BlockTalks: Bitcoin for Institutions, with Richard Green

We're in this very interesting chapter of the crypto story or history

books,

where for a very long time, the industry was concerned about the institutions coming in.

When are the institutions coming? When are they going to adopt crypto? And what we're seeing now is almost like As if crypto was co-opted by the institutions.

And instead of dealing with crypto and blockchain as a paradigm, they're treating it as a technology.

So we hear a lot of the rails, all the programmable rails and the stablecoin rails and the rails.

And rails is a very tradified term from remittances, right? Corridors, rails and things like that.

So I've been in the industry for over a decade and I'm now conflicted because I'm also a TradFi guy turned crypto.

And I'm now like, how do we reconcile these things? The reason why I stepped away from that was to work on financial freedom and decentralization and ensure that network effects apply and the values push to the edges and all that stuff.

And now the most successful companies in crypto are centralized companies doing IPOs, which is a very TradFi thing.

And I hate that I'm jumping

into the deep end just at the start, but you have a similar background to mine.

So I just wanted to kind of gauge what your recent experience dealing with that, if this is a dilemma for you and how are you reconciling these things as you build on top of one of arguably the most libertarian layer one we've ever had?

I embrace it, to be honest.

It's not something where I ever had the issue with pushing against it, other than what it could be used for in a maleficent manner, whether that's bad actors or whether it be control.

I'm not somebody who lives within a country that has a government, now this could be debated very much so, like within the UK, who are looking to do government control and monetary control and things like that.

However, I've seen those issues and that's where I think that that obviously sits.

For me, it's a case of how do we apply the technology so that it benefits others? And I do think that, to be honest, my view has always been for anything to be successful within the world of finance, you have to have institutional presence.

And that's because that's where the liquidity is.

So whether we like it or not, very rarely is a P2P network going to function on a mass global scale, right? You've got obviously what DOS is doing at Block, and that's because it's kind of an intranet, internal movement of money, and that's amazing, right? That serves a great amount of people.

But that's just one company.

And I think that for us to grow in our world, there was a few things that needed to change.

I think that we were rubbish at building the narrative and the marketing around what crypto was.

I think that we held onto that initial view that this isn't for any institution.

They shouldn't be able to have it because it's ours.