Well, look, very very happy to be here. You know, we've just been granted, after two and a half years of work, a license as a VASP here in South Korea. And we recognized the market in Korea a long time ago, and the opportunity for digital assets here. So look, I mean, I think Korea is prime and ripe. So we're happy to be here. We've been working, meeting with clients, there's a conference, meeting with some regulators. So anyway, it's good to be here and thanks for having me on your show.
Look, like a lot of people, I heard about Bitcoin. I initially thought it was probably a scam and, you know, the engineering side of me decided to look into it. It was fascinating that you could have money in your computer and that I could send it to you, you can send it to me without anything else. And so how could this possibly work? And of course it does work. I spent a fair amount of time just researching and understanding. I tried to hack it and I failed. Of course you can't, I didn't hack it. But then all of a sudden this was money in the computer. So I had worked on, you know, web browsers for quite a while. I had worked on HTTP protocols and we had always had the web with this overlay of credit cards on top of it. And it's okay, by the way, all of us have had our credit cards stolen because they're a pretty poor system from a security perspective.
But this was an opportunity where now all of a sudden your computer can pay on your behalf. You know, you could be watching this show, you guys could be charging by the minute for people to watch it, and your browser could just, you know, seamlessly pay behind the scenes. And a whole bunch of opportunities open up. So that got me excited about Bitcoin. There's other aspects. I think Bitcoin has a benefit which is it forces people to go look into like what is money in a way that they might not have before, and it's good education. Everyone should have it. We generally complain that like we don't educate our youth enough with regard to finance and money and, you know, how to deal with it. Did you become an adult? Bitcoin and crypto forces you to go look at it. We spend so much time seeking it like we should know how it works. And anyway, so similarly I was always spending time on engineering topics before. I was never interested in finance. I was never interested in financial services. But all of a sudden with Bitcoin you go and look at that and you realize, holy cow, there's a lot of opportunity here. So that got me excited and BitGo was born and here we are today.
For sure. Like in college I had classmates that went into financial services. They made ludicrous amounts of money on Wall Street. I was never interested in that. I have always felt that Wall Street is a tax on people that actually do real work. You know, you're building this show here, figuring out how to earn money, provide value, get clients that want to pay you for your services. And these bankers, you know, they don't really do much. They manage your money, and somehow they're the most lucrative on the planet. All right. Anyway, so I was never interested, but all of a sudden with Bitcoin, digital assets, technology, and finance intersect, and then look, it is money. It does need to be regulated for a whole bunch of reasons, like we do not want, you know, especially, you know, elderly people being scammed, and, you know, of course we've got regulations in place to make sure that frauds don't happen. You mentioned FTX already. So anyway, yeah, it intersected and it's been a good ride.
Actually, I just did this talk at the Korea Blockchain Week yesterday which kind of draws some parallels to this exact issue. So the internet when it was first born in the early 90s and then really grew in the mid-90s, it suddenly provided access for everyone to share information. It's an information, the worldwide information web, and the initial pass of that is like now anyone can publish. You can share with anybody, right? But then some questions come up like, well, who are you sharing with? Who are you publishing to? And when it comes to credit cards and things like that, we needed this secure layer that we put on top of it. So I was at Netscape as they were building the first encrypted protocol that ran on top of the web, which was the SSL, Secure Socket Layer, it was called. And that little green padlock in the upper corner of your browser was the visual cue that you're working with a website that secures your information. So first you have access and then you build trust. When you look at digital assets today, we're kind of in the same phase. So digital assets, like we all have access. We can send money. I can send it to you. We can send it anywhere across the planet. But now like when you're sending it to somebody, how do you know that they are worthy of receiving this money? And, you know, what kind of evidence of who they are, how they operate, are they fraudsters, etc., has to be figured out. So this is kind of a trust layer. Some people think trust is antithetical to digital assets. Digital assets are supposed to be peer-to-peer and they're trustless. Look, it is true what allows you to trust Bitcoin as a protocol is that you don't have to trust anyone. There's no central party to trust. However, when it comes to our own finances and our own money, we use banks. We use financial services companies and we use them because we don't want to take on that burden ourselves. And so I would venture to guess that all of us here in this room have banks, bank accounts that we use because it's more convenient than having cash and it's more, you know, it's safer. It makes you able to live at home and not have to worry about security and you can pass it on to your family as you wish and all kinds of things. So anyway, we're kind of at that same level right now and, you know, that's why we're here in Korea, right? So we are here, we got regulated as VASP so that we can hold assets and it's part of building the foundation of the financial services for digital assets so that you can keep going up the stack. Some people, some businesses have come in and they try to come to the top of the financial services stack. They want to do lots of trading. They want to start doing leverage and things like that and sometimes they blow up spectacularly like FTX did. So you build that bottom layer first and then you can build up and you build a really solid financial services stack.
