BlockTalks: the Age of Utility, with Arthur Firstov

So you actually got, as you built, you got the whole DeFi wave, NFT waves, and now more of the stable coin era of crypto or the era of utility, as I like to call it.

So walk us through the changes you guys saw over these years, these many years.

And how did you adapt to the landscape? Were there many pivots? Were there many changes in strategy? How was the navigation across these? Because we kind of compressed like 100 years of financial services and like maybe a decade in crypto.

So how did you guys adapt and continue to pursue the goal for the company?

Yeah, I think the whole industry started a little bit earlier.

I think the first narrative in crypto, the industry started a little bit earlier than we started Mercuria.

And I think people were doing a lot of ICO projects and launching new protocols, building exchanges for letting people buy crypto.

And the idea that we had was just basically to simplify this process for users to buy their first cryptocurrency on their wallets, on their exchange.

And we were connecting the traditional finance, different banks, banking infrastructure with crypto, so just helping users to buy crypto with their bank accounts.

That was in 2019.

And then 2020, 2021, COVID years, we were basically locked in, primarily doing the whole thing online, fully decentralized, everybody in different countries.

And the first conference that we got into was 2020 and 2021.

And I think that was one of the first conferences actually after COVID in general, fintech or crypto conferences.

So there were a lot of people.

And I think 2021, moving into 2022, we had this DeFi summer boom where we already had infrastructure.

We had the product and we already captured some of the partners that were also super locked in during COVID time.

I think we had some bull market going on there as well.

And yeah, I mean, things took off the ground pretty fast after DeFi summer.

And it changed the landscape, how we viewed Mercurial as a payment infrastructure, what type of products we build in the future.

So it was extremely helpful.