Kraken Co-CEO Arjun Sethi Talks Bitcoin as a "Protocol" | Bloomberg Talks

Look, I think you just have a large amount of tailwinds from what you saw last year, obviously with members of Senate, members of House, etc. And so you just have a lot of excitement between folks that are here in the United States and outside the United States thinking about what's going to be the next evolution of building on blockchain, building on crypto, building with global liquidity in mind. So the vibe here is great. Like we're in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, right before the meeting with the rest of the Fed and you just got a lot of excitement in the room.

We're really early. We just had at the symposium we kicked it off and we started talking about global finance and what's going to happen in the ecosystem. We had a very US look at it and then we had a very zero sum look at it, which is the value of bitcoin is going to be more with gold, and our take has been more that bitcoin is a protocol, it's a network, and you have another set of protocols like ETH etc. And the way in which we think about it today is very linear. And it's hard to think about what is exponential and superlinear. And so the way I think about it is that we're just in the really early innings of what's going to be trillions of trillions of dollars coming into the ecosystem, building against it, and then the value continuing to grow.

Look, whenever in history you've had anything starting to grow at a certain velocity, people have different interpretations of what it means. And so the first version of what you've seen in crypto, Bitcoin, which has been the default. It's an on-ramp and off-ramp into crypto has been that like this will be the store of value and this is where I think I can make money. So you have volatility across the way and you've also seen the asset continue to grow. I think there's a certain amount of people that want to perpetuate that. Then there's just the what is the technology of what you're allowed to be able to do with Bitcoin and how that's going to continue to be perpetuated and preserved. And so remember, look at the original thesis of the Bitcoin white paper. It was to be a hedge, but at the same time, it was sending and receiving payments. So you've got a lot of folks coming at it from different angles. When you have a lot of folks coming at it from a different angle and it's a protocol and it's a network and it's a store of value, there's just so many different applications that are going to be built around it and within it. Then there's the next set of folks that are thinking about how to build around it, which is what we've seen with ETH, then Solana, the list kind of goes on. They're all combined together. And I think what people miss is that we're just in the early innings of what the market cap is, in the trillions today. What happens in 5 years? What happens in 20 years?

That's right. Well, there's some folks that are trying to take payments in Bitcoin, but I think the overall arching thesis today and the usage is buy and hold and then watch the value accrue. But you are starting to see people try to bridge against it and build against it. And so it's really early. Most of this innovation you see is happening outside the United States, but a lot of what we're trying to figure out is like how do we bring it into the United States, keep it here, control it here, and perpetuate it here so that innovation continues to grow in the United States.