Stablecoins are just a far superior payment mechanism than anything that exists in traditional financial services. Far superior. We of course back in the day thought like, hey, well, how are we going to get Bitcoin and/or stablecoins to be used for payments? You have this huge catch-22 where in order for them to be used for payments, it takes two. Takes a sender and a receiver. And so you need to build a network. And the problem is in order for everyone to kind of like adopt stablecoins or Bitcoin all at once to use them for payments, it just isn't going to happen. But what we saw happen is that many people adopted Bitcoin for whatever purposes. The big one, the inflation hedge, the investment on future gain and adoption of the network, all that type of thing that put Bitcoin and stablecoins in many people's hands. Stablecoins then kind of arose as this settlement currency across all of the centralized and decentralized exchanges.
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Kraken co-CEO David Ripley joins us now. Hello.
I'm doing well. How are you doing?
Great. Well, congratulations on those Q3 numbers.
Indeed. Yep. All right. Before we get into that, talk to us about why it's important for an exchange like Kraken to have a presence at an event like this.
Well, you know, we've actually been partnered with Ripple in some ways for well over a decade. We were one of the first exchanges out there to ever go multi-token and therefore list XRP back in 2013, so quite some time. We're also one of the first exchanges to list Ripple USD as well, new stablecoin back in the spring. So look, we take kind of an open approach to the ecosystem, partner with all different blockchains, banks and payment processors on down the line. And so for me personally, I like to do the same when I'm attending events and conferences, kind of go to developer conferences, investor conferences, blockchain such as this one, and kind of spread it around.
So investor behavior is changing, right? And retail has a lot of different places to trade things. And I remember from last year, you're kind of trying to go the other way and bring tokenized securities to folks to trade. So, how do you keep your finger on the pulse of your retail traders who are keeping liquidity in the exchanges and keeping that activity going?
Well, I think that's one of the most significant things that's happening right now and certainly what Kraken is leaning into, right? And so when we look at our population of we serve kind of individual retail traders, individual professional traders, institutions as well, maybe starting with the retail and the individual pro-trader group, you know, they want to trade assets. They want to trade a number of different asset classes. And so we made moves to move into TradFi actually. And so now we offer a full suite of futures trading. We acquired the largest retail futures broker in the US, NinjaTrader, pure play futures broker. So now we trade, you know, offer trading in futures for indices, commodities, FX and the like. Same with equities, you know. So we also are a registered broker dealer offer trading equities. The next step for that is kind of like bringing the two together in a really interesting way, which would be tokenized equities, which is probably the most exciting thing we have going on right now.
So big question. I'm glad I get to ask you this directly. I grew up in the equities world, in the derivatives world, but on the securities side and you know, people have brokerage accounts. Not a lot of retail people experience the futures market except in crypto, where people are huge, right? So, offshore people are very used to this kind of delta-1 futures experience. In the regulated world in the United States, and this is a challenge for the CFTC, not a lot of people have futures accounts and understand using FCMs. Do you think that behavior is going to change? Like how is retail going to express their derivatives positions or their views on crypto exchanges? Is it going to be short-term options or do you really think they'll start to lean into futures and that will kind of change their behavior?
Well, I think in some ways maybe not honestly. So we have we kind of think about it from our different populations of customers. We divide in those three groups I mentioned before. Consumer, individual, pro-traders, institutions. I think that individual pro-trader segment where Kraken is particularly strong. They'll trade futures all day.
Exactly. And I think that's kind of the population of the acquisition. We made NinjaTrader, another peer in the traditional financial services space like Interactive Brokers. That group of course familiar with derivatives, they want leverage. They're interested in trading the action that they get on those.
