Digital Currency Group

But I was at this conference in Half Moon Bay in California and We were invited, like very nicely invited to talk about Bitcoin.

And it was myself, Mickey Malka, who runs Rubik Capital, Barry Silbert, who runs DCG, like three people who are pretty well known in Bitcoin, but then were not known in really anything.

Well, they were accomplished in their own rights.

I wasn't well known in anything else.

So we go back more than a decade now.

That was acquired by Digital Currency Group, as I was alluding to earlier, ran a very large team at Genesys.

So when we joined, it was probably 50 to 100 people.

And Genesys and DCG, by the time we left, it was 250 plus and built out a massive engineering work there as well at the quant research team.

Who's backing them? That matters for institutional credibility.

The release lists Ark and Cathie Wood, Founders Fund, Pantera, Galaxy, Kraken, Digital Currency Group, Bill Miller III, and Tom Lee among prominent institutional backers.

Speaking of Tom Lee, he's the chairman and is delivering a keynote at Korea Blockchain Week on September thirtieth.

What's management's read on the broader market environment?

I think even, even for me, I remember I was actually also pretty uncertain at that point in time.

Uh, I thought that, um, DCG would go under, Genesis would have to do a fire sale for the GBTC blocks.

Um, and that did happen.

But once that block cleared, I knew that, you know, it was time to actually start going into all this.

Hence, there was a-

Mm-hmm

... premium that was paid because these guys, like DCG, Michael Saylor, he, they effectively created wrappers to allow people to access it.

Yeah.

So I got the diploma from my mom.

So you guys did so well at like 21 year old that you got acquired by the digital currency group.

What is the Digital Currency Group? So DCG is a conglomerate in the crypto space, one that's been around for a very long time, led by Barry Silbert.

He's kind of one of the OGs.

Lots of respect for him and the businesses he's built.