Don't think you can have a discussion about Bitcoin maxis without talking about Michael Sailor.
Yeah. He's kind of the newest and biggest Bitcoin maxi out there.
You believe the 10 million per coin prediction of his?
Yeah. Yeah. We'll get there.
Welcome to Forged in America. I'm Ravine Gandhi with my buddy Al Goldstein. We are both entrepreneurs who have started and sold businesses. In my case, I started a business called GMM that we did about 100 million in sales and sold to a massive Japanese corporation. And Al has started quite a few unicorns, currently running Avant and Stoic Lane and doing this podcast. Why only his therapist can tell you. But the reason that we started Forged in America was because as entrepreneurs we love people who have kind of done it talking to other people who have done it. And today we have Dave Ripley who is the co-CEO of Kraken. They are one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges. They did over $2 billion in publicly disclosed revenue in 2025. And also public was their last fund raise was north of $20 billion which is pretty amazing. So looking forward to talk crypto and entrepreneurship today. Welcome to Forged in America, Dave.
Awesome. Great to chat with you guys today.
So Dave, I was trying to remember when you and I first met at 1871 in Chicago. I was too dumb at that time to invest in your company.
And so I ended up becoming a Kraken investor through an SPV a little while ago. So it took me way too long at a much higher valuation, unfortunately.
But it's fun to have you on here and talk about all things crypto and markets.
Yeah. No, we were so the company I founded, Glider, it founded in Chicago. But we did Techstars Chicago and you were just one of the kind of one of the top entrepreneurs or even company leaders definitely in fintech but even broadly at the time. And so one of the Techstars things as a younger founder many years ago is to talk to all the entrepreneurs that have been there, done that, been successful and you were one of those guys back then.
In 1871 I felt like there was it was like a power law. You had some guys like you that just shot the lights out and obviously killed it and then there was like the entry-level lobby part of 1871 where if you walked in there sometimes I felt like in front of the Vatican with like the gypsies where they would that's an investor. Oh my god. Like, let's go get him.
It's not there anymore, is it?
I think they shut it down.
And this is maybe too deep into Chicago, but I think my one moment at 1871 when I was just like, you know, sort of like Ravine said, is I was there at some point at 5:05 or 5:10 p.m. And it was like you're in like an old western town and you have the tumbleweeds blowing. There was nobody there. I'm like, I'm not sure this is how you build a company, right?
Well, yeah. And then there was actually I went to a number of like happy hours there. You know, you walk in there and it was a pretty social place.
I guess to set the stage when you look at crypto today, Dave, you guys are obviously a very central player and you know some people say that we've just kind of are coming out of this crypto winter depending on who you talk to. Where would you say we are today if you have to look at like the overall health of the industry in terms of adoption and just people thinking it's legit?
Yeah. Well, look, fundamentally and real adoption is truly at an all-time high right now. If we look at people that are using cryptocurrency for payments, people that are using DeFi for actual lending opportunities, lending, borrowing, all the various different decentralized applications. So, kind of like real adoption is roughly at an all-time high. Now, there's also this other piece which is like, hey, what's the price of XYZ asset, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so forth. They're not at all-time highs for what it's worth. So, they've come back. I mean, I think the all-time high we hit in Q4 and then now Q1 and Q2 we pulled back a bunch from that. So, but when we talk about like real adoption, I mean I think we're hovering all-time high.
So, I was going to say on that front, if you look back 10 years and Ravine and I have both been interested in crypto for at least that long and you think about what the killer apps were going to be and what the killer apps have become. Is it obviously there's a lot of trading and a lot of speculation still in the markets, but is it the stable coin that's driven the most adoption and where do you think we go from here?
Yeah, I mean I probably the top two that I would point to and they frankly reinforce each other quite meaningfully would be stable coins and two would be DeFi, decentralized finance, decentralized lending protocols and exchanges. You know, many hundreds of billions for both of those two use cases. So, they pretty much sit at the top. I mean, I think you probably got to keep unpacking it from there, right? Okay. So, we talk about stable coins, how are people actually using stable coins? And we go down that path. Then we talk about DeFi and say like, okay, how are people actually using this? Then we go down that path to get like a bit more real on it. But yeah, from a technological standpoint, those would be the top two.
When you say adoption is at an all-time high and I know there's a lot of ways to kind of quantify that but when I live my day-to-day life and all the things I transact with my Bitcoin basically exists in my portfolio as digital gold and I just kind of look at the price a few times a week and did it go up or did it go down but it has had no discernable impact in terms of going and buying assets. And if when I look at ETH, you know, I was promised the smart contracts and I was promised all of this stuff that was going to change real estate. Is it a fair statement to say that none of it has happened yet or is that an unfair statement?
Yeah, I mean I think it's well it's clearly accurate for you, right? The reality is yeah, there's a bunch of people out there like Ravine, right? Where they've bought Bitcoin speculative or store of value. That's a little bit different and they're just holding sitting on it. And the same might be true for a handful of other assets and so forth. But there's also a lot of other people out there that we see in our customer base that are using Bitcoin or Ethereum or particularly stable coins for other things. I give you like a use case that we like kind of see a lot in our client base. Someone that originally decided to buy crypto or stable coins in some place in Latin America and they maybe did it because they're like, hey, I can either hold this or I can hold my native currency and my native currency has been losing value 10, 20% a year and that's not so great. So, let me hold one of these things. And they were happy with that. And then those same individuals or businesses started using them for payments. And what we often see is like the most significant kind of like usage of payments tends to be like developing market to developing market. So you know someone in Brazil paying a vendor in Hong Kong for example if that makes sense right as opposed to like developed to developed very minimal almost none.
Well that makes total sense to me. The remittance use case if I'm in the US and I'm sending money back home to Mexico, makes total sense. I guess the question just to follow on Ravine's question is how big of an opportunity is that use case the third world developing country relative to okay now is the time that you live in the US and this becomes part of your daily life.
Yeah. So great question. So I think probably two additional pieces we have to layer on to the story here. One is why do we see the developing market adoption happening sooner? Well, in a lot of instances for these individuals it's substantially better. It's 50% better or it's 2x better depending on the use case in terms of fee reduction and so forth. In the US, yeah, stable coins are actually better, faster, cheaper than the existing other payment mechanisms, but they're like 5% better, right? And so, like, are you going to actually move to this new payment mechanism? Well, one thing that we see is kind of like as stable coin adoption grows, as we get many different businesses that tend to be more developing market that tend to be more obviously kind of like in crypto natively or fintech or what have you using stable coins, the liquidity grows and then you get to a place where hey, if you're a business in a developed market, there's a big thing to plug into and all of a sudden that 5% better is actually meaningful. And so we will see adoption. We are starting to see adoption in developed markets. It's just going to come ex-post. It's just coming in a later phase than what we've seen in developing markets.
Well, when we had Dimitri Bellios, that's I've quoted him many times on this podcast now where he said, the one thing I got Bitcoin, what I got wrong about Bitcoin is underestimating the international adoption for the unbanked. Because I think that there are billions of people who fall into that category and if I put on I think my most like bullish hat and again like I said I own millions of dollars of crypto so I hope this happens that narrative is that you start to see some degree of virality in some country where from the street people are actually starting to transact in a way that legitimizes it in a way where I remember you know Google etc got banned in and I built a business in China and I had hundreds of people there and whenever I would come back X times a year, they would start telling me, oh, there's this like WeChat. That's what we use. That's what we use. And then eventually got to the point where people in America started to use that stuff. So I do think that a way that I could paint a very very bullish narrative.
Yeah. I think what's going to happen and is happening now sooner is that there are a lot of kind of like traditional financial services companies that are now actually using it in the background more so stable coins. So we know several for example card issuers, card processors that are conducting settlements in stable coins. So you might be like using a credit card making a payment and you have no idea but the settlement from your card issuer to the merchant is actually happening in stable coins yet to you don't know that you're touching crypto at all. And so that's actually something that's continuing to happen. Also you might be using a remittance app. Several of the more of the challenger remittance companies a little bit. Some of the big guys are starting to explore with it, but a lot of the challenger remittance companies are finding that they could actually get an edge this way.
So, that's where I've seen it. I mentioned remittance, you know, again, basically sending money back home. You're here in the US or whatever. In credit card, I've also seen it a little bit as you know, Avant is in the credit card business. And I think there internationally as well. So keep coming back to at what point does it become a US use case and then tokenization which I know we hear a lot more these days and maybe you can sort of describe what that actually means for the lay person.
If you're familiar with stable coins, it's basically there's this token that rides on Bitcoin or Ethereum, and that token represents $1. And where's the dollar? Well, it's backed one for one in a bank account or a money market fund or whatever. One for one with that token. But of course, you could do this tokenization structure with other assets. For example, public equities. You could take, create a token on one of these blockchains just the same as a stable coin for a share of Tesla stock and back it one for one with a share of Tesla stock in a custodian. That happens to be one of the other things that we've built as a company. It's called X Stocks. And so we have a number of US public equities that we've tokenized. And we're now north of 20 billion in total trade volume since we launched, which was getting to be close to a year ago. Technologically, it looks similar to a stable coin. But now, this is an actual equity. Not that many people immediately in the US. For one, we can't offer it here regulatory just yet. So, that's one challenge. But when we get there, we do expect to see some adoption for a number of different reasons. We already see significant adoption. A lot of those same emerging markets, those same people that wanted to hold US dollars. They're also quite interested in holding Apple stock, but it wasn't that easy for them to do so.
I guess that's the question. If you have an account with Robin Hood or Fidelity, what does this really do for you? Is this really just ease of distribution for folks that don't have those accounts?
One of the differences, you'll be able to withdraw that stock from your Robin Hood account, which you can't do today. It just sits there. You'll be able to withdraw it. You'll be able to send it to someone else. You'll be able to trade it on some other exchange. Right now, X Stocks are traded on 50 plus exchanges out there, which rivals the number of venues for traditional equities right now. The other thing that you can do is of course trade them 24/7 365 because blockchain networks are basically live always and ever, right? Which is a little bit different than the traditional space. So you have kind of like real price discovery. That's the other thing that we're starting to see. Just because the technology is built to be global. It's built to be always on. You now have people using X Stocks for price discovery over the weekends where they can't get it in traditional markets.
Yeah. Look, I would make a similar bullish case. If you're telling me that someone who lives in some small country in Asia or Africa that does not have a bank account could own shares of Apple that were tokenized by virtue of this technology. That to me is amazing. I mean, I think that's just an overall bullish sign for the world. I think if that actually was the case, take me through the mechanics of that, though. That person who lives in, let's say Ghana and they don't have a bank account and there's a share of Apple, where is that share actually custodied from Apple's perspective if that person someday is buying a tokenized version of that?
Yeah. So the custody I mean so for X Stocks I mean we're not the only one that offers a tokenized equity out there but for X Stocks this is custodied in a US broker dealer clear with a clearing broker where basically all stocks are custodied in what's referred to as a clearing broker dealer in the US.
You got it. Yeah. You got it.
And but the point is then you guys would make it your business to tokenize that and I assume that person would be able to buy even a fraction maybe of one of those shares.
Right. Yeah. I mean, look, I do think there's a real thing there, you know. Now, the question is who is going to go first? But I think that's bullish. I'm gonna flip now and ask you something not bearish, but I want to frame this question this way because I've seen it a lot.
When Donald Trump was elected in November of 24, I mean, you saw just such a spike in all digital assets, right? Because the narrative was...
That's how we knew the election was turning is you saw the Bitcoin price go.
Oh, yeah. The Bitcoin price beat all of the people on CNBC and so forth or whatever the networks were that were trying to predict the election.
Yeah. Who needs Polymarket or Koshi? You got Bitcoin.
Kind of like a precursor to Polymarket, wasn't it? Yeah.
So my question is I mean there must have been two or three waves of almost orgasmic narrative from November of 24 through probably January February of 25 where people said you do not understand how pro-crypto this administration is. You do not understand how beneficial it is that what they're doing with the SEC. You do not understand what they're doing with David Sacks and all the legislation. And it's a dream. It's a dream that you can't even believe. And then Bitcoin, you know, went up to 120 something. My question for you is, okay, all that happened and now the price of Bitcoin, I think maybe it's exactly the same as it where it was in November of 24. Like, what's going on? Is it just a matter of it's a weird blip in time and this has happened for 15 years?
Well, look I think I mean again the price is the price but let me say like a number of things that did happen very tangibly following that. So one is you had a set of regulators in the US that approached this industry with zero communication and only via an enforcement posture, right? And after the administration changed new regulators came in that wanted to communicate that wanted to learn that wanted to understand the technology. So that was one tangible piece. Now that impacted our business impacted a number of different other institutions. So one thing that you'll see this year is it takes a lot of time for these big banks and big brokers to like once they decide to do something to actually make it happen. But all of the big brokers, big banks, think of the big retail brokers out there. So not just Robin Hood's going to support crypto but you think like Schwab, E Trade, all the other big guys. Everybody else out there. They're going to add crypto to their offerings and then the big banks will do it also for institutions and high net worths and so forth. And that's a lot of that is on the back of just like a more favorable environment for crypto in the US than what we saw before.
And what happens if you know 2028 the administration changes it reverts back to the prior administration? How does the industry think about that? How do you think about that?
Well, you know, that would be very unfortunate if we actually went back to that place where regulators being open to communication, open to learning about it, open to actually crafting regulations that make sense. That'd be really unfortunate.
Yeah. Regulation by enforcement, I think, generally is not a good policy. I would agree with that.
Yeah. So maybe Ravine, you tell me, but maybe it makes sense to kind of zoom in a little bit on Kraken versus the broader industry.
Yeah, I do want to go to Kraken, but I want to get there via this last kind of broader question, which is the whole dream of digital and crypto to a certain extent is decentralized, right? The whole problem that Satoshi and the famous white paper was the trusted third party, right? I mean that's what we were trying to kind of get away from. So the question is, you know, Kraken, and Coinbase and all these other entities. In the world where you want decentralized and you can cold wallets and keys and all that stuff. Doesn't your business, not you, Kraken, but all of you, doesn't that fly in the face of the whole decentralization situation?
You know, I mean, in some ways to answer your question is yes, which is probably not what you expected to hear, but like a couple of different things. So one of the ways that we referred to Kraken in the first nearly decade of the company's life first two-thirds was as a bridge and it's a bridge to allow people to get into cryptocurrency to get into decentralized finance. Kraken was this bridge and exchange plus other products and services that allowed people to get from fiat currency to cryptocurrency. Right? It's really for the most part necessary. I would almost refer to as like a least common denominator. You in order to integrate with fiat currency and allow people to get from fiat to crypto, you more or less need to have a centralized entity because that's how the fiat side of things work. Now, once you're in crypto, you can have like a fully decentralized experience, fully non-custodial, fully decentralized and so forth. But in order to kind of like interact with the traditional financial system as it is with fiat currencies, you need a centralized entity. And that's just part of the role that we play in the ecosystem.
Moving back in time a little bit, you as I understand arrived at Kraken by virtue of them buying your startup.
So what was the thesis of your startup that you did and why did Kraken buy it?
Well, it's interesting that I mean it's kind of on the same concept of a bridge. So, there's all these various different non-custodial wallets out there and those non-custodial wallets, they don't interact with traditional financial services system or anything like that, but there's still these little wallets that store funds and allow you to make payments and allow you to receive money and so on so forth. Many of their users, one of their challenges is they have this cold start problem of exactly what I described. How do I get my wallet users the ability to buy their first crypto, buy their first Bitcoin, whatever it is? And Glider, the company we founded was basically a service that plugged into all those various different wallets, provided them an API, an SDK such that they could add that capability into their wallets.
2016. Okay. So, how it happens, but it's rare that the CEO of the little startup that you buy ends up running the whole damn thing. So, you know what? What kind of gladiator path did you have to go?
I mean, it's been a number of years, 2016. So, we're going on a decade this year. Specifically October. So, in October, it'll be a decade. I joined I was chief operating officer for a good number of years. The majority of the time, majority of those 10 years. And then it's only recently in the past, I don't know, two and a half or whatever it is that I moved from chief operating officer to co-CEO now.
So, we're expecting a final death match in the arena between the two co-CEOs.
Yeah, you'll have to arm wrestle over it. Why? Why the co-CEO model? Because that's a kind of a European thing, I think. You don't see this in America.
We're actually hearing it. I'm trying to think there's a couple companies where we heard just like announced co-CEOs more recently. And yeah, I guess it is a little bit more common in Europe, but so the co-CEO of the company in addition to myself is Arjent Seth. He's got a fantastically interesting background, done a lot of fantastic things. He came in as an investor to Kraken Payword back in 2020. So, he's been kind of part of the company, investor and board member for a number of years, but it's been a fantastic setup. I mean, since putting in the co-CEO structure, probably had one of the greatest runs in the company's history and we're doing a lot of fantastic things. So, it's been pretty awesome.
So maybe you could just talk about your competitive position, vis-a-vis Coinbase, which everybody knows, and I guess today is roughly a 55 or $60 billion market cap company, and people know about Binance and the various ups and downs of that company, and just the rest of the market and where you think Kraken can win.
We're similar to say a Coinbase. Well, this is usually the one that gets called out many times. But historically we've been different on a couple of different dimensions. Where we were strong over the life of the company and how we really grew was we really were strong with the individual pro-trader segment. We've built for that segment. We built products that a lot of our peers didn't build. We went after that segment. We've been really strong. The other difference from a lot of other companies out there is that we were the first place you could buy and sell Bitcoin with euros. You know, we only today we only get less than a third of our revenue from the US. You look at Robin Hood, they're like nearly 100% US. Even Coinbase is like three-quarters US. And so from just kind of like we given that we started in Europe, it's a much more heterogeneous market and it almost like set us up to be quite international because we had to think about many different countries, languages operationally, all these various different pieces and we kind of just went down that path.
You guys recently announced a pretty big deal with Bitnomial. Can you tell us the thesis there?
Yeah, one of the things we originally you know Kraken as a company was built on the first product was a cryptocurrency exchange but the intent was to build a truly global financial company derivatives commodities against commodities indices FX equities and we have now kind of like fulfilled that journey of becoming truly multi-asset that's a bit about where we're headed going forward is a meaningful piece of it, you know, it allows it gives us the full stack of CFTC licenses, allows us to be a full back-end liquid exchange for many of these different asset classes, namely derivatives where we could not previously offer that in the US. And so we were offering in all the other geographies I mentioned, but not the US. So that's a key piece that allows us to do there.
Dave, you have been in crypto for over a decade and these are what dog years. So they tend to age people I think but you're here and you guys seem to be crushing it. We like to ask our guests and I've told some of these stories Ravine has as well is these paths tend to not be linear. Maybe give us some of the low points and what did the company do to survive?
You know, I've been through several different bear markets and each of them been different in different ways and they've all been like pretty painful. Like the first one 2014-15 I was like just starting up and we kind of had this bull market in 2013 and that one was a tough one for like really all the crypto companies because everyone was mostly a startup out there and then we kind of came out of that strong market 2016-17 and that was the ICOs cycle which was a little bit crazy in its own right. It was easier than the previous one and it wasn't that fun. It wasn't that painful, but we basically just reinvested in like strengthening the platform. Then you had the 2021 market and I was actually going in, you know, I was expecting, you know, at some point we'll probably have another cycle. And I was like, you know what? I've been through these bear markets and this one I know how to we know how to do this. They'll be easy. They're getting easier over time. And it was like absolutely the worst one. And this was after we kind of like saw all these failures with FTX and so forth that was a super challenging the prices and activity came way down and we had this whole regulatory kind of like challenge particularly in the US where we were in battles constantly.
Have you guys seen this thing that's been floating around about FTX specifically that SBF obviously investments amazing.
Yeah. Like obviously he used customer money to make a bunch of these venture investments.
But what is it? He put 200k into Cursor that today it'd be worth like three and a half billion and Anthropic. He invested in Anthropic too.
Yeah. It was crazy the balance sheet. I don't know where the money went for all those.
I mean, maybe these guys they must have the...
No, I think they had to blow out of it at cost, which is great.
But obviously somebody made a killing that picked this stuff up. But here's the list that I'm looking at it now. So 500 million cost basis in Anthropic, which today would be worth 30 billion at least. Solana which is a 10x 464 million up to almost 5 billion. Robin Hood 648 million which would be an 8x.
Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity. So he took all this customer money, made these investments. It turns out, you know, of course customers wanted to withdraw the money, couldn't withdraw.
Right.
The money because it was all in. I mean, it was that and he blew it on, you know, Super Bowl commercials and other kinds of stuff like that too, right?
I mean obviously he had something prescient about just identifying these companies early that if you could figure out how to bottle up.
Well, I read Michael Lewis's book about this and I mean he comes off, he's clearly a smart guy, right? Any way you look at it, there was no ethics whatsoever and I think he essentially deserved what he got. Would you agree with that? Do you agree with that characterization, Dave?
Yeah, I mean look, all of those activities and so forth, you know, is just atrocious what he did and that's our perspective, that's my perspective.
Jumping back into the macro, I really do like the stablecoin narrative. It makes a lot of sense to me. The way it makes the most sense to me is that for a lot of years I secretly believed that the Fed and the US government, irrespective of parties, they would always kill crypto just because there is such a power in having a printing press that prints the world's reserve currency. That is a superpower that this country has that no one else does. So now when I hear about the stablecoin, I go, okay, maybe there's crypto rails but it's still the USD and in a way it seeds the USD around. Then you see what's going on in Iran and there's so much of that, I think the dollar is at the heart of it, you know, in terms of petrodollars and where things... Do you share any of my skepticism about the intent of any central bank, particularly America, to want to have crypto exist because it just lessens their control?
Yes, on both counts. Absolutely there's a lot of people out there that view crypto as a threat to fiat currencies and their existence and so forth. And government control. Yeah. And the reality is that's true and over the long arc that is true and there will be a time where that comes to fruition and that might be many, many decades away. In the nearer term, your point on stablecoins is spot on. And there's this bill called Genius, which is the stablecoin bill in the United States where they basically put in place the regulatory structure for stablecoins. This is absolutely one of the things that they have in mind. They're like, look, this is absolutely a path to promote the usage of the US dollar. We put in place a regulatory structure that allows dollars to move on these rails, allows them to be used globally as they are already today, but allows them to be used much more efficiently. And this is actually strongly supportive of the US dollar, strongly supportive of the US dollar extending its life as the world reserve currency.
So Brian Armstrong has been pretty aggressively out there on this legislation and talking about how the banks have been trying to stifle it. What is your view and is it going to happen?
So this bill, yeah, this bill has been out there for a while. Frankly was out there in the mix before we even had the administration change. We get closer every day. We get closer every week. Probability of it getting done has never been higher in my mind.
Does it say what the odds of it passing are on Polymarket?
I'm sure it does. It's got to be on there somewhere. Yeah, if you look for Market Structure Bill or Clarity Act or something like that, it'll be up there.
There's got to be. Yeah, I don't know what the odds say for what it's worth. But I think they get stronger, you know, every day. I mean, we're super active across Senate Banking, House Financial Services Committee to try and move the bill forward in a way that works for the industry. We're proponents of seeing something in place that is really sensical.
Okay. Well, here's some bad news for you, my friend, because on April 11th, it was 68%.
Yeah. It in the last week has plummeted to 38%.
That's a big thing. I wonder if that's lack of... Yeah, we'll have to see the volume on that.
The volume on that is $550,000.
Okay. I mean, that's just, that's not much.
Well, no, no, that's... I mean, I've heard Allin litigate the liquidity that I think when you're north of half a million, it's not super low.
Yeah. Like sometimes you see it and it's like $6,000. You're like, 'Okay, this doesn't count.'
No, but I'm taking this as a signal. So, what has happened in the last week? Have you heard of anything that really...
I haven't. Yeah, I haven't. I mean, if I had heard of something significant enough, I probably wouldn't be able to share anyways. But like, yeah, I haven't heard anything.
