Does Crypto Need Wall Street, or Does Wall Street Need Crypto? | Adam Back & Jenny Johnson

**Eleanor Terrett** (0:07)
Hey, everybody, how's it going?
Wow. I'm excited. I got some real legends on stage with me today. So when I spoke in my opening remarks a couple hours ago, I talked about the convergence of Wall Street and crypto, and how that's really become a defining theme, not just of this conference, but of the space as a whole. And I feel like these two guests really represent that convergence better than almost anybody. We have Adam Back here, who is a key figure in the cypherpunk movement, and that was a community that believed that cryptography and open networks could reduce reliance on traditional institutions. And then we have Jenny Johnson, who is the CEO of one of those traditional institutions, and Franklin Templeton was one of the earliest companies to bring financial products on chain. So we really are talking about the crossroads here of the cypherpunk movement, early roots, and the traditional financial getting into crypto. So Adam, I want to start with you, because we had an interesting conversation backstage. A lot of people frame Wall Street's embrace of Bitcoin as being in tension with the original vision of Bitcoin, the original cypherpunk vision. But you have a counter argument, and you say that the cypherpunks were also strong believers in the free market. So is institutional adoption perhaps more in line with the cypherpunk vision than we originally thought?

**Adam Back** (1:35)
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a sign of growing adoption, and being able to buy Bitcoin in an ETF is an improved way to get accessibility to a lot of people. So you have to bear in mind that many people are not doing self-directed trading. They're not trading on an E-Trade or something. So, you know, on the cypherpunks list, when people were talking about electronic cash in the 1997 to 2004 era, I was actually a day trader, not as a professional trader, but trading on the E-Trade, which is now part of Morgan Stanley, and I'd invested in some IPOs in the UK.
So I think generally the cypherpunks were what they would call a narco-capitalist. So it's a free market advocate, but a strong believer in the function and purpose of capital markets for driving the wealth in the world, the development of products and services.

**Eleanor Terrett** (2:41)
Would you agree that there is some tension though between maybe some of those original visionaries in the space who saw Bitcoin as maybe a way to operate outside the financial system, maybe a method of freedom from those traditional bonds as it were, and that's sort of now merging with that system that they wanted to get away from?

**Adam Back** (3:05)
Well, I think it's maybe a bit like the internet itself. So in the early era of the internet, it was very freewheeling. And then over time, all companies had a web presence and then smartphone apps and so on. So I think it's just that Bitcoin has some of the early proposition is that it is physical, even though it's electronic, you can physically own it yourself, which is generally not possible or not easy with shares. There aren't bearer shares, or if you have shares in a company, you depend on the company management. And if you have cash or a bank account balance, you're depending on the government, you know, how much more they print, the monetary policy. And if you depend on a bank, you depend on their solvency and prudent behavior and so on. Whereas with Bitcoin, you can hold, you can elect to hold a bearer asset, and it has much lower friction. So you have the sort of benefit of an open financial network.
So the Internet is an open network, and open networks innovate faster, and ultimately deliver a lot of value. But, you know, as with the Internet, you saw a whole range of startups and applications of big companies building things on top of it. So I think you can think about Bitcoin as the Internet of Finance. And with Blockstream, we build the sort of settlement network technology for that, which is the Liquid Network.

**Eleanor Terrett** (4:34)
Jenny, you've been on Wall Street for over 30 years. And, you know, you've seen it all from the 2008 financial crash. You've seen the really start of Wall Street coming on chain, as it were, and Franklin Templeton has really been getting the charge on that front. You guys were the first to tokenize a money market front, you know, with your Benji platform, which I believe just turned five years old. So that's exciting.
You know, what do you think crypto has really gotten right? You know, as someone who's come in from the traditional side and seeing, you know, the merits of crypto, but also the shortcomings, what would you say crypto has gotten right? And then also, where does it still fall short?