Julian Liniger: The Surprising Truth About Who's Buying Bitcoin

**Julian Liniger** (0:00)
They think it's too late. They think, oh, it has done 100X, so it's too late. Market sentiment and retail investor sentiment is really at an all-time low. Fear and greed index is an absolute fear. So now we're seeing a very tough bear mark.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:12)
What do you think will bring momentum back into Bitcoin?

**Julian Liniger** (0:14)
I've never seen this before, to be honest, like that.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:17)
Where will we be, let's say, like a year or two from now? Hey, everyone, joining me here this week at BTC Prague is Julian Liniger. He is the founder and CEO of Relai, which is the most popular Bitcoin exchange in Europe, right?

**Julian Liniger** (0:38)
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Natalie. Yes, I mean, popular, it depends on how you define popular, right? But definitely we're the Bitcoin-only on-ramp that people really know and use a lot in Europe. We're also a very proud sponsor here at this conference, and we've on-boarded more than 100,000 Europeans to Bitcoin, and they bought around 20,000 Bitcoin with us in the last six years. So we're very proud of that, yeah.

**Natalie Brunell** (1:05)
Tell me a little bit about the history of Relai. How did you come to build this company, and why did you see Bitcoin adoption as something that you wanted to help with in Europe?

**Julian Liniger** (1:15)
So that story actually starts like 10, 11 years ago when I got into Bitcoin 2015, and I was fascinated by it.
But I had a very hard time buying it myself. Actually, I had to have this friend of mine who was more a tech nerd, who showed me Bitcoin. I had him buy it. I went home, I was hooked, I tried to buy it, it was too complicated. So I asked him, can you buy me one Bitcoin? It was 500 bucks back then. So I gave him basically 500 bucks in cash, and he bought me the Bitcoin because it was too complicated for me as a non-tech nerd guy.
As I got deeper into the rabbit hole, actually the next year, Ethereum came out, and back then I was not Bitcoin only yet. I learned that now, right? But I was interested in investing in Ethereum in the ICO for one dollar per Ethereum, and I couldn't do it because it was too complicated. So I did not. It would have been a good investment, right? So I was frustrated of how complicated all these things are with Bitcoin, crypto, etc. And so then fast forward to 2018-19, I had this idea because a lot of people asked me, hey, Julian, can you help me buy Bitcoin? And it was just too hard, like 9 out of 10 of these people just didn't make it through. They only wanted to buy 100 bucks Bitcoin, maybe set up a savings plan. That's actually what I wanted to do as well, set up a savings plan for 100 bucks a week or something. And there was nothing that just made it click and make it easy for the 90% of the people that are not tech and finance nerds like many in Bitcoin, right? So then I ended up really founding this company. I found my co-founder who is a CTO who could build these things that I had in mind. And so we went live in summer 2020 just to make Bitcoin easy to understand and easy to access for people. And ever since we've been on the same mission, still the same every day, I got up and tried to help people understand Bitcoin and get Bitcoin very easily, but in the right way, like Bitcoin only, no other things that make it more complicated and in a self-custodial way. So what's different about Relais as well? It's not a typical exchange like Coinbase or Bitpanda in Europe, where the exchange holds the user fund, we never hold a penny of our user's fund, we're a self-custodial wallet integrated in the exchange.

**Natalie Brunell** (3:26)
Why did you choose to do that?

**Julian Liniger** (3:28)
So, first of all, it's of course an idealistic thing because the full potential, the full benefits of Bitcoin, you only get really when you hold Bitcoin yourself. Like, take control of your future is our mantra, basically, we want to help people take control of their money. No counter-party risk. You can send it anywhere in the world to anyone over the internet, no counter-party within a few seconds. And it's just a true, no one can censor it, no one can take it away from you. All of these things only work when it's self-custodial and people actually hold it. So we truly believe in that. But also, and that's more of the converse point, is that I believe long-term it's going to be actually easier to use Bitcoin in a self-custodial way, because it's much less regulated. Now that we have all these licenses, we see what you need to do if you hold Bitcoin on behalf or any asset on behalf of your clients.