SCBC 2026 | Arjun Sethi Keynote w/ Jan VanEck on Crypto’s Future

All right, Arjun. Great that you made the trip down here to join the number one blockchain student conference in the country. I guess we could call this the CEO panel, right? We're both CEOs. Not used to asking questions, but I'm really excited. So, I guess my first set of questions relates to you as a student. And it's not going to be in the probably direction you're thinking. There's a lot of stuff happening in the world right now. And we were talking before asking, 'How do you stay on top of all the changes?' And so, I'd love to that would be my first question. I mean, the most important is obviously AI and technology. Like, how do you stay on top of that?

So more specifically, like one of the problems I have is I can spend all day reading emails and answering emails. How do you manage your time to mitigate against that?

Okay, thanks. Thanks for that dig.

Do you feel from a security perspective more comfortable in one ecosystem versus another, like Google?

Did you do that yourself or did you get people to help?

Yeah, I think there's this concept of regression to the mean. You get used to a certain workflow and you don't want to change it. The more you get used to it, the more you regress depending on what you're doing. So if we're building financial infrastructure — tokenization, agents — you're not really doing it unless it's happening bottom-up and top-down at the same time. A lot of executives who are not close to the field just say 'use AI' but they can't spell it. That's a big fear for us. So a lot of it is: what can you do yourself? How do you inject that DNA as quickly as possible? It's not just AI being the flavor of the month; it's new tools, workflow tools, what teams like compliance and legal are doing. You have to be close to all these pieces to run these institutions.

You track the use of AI at Kraken. What are the different metrics you track? Token usage, number of agents? How do you think about adoption?

We have been XL ETFs, we do them through distributors like yours, about 70% of our business is through financial advisors. But there are a lot of do-it-yourself investors. Someone like yourself or people in the audience that know enough about the market might say, 'If I could do prediction markets, I can take an ETF'

Yeah, there's this concept from some sci-fi books: the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. That applies. If you're really rich today, you can build all these things, have a wealth manager, have someone trade on your behalf. It's about how to bring that education, those tool sets, and systems to everybody. The heartbeat of crypto, why I got into it, was that after the global financial crisis, the system could be unfair to a certain level of folks. That's how the Bitcoin white paper started. People started talking about freeing your capital and being empowered. It's part of the self-directed movement, but it's more about having tools to make your own decisions without intermediaries extracting along the way. In fintech and banking, companies extract along the way. Our goal is to bring the access, better yields, better trading strategies that Citadel and Jane Street have to the average person if they choose to make those decisions. That's how Payward was born — we built for professional traders and they helped us build for consumers.

Maybe going into Bitcoin and the origin story, how you got involved with Kraken. Love to hear about that.

Do you remember what year that was?

How do you do that as a VC and an incubator and a founder? How do you treat client money? If you have a fund, do they have access? Do you allocate that to the companies you're incubating or do you put them in a separate pocket and say that's too risky?

You mean revenue? No, enterprise value. Okay, because you can also get customers if they're not paying yet; it's just engagement. So we had a concept of how to qualify product-market fit based on engagement and distribution, regardless of whether it's enterprise software or a consumer product. That's what we did our whole life. That's how we started that company. The value proposition was that we would identify these companies, identify markets, or start them ourselves. Most of the capital was principal capital — at the time, 20% of it. We said we're going to do it our way, not be beholden to institutions telling us how to do it. So it wasn't that we were an incubation house or just a VC firm; I just wanted to do whatever I wanted with our time and capital. We concentrated it into a small set of companies, started some, and in some cases ended up running them.

As a CEO or as a VC, how do you think about boards of directors and major shareholders? You've switched roles a couple of times. For students starting up, governance matters at a certain scale. How do you think about that?

I mean product really matters. If they can't add value in thinking about product, new distribution, and growing, that's a key part. I've always been averse to the checkmark — like 'this person served on an audit committee.' You want someone who really understands your company. That's not to say anything negative, but just thinking about someone from Wells Fargo in the '70s — who cares? They don't know anything about what you're doing moving forward. You have to look for people who are constantly keeping up with technology. Generally, it's younger people. Probably 90% of the folks here have a better understanding of what's happening in the ecosystem than some who've been around a while. The only difference is the delta between wisdom to make decisions and the quick ability to build something. If you can marry the two, it's a good dynamic.

I want to go back to your actual student days if that's okay. I just want to say, I don't know if anyone knows what you majored in college, but one of them was history. I'm curious: have you read a good history book recently? What did you gain from that discipline? And then riff on college in general — does one need a degree from a university?

What's a primary source is also interesting. In high school I read newspapers; now I read newspapers. Can you imagine trying to figure out what was going on in 2026 by only reading the New York Times? You wonder how much people on the ground were actually thinking. That's why primary sources are so important.

Did you get value out of some of your history?

So why do you tell your kids they don't have to graduate from college? Are you trying to challenge them?

Where does curiosity — one of the words I like to use, you used a different word — fit in? How do you communicate that to people you work with? Do you just model it in leadership? Do you look for it when you hire? Because if the world's changing so quickly, the most important thing is to be curious.

Yeah, I have a rather extensive sense of humor. What's interesting to me, we do some of the bubble-up stuff too. It's people designing agents for other departments because they get frustrated with those departments rather than the department itself fixing it. That shows how people are resistant to changing their own lives. The goal is how to get as much authenticity as possible. It's a political statement, but it's really about making sure the organization and the people are not fake. That was my biggest frustration working anywhere — even on this stage, someone is just making it up the whole way. So how do we reduce that? We say we take politics out, but it's always there. How do we make sure people are direct and authentic and not fake while communicating? Sometimes it's not the most elegant way, but it's as direct as possible, and that's how we've been able to move forward faster.

It is, but they also watch the executives talk to each other.

I mean honestly, I actually don't know how it's going to be different. There's some directionality: politically the world seems isolating, but infrastructure-wise, commerce, how people communicate remotely — it's still global. That's how we're built. We're a global org moving payments, helping people trade and invest no matter where they're from. The future is already here, but not evenly distributed. How do we get more people access to assets, collateral, debt? Debt actually spurs the economy worldwide. A lot of markets have no access to capital or debt. How do you do that in a risk management way? It sounds boring, but it has huge impact in places like Argentina and Mexico for small to medium businesses all the way to larger institutions. So I don't know if the world will change that much because a lot of what we do is in the back — infrastructure, protocol, liquidity, movement of capital. We're helping build the roads; other people will build applications on top.

Yeah, well, I believe in experiences: someone on this side of the stage is different from that side; consumer vs. institution, B2B app. Our goal was to build infrastructure, then first-party products for consumers, retail investors, remittances, market makers, professional traders. That built our infrastructure because they use it. You get liquidity and movement of capital. Then we started building infrastructure that powers our competitors — Revolut, BitMEX, anyone else. They compete against us, but they use our rails and roads. Our goal is to continue that in the DeFi ecosystem and the centralized exchange system. People forget the first principle: removing collateral around and reducing how long it takes to move that collateral is most important. Adding debt — a longer conversation about risk management — that's how the global financial system was meant to be, built post-World War II with brick and mortar, paper, pencil, fax. We've only augmented that with the internet, not used technology as the basis for building blocks.

Yeah, I'm not going to make a statement on anyone specific, but I'll revert to some people in the past. This is why I still wear the venture capital hat: anyone starting a company today is the most inspiring. College kids here, it's possible. They're at the cutting edge of innovation because they have nothing to lose. You see that worldwide — Europe, India, China, Latin America. I spend a lot of time with those folks because I learn more from what they're building; they are the greatest advantage, threat, and partners long term. On the other side, going back to basics is important. Watch how Steve Jobs ran his company early on, when he failed, and when he came back. I was lucky enough to spend time with him during his second arc. He was very relentless about understanding the customer. I think we lose that when we talk about technology or AI or protocols — who is the customer? What segment? What are you serving for them? That gets lost 90% of the time. When you say 'super app,' you have to ask who does that serve. The number one thing we talk about internally is the experience we want for our customer. Does our application serve that? Many times the answer is no, so we create a new experience or acquire one. It's magic. You say it in a classroom: 'Just listen to the customer.' But sometimes the customer doesn't talk to you. They don't tell you your product is too expensive; they just go somewhere else. No one told Steve Jobs to create an iPhone; he was thinking for them and understanding them deeply. I never met him, but I think it's magic — a very underappreciated skill.

Sure. I always look at the supply chain workflow: what does someone need, who is the customer, and what are all the intermediaries along the way? Then you have to question which intermediaries are at risk and which will go away. For example, SaaS vendors today — even us, we call something 'dispatch' for sending notifications on your phone. We had vendors along the way; we have to connect to them, they come back to us, and we send a token. The SaaS vendors we used to use took a long time to integrate. Our teams said, let's rewrite it now because it's faster and easier. So that vendor goes away. You'll see more of that in the short term. In the medium term, vendors will change in terms of what they can do for you. Some will work forward in the workflow, some won't. That's a way to think about it across hardware, software, and regular products.

Look, Binance is a large company. They started off in all the offshore venues — we call them gray markets — then started trying to enter regulated markets. They entered some that were not yet regulated, like Europe, and slowly got kicked out. Early on, exchanges outside the US tended not to follow the rules we're used to here. If you start in a regulated market like we did or Coinbase did, you use the same rules for banking and financial services. Over time, markets became more regulated. They either retreated or built new products. From a product perspective, they do a great job — vertically integrated, not just exchange but movement of money and marketplaces. But they become like an anything store that becomes a nothing store, like Craigslist or eBay. For remittances, there are better experiences; for card services, there are better experiences. You're seeing that in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, where they've had to retreat because a specific product offering for that audience is more powerful than a massive conglomerate Frankenstein product. On the Judeo-Christian side, from my historical background, I studied a lot of religion and spent time in a lot of those places. I'm not religious by nature, but I like the philosophies. To shorten it: there's a concept of whether you want to be in a heaven that's hierarchical or bottoms-up. I prescribe to a bottoms-up philosophy.