Kraken: The Crypto Native's Powerhouse Exchange | Dave Ripley

Thanks, yeah.

Yeah, well, gosh, a lot to cover. I mean, you pick any 12-month in crypto, I don't care what it is — bear, bull — you just dive into the heart. Like, it's horrendous. We've all, you know, as the saying goes, we all age five times as quickly given all the excitement in crypto. But yeah, first on Jesse — I'm glad you hit that. He's one of the top few pioneers in crypto, top few entrepreneurs frankly. He's an incredible entrepreneur generally, founded a previous business before Kraken, really only ever been an entrepreneur in his life. So he's really incredible from that standpoint, and then also like you said, one of the top few pioneers in crypto. And he's poured his heart, life, so much into the industry generally — I mean, of course Kraken, but honestly it's the industry generally, which is in line with our mission, which is to grow cryptocurrency adoption. And frankly, one of the things that I think is important about how we view that mission is we view ourselves as having a role and not — Kraken's not going to do it alone. That's like the antithesis of what Bitcoin and crypto are. It's a community, it's a decentralized network, you know, so it takes all kinds of participants.

But yeah, I guess to get into the meat of it — what's the past year been like. Well, so first off, I've been in crypto and I've been at Kraken for a really long time, and even in crypto for even longer than that. I started back in 2013 and I founded a company, Glidera, that was acquired by Kraken in 2016. So that puts me at, what, like seven and a half years or so at Kraken as of today. So I've been with the company for a long time, certainly know the business well, know the industry incredibly well.

That's a good question. I don't know, it was — there were probably not more than 50 people when I joined. I mean, there was only a handful of engineers, there was a decent — maybe a couple dozen people on our client engagement team at least, and then all the other functions kind of probably added up from there. So yeah, I wasn't the first dozen or so, but fairly early. And of course there was probably a handful of people that had joined Kraken and then left, so if you add those up maybe I'm getting closer to 100 by that point.

Yeah, just on that — you pretty much summed it up correctly. We have really significant business in US, Canada, Europe, UK, Australia. Those are major markets, make up huge, huge portion, majority of the business. Really Europe and UK first — that's where we launched initially, first place you could kind of like buy Bitcoin with Euros domestically and then with British pounds as well. But I think this past year was really marked — so one, it was a bear market, and you know each bear market has been unique in different ways. This is my third bear market and coming into this one I came in with a little bit more optimism and a chip on my shoulder saying like, hey, we've done this a couple times before, we got this. But lo and behold, no, this one brought real meaningful and unique challenges. And what really were those? On the heels of the FTX and other failures, you kind of had this huge ramp-up in, I don't know, pushback certainly on the regulatory side — that was a big piece — a bit of like the Choke Point 2.0 for the banking of crypto companies. And then of course the public perception, right? Like, hey, there are these failures. I think a number of people in various different places, some in US government, like looking to kind of pin this on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency itself as opposed to specific failed trusted third parties. Which by the way is the incredibly ironic piece of this, which is the whole premise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is to move away from trusted third parties, and here are these failed trusted third parties giving Bitcoin and crypto a black eye, which is truly ironic because the whole premise is to someday move away from those. I mean, of course, going to take time and so forth. So these are the various different pressures that arose, and of course here in the US there's really Ground Zero for where there's the most pressure, chaos, whatever. And kind of simultaneously with this period, many of the other geographies — like Canada specifically, Europe as well — had already been marching forward with various different regulatory structures. Canada kind of had their FTX moment several years ago with QuadrigaCX failure, and that kind of pushed them to put in their licensing structure. Of course in Europe they have the VASP registrations and now followed by MiCA. So there's already a lot of advancement, which is in some ways — look, there's trade-offs in some ways, but the additional clarity is hugely beneficial, particularly as we look at it vis-à-vis the United States. But of course there's overhead and work and all these things needed to do to go through licensing processes and so forth. But the reality is all of these things combined led to really a significant amount of lift on the business — whether it was navigating Choke Point 2.0, basically working with existing bank relationships, establishing new ones, obtaining licenses where there's new license, and then in the US basically dealing with litigation and of course the SEC and everything they're up to here. So it's really been meaningful — it's just presented a meaningful set of things that the business has had to do, the US being Ground Zero with the activity here. But I guess the upside is, for the most part, Kraken has navigated all of these challenges quite well and frankly better than many of our peers out there, right? And so we've kept all of our fiat rails up and custody, and we actually went for licenses. Take for example Canada — we went for the license there, a number of other companies exited, our market share position went from like mid-single digits up to like nearly 50%. And so we've just seen really significant success over this period in terms of market share over the 2023 period, despite the overall market being down significantly.

Yeah, I'd say that's partly right. For what it's worth, the piece that's absolutely partly right: yes, we have focused meaningfully on those more professional advanced traders and investors historically. You mentioned the Pro experience, but we were one of the first — if you dial it back, one of the first to go multi-token, one of the first to offer margin. We of course moved into derivatives a while ago with our futures product. So we have in fact invested meaningfully in that area and we'll continue to do so. We have more tricks up our sleeve for that particular group of clients. We think that is a really strong part of the business. And what it means is, yeah, if you compare Kraken to Coinbase or some of these other companies, the stickiness of our clients, the retention of our clients is actually much stronger. So when we see various different bull-bear cycles, we don't see as much pullback from our clients over those time periods. And then furthermore, given the increased level of activity, there's of course a stronger relationship, higher ARPU, all those types of things for our clients. But going forward, I mean —

Yeah, I mean, there's a few different ways to look at it — like, do you strip out institutions or do you keep them in and these different things. We don't really disclose the specifics, but you could think about it as several multiples — like three to five x. And it's for this reason though, I mean, I think probably the strong investors out there would almost guess this if you just described our type of client, where we're strongest and so forth. But the reality is that we have since a handful of years ago launched a product and experience that's much more catered towards consumer retail, individuals. And the way we're thinking about that product and its approach is, look, Coinbase of course has been in that segment really deeply for a long period of time and they have their reputation. But I think there's a great opportunity for a lot of the things that we built in Pro to consumerize them and make them really simplistic — whether it's margin trading or any of these types of things — and find a way to make it really simplistic and understandable and bring the right education and service and all these other pieces for consumers. And we think that's an opportunity out there, just given that we've done all of these things successfully for an advanced trader and there should be an opportunity to do that more for consumers. So I do think going forward, we have been growing that segment — the non-advanced trader, more the individual consumer, retail investor, what have you — and I think we're already seeing really good success, really good growth there. And I think there's a lot more that we'll continue to do to expand in that way, and we'll probably hopefully do it in a somewhat different way where we leverage some of what we built on the Pro side and these various different things to really have a nice experience for clients.

Well, you know, I'm glad you asked because it's the part that I left out, maybe not intentionally so. Kind of just when I was talking about the most recent 12 months and the market share gains and so forth. So yes, we were navigating a number of these challenges with banks and regulators and going for licenses and staying in markets while peers were pulling back. But the other thing is that you hit the nail on the head — we started marketing for the first time ever. Okay, we had done some marketing before, but really not significant. And I'm glad you mentioned Mayur, Kraken's Chief Marketing Officer, who's been here roughly a couple years now. And really that first year was a lot of foundational team structure, starting to move the ball forward in a few different areas of marketing. But then in the past 12 months we did actually ramp up. So it wasn't a huge amount of spend that we brought during this bear period, but we actually increased our marketing spend meaningfully into the bear market in terms of absolute, not just in terms of percent of the total, but even in terms of absolute dollars. And we were doing it with the right team, and we continued to do it fairly — I don't know what the right term is — methodically. We looked to really build in the right way here as opposed to just jumping out a couple stadium naming rights deals or what have you. But it's really all the different components. And so that was also likely one of the big drivers of why we saw positive market share over that period — we were going in the opposite direction of marketing as everybody else. And so we really saw it with strong new client acquisition and a number of really good things over that period.

Well, it is challenging, right? I mean, there's ebbs and flows on the marketing side. We kind of went from — I think back in the day, before I was even there, where there was no clue, you know, you do these ad campaigns and TV ads and radio or whatever it was — and then we went to a world where there's really tight performance marketing, paid advertising, direct to client. And I think that's being somewhat challenged now, just given how much data is shared by the various different companies out there that you do paid advertising with. But nonetheless, really challenging. That's almost the whole game of testing and trying a number of different approaches, areas to advertise. I mean, I guess it's a little bit more on the growth side and product side, and then you make some of the bigger bets on the brand marketing side.

Yeah, I mean, it's of course out there. So one is, you've probably heard this song and dance from many others that you can only get so specific on these types of plans, so can't really share. But certainly it's out there. I mean, from a financial profile standpoint, Kraken is big and profitable and certainly larger than many other public companies out there. So that exists. Of course, there's more to it than just that to go public, and there are also implications of it. But I mean, it's one of the many things out there with regard to investing the private or public side that is absolutely on our list as something in the future.

Well, I mean, just taking the topic directly on a sale or an acquisition, there are a huge number of things to get right on such a thing, and you're right, the valuation is higher. And so that leaves us at a place where it's like maybe a lot of traditional finance companies that would have that level of pocketbook to go and buy — of course, they're not ready to come into crypto anyways. I mean, you think about like a big bank or whatever, and then there's all kinds of different questions on whether Kraken would be a great fit for those types of companies or not, and there's reasons why you might question that as well. So yeah, I think while obviously if there was some big M&A offer inbound, it's not like we would just ignore it out of hand, but this isn't the goal for the business. We think driving Kraken as a successful business — it can grow to be incredibly successful, already has and will continue to grow to be incredibly successful all on its own without necessarily going down the M&A route. We think we just have a huge number of opportunities to really make it an enduring, incredibly successful business, certainly irrespective of being acquired by somebody else, and then even irrespective of IPO as well. And that's like number one what we're focused on, and we know it to be possible and the outcome that's going to happen. So that's where we're really driving.

Well, look, I mean, the jobs to be done for our clients actually involve both of those types of things. So it's really — the first piece is what I'll describe as building the bridge. I'll come back to that. Number two is bringing our clients more investable, tradable assets, more access to various different parts of the crypto ecosystem and so forth. And the third piece is just giving them an incredible experience, incredible user experience via products, also first-class service to be able to navigate it all, understand it all, digest it all. And this cuts, as we talked about before, for professional traders an incredibly fantastic Pro experience, but then for the other segments we go after, just the same, providing them the same incredible user experience that fits their needs and so forth. So those are the three jobs to be done, and in these three I think we basically get at this dynamic where it really ends up being both. So first, the bridge. What's the bridge? The bridge is from TradFi to crypto. We're this bridge from this legacy system to this new incredible decentralized ecosystem that is growing at an incredible rate with tons of new innovations and so forth. But in order to be a bridge, it's kind of a least common denominator. There's a ton of different pieces that are really necessary to integrate with TradFi — red compliance, banking relationships, security, fundamental to all these different pieces. Custody actually ends up being a meaningful piece to really pull off the bridge because that's what's necessary in order to actually provide a way to get from fiat to crypto. And so all of those foundational pieces of being a bridge are really meaningful. And yes, that's where like a custody license comes in and a number of these different pieces. We spend a huge amount of effort and resource on regulatory compliance in all of our major markets. And so this bridge that we talk about is really — it almost pulls in the geographic piece, which is for us, that's Europe, UK, US, Canada, Australia, and we'll potentially add to those geographies over time. But that's our model — is to go deep, to support the domestic fiat currency, localize, provide that. All these things lead towards the last element — they provide the foundation to have an awesome client experience. And so we're thoughtful about when we're going to expand and add to that because it is a lift to do so. The second piece is where you're kind of the other side of the coin on the question, which is, look, we want to build more and more access to more and more investable, tradable assets in crypto and more access to all the things you can do in crypto, which for us — a lot of it is a value network, a financial network. A lot of this has to do with investing, trading, finding ways to earn, all these types of things. And a meaningful way to do that — I'm sure we can add more tokens to our centralized exchange and provide more custodial staking and so forth — but a big way to do that is to actually move on-chain. This is an open ecosystem. Innovation is happening quickly. We think it's going to accelerate. One of the great things about the two more meaningful use cases of the last cycle — DeFi summer and then really NFTs, digital art and PFPs — were the trend of where we saw the growth. They were both meaningfully on-chain, which was awesome and different from the previous cycle where it was like ICOs and centralized exchanges. So I think that's what we're looking forward to happening even more so going forward. And so for us, the wallet's a meaningful piece of this — providing access to all these, whether it's trading and investing into the long tail of cryptocurrencies that we would never list on the centralized exchange, just from a resource standpoint and whatever else, to a number of other things in the crypto space. And so I think both of them really are meaningful because the bridge is foundational on the first job to be done, and then the second one of providing access to more — that definitely means going on-chain.

Yeah, I think a couple things. So first on the wallet — absolutely, we're totally excited about that. It's like one of — looks great, by the way, it looks really good. Yeah, the UX is incredible, which is definitely something we're really looking to hang our hat on and really meaningful piece of this company going forward. It's open source — a good portion of the stack is open source, which is different than many of the other, maybe all of the other similar peer-type companies that have launched wallets, that have launched a crypto wallet. But yeah, with regard to your more significant question there on an L2 — yeah, for sure. I mean, L2s in general are, you might say that's one of the big areas of this cycle, to the extent that we're kicking off a new cycle here. It's one of the big areas. There's a lot of investment in L2s. There's always been a lot of investment in scaling, whether that's base layer or additional layer, and there's certainly a lot of activity here. And I think one of the things — there's of course this trade-off when you go L1, L2, with respect to security, finality, all these various different types of things. You get more transaction throughput and scalability, and I think that's actually meaningful for the industry to continue to test that spectrum between the two and find the right balance. There's no question that the big Bitcoin mass — most secure, decentralized, whatever it is — is like the core of what this value brings. But looking to think about layers on top of that, whether it's Lightning or certainly anything else on Ethereum or Solana or whatever — L2s are really meaningful. Where do Kraken play? We haven't announced anything or anything specific with regard to building our own L2, but I'll say for sure, much the same as I mentioned before with regard to jobs to be done and so forth, being part of this in some form or fashion is absolutely a goal for Kraken. Whether it's providing access to many L2s, building our own L2, and sequencer — any of these types of things — we hope, we would like to think that we approach a lot of these things thinking fairly broadly of the different opportunities out there.

Yeah, there are a lot of fees flowing through that. There are a lot of fees.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think when it comes to, I mean, just to like maybe just like take that IPO thing more specifically, like, yeah, I mean, look, I mean, for sure we're oriented towards serving our clients, building the biggest business we can, achieving the mission, all those types of things. And you know, an IPO is more of a means, it's not the endgame at all, right? And so that factors in. But that, irrespective of that, there's a meaningful regulatory compliance question for any of these new innovations out there. I mean, we, the way it works is we have an enormous team that spends all their time on this. We have, you know, 60-ish legal team, people on legal now.

Is Marco Santori still running that?

Yeah, he runs that legal team. 250 plus on the compliance side. I mean, just really a meaningful investment in this area. And you know, when you swing to the legal side, when we think about these new technologies and innovations, it's not like there's, for the most part, you know, think about like an L2 or whatever, L2 running a sequencer, there's just nothing out there with regard to specific regulations and guidelines or what have you for a number of these different things. And so you kind of have to say, okay, well, let's look at the actual law here and make sure we're applying that law to these new innovations. That's really what any innovator has to do in that area that's poking around something that's like somewhat regulated or whatever. And so that's what that team does. They do an incredible job of it and they of course partner meaningfully with our product team, business teams and so forth to iterate and understand what we're actually trying to build and might even influence it to some extent how we build it. Of course it influences whether we build it or not, but it definitely influences how we build it. Also, it influences like where we offer it. So this ends up being, given laws are tied to governments and governments are countries, it ends up being a geographic question as well. So yeah, there's a lot there. We often say much more than you would have probably ever envisioned long ago.

Yeah, I was like, oh, these, remember ICOs? It was like during all the ICOs. Mark's like, yeah, a bunch of these are crap, but like there is something here with these tokens.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, that really was the outcome, right? I mean, most of those 2017 ICOs were ridiculous.

Yeah, I mean, they, well, it depends. Depends what type of centralized exchange you're operating. So I think for a centralized exchange like Kraken, where we have this business where we're a bridge and then we're also looking to provide access to as much of crypto as we can, we become like increasingly successful and it just continues to, you know, we just hit, I mean, it's escape velocity and we just grow and grow and become really successful. Because look, I think more and more activity on chain is awesome from a Kraken standpoint. We even think that's awesome for our kind of core centralized exchange bridge business. The more use cases there are, the more reasons there are to buy, invest in, trade, use crypto and other decentralized assets. The more significant the demand is for all of Kraken's products. None of them really go away with any of this, in particular to the bridge. Because there's, however many, I don't know, call it 500 million people have touched crypto so far, but a huge portion of those are just like I bought a very small amount of Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, or Dogecoin or whatever it is from the last cycle, and you barely call them in the ecosystem just yet. They're really scratching the surface. And so when we think about the number of people out there, they're all going to be coming from TradFi. They're going to be coming with their fiat, looking to get away from fiat. We're going to move to crypto. And that's a big part of what this bridge means. And so I think that's going to be incredibly successful. The more activity, it only expands for Kraken. We will also provide direct access to a lot of that stuff on chain with great security, great service, all these various different things. And so I think it really is a fantastic outcome and we were encouraged by every, I mean, specifically look, when I go look at the volume numbers for decentralized exchanges, I'm always cheering whenever I see those numbers move up. And even if I see a move up as share of total of centralized exchanges, I'm like, yeah, this is good. This is what we want to see. Let's go.

Yeah, that's cool.

I think it was the NYSE. They were the first ones to mention it, I think.

Yeah, I mean, I guess two things. You know, kind of surprising that you haven't seen this earlier. Which I don't know, maybe there were like some small mentions of this in pockets of NYSE or NASDAQ or CME or whoever, but it doesn't seem like it's been like something really stated with like authority or some level of like, hey, yeah, this is really something that should be considered. Yeah, it's kind of surprising. I mean, 24/7/365, let's just note the fact that 24/7/365 is a very local, country way of thinking about something, right? Because not everyone has the same 24, for sure. We're all on different time zones across this whole planet and this is a very global world. And we're not even all on the same seven. Some countries in the world have different days for weekends. And we're certainly not on the same 365 with respect to holidays and seasonality and all these types of things. So it's like a very non-global way of thinking. 24/7/365 by definition is like, hey, this means global, right? And thinking in a world that is not global is, I mean, it's very years ago, decade ago mentality, I think. Because the world is going to become more global. This is one of the reasons why Bitcoin, cryptocurrency are such meaningful innovations, is because they solve for this global dynamic. They solve for it in an incredibly elegant way by just creating a new system that is actually built to be global. Whereas kind of trying to retrofit or upgrade an existing system to be global, 24/7/365 might not be that easy, right? So they can do it, but the only way to get funds on and off NYSE might still be kind of held up in the old 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday world. You still got the brokers. You still got the brokers. I mean, you have the actual fiat money movement that are going and trading on NYSE. It's not like a crypto exchange. So I don't know, but you know, maybe they can start unpacking that and incrementally moving in that direction. But I don't know, we'll let them sort that out.

Five years, yeah. I mean, I think pretty likely. I would say fairly likely. I mean, one of them, well, let's see, wait a minute, both of them, I mean all three of them. There's four big ones, right? There's NYSE which is owned by ICE, there's NASDAQ, there's CME, and then there's CBOE. You already have CBOE, and now exiting I think, and I think they've done that a couple of times. CME's kind of been in there with futures for a while now. NYSE, there's ICE and they kind of founded Bakkt. NASDAQ has actually been, but they have such a bad experience with Bakkt, like Bakkt they did, and CBOE shutting down as well. As far as I understand, like delisting any day now. So it's an interesting dynamic, right? Like I think the answer is, and we know just from various different articles and so forth that NASDAQ has been building and investing in this area, although I guess maybe not launching or pausing and so forth. So I think that, but the reality is, is it really isn't due to adoption in the ecosystem. We see the ETFs just came out with huge adoption by a number of big TradFi in the US. Those have been meaningfully successful, most would say by any measure in terms of adoption. So I think there's really a couple things at play. One is, it's not necessarily that easy. I mean, it's not just that easy to snap your fingers and launch one of these businesses. Maybe you could build the products to some extent.

Yeah, that's what I was talking about.

Fascinating. Yeah, NASDAQ will repurpose crypto tech to develop carbon markets. Exchange operator scrapped crypto custody plans this summer. Tech will be redeployed. Co-president. So yeah.

Cycle behavior, and they'll come. Yeah, part of it is probably a cycle. They're looking at like, okay, what's the potential demand out there? What portion of that demand are we going to get, which I think is like the biggest question. And then, what's all the investment required to do this? And they kind of ebb and flow on their analysis there. And I think they move in and then they realize maybe how hard some of this is to build. And then they probably realize also like, hey, we're not just going to magically get demand for this stuff right out of the gate, because there's awesome companies like Kraken and our peers and so forth that have already solved tough problems. They built products in a crypto-first way that we really understand these individuals and all the various different segments out there. And I mean this is Kraken and some of our peers. So I think a big part of it is that. But I mean look, I don't think it's like a complete null set on whether any of these traditional financial services firms are going to be able to enter and be successful. I think they already have intention. Bitcoin, crypto just going to continue to grow. The incentive to do so is going to continue to be there. We see some that are finding places of success. I mean even I would say CME futures have been successful on this TradFi side. Fidelity has kind of long been around the space and is now seeing even more success with their ETF. Obviously BlackRock jumped out. So while it may not be NASDAQ apparently exiting now, you don't point to them as successful, but I think there are some companies. And it seems to be generally some that have come with different offerings. I mean to the extent you call the fintechs TradFi companies, they've seen some success. So Block, Cash App, Revolut.

PayPal, great, interesting. They kind of came with their stablecoin, which I think is interesting that they made that move as opposed to just the straight-up simple buy Bitcoin and crypto in the wallet.

2016.

Yeah, well, this is one of the things that we've really been dialing in more and really thinking about intentionally much more so recently, somewhat driven by learnings from previous cycles. First off, I think it's really challenging to build a business in this space where you experience these periods.

I mean, for all kinds of reasons, but just on this particular one, this one of many, but this scalability piece of like, hey, we have this business that's going to do a 10x or even 20x within a 12-month period. First of all, meeting that demand and handling that demand, that's a huge set of challenges. But then on top of that, it's going to pull back 50% plus potentially with respect to client demand and what have you for a subsequent period that immediately follows that period. This is really actually quite challenging. There's the question on technology platform and can your platform just simply scale, or does it come to its knees and people are unable to access, log in, see all kinds of different errors or what have you, bugs, different things crop up once you try and put 10x load on a platform. So that's one where we've invested meaningfully. I honestly, really meaningfully. We went from like almost, I would say unfortunately, almost worst in class back in like the 2017 time period to best in class. Like if you look at our uptime, our stability, our response time, all these different types of things, we're like absolutely market-leading now, which I don't know if folks really understand. And we haven't marketed it very well because we did come from a place where we probably had more issues in the 2017 bull run than most others, and that probably sticks in some people's minds. But we've invested meaningfully here and we're really top of the market in terms of tech platform performance.

It's tough, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not sure if you can market that.

It is. I mean, and there you take us to the next piece of this equation, which is much more difficult to scale people in a team than it is to build a technology platform, you know, running in data centers that you can scale 10x. So we think about this in a few different buckets. But maybe I'll just break it down to a couple. One is we do have a portion of our team that is very much impacted by an increase in 10x client demand. And so these are individuals that are providing our client engagement team that provides direct support to clients, our operational teams that help with onboarding clients, fraud, that's tied to level of transaction activity for our operations team. So a lot of these operational teams, we think what are all the different levers that we can have in place, what's the playbook that we can have in place both for when we start seeing these volume increases to increase the size of that team very quickly. How flexible can the teams be from that standpoint? Then of course what can we look to push even more and more towards automation, AI, all these various different pieces that put you in a place where they scale much more quickly than having to add a lot of people. And that's kind of like the volume-based part of our team that's really tied to. Then there's some others that are not quite as much so. If you think about product and engineering, like yes there's more demand, there's more opportunity to build new products, but frankly adding team members here is even, it's just more time lag. To recruit an engineer is a significant amount of time to make sure we get fantastic talent in, but get them in, trained, integrated in the team, performing, all these types of things. By the time a lot of those things happen, you're well into the bear or bull cycle anyways. So for those functions or those parts of the business, ideally from a culture standpoint, a talent standpoint, retention standpoint, you ideally find a way to be much more balanced in how you grow there. Even potentially adding people still in a bear market to grab opportunities that are out there where other companies that took a different approach might be struggling more. So I think there's a lot to be said for basically handling these challenges on both sides and getting the recipe right. And I think it's one thing that we've certainly learned a lot over the years having done it. I think it's frankly kind of in and of itself a differentiator, the fact that we have this at this point much more figured out than really a lot of other companies out there.

Yeah, this is, I would take the exact opposite take, I think.

Yeah, I mean, my mind's made up, but I'm curious for other operators, like how do you think about the, there's a trade-off when you hire, every time you hire there's like you hire with experience, they have experience but they don't know crypto, or they know crypto and they don't have as much experience. And sometimes you can find the coveted unicorn where they have both, but often you're making that trade-off. And I'd be curious how you think about that trade-off.

Yeah, 2017.

Well, you know, that's about what you can do at this point in time often, is like, okay, well look where things are really going. And then you get to this place where it's like, oh well, they're potentially really going up because there is something there and it is really interesting. But then it gets to a point where things have gotten ahead of themselves and therefore leverage kind of crept in or whatever it is to the system. So I don't know. I mean, this cycle, where are we really seeing the activity? I think there's a lot going on with L2s, scaling, and kind of new applications on that front. There's a lot going on with restaking and some of these various different new mechanisms with restaking. Still some activity with stablecoins, both kind of on-chain algo stablecoins or whatever. So look, I think the real answer though is, I don't think it's really clear what the big catalytic drivers are of growth for this ecosystem. And probably even less clear where there's potential for something to really get ahead of itself and come crashing down. We're still frankly early. I mean, we just hit the halving. So if we do repeat this four-year cycle, we're still quite early. So we'll kind of see how things play out.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I've definitely heard cases to be made on both sides of the spectrum on this one. Like, oh, we're starting earlier now, we hit the all-time high before the halving, we're going to, the cycles are going to increasingly front-run the previous one, which somewhat makes sense that traders, investors lean into cycles, if they expect it to come, they'll lean into it earlier. So I've certainly heard that. There's also the dynamic that each cycle is a little bit more muted than the previous one. The high is not quite as, the new all-time high is nowhere near as significant a multiple of the previous one as the cycle before and so on and so forth. And similarly, the pullback isn't as significant. So that leads you to a place where it's like, maybe it'll just be a bit more muted, maybe last a little bit longer but not be quite as crazy. So look, I think this dynamic that we are leaning a little bit earlier into the cycle now is probably meaningful. And we already have the ETF catalyst, which I think are kind of just a mini catalyst if you will. I think there's going to need to be something bigger, probably on-chain, some of these different things really getting meaningful to drive even more adoption going forward. So yeah, I think that's probably where we'll head.

Yeah, likewise. Great connecting with you here. Really appreciate it.