The $2.2B Bet on Digital Assets' Institutional Future with Guy Wuollet

**Andy** (0:00)
Following their massive raise announcement, Guy, congratulations, welcome to the show, man.

**Guy Wuollet** (0:04)
Thank you for having me, Andy. I'm fired up. It's good to be here.

**Andy** (0:06)
Big day, huh?

**Guy Wuollet** (0:07)
It's definitely a big day for us, and hopefully for Crypto as a whole.

**Andy** (0:10)
How do you feel?

**Guy Wuollet** (0:12)
Well, I think I'm pulsing a little bit. There's a great vibe here today. It's fun to be with you. I feel like, you know, this conference in this week really epitomizes what you were just saying, that Crypto is certainly in its institutional adoption era. I think it's no mistake, we're both wearing a collared shirt.
I would say Crypto has graduated from the hoodie and the fuck you flip-flops to a collared shirt, and maybe a chance to broaden beyond the Crypto Native audience today, bring financial services and new products, not just to the small audience that is interested in on-chain that's watching here today, which we love, but also to people like my mom and dad, the relatives, and hopefully billions of people around the world, especially in developing countries who need the products and services that we're building, I think, in a real way.

**Andy** (0:55)
Yeah, man, I mean, the part of the kind of raise announcement that immediately stuck out from the headlines was crypto products or projects that people can actually use. And I think that is somewhat polarizing, probably by design.
Explain to us maybe what that is at the high level, and we can get into the raise and get into the vision.

**Guy Wuollet** (1:19)
Products that people can actually use is surprising and controversial. I would think that products people can use is kind of the point of the product.

**Andy** (1:26)
Correct.

**Guy Wuollet** (1:27)
If that's controversial, then I think we need to like, you know, bring the ante up a little bit. You know, people need to have more interesting opinions.
I think if crypto does nothing else, as an industry and a product, we will deliver stablecoin denominated neo banking to the developing world. And that will offer the opportunity to then give wealth management, saving, investing, credit lending products, not just to people in the first world, but people in the third world. And I think as you were alluding to, we've seen a lot of adoption and interest from traditional finance to move on chain. I think it's interesting and ironic. You know, I would have self-described as a diet in the wool cipherpunk. A lot of the friends I have from that era are maybe a little bit less excited about the modern era, whereas most of the people that I went to college with who've gone and done some investment banking, private equity job, call me and ask me, you know, I keep hearing about stable coins, I want to get promoted. Like how do I use this in our business? And so it feels like we're really in a kind of a market annealing process where crypto has grown and changed a little bit. And it's really starting to understand kind of the customer profile of existing financial market infrastructure. And I think with the passage of Genius last summer and a lot of the progress we've had both in terms of regulatory guidance and moving hopefully towards clarity, hopefully being passed in the US., that has created the opportunity for a lot of people that have seen the value of crypto products for a long time to finally start to adopt them in a real way. And so that's a lot of how we're spending our time today. And part of what has fired us up to raise a new fund.

**Andy** (2:58)
You have, man.
Do you find it that it's slightly boring to actually invest in and build real products? Like we've had this era of seven years or so, perhaps even longer, that was predicated on a lot of fun on-chain by the means of speculation of trying new products. And in that kind of phase, we unlocked anything from an AMM with an X times Y equals K, kind of like actual model there, perps. We kind of unlocked a lot of digital collectibles, a lot of these kind of zero-to-one ideas. And then it feels like the industry is kind of struggling now with what's that big next unlock. And perhaps it's not boring, but it's actually taking what we've built on the infrastructure side and applying it now to a lot of these real-world use cases. Robbie and I have this thing on the show where it's like a lot of the innovation is actually happening in the institutional sales side, in the regulatory side, and in the implementation side, and less so on the kind of trying to figure out what the next best TPS kind of mark is, or what the next kind of like execution layer can be. Feels like a lot of that has been built. We have stable coins.