Kraken CEO David Ripley talks bitcoin's halving and what it means for the crypto space

Thanks for having me on, Melissa. There's a lot that is the same for this Bitcoin halving. There are some new things. It's a great reminder of the deterministic supply in Bitcoin—never more than 21 million, the first currency in the world to have such a thing. You know what's different? Well, I mean, I think obviously, you know, the price tends to be a hot topic here, and so I would say this is the first time we actually saw an all-time high before that happened. Typically in the past bull-bear cycles for Bitcoin, we've seen the all-time high come a number of months after the halving. We're ahead of schedule this time. But honestly, I think the more meaningful thing for me, at least, is it's a great reminder of one of the most magnificent properties of Bitcoin.

Yeah, so, you know, I think it's a great, great topic as well. I mean, over the past four years in this last halving cycle, a huge number of new innovations in Bitcoin, in cryptocurrency, institutions come in, governments come in, even El Salvador adopting Bitcoin correctly. We expect more of the same in the next four-year cycle. A lot of investment that came in the previous cycle has all been deployed at this point. Builders are building, and entrepreneurs are building. We see a lot of innovations come out in the not-too-distant future. I think that, again, the short-term movements for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, there is volatility there, there is more uncertainty, but the long arc and the long trajectory is going to be a positive one.

Well, it does. I mean, certainly, the more holders, the more liquidity in the system, both those holding and those transacting and those trading—all of these aspects actually do reduce volatility over time. So, the reality is, while Bitcoin and crypto is still volatile, they're not as volatile as they were ten years ago, or five years ago. And so, we do see that coming down over time as adoption grows. Now, it is still an incredibly innovative technology with a lot of new things happening in the space. It's not as if volatility is going away completely, but it is coming down generally over time. So the general trend is for the price to go up and the general trend is for volatility to go down, again, over the multi-year period.

You know, we've seen Ordinals come on the Bitcoin network more recently, but look, Bitcoin is tried and true. It's digital gold. That's one of the beautiful aspects of it—is that it is the most stable from a security standpoint. All of these aspects, and so that's, you know, a role in the ecosystem, and it's an incredible new innovation for the world from that standpoint. Part of the purpose of all of the new networks are, in fact, to innovate and do something different than Bitcoin. Otherwise, why would they even exist? You know, use Bitcoin. So I think we do see more innovation in other networks, but with Bitcoin it's kind of like trying to replace the landing gear.