are quite integrated to our exchange, which we've made announcements around that already.

Well, I don't think you can say never say never. Um but to go back and reflect the we think of ourselves as an exchange first, right? Which is like it's secure, it's fast, we'll continue to have uptime, we'll continue to build what our clients want. So that means investing into that infrastructure similar to how you think about NASDAQ. But if you think about our suite of products and services or the family of products and services that we have, that's more akin to what I call Interactive Brokers and then more akin to like some of the products that you see with CME. Um so there's a certain set of folks that are professional traders. So CME plus Interactive Brokers, but then there's a certain set that we're starting to build that are like, you know, traditional financial services. So you could actually say like a lot of what we're doing is like, you know, onchain for Vanguard with like what we did with XXOs. And so it's hard for me to tell what's going to actually happen in terms of bifurcation between the market but if you take a look at the Genius Act stable coin bill and what's going to happen with market structure I think people are seeing that the fragmentation that you had in the past is actually more costly to the customer because of the regulations that you have in between. And I would argue because there's not as much transparency, there's more systemic risk to the ecosystem or the market, whereas crypto solves a lot of this because of this transparency.

So, I think so I won't go into each individual competitor. I think it's more about what's the admiration that you have for people moving into crypto and pushing the education of what it means for everyone coming into crypto ecosystem in the first place. So,

Let's take a step back. Financial services we're used to are pretty fragmented, bifurcated, pretty much closed ecosystems versus what I'd say is in the open source world. And so I categorize all of the companies in are they focused more on building products and services in an open source style fashion, or are they building products and services where they leverage some of that open source and they create closed ecosystems? And I think you can categorize all of these companies in that direction. Now, the reason you have closed ecosystems is that you want to be able to make more money passively on your customers. Same way in which like again a bank sort of holds you down. And our goal has been the other direction, which is how do we become more open? How do we become more hybridized? How do we come closer towards the goals of creating best-in-class products leveraging all of the open source and open ecosystems that you have in crypto. I think what you're seeing for other folks is that they are just reinventing the wheel of what you've seen in traditional fintech or financial services. And I think we've just squarely been against that because in our opinion it's a detriment to the folks that you want to be able to get educated with why crypto is so important. So if you want to empower the customer, if you want to be able to move ownership and sovereignty that we talk about to the customer, I think you have to embrace the open ecosystem and open source world or multi-chain whatever it may be.

So the best products can win and the best services can proliferate out there. And so I think everyone's done a great job of getting into crypto and I don't think that changes anytime soon. I think what's really important is to make sure that the ethos of why we got into this space in the first place, that foundational cultural set isn't lost when people talk about how much money is being made or how much the assets are going into crypto or here are all the ways in which you can save cost. That's all great, but it should be in service to the customers, everyday folks like you and me. Then the other aspect I think people are kind of losing is that because you've got liquidity and because crypto is coming, what does that mean for the average everyday entrepreneur? What does it mean for a protocol listing? What does it mean for capital formation? What does it mean for more and more innovation to happen because crypto can power it? So I think about a lot of these things and they may seem crazy, they may seem existential, but just take a look at the private to public world. That in itself is fragmented. A lot of people talk about liquidity, a lot of people talk about long duration, but it doesn't mean that you can't add more ways in which what I call forward mobility for whoever that may be. And we talk about the average everyday individual or the pro traders, but if you're a company that's at the early stage or mid-stage, sometimes you get stuck because you don't have access to capital and this is something that the public markets were supposed to solve. And so when I think about tokenized equities or tokenized assets or real world assets, I'm also thinking about the heartbeat of any economy or the heartbeat of any small to medium business or the heartbeat of entrepreneurship and innovation. The more you can unlock there in terms of faster cycle of capital, I think the more you can do and it's a better service for what they actually need.

No, I think like one they have a great product, right? So we should all be again in admiration for what they've done. But every couple years you have a new set of folks that are in DeFi which is great because it's open. And you have a lot of folks that are trying to build best-in-class products. So a year from now or two years from now or three years from now we're going to talk about the next one, right? It's going to be hype three or hype four whatever it may be. It'll be a different name and we may or may not remember Hyperliquid. My hope is that they continue to become successful and they've done a lot of great things in order to innovate again on behalf of the community. It's a great standard for us to be able to look at and say look at what they've done again on behalf of the customer. And so the onus is going to be on them to figure out how they continue to do that versus do they move in a different direction. And so are they going to eat into the market? Yes, but that's only if you assume the market is zero sum and it's not continuing to grow. And so the question you got to ask is how fast is market growing and how much more of the market is going to continue to change over the next five or 10 years.

Yeah. So the way to think about it is if you believe in a world where traditional financial products and assets, structured products, you know the list goes on, we use the word real world assets, but any of these tokenized wrappers on top of an asset is going to move on chain over a period of time. I think that's inevitable and I think that's probably the greatest innovation that we're going to have on behalf of anybody in terms of how you think about financial assets and collateral. What is the fastest way to be able to do that? It is to be able to own that chain or be vertically integrated, right? So NinjaTrader is based off of the same concept that you've had for Kraken Professional Traders, is that you've got a large cohort of professional traders a little bit older that have been doing commodities and futures trading and that's the way in which they've been trained. And so how do you get them to access crypto? How do you think about getting them access to collateral that is going to be in crypto? And again, educating them on their ability to move assets back and forth from each other. So when we use the word convergence, it's more about how do we bring more of these assets on chain, how do we bring more centralized liquidity for these assets and how are ways in which we can educate the customer that normally hasn't had access to crypto or didn't know that they could get access to crypto. And professional traders, there's not that many of them if you really think about it worldwide. And so for us it was more about getting access again to that education of another two million customers that use these products every single day.

And that was really important while everyone else was trying to figure out what the world could look like in onchain, which I think is also great and you need to be able to have a certain amount of bets in that direction. We wanted to move in the other direction, which is okay great, well how do we in order for us to be able to move and proliferate traditional assets into a tokenized world or into the crypto ecosystem, we got to go get them. And if you think first principles Elon Musk style is that you got to be vertically integrated in certain areas in order to move the puck forward. That's how we thought about the NinjaTrader acquisition.

At the time, yeah. 1.5 billion.

That's right, roughly, yeah. That's what we announced based on uncertainty.

Yeah. I mean the great thing about being countercyclical to how people think is that you have tailwinds in the crypto ecosystem. I think of everything in like this supply and demand curve. It's like a great framework to use, which is if there's more money going into crypto, we're talking about it, there's more headlines, that means the price of the assets are going to go up and so you can think of the world in terms of intrinsic value and options value. Crypto's become a world for a certain set of assets in terms of options value where things continue to get heated up. And my focus to the team was okay, right, here's our roadmap over the next three, five, ten years. And we want to be able to move into tokenization of commodities, equities, etc. What are all of the companies out there that look very similar to us in terms of the way in which Kraken has continued to grow, especially on behalf of professional traders? And they gave me a list and we have these funny names out there and I said, okay, great. Well, what do the NinjaTrader guys do and can we go talk to them?

And then I forced everyone to use the product and we used the product as well and it kind of gave us nostalgia to what Kraken had built. More importantly, what was really funny is a lot of the insights and aspirations and admiration that Jesse and Ton had when they built the company was based off of a lot of the stuff that NinjaTrader built. So there was this nice convergence of everyone on the same page, which is like this is a good product. Let's go identify and see if they're interested in the first place.

Not I would say like transactional order of operations, yes. But the way it works is that here's our vision. Here's what we do. By the way, the NinjaTrader team, their board and their shareholders had zero clue about crypto and Kraken or like our size and scale.